danweber

And those insiders should sell parts of their positions. They are very heavily invested in FB and need to diversify, even if they believe FB is a very wise investment. Many insiders probably have more than 90% of their portfolio in FB stock.

Unfortunately, the people "giving away" spend a lot of time reinventing fantastically-different but only-very-marginally-better wheels. Every week I see on HN about some new language or framework someone has invented that fragments the market even more. If you aren't being compensated in dollars, being compensated with being "the inventor of X" can come close, so there's a big supply of this.

Sometimes we broke the rest of the market, sometimes we captured a really big piece, sometimes we had to give up and do what they all do.

Autonomous cars never get distracted, have 360 degree vision, look at all things all the time, and can react in tens of milliseconds versus hundreds of milliseconds. I'd trust that over a "professional driver."

If it becomes a problem, the car can transmit images of the jaywalkers to the police.

Really, when there are more autonomous cars on the road, each and every one will get better from their neighbors. They can directly share the data they see and what they are doing. The network effects will be huge.

Knowing where there should be a stop sign and traffic lights significantly reduces risks. The computer still needs to be able to learn when new ones appear, of course.

Snow is much harder for the time being. A snow drift falling off a car can make a google car think a cooler has appeared in the road.

How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light?

It will stop. In fact, the "failure mode" of self-driving cars will be how pedestrians can bully them by stepping in front of them so they stop.

When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them?

There is already video of this. The radar/lidar isn't good enough to see a baseball, but it's definitely good enough to see a kid.

Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?

It will probably pull over and stop if something is wrong.

That specific combination of attributes still bugs me.

Bank Of America is horrible in this. First off, if someone else tries to log in using your username 3 times, it locks you out of your account. You need access to your email to get back in.

But it demands you re-create three security questions after that. I chose a simple username so other people stumble across it a lot. So I have to go through this process frequently, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

How securely are they storing this PII? Probably not at all. I try to give the exact same questions and answers every time to limit what BoA knows about me, but someone compromising by BoA account might be able to learn that information and use it to cascade attacks into other services. (They display by secret questions and their answers to me in plaintext.)

But someone got the bright idea to attach other things to your credit card information, like your entire MacBook.

We need to burn down the entire concept of "security questions" and start over from scratch.

The situation might change enough being on planet where the sun is slightly filtered by the thin atmosphere, and the sun doesn't shine ~12 hours a day.

RTGs have many other advantages: they provide heat as well as power (which is really important on Mars) and they don't wear out when covered with dust. If Curiosity stops running within a decade, it won't be because of power.

I was relieved it was so easy, but unnerved at how easy it was.

Maybe they had the cell associated with my land line, but I doubt it, since I got the line before I ever had a cell.

Old-school computer security breaks things down into the CIA categories:

Confidentiality is for things you want secret. Integrity is for things you want to not be altered. Accessibility is for things you want to be able to reach.

Honestly, very little of data requires confidentiality. Yet that's what encryption is usually used for. I would, by an order of magnitude, rather have a hacker gain access to my family photos than have them deleted beyond my ability to recover.

I hate whole-disk encryption. In nearly everything in my life, the threat of losing access to my data is vastly worse than someone else accessing it.

One thing that we should have is a "cool down" period. If you want to regain access to, say, your GMail account, then it will take 48 hours of waiting, and phone calls and emails will go out to your contacts before that is completed, so the real person has a chance to protest.

I don't understand how the MacBook data was permanently lost. Even if the files were deleted in the OS, they are recoverable by disk utilities. Unless they were encrypted. Which just goes to say that when you think the solution to your problem is encryption, you don't understand your problem.

It's like "for your convenience."

"For your convenience, all toilets have been closed."

Facing the Earth and facing the sun are highly correlated. Seeing one xor the other is possible, but unusual.

Full disclosure is a lot of fun, and it increases the status of geeks like us, so it's really to approve of it. I did when I was in college.