I suggest everyone to carefully read the replies of the Facebook employees in this thread.
These data are being released in hopes of furthering the developments of these techniques - which ultimately benefits a future use by Facebook.
In turn, people like "presenti" have pointed out several times that the data were collected in Facebook offices or other places where all participants consent. The implication is clear: While the present data are legal, they would not be if shot in the "wild".
In many jurisdictions, there is no legal use case for these methods. It is literally not possible to have a widely-used implementation of these glasses that would not violate the privacy rights of "bystanders".
Of course, Facebook will work hard to make it legal, on all fronts. Whether laws need to be changed or, as pointed out by presenti, some innovation may arise to make you at least an anonymous blob, separate from name and address. And if you do not have an account - see in this thread - what is there to worry about?
Well, even if the association would only be indirect, any data collected from you (with increasing sophistication) would be part of Facebook and its models. Even as a group of anonymous users, you would become less and less anonymous and increasingly more explainable.
If you are so far unconvinced that this matters, please be also aware that the only thing standing between businesses and the extraction of the entire surplus (or consumer welfare) is asymmetry of information.
As soon as your needs and wants are sufficiently modeled, companies will use these data to maximize the profit from all their interactions with you. You will, in a sense, pay monopoly prices without facing monopolies.
Again, read the replies carefully. See how legal constraints are certainly something that is "to be solved in the future". However, whether you should ever be afforded privacy or anonymity in the face of facebook's algorithm is implicitly answered, with (frankly) a worrying amount of arrogance and dismissal: no, you and everything about you should no longer be any unexplained variation for facebook. One way or another, facebook plans to uncover you, and there is no negotiating this point.
You must now realize that Facebook is not interested in your name and birthdate, they are interested in being able to predict everything about you without these personal data. Faeebook wants a model, one that is fundamentally opposed to your welfare. And this objective will be realized.
Take heed of this, better now than later.
Interesting. I used to work on legged locomotion in the 1990s.[1]
The notes point out that locomotion on the flat is a special case. Too much work on legged locomotion assumes flat ground. On the flat, balance dominates the problem. Once you get off a flat surface, slip/traction control dominates.
Slip control is like "ABS for feet". You have to keep the forces applied parallel to the ground below the point where slip starts. That changes the shape of the problem. Classically, most robot control is positional. Slip control is in force space. Until you have slip control, hill climbing will not work. So the first step is to constrain those forces to stay below the break-loose point.
I pointed out in the 1990s that legs with three joints allow manipulating the contact force vector and the position independently.[2] This is visible once you watch people climbing hills, and even clearer with horses, where the leg bones are closer to being of equal length.
Most legged robots don't make fast starts and stops or fast turns. Even the Boston Dynamics machines usually start by trotting in place and then shifting to forward. Motion with high accelerations is traction-limited.
The first step is like ABS, constraining the forces below the break-loose point. You need that because in the real world bad stuff is going to happen and recovery involves backing off the forces until traction is regained. The second step is considering forces when planning, so that movements get near the limits of traction but don't exceed them. This is where you can begin to do more aggressive movements.
The lesson notes are finally going in the right direction, looking at this as a two-point boundary value problem. Most previous work has focused on finding some expression that measures stability and maintaining that. If you want agility, you have to give up stability maintenance throughout the gait cycle. You need good landings. Everything else is secondary.
You have a set of constraints that apply at a landing, as a foot touches down - be within slip tolerance on forces, joints not too close to limits, impact not too high. And, importantly, the situation must be within the basket that allows stability recovery during the ground contact phase. Land, stabilize, launch, reposition for landing while in air, repeat.
Most work focuses on stabilization. That's only part of the problem. What to do in the air is classic rocket science trajectory planning. Launch control is mostly force-limited, and that's when you get to apply big forces and get big accelerations.
How far ahead do you plan? One landing ahead for basic locomotion, two landings ahead for athletics. If you plan two landings ahead, the stability criterion for the first landing can be relaxed somewhat. You might fail to zero out rotation in yaw because that will be fixed at the next landing, for example.
This stuff is cool, but there's no market. It was fun to work on, though. In the end, I sold much of the technology to a game middleware company, so it worked out OK.
This isn't related to the carrier-imposed surcharges, however. Airfare is priced according to a system of filed fares with specific rules, for specific city pairs, that require booking into specific "inventory."
Internationally, round-trips and different fares than one-ways. And SFO-SYD is a different fare altogether from SYD-SFO.
A fare might say:
- Originates in SFO, destination SYD
- Books into economy class
- Requires S-code inventory
- Requires a round-trip
- Can be combined on a half-round-trip basis with any other fare USA-Australia fare (e.g. you could combine two fares SFO-SYD and NYC-MEL to get a SFO-SYD/NYC-MEL round trip)
- Can use any flights that have S-code inventory
- Except no stopovers
- And only 1 transfers in Area 1 (USA)
- Can be reissued for 400 USD
With that fare, you can then build an itinerary from segments (flights) that match all requirements of the fare.
I have been on the bad side of IBM Global Services both times I’ve encountered them and was warned off by someone with existing beef.
They will build the most complicated thing that could possibly solve the problem. And then you can’t get rid of them because holy shit nobody else wants to deal with their code.
If Rube Goldberg and H P Lovecraft had a child it would weep in despair knowing that in all its life it would never create something as sinister and complex as the stuff IGS makes before breakfast.
They were trying to charge $80k a year for a proxy server to handle XML RPC. For a system that was basically ftp with code signing. Our team took care of the code signing, soup to nuts. To this day I don’t know what they were doing with all that money for a tiny part of the system. Except try to take over. They didn’t expect the wall of competence they encountered.
Not a UI feature, but I found this guide last fall and have been using it flawlessly since. I whitelisted a few SSIDs and everything else goes through the VPN. Even works with walled auth garden networks like xfinity wifi.
Generally agree with you... however, I’m a designer and I’ve had surprisingly positive experiences with AWS. I thought it was going to be highly technical and frustrating, but for basic static hosting AWS doesn’t require any command line skills. It’s all point and click. You can even set up SFTP to your S3 bucket with something like Transmit from Panic (Mac). More of what you’ll find yourself dealing with is AWS’s confusing UX, understanding how all the AWS parts fit together (Route 53, CloudFront, etc,) and discoverability in their help documentation.
"Seriously, it's the kind of garbage that makes me think your opinion and your code cannot be relied on" is, quite bluntly, a personal attack, directly commenting on an entire developer's code history and knowledge based on one single issue. This could be worded a lot better. The profanity is also unnecessary.
The rule of thumb I've seen in your typical management oriented business books ( eg, your books / training like Crucial Conversations: https://www.vitalsmarts.com/crucial-conversations-training/ ) is to be "persuasive, not abrasive" as that site says. The issue with being abrasive is that one way people might react is by instinctively attacking back -- no matter how technically correct you are, f-bombs and personal attacks might tempt others to throw counterpoint f-bombs and personal attacks back. Another is that repeated behavior along these lines might drive away some people who would rather not see profanity and anger in their mailbox.
Everyone loses their temper occasionally, and John Johansen reacted in the way you should to someone who loses their temper.
Unfortunately, the Linux community as a whole has a reputation in some circles for being overly "hostile" and "toxic". Linus himself has this reputation. How much this reputation dents Linux contribution and usage isn't known, but I doubt anyone can say that this is a positive.
If you enjoy the discussion of permutations and cycles in this article, there's a puzzle you might also like:
Prisoner A is brought into the warden’s room and shown a faceup deck of 52 cards, lined up in a row in arbitrary order. She is required to interchange two cards, after which she leaves the room. The cards are then turned face down, in place. Prisoner B is brought into the room. The warden thinks of a card, and then tells it to B (for example, “the three of clubs”).
Prisoner B then turns over 26 cards, one at a time. If the named card is among those turned over, the prisoners are freed immediately. Find a strategy that guarantees that the prisoners succeed. (If they fail, they must spend the rest of their lives in prison.)
Needless to say: The two prisoners have the game described to them the day before and are allowed to have a strategy session; absolutely no communication between them is allowed on the day of the game. Notice that at no time does Prisoner A know the chosen card.
Obligatory disclaimers: not a lawyer, not an accountant, am employed by Stripe to write about these sorts of topics, writing here only in my personal capacity, none of the following is advice but rather just a pointer for your future Google searches and talks w/ qualified professionals:
I ran my businesses for the first ~6 years as unincorporated sole proprietorships. The exact mechanisms of doing this are different based on where you are (both at a national and local level). Japan and the US are fairly similar: a sole proprietorship exists as soon as you say it does. (In Japan, you should probably walk down to the local tax office and file a form announcing your intention to file 青色申告 next year if you plan on making more than $30k revenue. They'll know which form to file and you are capable of doing it write if you can read Japanese.) Some US localities will want you to file for an assumed name / "doing business as" (DBA) with your local county clerk or have a city business license -- you can usually find out about that with some quick Googling. I filed a one-page form with Lake County, IL saying that I was doing business as Kalzumeus Software (several years before I had that LLC) and then had to pay ~$50 or so to put an ad in the newspaper for a few weeks saying "Heads up Kalzumeus Software is actually Patrick."
You pay taxes on the profits of the business, not on the revenue of the business, which is a crucially important distinction that many HNers do not know when they start and which many do not properly operationalize even if they know it. I cannot underline this enough: no software entrepreneur I've ever met had a good handle on this when starting. If you sell $10k of software and think "Hmm my profits are maybe $9.5k -- the only expense was a DigitalOcean server" I think your profits are ~$0 after you spend a few hours with an accountant walking through credit card receipts. They're going to walk you through things like e.g. depreciation, apportioning business and personal use of your Internet/cell phone, conferences, business entertaining, (potentially!) home office use [+], etc etc. (A thing your accountant will probably tell you, in the US, is that if you want to decrease your tax burden for 2016 buying a Macbook for the business
You should ordinarily be listing income from a side business as business income, at least in the US and Japan, and not as any other type of income. This is both a) correct and b) gives you the ability to deduct expenses, which is not possible on all types of income reported on e.g. one's 1040 or 青色申告.
The US has you pay quarterly estimated taxes. There are safe harbors which are likely to cover you in the first year of running your side project. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch04.html#en_US_2015_pu... The calculation of these can occasionally be complicated; this is a great "ask an accountant" question because this is their bread-and-butter and that particularly calculation is something that most accountants would do for free, on spec, as part of soliciting your business for next year. The penalties for not paying estimated tax in a timely manner are very small -- many entrepreneurs of my acquaintance treat timely tax payment as a small discount to the "real" tax bill and elect to simplify their lives by paying taxes once a year rather than by calculating quarterly.
The chief reason to put a side project in an LLC is to reduce the risk of liability of the side project flowing to you. Most side projects have vanishingly little liability. Ask me for a citation some other time, but even software development freelancing is low-risk -- my insurance company calculates than ~0.5% of freelancers/consultants get sued in any given year. Downside: when they do get sued, win or lose, that averages $40k in costs. If you're doing something where you have non-trivial liability or if the prospect of $40k+ vanishing just makes you unable to sleep at night, incorporate and get an general liability / E&O policy. (Costs $1k or so per year as a floor; mine as a comparable is $3k and has the words "patient health information" and "HIPAA" on it, which contribute expense and underwriting fun times.)
If you have additional questions about this sort of thing, I'm writing about it this week (in my employed capacity) and would love to hear what you're thinking about.
[+] Home offices are historically a contentious deduction in the US, but one of the reasons you have an accountant is so that they tell you consequential things about the difference between the regs as written and the regs as customarily applied like "You don't have an office? Oh, in Japan, we just deduct 40% of your rent then. Substantiation requirement? Ah you Americans are such kidders. There's the law on the books which is $CALCULATION but the tax agency basically feels like you don't screw them too much on being aggressive and they won't screw you too much on bringing out a tape measure to your kitchen.")
If you want to speak to an accountant to sanity check your plans, literally any CPA should be able to help you do it, particularly those advertising a specialty in small businesses. I would caution you that this is far from the hardest question you'll have for your CPA over the next N years and that many people who are competent to tell you what an LLC is are not competent at giving meaningful advice about e.g. what sales tax filings are required for a SaaS business.
I would not recommend having an accountant actually create your company for you, simply from a cost perspective. Making an LLC is as easy as buying a book on Amazon. You wouldn't hire your accountant to buy you a book on accounting from Amazon, because he'd charge you $200 extra to do so -- you'd just get the name of the book and then buy it yourself. Cookie-cutter solo-founder LLCs are roughly as simple as books or sweaters.
I don't make a habit of putting my own work on HN, but I express modestly high confidence that Atlas' guides on these and related subjects will end up here at some point.
These data are being released in hopes of furthering the developments of these techniques - which ultimately benefits a future use by Facebook.
In turn, people like "presenti" have pointed out several times that the data were collected in Facebook offices or other places where all participants consent. The implication is clear: While the present data are legal, they would not be if shot in the "wild".
In many jurisdictions, there is no legal use case for these methods. It is literally not possible to have a widely-used implementation of these glasses that would not violate the privacy rights of "bystanders".
Of course, Facebook will work hard to make it legal, on all fronts. Whether laws need to be changed or, as pointed out by presenti, some innovation may arise to make you at least an anonymous blob, separate from name and address. And if you do not have an account - see in this thread - what is there to worry about? Well, even if the association would only be indirect, any data collected from you (with increasing sophistication) would be part of Facebook and its models. Even as a group of anonymous users, you would become less and less anonymous and increasingly more explainable.
If you are so far unconvinced that this matters, please be also aware that the only thing standing between businesses and the extraction of the entire surplus (or consumer welfare) is asymmetry of information. As soon as your needs and wants are sufficiently modeled, companies will use these data to maximize the profit from all their interactions with you. You will, in a sense, pay monopoly prices without facing monopolies.
Again, read the replies carefully. See how legal constraints are certainly something that is "to be solved in the future". However, whether you should ever be afforded privacy or anonymity in the face of facebook's algorithm is implicitly answered, with (frankly) a worrying amount of arrogance and dismissal: no, you and everything about you should no longer be any unexplained variation for facebook. One way or another, facebook plans to uncover you, and there is no negotiating this point.
You must now realize that Facebook is not interested in your name and birthdate, they are interested in being able to predict everything about you without these personal data. Faeebook wants a model, one that is fundamentally opposed to your welfare. And this objective will be realized. Take heed of this, better now than later.