skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did not make a blanket statement that all ML algos are racist against Asians. My point was to convey that if the training data do not accurately represent the population, the algorithm will carry the biases of that inaccurate representation: the algorithm is only as good as the data it is trained upon (for supervised learning).

But that's not true. Inadequate training data will cause variance, not bias. This variance can have any direction.

In a linear prediction scenario (i.e. any go/no go decision process), which exactly what Cathy O'Neil is criticizing, the effect could just as easily be "more loans for black people" as "less loans for black people".

In a multidimensional predictor, it does directly decrease accuracy but that's all. "Black guy -> gorilla" is just as likely as "yummyfajitas -> tank".

Also, realistically, if we want to think about your black guy -> gorilla example, most likely if insufficient training data was the problem, then it was the number of gorillas that was too few. Google has vastly more black humans in their training set than gorillas - a quick google search suggests there are only 100,000 gorillas in the world, most of whom are probably unphotographed.

As a sibling comment stated, humans are deeply involved in all aspects of designing and interpreting an algorithm's results. To the extent that we are flawed, so will our algorithms be.

Sure, algorithms are flawed. But this does not imply that bias must be present proportionally to ours. Insofar as we do good statistics, human bias is mitigated and can even go away. Science works.

As a classical example, consider Morton's analysis of human skulls. Morton was a super racist guy trying to prove how white people are superior. But he did an unbiased analysis and accurately measured skull volume - filling a skull with buckshot is a pretty unbiased process.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

I am frankly confused as to what is so controversial about the statement that algorithms created by humans are not free from human biases.

What's controversial is that this is the idea of "original sin" but applied to science. And most of the proposed mechanisms are simply mathematically wrong. Also many of the examples cited by proponents of this original sin concept are also wrong.
>"Conflict of interest" in lawmaking is a concept which only applies to people to whom additional authority beyond that of citizen of granted to act as an agent of other citizens

That's precisely what a voter is doing. According to the Constitution, the citizen is sovereign. Therefore, when one votes, one is acting in a purely public capacity, completely separate from one's private interests as citizen.

Even Congress recognizes this about itself - it passed Amendment 27 which limits its ability to raise its own pay. It thus recognized that it is acting in a different capacity when addressing its own pay than when addressing normal business.
You jumped immediately to an assumption of higher crime in the neighborhood, while the article pointed out the existence of white-collar crime in other neighborhoods.

An interesting similar practical application was differential sentencing for drug dealing outside versus drug dealing inside. White and black Americans use illegal drugs at essentially the same rate, with white Americans pulling ahead in several categories historically. Suburban Americans more often deal drugs inside houses, while urban Americans are more likely to deal drugs outside than suburban Americans. Due in part to redlining practices, black people are more likely to live in urban areas and white people in suburban areas. So just send a bunch of cops to urban neighborhoods and you'll catch plenty of drug dealers and give them higher sentences, while letting all the white drug dealers go and giving them lower sentences if their behavior is egregious enough that you've got to arrest them.

This example doesn't even get into differential treatment for white-collar crime (scamming your investors) vs stealing meat from a grocery store. All those articles we saw on HN about scamming your employees and investors? MotionLoft, 1for.one? Those folks are "just doing business" and most commenters seemed to implicitly condone the scamming behavior -- sure it's unfortunate that it happens but you know business -- while no one here would condone stealing meat from a grocery store, and the meat-lifter would be more likely to get caught since there are cops at the doors of those grocery stores. Do we need cops in the startup scene if scams are happening, though?

The bad thing is not targeting "needs," as above, it's targeting perceived needs or exploiting differences in a way that contributes to injustice. I can see how you might not care about targeted advertising that allows you to ignore the lives of the poor -- that's fairly normal and in the US we really rely on it for political stability -- but ads that only show high-cost high-interest low-placement educational options for poor people push out ads from your local community college, targeted ads contribute to the political polarization we're seeing, targeted ads show higher-paying jobs to men than women regardless of qualifications. There is information asymmetry in a lot of these situations and in several ways: if the poor person trying to look up education doesn't already know about the low-cost legit CC and the information is buried after a page of for-profit ads, they may not understand all their options, and just as bad, we who earn a bit more may not know that's happening, because when we look up education to see if our teen could take multivariable calc nearby, we will get the CC right at the top of the page and the for-profit schools, not targeting us, won't show up! And then we can grumble with a clean conscience that poor people are so dumb they can't even look at the first search result...
International Entrepreneurs Rule (Obama’s Startup Visa Alternative)- Summary
Do you think corporations are people?
Did you read the article? They are forced to pay retroactively. It's like if the government raised income tax rates and tried to collect the difference for the last 12 years from your taxes. Would you like that?
My colleague theorizes that many of the developers that we're interviewing with 12 years of experience actually have the same year of experience 12 times. That is, they move from job to job after 12 months and do the same stuff again and again without any kind of growth.
> So having more cops in a high-crime neighborhood is somehow a bad thing, because the presence of more police actually confirms the fact that there is more of a need of police in this neighborhood?

That's the essence of the Security vs Liberty argument. Yes, on one hand it is a good thing to have more security in an area which needs it; but will you accept say, being filmed 24/7 for more security, with the tradeoff that this same data can be analysed by third parties for any reason whatsoever (ala Minority Report's shopping mall scene).

It is not an easy problem and we must decide for ourselves which tradeoffs we will accept, because it is seldom free technology with no strings attached.
Sounds like you owned one too much.
Show HN: War on Ether
Postcss-ant: A size-getting function
I don't think that implies not being in good faith. Bad faith would be if they knew the EU would rule this illegal, but still continued with this.

You pay your army of lawyers avoid that. You want to walk extremely close to the edge, but not drop from it.
>Many PhD programs offer full tuition, health care, and a yearly stipend with teaching duties.

Do we have data showing that entry-level jobs (the first three to five years) in STEM industries have 35-50% attrition rates?
Yep, GMT Games's P500 is just better than the old wargaming business model, and there are plenty of other companies, like Victory Point Games. It may be that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Board games have exploded in recent years, but like abstract strategy games, wargames are no longer the center of the boardgaming world. I think board games have expanded so much because designers and publishers have introduced new games and gaming styles that expanded the market. There are still the same thousands of people playing chess or Gipf, and the same thousands playing hex-and-counter wargames, but there are also thousands of people playing CCGs and thousands playing eurogames and thousands playing cooperative games. There are some really cosmopolitan board gamers, but there is a large group of people who would like to play Pandemic but abhor the direct confrontation of hex-and-counter wargames and abstract strategy. Some of the most successful games are those that appeal to multiple groups, like Twilight Struggle or Legendary.

Of course, that's a re-definition of terms as well: back when Charles Roberts started Avalon Hill or Gary Gygax &c. started TSR, there wasn't really a "boardgaming world"—boardgaming was just getting itself organized; there were wargamers and miniature games, but the eurogame was just a gleam in Sid Sackson's eye.

This article's postmortem is almost comical in hindsight, but it looks like the core of the analysis is from 1998, when boardgaming was in a very different place.
Any way to bind the mac command key (⌘)?
That's exactly the internet equivalent of too big to fail banks. And like for banks it is unacceptable. The internet needs its Lehman moment to become resilient again. We should let a Comodo fail.
> A lot of Europeans (me included) are not at all happy to see massively profitable companies operating in Europe without paying practically any taxes.

From the letter, it seems Apple thinks it should be paying taxes in California rather than were the profits are coming from (the EU). Excepts from the letter: "In Apple’s case, nearly all of our research and development takes place in California, so the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States."

The second half of the sentence seems to be a non-sequitur, or intentional misdirection -nothing about it follows from the first half.
I just went to delete these roots from my Windows system but it's not listed. It was in Firefox's list but not in Window's. Anyone know why?
Don't know why you get downvoted, but such a embarrassing, slimy letter from Cook is relevant for HN. I guess he just killed a lot of his credibility with this sniveling letter.
I agree with you that for most of these points, the algorithm is unlikely to be less rational or more biased than a human (and the crime-fighting algorithm example doesn't seem to make a good point against the algorithm at all).

However, for something like a credit approval algorithm, there is a valid issue of centralisation - if there are problems with the algorithm, a large number of people will be affected negatively by the same algorithm. While humans are biased and imperfect, you can find some who are less biased, or call their manager and see if they can justify themselves, etc. I can imagine situations where it's hard to escape or find recourse when you're faced with an algorithm that's put you in an unfavourable situation.

I'm hoping that, given enough data to train on and enough validation to make sure they are working optimally, this will not really be a big issue, but I can understand if some people are concerned about that aspect.
I see a battle between two sides here in the comments which basically winds down to capitalism vs big government.

There is an incredible amount of corruption in both areas, and even between them (we call this "crony capitalism"). Both within the government, and within the private sector, corruption can be used to squeeze money out of the general population. Both have necessary roles, and their benefits usually outweigh their level of corruption. But to take the side of one or the other is a rather fruitless exercise.

Instead, effort should be focused on how to improve the laws so that we can make them work well for all parties involved, especially the general population. And sadly, its beyond the level of conspiracy at this point that the people who control the laws are the people who benefit most from them.
also statically linked, at least on osx.
Ireland wasn't really pressured, was it?

You can phrase your post another way - the EU "safeguards" members against making their own decisions and possibly becoming more attractive than the others.

And because the EC is not controlled by any single member state, it can't treat any single nation different from the others.

Tell that to Jean-Claude "it's different because it's France" Juncker!
VAT is not irrelevant for companies, because the consumer pays the all-in price. If I have a product that I can manufacture for $90, and I know that I can sell retail for $100, VAT at 20% means I don't have a profitable business.

Edit: why do you think business lobby groups are constantly asking the govt to reduce VAT? Have you ever heard of the demand curve?
Maybe because I'm from Europe (and the native population here is predominantly white)? Although even in the US, I don't see racism as being "tolerated", at most "present and being exterminated".
FPGAs have been "all the rage" in a handful of fields for a reasonable amount of time. It just happens to be that most fields don't actually need FPGAs at all, and a CPU and maybe a GPU to go with it works just fine.
AMD RX 490 – release date, specs, price and rumours
It's possible to for something to be technically legal according to the letter of the law, but still be breaking the spirit of the law and consequently considered illegal by some.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_and_spirit_of_the_law
Tax law is not easy by any stretch and it's probably now more complicated than ever. We are at a point in time where possibly for the first time in history companies are so big to be in every country of the world, there are new fields to regulate, new technologies an situations. Laws are sometimes hard to change and haven't caught up yet with all of this. That's why there are many gray areas and possibly many loopholes.

If they had a real interest in the community, what would be really nice to see is companies trying to contribuite to improving this laws rather than trying to find loopholes that then need to be patched with what are more "hacks" than proper solutions.

Instead here we see Apple trying to justify themselves with some bs PR. Pretty sad but quite in line with what I would have expected of them.
A really annoying "feature" of regexes in POSIX is that known regex meta-characters are used as ordinary, when they are in a context that doesn't recognize them.

Some examples are a superfluous closing parenthesis or a [ bracket in a character class.

A sane regex syntax treats these characters as a separate lexical category from literal characters, in all contexts, and only produces literals out of them when they are escaped.
"If you wish to make a web browser from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
CloudFlare is the very definition of MitM
I feel bad for shykes. This can't have been a very fun release. He tries really hard, and I get the feeling he takes a lot of the feedback to heart.
Maybe to emphasize that machines are there to make the human task easy but not let them get lazy and develop a hard dependency on the machine!
As in - I can't do this without using some X machine, is a clear sign that we developed a hard dependency on the machine and we fail to learn/understand how to do the task without using the machine.

Happening a lot, the boundary is fading slowly. The human dependency on machines is constantly increasing, intelligent/ AI machines take this to next level e.g. Self-driving cars.
Browser Engine https://limpet.net/mbrubeck/2014/08/08/toy-layout-engine-1.h...

How to Create your Own Internet Browser in 5 Minutes! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn22JBRC1UI

Chrome's Engine http://www.chromium.org/blink
They're cross-signed by startcom.
I could see Synergy for a workstation, but eventually one of the turtles on the way down will most likely have a keyboard/mouse connected to USB. Headless for servers certainly.
Hi! Current software maintainer here. (I meant to reply earlier, and then a storm knocked out power to my house.)

The weird routine you posted is for backwards compat reasons only. It's used solely when decrypting our very first file format, which we care about only because some people never throw anything away. Obviously the password stretching has to match exactly, so the code that originally stretched it (PBKDF 1.5) is still there. It's not been used for new files in the last... five years? Since before my predecessor, anyway.

Encrypting/decrypting with a password these days uses standard PBKDF 2.0, with a configurable-as-long-as-its-larger iteration count. Been poking at other stretching schemes too, but none of them are included in released versions yet.

At some point we'll drop support for decrypting the early versions and get rid of all that cruft. Anybody still needing their ancient files can use an earlier release.

> Their PasswordGenerator class is also interesting. Has
> a loop that runs for an arbitrary 80000 iterations, etc.

The generator doesn't need to loop at all. The first implementation did, because hysterical raisins. The current random generator just does its work in a single pass. Cleaning up the surrounding code (including that needless loop structure) is on the todo list, but not a priority for the end customer.

Cheers!
Minor nit: It was an English admiral that was killed to encourage the others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Minorca_(1756)
Could someone please explain why this isn't on the top of the front page anymore?
So your argument is that this person has no rights to know who this person who is scamming startup employees is and that the "reasonable" action they should take is to offer $100k.

You can't seriously believe this makes sense, right?
He made his bed.
>Local subsidiaries are not usually resellers, and even if they were, the parent company can set an arbitrary price

The main reason why subsidiaries are set up is to enter a market and sell stuff.
The main reason tax is discussed is because sales/revenue/profit is generated in one place.

And they do set up arbitrary prices within the limits of anti-dumping laws.
But then again, someone somewhere will tax something.

>no direct revenues, just a big cash transfer to fund the costs from the parent company

In Apple (and many others' case), the local subsidiary has revenue. They actually bill consumers and collect payments.
As somebody already wrote "Starting from scratch is almost impossible to do alone". However you could set a first goal of doing some basic rendering of plain HTML, even text based. That should make you familiar with the hurdles of a rendering engine. Then apply some CSS. Even writing a browser for HTML 3.2 from scratch and no JavaScript should be an exercise to be proud of https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32 (1997). Then start looking at modern browsers using the links others provided. You should have the experience to understand all the moving parts by then.

This is similar to writing the very first web application without using any framework, maybe even interfacing directly with the web server. I remember decoding CGI arguments in C in 1994 before discovering Perl's CGI.pm. Then you understand the magic inside frameworks and don't get burned by surprises.
That's the goal of the EU though over time - to erode the tax sovereignty of member states. It's inevitable.
There is always something to be learned. Thank you for sharing.
Launch failure story here.

I posted to Reddit and Hacker news about the software I had built, but this didn't attract much attention. Largely because the software wasn't so very usable to anyone — I had mostly built something that mainly I liked. Which I didn't realize at that time.

Then I wrote a blog post related to the software, and it got popular here at HN, and topped the HN list for a short while. Lots of visitors to the website, and a few (like 5? 10?) people signed up and started using my software.

But what I had built was hard to use, so the few people who tested it, quickly abandoned it. I had not done much usability testing, at that time, and didn't realize how important good UX design is (UX design = user experience design).

Eventually I shut down the startup company (it was just me), and got a job instead.

But I continued working with the same software, on my spare time. And redesigned everything. Now it's soon time to launch again :-) And this time I've hired usability testers and UX designers and asked them for help and feedback about how to make everything (the software & website) more UX friendly.

I hope this'll be helpful to someone :-) I.e. to ask UX designers about feedback, on both the website and software, before launching. I found the UX designers at a freelancer site. Some of them are really talented (from my point of view), whilst others might instead make things worse.
Breach seems like a poor choice since the project has been inactive for ~2 years.
Not at all. You know a place is in the sweet spot when people say "I really value the discussion here, it's often very enlightening and interesting." Being left/right/center or whatever is an oversimplification of "political" discussions, and claiming that having a "balance" is healthy is the same silliness that leads to things like "Crossfire" on CNN. What matters more is ensuring that productive debates on potentially thorny topics can occur.
Okta may have found a better way to handle our online identities
This is not true. There's always the spirit of the law and this is checked by a group of people with that power, the juries.
> so the subsidiary makes a massive loss

Sure, and if it did, the parent would make a massive profit they would have to pay taxes on.

Someone at some point has to pay taxes on the profits. Apple just pressured Ireland into looking the other way and granting a tax scheme that is not actually valid and the EC has corrected that by pointing out Apple failed to pay taxes it legally owed.
Hi, chclau, I see you are the author and you are present in this comment thread.

Your post smells like spam. However, other posts on the same blog have content: https://fpgasite.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/pseudo-random-gene...

What's up? What is this blog for?
There's no historical data on the default rates of people who didn't get mortgages, because they didn't get mortgages.

I'm willing to believe that theoretical solutions exist. I know from direct personal experience in the big data/lending industry that they are not always applied. If you are claiming that real-world lenders never train their models on human decisions then you are simply wrong.

Nice zinger - I hope you weren't saving it for too long. But I'm not going to get into witticisms or personal arguments.
And on x86_64 and ARM.
It's definitely a resume builder. The "Teradata" on my resume has sort of gone out of style. Other than cost, though, I've really not run into a practical situation where Hadoop would help me with something that Teradata wouldn't do. I work for large companies that can generally afford Teradata and to scale it as needed (Teradata is awesome when you need to scale easily), so my professional Hadoop experience is near zero.

I read the link and agree with most of it. All except for when he gets to the 5TB part, but I get that it was written in 2013 and probably not to a fortune 500 audience. If Teradata Cloud could get a reasonably priced entry level tier going, I think they'd be talked about a bit more.
>> "That sounds like fault lies with Ireland, not Apple. Or perhaps with the EU for failing to enforce their own damn rules."

This decision is the EU enforcing the laws though. And I think the fault does lie with Ireland - but nobody is saying the fault lies with Apple. That's why they're not being fined. They're just being told to pay money they have always owed, money which was never theirs. I can see it from both sides though. Why should Apple be 'punished' if they were told they were paying the right amount? On the other hand if my accountant screws up my taxes and I pay too little I have to pay it back eventually.