skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting a prototype working would take a week for a skilled machine learning engineer, assuming they had access to well labeled tagged data.

What will be difficult is to push the accuracy up to get actionable information from it. Assuming you're an evil repressive regime, even if you're system had 90% accuracy, you'd be falsely accusing a huge number of people and doubt even a repressive homophobic regime would implement it. Getting that 90% accuracy to 99.9% or higher would take a huge effort, this study isn't anywhere close.

That said, the concerns are real. Automatically sorting hetero from homosexual people, Jews from Christians, or even black from white comes with a tone of moral issues.
how about having photo on the credit file. this would solve so many problems.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15198206
I guess because the algorithm has been trained on 50% straight 50% gay and the 80% figure is actually for telling appart a pair of straight and gay persons, it will say gay half the time.. But this is confusing you are right. The explanation using false positive is clearer.

If there is 1000 persons, 40 gay, and the algorithm is 80% accurate, it will say: 960 * 20%= 192 straight people are gay and 40 * 80% = 32 gay person are gay. Not very impressive and shows a very stong gay bias if I can say so
What the Rich Won't Tell You
Just put it in, it's pretty amazing when the food is cooked :)
They are literally selling $20 for $10. That's one model for growth.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-dr...

"They keep trying, and the FDA keeps refusing to approve them for human use."
You take a lot of the risk but not all. If this was due to weaknesses in their IT then managers should be liable. But it's possible that they had one of the most secure systems in finance and still someone found a way in via undisclosed exploits. In that case there's nothing a manager could've done.

But since the core database wasn't hacked, it seems likely that someone had a database dump on a development machine which was outside the scope..
Amusingly that same video seems to be getting posted as being Mexico, too.
Ask HN: How does Facebook know my Google searches?
I was doing some work on a side project earlier today and Googled "pug" for pug.js. Google returned results about dogs instead, so I clarified my search to pugjs and thought nothing more of it.

I've just logged into my Facebook account tonight and it has two suggested groups on the right hand side. "Pug Crazy" and "Passionate about Pugs", both dog related.

How the hell has Facebook linked my Google searches to my Facebook account? I just mentioned it to some family that said they've experienced the same thing from searching a camping spot. Is it time to nuke all my accounts from orbit?

---

EDIT

I used two Chrome profiles with the following extensions:

dev - 1Password, Adblock Plus, Click&Clean, Privacy Badger

personal - 1Password, Adblock Plus, Chrome Remote Desktop, Click&Clean, cookies.txt, Privacy Badger, Save to Pocket
> It's significantly easier to launch a website from scratch today,

Write HTML, copy to server, press f5/open URL. It doesn't get easier than the 90s in that regard. You didn't even need a framework for that, so ... I'm not so sure.
Lego City My City 2 Build Police Cars with Fun Action and Adventure
I am less concerned that there may be visibly identifiable characteristics of homosexuality. I am more concerned that these features can be automatically discerned by computers on a massive scale. It's one thing for an individual homophobe to call out someone because they look gay. It's quite another for a government or organization to do that to millions of people in seconds, and then act upon it at scale.
It is the senator's child. Assuming no other malfeasance, I see no reason to take it out on anyone who isn't actually responsible.

To be fair, assuming no other malfeasance requires a pretty big leap of faith...
Equifax executives sold stock after data breach, before informing public
The key point is sort of buried in the article. They hope to parlay this into revenue-sharing deals. I could actually see something like this making sense--provided that the card issuer gets at least a cut of refreshments. I don't know the exact numbers but my understanding is that movie tickets are basically breakeven for the theater. They make most of their money on refreshments.

(Of course, people also buy subscriptions and then don't get around to using them much but I suspect the revenue sharing is key. I'd also wonder though if the theater chains aren't really in a better position to go this route.)
> All this study says is that there is a strong genetic/developmental component to sexuality - something we've known about for decades.

It doesn't say that. The effects could very well be presented by how people with different sexual orientations present themselves (sub)consciously to attract similar people.
Most European countries have credit agencies, just that they have different names. When moving country, you usually have to build up a new credit reputation. Even when you move within Europe. A clean history will mean that you can get some credit cards but bigger loans will often require a few years of history with at least a current account.
If you really want to be sure, you can create your own private key with dice:

http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2s2w1r/generate_ad...
He made Netflix, now he's hacking movie night
Homosexual men will have to start wearing ill-fitting suits and dirty gym shorts to avoid being caught by the algorithm.
Total garbage. There will need to be some laws put in place soon to stop this type of thing by companies, otherwise we're going pure Gattaca. The nearest term risk for AI making your life suck is basically encoding people's biases into models that are used to affect your life. This "research" is the equivalent of making an inference like "He's poor so he must be black, etc.."
The distinction between sex as biological and gender as social seems useful to me. It makes "gender is a social construct" a tautology, but doesn't in itself reject scientific evidence. It's just that inasmuch you have evidence that some behavior is biologically determined, the behavior is less amenable to analysis in terms of only gender.
“Add data” ... “Add data”, all rather lame.

Minkiz has the data ... https://minkiz.co/coin/name/ (basically just a rendering of the metadata in DOACC (https://github.com/DOACC/individuals).

Admittedly I stopped recording in March last year but nevertheless.
David Allen, has said this in his TEDx talk. In moments of crisis and duress, its very easy for the brain to reserve all its cycles to the one task at hand.

However once that moment slips, your mind begins to wander. So a degree of constancy of purpose is needed. And you need a kind of GTD system to prioritize and eliminate what is unnecessary.
Beyond Peace and Quiet – An Addiction to Silence (2008)
that was my question too. seems like no for now, and no plans either.
Isn't this a result you should immediately be skeptical of because the results are so significant? I mean, the idea that you can detect sexual orientation from facial images seems somewhat plausible, but no way I would immediately buy that a classifier can discriminate just from the facial-structure with 81% accuracy as the title may imply, for instance. To be fair, in their abstract the authors mention grooming style and so on, but I feel that the title alone is slightly misleading.

Also: man, that preprint formatting is annoying to read.
Who Owns Work, and Its Future?
It doesn't make sense, but that's exactly right. If their training sample had been only 4% gay and achieved 100% accuracy, then the true positive rate would be expected to be 1, because the denominator changes to 0.04.

It does raise the question of how Bayes' rule applies if your sample is underrepresented, though... say their training set was only 2% gay. Could they achieve a true positive rate of 200%?
Just looking from outside the square, is it possible that the Facebook cookie on your machine is interrogating the Google cookie or your browse history?
Is there a name for this kind of smug, couple-of-sentences, incorrect, dismissal of proper research?

It seems to have infected a lot of the sites I visit, and is always liked or voted to the top.

I guess people just love feeling superior.
They don't use the SSN to check for prior IDs issued by other states and/or the Feds, and compare the applicant's photo/gender/age/height/eye color, etc to them first?
NAT does give you some valuable security features though
Senior iOS Engineer
> I think this is Google shooting itself in the foot.

Only if it fails. I'm sure this is making Android phone manufacturers nervous but what are their options? Essentially, Samsung would need to revive its mobile OS platform and build a competing ecosystem. That's a huge gamble that's already failed multiple times.

It strikes me that it's more likely that they'll take the same dichotomous approach as they do with selling chips to Apple. My guess is that Google are assuming the same.
In some countries when you sign out a loan and a card you get picture snapped. but then this measure would stick banks with loans and not the consumer.
Let me rephrase that: it takes a lesser percentage of bitcoin holders vs fiat currency holders selling their assets to collapse the value of their respective currencies.

Or even better: it's nearly impossible to do that with fiat currency, because there are checks and balances in place.
Maybe it's more important to have some readers rather than to have a pixel perfect layout. I and others will not read it as a PDF.
How the Web has evolved on Mobile
Not totally useless. Still can be sold as motivational posters and meme material.
A bit disheartened to see that this paper came out of Stanford. Of all the great applications of ML and computer vision, they have to pick a project that attracts clicks but has far more negative value than positive. How about identifying people that have clinical depression? Or for a skin disease? Or if they like to surf or play basketball? Or if they are good chess players? Even just hot dog or not hot dog.

The study seems intentionally divisive. I get that a Stanford BSchool student would take it on to attract attention, but disappointed that Stanford would get behind it.
I don't know about you, but when trying to figure out if someone is female by sight alone, long hair is a big clue, after clothing and before facial characteristics. Visual analysis can only reveal surface characteristics that are subject to manipulation (up to and including hormone therapy and plastic surgery), not "intrinsic", whatever that means.
actually this is because of arcing beween swinging powerlines.
> The recruiter did in fact know exactly what the difference was and he was obstructing the candidate.

For a little while I was basically convinced of deliberate obstruction - no sane person would use the arguments employed by the recruiter. But, on reading through from the top once more, the recruiter was actually initially helpful and I have settled on "incompetence, not malice". Almost settled, at least.
The bit about camel-llama hybrids being camel-sized and llama-woolly seems to be completely wrong (they've confused the general goal of the project with reality), so I'm a bit dubious about the rest of the article. According to Wikipedia [1] and google image search, camas are smaller than both llamas and camels, and not very woolly.

I do find it fascinating that camels and llamas, whose last common ancestor was roughly as long ago as that of chimpanzees and us, can produce viable offspring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cama_(animal)
I saw that, but I don't understand why the theatres would volunteer to share profits with them, and I can't fathom how any amount so shared would be sufficient to cover the enormous losses that Moviepass will incur at the $10/month price.
C# has some SIMD support since version 6.
We have to move the goalposts, otherwise we'd still be talking in terms of attaching stones to sticks.

The comment was about the reduction of progress, which is like talking about derivative functions. The value of the function is the goalpost, and it moves.
81% accuracy in binary classification isn't something to write home about, either...
This also goes to the heart of the problem with deep learning on neural nets. We have this algorithm that apparently identifies homo and heterosexual people, presumably based on a variety of subtle features, but we have pretty much no clue as to which features and why.

The human judges may have been less accurate, but they could likely explain each decision they made and the visual features they based their decision on.
>>Amazon WILL build HQ2.

May be somewhere in India, where its cheaper for them to operate from.

Also given places like India want to attract investments, they will be more than happy to offer not only subsidies, but also provide free land and other perks like tax breaks and free electricity.

This might feel like blackmail. But that is what capitalism is all about. Companies do what is profitable for them.
Amazon warehouse workers are hardly the kind of jobs safe from automation. Self checkout lines supliment cashiers, but that means you end up with fewer cashiers in the short term not zero. Amazon clearly uses automation when cost effective and competing head to head with machines is not a long term viable option.
https://icostats.com/roi-since-ico

This is why people are putting as much money as they can. The total crypto market cap is 160B, which is basically nothing. There are now future Apple, Google and Microsoft stocks in crypto traded for pennies.

In the investor groups I am in totally anonymous strangers are pooling multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars for ICO funds, all based on trust. The idea is to send as much money as possible as a single transaction with insanely high transaction fees to get ahead of everyone else before the hard cap is reached.

If you have some amount of money you don't mind losing just buy some BTC, ETH, LTC, NEO, GAS, OMG, PAY, XMR, BAT, LSK, ARK and forget about them for a few years. November will be a good time to buy in because the uncertainty about the BTC hard fork will make people exit to fiat.

Thank me later.

As for Filecoin - their ICO cap is unreasonable, this is too much money, as soon as their tokens hit the markets the price will drop to nothing.
America influencing elections in other countries and overthrowing leaders: No one cares, it's for democracy and the US is in the right.

Russia influencing US elections via Twitter bots: End of the world style panic.

Yeah, I'm not particularly sympathetic here. Especially given how at the end of the day, this isn't 'hacking' or anything of the sort. It's a bunch of fake accounts on social media sites, something which has been done to death for years by individuals, companies and governments alike.

Maybe the US could simply make a bunch of fake Russian accounts to influence the 2018 Russian election or something too.
I check HN every couple of hours. :P
This is probably the most inaccurate statement I've ever read.

Here are just some of the assumptions it is making that are flawed beyond repair:

- Algorithms don't have unexpected behaviour.

- Computer programs operating in real time are predictable

- We can agree on what to optimise for

- Checking the source code is always possible

- Checking the source code allows you to understand a program
Yes, it's called "peer review".
Distributed storage is pretty neat definitely

On your second point self-sovereign IDPs are not going to become a thing, it's a huge chicken and egg problem, consumers don't care because there's no merchants on board and as a result merchants don't care.

The only real option is to extend out from something that already exists, has a large customer base, and that you true to be secure. That way you solve for the chicken and only need to make an egg. It could be social media (FB, LinkedIn, Insta, SNAP), private (teleco, bank, ISP) or gov but the point is ou already need that critical mass as identity is a secondary benefit to a consumer (at least right now).
>Lastly do you have any actual argument against the papers methodology? Or the phrenology paper you link for that matter.

The latter paper's approach is harshly criticised here:
http://callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_criminal_...
AWS provides you with a number of DNS records for each NLB:

- One record per zone (which maps to the EIP for that zone)
- A top-level record that includes all active zones (these are all zones you have registered targets in, IIRC)

The latter record is health checked, so if an AZ goes down, it'll stop advertising it automatically (there will be latency of course, so you'll have some clients connecting to a dead IP, but if we're talking unplanned AZ failure, that's sort of expected).

That said, this does mean you probably shouldn't advertise the IPs directly if you can avoid it, yes.

(disclaimer: we evaluated NLB during their beta, so some of this information might be slightly outdated / inaccurate)
That's an interesting link. What's particularly noteworthy is the mentioning of the inflationary spread of paper money that the banks issued which had no gold/silver etc backing...and the role of the government facilitating this to finance their war. Now, the crypto world was created as a direct response to that problem - nobody can issue fake bitcoins/file coins. You will have to have the cryptographic key to a public address. In that sense while we might be back in 1810 we seems to be branching off into an alternative reality where 'banks' can't produce more coin-notes than they have. I am also not sure anybody would accept a paper note as a substitute for a Bitcoin.
Moviepass is hurting AMC's business and doesn't seem to have plans to make a profit.

If I were AMC I would buy this company just to shut it down.
> The strict FDA requirements are there to make sure only safe and effective products come onto the market

How did this product fail then?
This is the part of his explanation I find confusing too, though I do agree with his general argument: the results aren't really useful when they haven't been tested on a dataset representative of the real distribution.

From what I can gather he's basically saying that the "probability of a random face being classified as homosexual" is 0.5. This isn't REALLY true (would have to run the classifier on all possible faces to find this), but that is in fact the "environment" the classifier has been trained within.
There are a couple 19th century Hegelian philosophers who would love to have a conversation with you.
Turbo Pascal did not die, it was reborn as Delphi and only decreased its market share because many key developers ended up going to Microsoft, while Borland management decided enterprise customers were more important than indies.
Don't you think these thoughts are justified?
Getting buy-in from an evil repressive regime will be hard if we assume they have a population distribution like anyone else which means a sizeable proportion of those in power are gay but not openly.
Pressure from customers coming from UNIX, and Apple trying to get into UNIX with A/UX.
Suspecting Husband
It's also saying that being gay has an effect of facial shape, for which there is current zero evidence, and phrenology is junk science.
The homosexual percentage is very likely to be lower than 4%, but getting accurate data is not easy [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
Would a company like this ever offer equity to one VC for $x and then charge a second VC $8x 2 weeks later?

Honest question?
What year did Borland make that call? I remember my HS programming class in the late 1990s used a Borland compiler and development environment. I don't recall it being "enterprisey" at the time. That being said I was in HS, and likely associated the word "enterprise" with starships more than big companies.
Right, and this is the point where we, as computer system / information security / software (whatever, but) professionals switch to using the word "authentication", and stop being obtuse about the ambiguity in the multiple definitions of the word "identity".

> For example, it is claimed that being able to say the DoB of Alice is an attribute that identifies Alice's body.

And then we say that the stating the DoB authenticates anyone to make changes to Alice's account.

And then we say this is a terrible idea. And then we are in agreement.

And then we don't have to say completely unhelpful nonsense like the following:

> Then, it is also claimed that somebody else saying Alice's DoB supposedly is an act of stealing her identity, and that the set of such people is non-empty. Which means that being able to say Alice's DoB is not actually an identity in the first place, much less one that could be stolen.

If these credit bureaus insist on conflating the word "identity" with "authentication" then it is up to us, computer / information / system / security professionals to correct this error and continue with more clarity.

Not not to start a one-sided (credit bureaus aren't listening) philosophical argument that nobody was really talking about in the first place. This isn't about ontology, and it never was.

(Ontology is the field of philosophy that asks the question what "is" is, a.k.a. "identity" and it's very interesting but also very much irrelevant to this incident and the problem it poses to badly designed authentication systems)

An important part of our jobs is being able to clearly explain such computer security and authentication concepts to a layman. That includes properly framing the question. Digging into a philosophical argument because you feel you can argue your way around a particular word that is used, only feeds pedantry.
Its not realistically possible by very definition to scale high quality jobs with quantity.
OTOH a coin ICO seems to be exactly this sort of behaviour, the issuing of effectively un-backed tokens by anyone that wants to.

Bitcoin and other crypto-coins are also created without the gold or silver backing of course... they just aren't issued in quite the same way.
From memory I logged in to Facebook using my personal Chrome profile and I searched for pug.js on my development Chrome profile.

I'm fairly sure I opened the pug search on my dev profile but it's possible I opened it on my personal one by mistake.

Every time my chrome Profile window is closed it wipes all cookies/history/local storage etc. using Click & Clean. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickclean/ghgabhi...

Either way it seems Facebook is acquiring user data in a really creepy way.
Pretty sure there's conclusive evidence of an existing effect whereby how attractive you are plays into if you're found guilty
As mentioned on some other thread, there was hardly any C being used outside UNIX during those days in Portugal.

It was all about Pascal, Basic, Assembly and of course xBase notably Clipper.
Totally agree! Heterosexual women will have to wear makeup and grow their hair long to avoid being misidentified as lesbians. Personally I think it is wishful thinking on the part of people who think that you aren't born gay. This algorithm will out even the most repressed homosexual as it is not entirely based on 'social characteristics'. Science doesn't care what you think.