skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the broader community should tolerate laxer pre-trial sentencing standards applied to people of race A, precisely because they commit more crime than people of race B

Does "they" they mean "each individual of Race A", or the subpopulation of "Race A"? Those are two very different meanings, and the heart of the problem.

Why should I be jailed because other people with similar skin color to me committed crimes?

Should we go digging to find whether Irish or Russian caucasians have higher than average crime rates, and then refuse bail to all Irish or Russian-descendant defendants?
Ah yes the old "akshually advertising does work on you", a similar argument used by the fervently religious in discussions: "You'll see I'm right in the afterlife".

At some point, if one needs to buy toilet paper, one needs to buy something. Just because you ended up buying one doesn't mean that the one you bought was due to advertising. Advertising doesn't become the reason for a purchase over availability, economic value, etc just by virtue of existing.

> 2. That you believe you are resistant to advertising places you in a predictable demographic that, like all demographics, can be successfully targeted without it being spotted as advertising.

Yes, the "I'd like to be left the fuck alone to make my own decisions" category, that advertising, despite it's apparent infinite wisdom still hasn't managed to figure out.

> Did you do an empirical, feature-driven search for all of the products from these brands? Does any brand stand out?

This is not a feature of advertising. This is a feature of product quality/price/feature-set etc. Advertising is independent of this and will happily lie you to in order to make you buy product x instead of y. To suggest that you actually bought product x instead of y is due to the effect of the advertising and not literally any other factor is disingenuous.

> 1. I doubt you have enough self-awareness about your unconscious product reasoning

This is a bit of a broad and unfair statement, it doesn't require too much concerted critical thinking to be aware of the tactics that advertisers use. Even if you're not fully immune from them, being aware of them can significantly reduce their effectiveness and restore a good degree of agency to you.
If 90% of the world becomes uninhabitable, you and your millions of very close neighbors will have nothing to eat.
It's a matter of practicality too. A scientific experiment of any kind can only in full honestly provide a set of results given a set of conditions. No matter how well your theory may fit the existing data, fundamentally your data may simply be responding to some other mechanism you're not aware of or not measuring.

There is a huge amount of effort required to say why something works with certainty. Usually to get there requires many years of experience with a new surprising result. Which requires publishing lots of results before understanding the mechanism.

If you refuse to believe anything that isn't figured out from first principles is true... I mean... I have a condition and if someone told me a higher percentage of patients on a new drug did well than on the one I use, do I care if they can tell me exactly why? Not in the slightest. I will wait a year or two to see if side-effects crop up and ideally see the results confirmed, but I'm not going to not get a treatment likely to help just because they don't know how exactly how it works.

I think it's good practice to assume the results of a paper are accurate, even if you give no credence to the interpretation.
Since apple hasn't been banned in China, I think that's all the evidence you need to deduce they are following all local laws.
With the exact same quote in the clipboard, I came here to make the exact same comment.

It is depressing.
Well, not everyone has the benefits of an educated parent who takes time out of their day to tutor their kids through calculus. Maybe "everything seem so hard" to people without those kinds of advantages.
Because correlation != causation.

Here's a very simple refutation:

Is past arrest history a valid factor in the model?

What if past arrest history is biased due to biased policing (Hint: it is, well proven)

How about zip code?
Scientists Expect the Year 2018 to Come with Severe Earthquakes
Geography is a good place to look for clues to causes, but a not good justification for locking people in jail without trial.
It does depend on your body composition. The largest energy drain on a person stagnant in water is their body working to keep them warm, and then breathing (lungs have to expand, muscles have to contract, water has to be displaced).

Lying flat, arms out reduces the work needed to stay afloat - but will drain your core temperature faster (although after 27 hours it doesn't really matter, you'll shiver your way to stay warm "enough" or hypothermia will set in).

I can't find the study I read after that movie came out a few years ago on this exact scenario. Will reply or edit my post if I can find it.
This might be a bit harsh, but the other comments point you in the right direction for general remote hiring and hiring developers in general, so specifically:

* After I see the quality of your website and copy, I assume you don't have $$ to pay a decent front end designer or copywriter, or even $ to outsource this.

* If this is true, hiring good devs is going to be difficult. If it isn't, I would iterate on your frontend and copy ASAP. It's the first impression for your customers and potential employees, and currently the design is not great, there are many front end bugs, and the copy sounds like it was written in an evening by the founder.

Not trying to be overly critical - shipped is better than perfect. But your current first impression means I didn't even look at your jobs page, so it might be something you want to focus on before going into full hiring mode.
> If you have race, age, number of friends who committed crime then maybe you don't need race anymore.

I understand that your argument is a toy argument so it doesn't make sense to discuss it specifically, but I feel it's important to point out that the issue here isn't just which variables are used to make the decision, but what the decision ends up actually being. That is, maybe you find that you can make a very good decision based solely on age and number of friends who committed crimes, and don't take race into account at all -- but then if this algorithm ends up yielding "yes" to most white people and "no" to most black people (even if your algorithm doesn't use race at all), you haven't solved anything. [edit: "solved anything" was poor word choice on my part, obviously you have solved something, but you remain in the state described by the paper]

Another issue is that while you can "whitewash" variables, it's very difficult to scrub race out entirely. For example, in practice we can't use "committed crimes" as an indicator because we can never know a ground truth: we'd have to use "were convicted of crimes" instead. Unfortunately, you're far more likely to be convicted of a given crime if you're black than if you're white, so you're already mixing race into your variables even if it isn't named. With the disparity in convictions, enforcement, etc., it's very, very difficult to come up with measurable signals that are not in some way already tainted by racial decisions.
What helped me to learn programming as a 10 year old child, was the 80's programming books targeted at children.

Always full of drawings, or little stories, and along the process I got introduced to BASIC, Z80 Assembly and all the intricacies of Spectrum hardware.

I used to think those books were gone, but they seem to have come back regarding Arduino and Rasperry Pi programming. Just focusing on Python and Scratch now.

Giving them a board with such books and some electronic stuff is probably the best way to teach them. Regular computers have too many layers that just hinder learning and its hard to see things happening.
Maybe even more amazing is that Courtney Dauwalter ran the Moab 240 ultra marathon (240 miles) non-stop in 2.5 days.
UK PM seeks 'safe and ethical' artificial intelligence
Probably talking about PRISM and the slide somewhere showing Apple participating. IIRC that was form 2008 or whereabouts when iPhone was a year old and had now secure enclave.
For some reason people assume nothing ever changes.
>>It is incredibly easy to find statistically significant correlations given just a few (more than 7) different views of the data. In general these ml models are not working with less than hundreds or thousands.

I would be interested in seeing examples. So far in this thread the arguments were along the lines of: "but then the algorithms punishes poor neighborhood instead of race" but you shouldn't have address in the data either as (I hope) nobody is ok on punishing people for living in bad neighborhood. We should only include data we would like to see in the explanation of the sentencing.

"You are not getting parole because you live in a poor neighborhood" is unfair while most people would be ok with:

"You are not getting parole because you willingly associated with people who committed crime".
Have you ever tried that in the open ocean? It's quite different from a pool, or a river.

-Spent over 120 days in the open ocean aboard a 25ft boat.
HNS IoT Botnet Compromised More Than 14k Devices
Examine.com has a page for curcumin. They cite 5 sources with notable impacts on reducing depression, but they summarize with this:

"Curcumin seems to be somewhat more effective than placebo in reducing symptoms of depression. It may take 2-3 months to see any outcomes. Skepticism is warranted though, as the studies comparing curcumin to placebo were not well designed and produced effect sizes not too far apart, even though the differences were statistically significant."

https://examine.com/supplements/curcumin/#hem-depression
When you do this would it be possible to include the old headline in your comment?

Without it comments like the GP are harder to understand what exactly they are speaking to.
I am 100% certain, based on 5 years of observation, that there is a significant portion of users on this site who absolutely believe that racial disparities are genetic and immutable.
Apple is adding new Privacy icon to iOS and macOS to prevent iCloud phishing
It depends on kind of products / applications you want to build. If you are looking for mainstream developers who can create web/data processing applications, (As suggested in other comments ) StackOverflow & Github are two places to find candidates based on their actual work.

Another place to look for remote developers is freelance websites.
https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/browse/
Just an example. A quick search can bring other names.

From my experience, many projects listed in freelancing site lacks Clarity in requirements, asks a lot of productivity for minimal costs.If someone manages good feedback, they can ideally be called a good developer. And yes you can filter by technology, type of projects (long, short, tight or trivial).

Your work culture and process, will be the driving factors in building a positive word of mouth and feedback. Only that can help in retention and additions in the longer term.
But if you're explaining it to a 5 year old, they've hardly been poisoned by the classical ideology taught in schools. You couldn't analogize it to a classical concept anyway because they wouldn't have the background. So maybe there would be an ELI5 that would be effective, if it was intended to be understood by someone without the baggage of traditionalism. :)
And "public safety" conspicuously excludes the harms caused by incarceration (for both innocent and guilt suspects, and the innocent members of their families and communities).

(Not to mention that "public safety" still excludes the harms of centuries of slavery and decades of Jim Crow...)
Hi Vivek,

My previous employer eventually made HackerRank a requirement for hiring. Fortunately, by that time I had already basically figured out how to freeze the size of my team despite having an absurdly large headcount projection attempting to being forced onto it, so I was able to ultimately abstain from using it (after catching some hell for actively opposing it).

However, if I had been in a position to have to use such a tool, there was a major failing in the way it worked (at least 2+ years ago) that would have made it impossible to derive useful meaning for me from the results.

What was critical to partially assess for me was a person's ability to fully understand the nature of basic assumptions they take for granted. To get a sense of their completeness of thought and appropriate self-doubt in that completeness.

I wanted to do this by being able to provide a black-box implementation of two simple functions:

add/2
multiply/2

Both of which would be intentionally implemented incorrectly. Then I wanted to be able to have the user write out property-based tests that would help them discover the way in which the opaque underlying implementation was flawed despite the fact that they would have no internal knowledge of the implementation.

This would have very roughly allowed me to assess:

1. How they dismantle basic lifelong concepts that have become mental reflexes like addition and multiplication, but in terms of their properties and invariants (associativity, commutativity, identity, etc).

2. Then also whether or not they could infer what was wrong with the simple opaque implementation based on which properties/invariants weren't holding as they should have. So that I could see how they handled their confidence in the completeness of their analysis.

No idea if you could do this today, but at the time the HackerRank system couldn't usefully support the above use case. Or at least the person who conducted the training had no idea how one would do such a thing.
The Black Hat talk was really great: https://youtu.be/BLGFriOKz6U?t=6m55s (link is to SEP and on-device encryption, 22:30 is iCloud stuff)

> I know they said they could have accessed that San Bernardino terrorist’s iCloud backup if only they had one. Not sure if they’ve change the security architecture since then.

I actually think they have, the shooting was in 2015 and iOS 10 was released in 2016 and was first to have some of the features he talks about in the video.
If you've ever done advertising on a small scale, you'll see how effective it is. For example, I worked in an antique shop that saw perhaps ten customers a day in its first month. At the end of that month we had an advertisement in the local newspaper, a full-page puff piece with a picture and about 500 words of text. I couldn't imagine that anyone actually read the little village newspaper it was in, but our foot traffic tripled for the following week, then dropped right off again.
Ask HN: Real algorithm interview problem that you solved at work?
I'm curious how many times have you asked an algorithmic interview problem that you actually solved at work.

Please help me collect some data.

e.g 1 is my answer. 16 is the number of toy algorithm problems i have asked in my current role. One among 16 was really relevant to what i have really worked on.

Thanks!
absolutely! Ability to work remotely well is another bullet point on hiring requirements. It's not for everyone and you have to have a good culture around remote working at the company in the first place.
>humans can live in a much broader set of environmental conditions than any other species.

Absolutely not. Most lifeforms simpler than us have an easier time surviving because it is easier for them to reproduce quickly. You're basically ignoring insects, crustaceans, algea, bacteria, most plants, and pretty much everything else.

Sure we're hardy and adaptable when you ignore most of life on earth. And then you want to bet on the only species that has almost purposefully engineered its own demise? Talk about bias...
It likely means that that for sold software that term of the license is void and does nothing. It might, but probably doesn't, void the entire EULA/license. It almost certainly isn't "illegal" in the sense that it's perfectly legal to send people contracts that don't do anything because they are legally void.

I don't know Australian law, this is just me guessing from the mix of Canadian and American law I am somewhat familiar with (and I am still not a lawyer even there).
It seems like the problem is that any data that works statistically will not be fair to individuals who are intuitively exceptions to the general trend. It sounds like algorithms relying on statistics are pretty much guaranteed to fail the fairness test. It's the wrong tool for this problem I think.

There are so many factors in morality that I think individually, case by case judgments are likely the best option. Racial / class bias seems to be just as present in these algorithms, so lets at least allow for human intervention rather than forcing ourselves to be constrained by an inherently unfair system. Yes, humans are flawed too, but perhpas we should be spending more time trying to adjust / account for those in different ways.

Note: Bias in sentencing/convictions is a huge problem that should absolutely be worked on. I'm only claiming that these approaches are inherently flawed, not that what we have now is anywhere close to good enough.
We’ve had 300.000 Chinese tourists since August. I’m not sure how many Americans have been by in the same period, but in a typical year we get maybe 10.000.
“Swastika Night,” the Novel That Imagined a Nazi Future, Before WWII Even Began
>>That is, maybe you find that you can make a very good decision based solely on age and number of friends who committed crimes, and don't take race into account at all -- but then this algorithm ends up yielding "yes" to most white people and "no" to most black people, you haven't solved anything.

It would actually solve the problem. It's ok if I give more "no's" to black people as long as black people are more dangerous in general. It's only not ok if I punish a specific non-dangerous black person just because they are black.

That's what fairness is: you get what you deserve because of your decisions and wrongdoing not because how you look or where you were born. That some groups end up with more convictions is expected and doesn't contradict fairness principle.
Statistics tell you something significant about a group, but little of significance about an individual. Statistical measures should not be used to make decisions about individuals. Other names for doing so are: "Sacrificing the one for the many" or "Presumption of guilt."
This is one of the worst things Obama did for Net Neutrality -- tying its fate to paid prioritization because the public is too ignorant to understand any of the real complexities of NN.
> White paper also discusses a special escrow service for backing up your keychain, incidentally.

My foggy understanding is that iCloud backups are encrypted with a key stored in iCloud Keychain, which is encrypted within the hardware security module escrow service they run, so after iOS 10 they can't actually decrypt your backup.

Edit: oh, I replied to you below as well. That video has the details but it's been awhile since I watched it.
Sure, but the true ELI5 would take years to get through the necessary fundamentals.
Doesn't Steam track your game completion/hours played?
Having founded a daily deals company a few years back, I can say this mindset can easily be a trap. Software plays a larger role in many companies and can be part of your offering, but I strongly disagree you should run every company like a software company.
"rigorous" in science, especially biomedical sciences, has a specific definition. Where is the double-blind testing? Where is the statistical significance? Where are the clinical trials?

Ayurveda likely has a lot to offer as a FOUNDATION to start doing investigative research; but this claim of "any vedic sciences are arguably as rigorous as today's sciences" is bunkum. Show me any statistics / clinical trial data (or its equivalent) in the vedas?

I will accept & agree with the idea / contention that a lot of the treatments in ayurveda are possibly based on strong observations & correlations. Which is a good place to start modern scientific research from.

But to claim that ayurveda as written in, for instance, the Atharva Veda, is rigorous science demonstrates to me, a rather stark, depressing & baffling ignorance of modern science.
This isn't a particularly new insight :-). And the phenomenal rise in the use of ad blockers, dvrs that skip commercials, and direct to streaming services suggest that not only has "big advertising" poisoned the commons they are at risk to training an entire generation in the art of avoiding their product. It's my hope that they entire house of cards will collapse.

There clearly are "good" advertising options. People will often read topic specific periodicals (magazines, newsletters, Etc.) both for the editorial content and the advertising of service providers surrounding the topic. And of course there are people who will be more excited about the advertisements on the Superbowl next weekend than the game. But advertising as envisioned by Google and Facebook feel like they are under siege and there is a race to the bottom in terms of what advertisers will pay, and so how much they 'care' about the end product.

The growing battle will be advertisements "embedded" in content. People can already replace billboards in movies or on Youtube with ads for actual products. At some point these 'insertion points' will be programmed in as meta-data in the distribution of content so that they can be added in on site. Things from store fronts to the vehicles in the scene are up for dynamic replacement.
I don't know why you think dead people care how they got that way. I've never met one that did.
> In other words, black defendants actually are more dangerous to release and there is no magic algorithm that bypasses this fact.

You are right, but that's not the problem with the algorithm.

A critical assumption with large-scale data mining is that past trends continue - the problem is that the existing data fits the algorithm. It is just a conservative What-If decision maker operates on existing facts (i.e bad present day situation), just wrapped into code (or worse, encoded as opaque literal "biases" in a decision tree).

I see somewhat similar patterns in lending interest data (redline zipcode -> credit ratings) and the problem is that bigger the historical trend data, the less forgiving a "past trends" algorithm will end up being.

Since this ends up being a prisoner's dilemma, if you are a rational actor in this system and the system keeps playing a defect card on you, then the obvious move is to always defect - cut your losses.

Algorithms can't improve the job prospects of the people released. And that's not the algorithm's fault.

And therefore, the you're right - the algorithm can't change the world beyond its output result.
Starting with gradle, creating a simple build.gradle
I'm going to chime in to the growing chorus of HNers trying to explain to you why you're wrong.

There's no such thing as "any other science." There is science as developed and practiced by qualified researchers all over the world - including India - and it's all one and the same science, which is a set of protocols for rigorously checking the relevance of what you're seeing, and the huge body of useful human knowledge that these methods have brought forth. And then there's everything else, which encompasses "folk wisdom," quackery and outright fraud. If Ayurveda and its kin provided comprehensive documentation of rigorously controlled, published and peer-reviewed studies, it would be science; as it doesn't, it isn't.
It's not enforced for most titles, you basically can go offline and play whatever you want unless you need to use multiplayer.
How about an option for 5s or 10s? Kind of funny the non-pro version can do 5s but the pro can't!