skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So you're basically saying the algorithm is broken because it discovers illegal correlations, even though they may be true.

No. Discovering those correlations is completely legal. Making certain decisions based upon those correlations is illegal. Mostly because by making a decision, you make a tacit assumption about causation that's borderline impossible to prove and can have a huge impact on people's lives.

Like I said, if it's just you in your home office having fun, go at it. But if you then bake that model into certain products, you have a very serious bug.

> Well, that's precisely "polite fiction".

Except in this case, it's not even that!!!

The observation that certain crime statistics are highly correlated with race, and that race is correlated with zip code, are not new observations. ML did not usher in some brave new world here. Just because we call it "AI in 2018" instead of "John from the Actuarial dept. in 1960" doesn't change the moral, ethical, or legal landscape. (the article literally makes exactly this point.)

And despite your characterization, this particular truth (race correlates to crime correlates to zip) isn't even a politically incorrect observation!!! It's something everyone already knows, and I've never seen someone attacked for pointing out this correlation. In fact, it's a favorite talking point of social justice types! Pointing out this correlation is not impolite.

The impolite assertion is that there's a causative link between race and crime. That's an assertion that models (tacitly) make when their users shift from truth-seeking to decision-making. See the "question you thought you asked vs. question you actually asked" portion of the essay.

Now, if ML algorithms discovered some genetic, racial, causal theory of crime, then you might have a point about ML exposing polite fictions in this case. But they didn't, so you don't. COMPAS isn't being censored from sharing a politically incorrect truth. It's being prevented from ruining people's lives with a really, really lazy application of statistics.

I often joke that racial discrimination laws are one of the few examples where "being bad at math" is not just criminal, but unconstitutional.

> ...laws are not designed as truth-seeking tools

Again, in cases where bias becomes illegal, these models are NOT just being used to seek truth. They're being used to make decisions.

You seem to have misconstrued the fundamental thesis of the article. The author isn't calling for death to polite fictions. And there's a concrete example in the article of this point of departure between your perspective and his. Namely, his response to people-as-gorillas was not "fuck you, the math is right". And the crescendo of the piece is "AI is just a tool, not a divine oracle, and there's nothing new under the sun".
Thanks for the heads up, i fixed the formatting.
The article is another iteration of https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth... . OP is unable to find any evidence that Amazon makes the problems worse, aside from innuendo, but since Amazon is there, now it's their fault.
No we don’t do that.

In TypeScript code ‘this’ is typed, and we can infer the type of this for classes and ES5 classes in JS. However we don’t analyze calls to ‘.call’ or ‘.apply’ to infer the type of ‘this’ in a given function.
Huh. The wikipedia page of bacteriodes fragilis says that it's an obligate anaerobe[1]. I thought that our bodies were filled circulating oxygen-rich fluids. How can obligate anaerobes surivive in our bodies?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteroides_fragilis
Do you have citations to back that up? A quick search turned up a couple of hits (one old, one relatively recent) that both said that Employee owned businesses performed reasonably well. Certainly not conclusive, but a first stab.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/19/are-emplo...
https://hbr.org/1987/09/how-well-is-employee-ownership-worki...
The Memo [pdf]
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/27/politics/donald-trump-access-h...
> In the world of Linux DEs, allowing the user to change the DE is considered a "power-user" feature.

The thing is 99.5% of computer users do not care about any of that.
I'd agree, except for the word "blissfully". Go visit a games subreddit and you'll see tons of people who think programming is easy and are screaming that the devs are lazy money-grubbing idiots that should be doing things better. They aren't "blissful", just ignorant.
Ask HN: How did the general perception and attitude towards geeks change
... over time, lets say over a period of twenty five years?
How does this perception differ between the US and various parts of Europe ?
*in the USA.
That is such a great diagram. Pretty awesome seeing the split tones in DTMF, frequency probing and negotiation.
"But what gets someone to develop those creation-oriented interests instead of just being an idle consumer? And some of my ambitions, like programming, languished until I was in university and discovered amphetamine.
Seems to be some mix of opportunity + a certain amount of destitution + luck."

I think we all have the innate desire to create. No one looks at an instagram craft and say "I wish I wasn't able to make that". IMO, failure is the biggest obstacle for most people.

If you look at kids in their natural environment without devices, they naturally are creative in their play. I think fostering that creativity without the distraction of television and devices is the key with ample praise for effort. I don't think it really matters whether they are creating on a device or with blocks. If the desire to create is there, they will eventually find a medium they can be successful with.
So we ban child porn to try to curb the production of more of it. Its production is what is harmful, and we do everything we can to reduce its production, which involves trying to reduce the demand by making it illegal and arresting people who obtain it. It has no legitimate use, so there is no collateral damage when we ban it.

Banning this technology would be more like banning cameras, since they can also be used to create child porn. However, it would be even LESS effective than banning cameras, because we are talking about a software algorithm.

Also, you say this technology is 'dangerous in the wrong hands.' Why is that the case?

I think the only reason is because it has the possibility of decieving people into thinking it is real. The real way to reduce this risk is to either spread the idea that all video is suspect, and you can't assume who you see on video is who it appears to be, or to perfect technology that can instantly detect when this system has been used.

If you are able to easily distinguish between true and false video, isn't the entire danger mitigated?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-...
It shows his bias, which is a clear conflict of interest, and something that at the very least should have been disclosed to the FISC for their consideration for the warrant.

The fact that it was not disclosed shows that either the leadership of the FBI was overzealous or also very biased.

Legally, if there is even an apparent conflict of interest, an FBI officer is supposed to recuse.
Unless you have insurance, provided by most employers.
I sort of feel like this should be the default required disposition of any fortune. A little something for the heirs, the rest into public trust.
> What is different?

That those jobs aren't reserved for a subset of the population (mostly white males).

Also, I think you're thinking more like 5-6 decades ago, the US car industry wasn't doing so hot in 1978.
They are semantic in that <header> differentiates content in a way that <tr> does not, even though it may also have layout implications.
The invaders positions shouldn't all be updated every cycle, they should be updated one at a time, or in a separate thread, this is what the arcade machine does and due to its limited processing speed this naturally leads to the aliens speeding up as fewer aliens remain.

This implementation starts with the aliens going at what might be considered "full speed", and is probably much more difficult.

https://www.giantbomb.com/space-invaders/3030-5099/
Disclaimer: I work at an Amazon delivery station and briefly worked at a FC prior.

From my experience the managers at my warehouse are very open to moving people around to fill different roles if you request it. This is obviously anecdotal but from my experience people tend to want to stick to one specific job rather than move around.
Grueling is one issue. Financial security is another.

Not knowing if your manager will give you 4 or 40 hours is stressful.

Amazon measures everything. Their incentive compensation plans should be rewarding employees that exceed quota with daily bonuses.

One-year of tenure should not be required to qualify for basic benefits.

In short, these employees need to unionize and collectively bargain.
The algorithm used (EPH) seems bit curious. The paper says "The EPH algorithm was implemented in the C language
and is available at http://cmph.sf.net", but that page has no mention of EPH and I even checked archive.org. I wonder why they ended up never actually releasing a version of cmph with that algorithm. Two years later they seem to have come up with another algorithm, CHD, which was actually released in cmph. Interestingly enough the CHD paper has no comparisons to EPH either.
What if your face is deepfake'd onto one of the people in the child porn? My first impression is that would destroy your life if it was released.
It seems like a great opportunity to finally do something useful with blockchain.
I think producthunt is for actual product releases. Show HN has a much wider range.
Bacteroides fragilis is part of normal gut flora[1]. It can cause infections in the bloodstream(like after surgery/from disease) but trying to balance it in the gut is a different issue entirely. The 2013 study did show some reduction in autism-like symptoms in mice. And they did another mice study on probiotic Lactobacillus reuteri in 2016 with reduction of autism-like symptoms as well.

It's not a cure, but they are studying it to help symptoms. I'm fairly certain you can't buy B. Fragilis commercially anyways.

https://www.autismspeaks.org/blog/2016/06/24/new-findings-pr...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora
Child pornography isn’t a technology, it’s a product. This would be like banning cameras because you can use them to produce child pornography.
How would it be more damaging? If this becomes widly used, everyone will know the videos are fake. How would it be damaging?
No More Servers – FaaS with Firebase Cloud Functions
it depends on the company.

From what I've heard, waymo's controller system has a long set of heuristics, many other competitors use learned algos.
I wish the article talked more about what Amazon and other companies can do to better invest in their communities and employees: how they can train employees for advancement, how they can proactively recognize and nurture talent instead of churning and burning through workers, how they support the community to attract better jobs and help more people, etc. it presents unionization as the only solution. I worry that unionization might increase the cost of labor and just push jobs elsewhere.

Perhaps I'm naive, but how hard would it be for Amazon to really commit to investing in its workforce and community rather than just strategizing to avoid unionisation? The article states they invest in schools in whatnot, but are they just doing this for political points or actually dedicated to investing in the workforce / community and helping its workers grow?
The efficient market hypothesis is not an example of good science. It's still only a hypothesis because there's so little evidence to support it. The market is rife with failures due to all the quirks of human psychology. Any realistic model for the future must be built on the framework of behavioral economics.
Which is the technologically most advance font renderer?
Are there font rendering engines which are simple yet fast?
I did a brief armchair check of the patent dates related to v.34 and I think they should all be expired (from the dates on the ISO site) - so connecting at up to 33.600 bidirectionally on a robbed-bit-signalling DS0 line should be implementable in software legally ... I think Hylafax or a similar project has a library implementing these...
*Only in the USA
(Related topic) Since this might gather eyeballs that would like to see decimal support in JS, I'd be interested to hear more details about use cases people have for this Go package as well as potential use cases / interop in JS.
It is not obviously stupid that labor running the company is a bad thing. I think it is a bad thing in most cases, but I can understand the debate.

What IS stupid is thinking that companies will stick around while their control gets transferred away (from those controlling it). If a company wants to transfer control to its employees, it will do that. If a company doesn't (almost all of them) it will leave. That seems pretty darn obvious to me.
Welcome to the USA. Uninsured appendectomy in California – now I owe $45k. #freedom
Totally. There's no rain in Seattle ever.
Microsoft had some early hiccups in settings being forgetful when reprovisioning them in updates, and apologized for those on the Windows 10 blogs (and especially to Insiders who saw it the most; and also helped report it and fix it). Windows 10 has gotten more reliable to not accidentally forget settings with each major update.
There's no point to these early Fuschia review attempts. I don't see how it demonstrates anything. It's like looking at the famous first email from Linus Torvald and figuring out what the os would be in the end. So it boots, it has windows, but not apps, and prints some things to the screen. It tells us nothing about real intentions, future capabilities, etc.
Thanks, I'll take a look. I do like Scala. Do you recommend a particular editor?
Not to take away from your interesting comment, but it's not written "70-ties", just "70s" - the first one reads as "seventy-ties", which is odd :)

EDIT: Updated "70's" to "70s" because of the great child comment that links to an article showing that while 70's is technically correct it's much more usual to exclude the apostrophe.
> Plenty of Democrats, especislly since Bill Clinton’s Presidency, have been on the side of corporations against the AFL-CIO and organized labor generally on lots of issues of central importance.

First of all, the AFL-CIO is a corporation, so this isn't really a meaningful dichotomy.

But moreover, I'm not sure why this comment is at all relevant? Sure, sometimes Democrats might not always vote the way the AFL-CIO wants, but that doesn't change the fact that the AFL-CIO are major influencers of the Democratic party platform, and it's not at all debatable that the AFL-CIO has lobbied incredibly heavily in favor of the Jones Act.
My biggest issue with the "miles driven" metric is that it doesn't account for the software version. Maybe updating from v1.0 to v1.1 won't warrant resetting the counter, but I believe that over time each historical mile driven becomes materially less relevant to currently deployed version.
>The folks benefitting from a thing will vote themselves money and perks until the place is bankrupt

So, executive boards of companies?
Good point and good observation! The statement of Betteridge's Law itself would have to be changed though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
It wasn't necessarily stupid. But probably ahead of its time. Today, when it is probably too late to do anything, a lot of people are talking about the risks with automation and need for basic income. And that is essentially what it was, to take the increased profits of automation and put them in a sovereign wealth fund for wider distribution without creating inflation.
> The real fix for this problem is the modules system, where the compiled module can expose an object's size without exposing its contents.

Exposing the object size is already too much, it's part of the ABI. The truth is : we can't have our cake (maximum perf due to stack allocation) and eat it too (hide all implementation details)
The thing that upsets me most about self checkouts is just how artificially slowed down they are

I used to be a cashier and bagger at a local supermarket. We were expected to be able to be able to keep up a pace from 20-30 scans per minute, including handling the money, counting change, etc, and baggers were expected to keep up, no matter the size of the order.

Meanwhile I struggle to get self checkouts to recognize more than one scan every ten seconds. I wish I could just log into one of the main, unused lanes and scan myself out. It would take significantly less time.

The banana trick shows that the security implemented in self checkout is simply a sham. Just open them up completely and let us go through them at a higher throughput. You can probably eliminate yet another cashier at that point.
Waymo progress seems to be slowing on critical disengagements (in older CA DMV reports these were called "safe operation disengagements" - they stopped reporting this type in 2017). These disengagements deal with perception issues, the software leading to unwanted maneuvers, inability to react to reckless road users, and incorrect predictions.

You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers:

2015 0.16 disengagements per 1000 miles

2016 0.13 disengagements per 1000 miles

2017 0.12 disengagements per 1000 miles
I suppose it doesn't really? It's a bit of a side question that I thought maybe someone would have insight into.
> It's unfortunate that the community wasn't organized enough to come a consensus on "scaling" ...

I thought the principle appeal of bitcoin was its decentralized nature. Why do you want to forge a consensus and remove the best feature bitcoin can claim?

> ...that politics trumped usability

You mean, bitcoin operates in The Real World (tm) operated by humans?
I have never heard of this, but knowing the mistrust for the Centre in the Southern states I can believe how it is accepted.
Imagine: You'll never need to see that person you don't like again.
There very much are! For example, Diptheria, Pertussis, and Tetanus are all caused by bacteria, and we have vaccines for all three
I haven't built a site in the last 5 years without flexbox and not a single time was I able to interact with it without referring to docs, then still randomly iterating through property values in the inspector until it looked right. That's basically my official process. Luckily the problem space is simple enough for that to be efficient, and only a couple of properties are needed 90% of the time.
Thanks for giving that link. Highly recommend reading it for anyone. And, honestly, this makes me think I should be reading the announcements of all Nobel prizes now. Did a really good job summarizing the reasons.
Living the American dream
More data is needed to combat non-communicable diseases
Yes I have EdgeHTML16 and my grid-based sites look good.
> I'm not sure if your extrapolation from your rejections is accurate.

sure, it maybe wrong, maybe not. I just provided additional information to the context.
Yes, it's Xeno's paradox (http://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/zenos-paradox-of-the-...).
CGI has exactly that same problem - the first 99% is easy, the final 1% is impossible.
What is the test suite spending its time on? CPU? Waiting for a database? `time.sleep()`?
I saw this critique a while back on reddit: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BiCvPKWCUAA7Rtl.jpg:large

The long story short, Breaking Bad, wouldn't be a TV show. That's because of socialized medicine didn't try to profit on the sick. So he wouldn't have started making methamphetamine.

------------------

Edit: Sigh, at -4. I thought this added a valid discussion, that the idea of lack of any sort of medical program across the US is a definite detriment to all. Not only that, but saying he had insurance through the employer only reaffirms:

1. You're trapped at your employer if you're sick

2. You're bound by the quality of care the employer offers via agreements you can't have access to (chosen insurer)

3. Lack of choice by mandated "care plans" and coverage agreements that exclude you from treatment due to insurance not covering it

I really don't get HN some days.. :/
Startup advice collection
A manager can't follow each individual employee every moment of the day.

To be a little more abstract, I'm talking about the degree of privacy and autonomy that workers are afforded. The reason people find the idea of wristband tracking objectionable is because it provides a means to reduce the autonomy of large numbers of workers beyond what was previously feasible.
I'd love to see an analysis of the sorts of situations that the advanced systems can't handle.

Driving in Mexico City last month I was appreciating how intensively interpersonal driving was: it seemed all drivers were constantly computing the risk appetite of all other drivers and acting accordingly; navigation, avoiding pedestrians, and following the law (to the extent possible) was the easy part. Maybe there's a way to avoid issues by providing coordination mechanisms, but I don't see how this would work as long as there are human-driven legacy cars. So will self-driving cars need theory of mind?
Nice! I have a project of my own [1] in a similar vein although not as low level as yours. Using an RPi3 with the official TFT LCD and touchscreen and rendering graphics via OpenVG. Getting about 45fps (~22ms per frame) on the Pi itself to render an 800x480 UI filled with some round-rect buttons, rotary dials, and text. Rolled my own very basic UI controls library and cross-platform host isolation library [2] to achieve this. Tested and working on darwin, win64, and raspberry pi 3.

[1] https://github.com/JamesDunne/axewitcher-ovg
[2] https://github.com/JamesDunne/golang-openvg
"But it's better than no job at all."

If that's all you have to defend it with, then you have nothing to defend. People expect better of Amazon, as they should. The company turned the owner into the richest man on the planet; there is zero excuse for short changing the workers.
I think that you are right, it is great that companies are getting interview reviews on the monthly thread, especially companies that treat candidates poorly. HN is still a relatively small community, so we must all use justifiable words and beware of cognitive biases. For example, I interviewed with the company we are replying to here, and I thought that I was treated fairly. They even looked into bending a hiring policy for me.
Lack of incentives for good behavior is the natural outcome of a necessity like housing being privately owned--with no realistic alternatives. Liken this to water; we are free to buy our own expensive water if we want, but wouldn't you be outraged if there were no baseline of free/low cost tap water?
The problem used to be that old registry hack would go viral in an old person email chain or some terrible adware/malware app would suggest it as a way to "speed up your machine" or worse some virus would do it unsuspectingly as a way to cover its tracks and a lot of inexperienced users would suddenly stop updating their machines regularly.
Go to Canada for that.
You can't work for a business which has been driven out of the market. And that is how markets can work for good, by selecting efficient businesses (but also bad - the market itself doesn't care), but if you look at businesses in the market, if they all race to subsistence wages then businesses willing to pay more can't operate and the city around the market declines. If the wages stay higher, the cost of goods are higher, but other opportunities rise, and the city as a whole can prosper. If the wages are way too high, then that can also be bad that can also cause a decline.
Thats it? ;) Antivenin for rattlesnake bite costs over $153,000. Watch your step and don't tread on it.

http://www.wideopencountry.com/actual-cost-rattlesnake-bite-...