skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Totally agree with this. If the web resource is available to anyone, then how could you be mad that some one saw it.
> I think most people would assume that documents that can only be accessed by editing an ID were not meant to be accessed.

I think most people don't have an intuitive understanding of this at all, which means you can get them to give any answer you want by crafting your description of the problem appropriately. That doesn't make such a procedure reasonable.
Not easily. You might be able to find something in the Boston Globe archives circa 1993-1995 for the Samsung stuff.
Golang Maps: Learn by Example
It's hard to be believe these days, but once upon a time language models were written by hand. Imagine you hand-wrote such a model and put it to use in (for the sake of example) a psychological evaluation application. Now imagine that after years of use you discover that your model systematically marks african americans as less psychologically fit than white americans. Who would be to blame? Naturally, you would. Your actions led to a biased model being used to unjustly and arbitrarily harm innocent people, and your leadership would be right to call into question every decision your application ever made.

Now imagine the same scenario except your app was trained on data instead of hand-written. Make no mistake, the answer to the question of who's to blame is exactly the same: the developer. The response should be exactly the same: a complete loss of confidence in the model.

I'm appalled that this needs to be said, but reading this comments section I'm afraid it does: Machine learning models are inference and pattern recognition devices, not scientific tools. They don't magically reveal hidden patterns in the world, they repeat the patterns that the developers train them on. If you trained a machine learning model to perform psychological evaluations [1] or sentence convicts [2] or recognize faces [3], and your model is biased in a way that is unnecessary and unjust, your model is bad you should be held accountable for its failures.

[1] https://affect.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=4079

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-priso...

[3] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/deep-problem-deep-learning...
Correct. Many businesses ignore the poor, explicitly or implicitly. Luxury apartment price rates are often high, not because the services they offer are valuable, but because high prices exclude the classes their clientele want to avoid. Alternatively, try walking into a Nordstrom's with obviously dirty clothes and see how the staff treat you.

The businesses that do cater to the poor classes exploit them. See fast food restaurants, payday loan lenders, casinos, etc. None of these businesses exist to improve people's lives, but exploit a weakness at a particular moment.
Show HN: Simple P2P video sharing in Java
Maybe it's just me, but that headline sounds as if the 100th Meridian, rather than where the Great Plains begin, is shifting.

Perhaps a better headline would be "The Great Plains, which began at the 100 Meridian, may be shifting".
This post goes into a lot of concepts but doesn't really touch on anything concrete.

Also the justification for the Actor model is flimsy compared to the other concepts.

I'd love to see an actual diagram of the architecture that was built, and maybe also why sharded + replicated postgres (+/- kafka maybe) wasn't enough to solve the data needs of this application.

Assuming they farm out the actual processing of payments (talking to credit card companies) to stripe/paypal/braintree or whatever, all this "payment system" is doing is taking API requests to make payments, calling out to whatever processor they're using, and saving the results, and probably maintaining the state machines for every transaction (making sure that invalid state transitions don't happen).... It sounds like they broke up a monolith but it's completely unclear how they made it better.
>"Unfortunately, what had happened is someone went in through the URL and just sequentially went through every document available on the portal," she said.

It's not clear if the links to the documents with sensitive information were public or not. Yes, it's absolutely stupid to have security by obscurity, but from a legal point of view abusing someone's stupidity may look like a crime. The story, while sad, doesn't look black and white to me as CBC tries to paint it.
> the first question to ask should be "is that result accurate?" not "how do we tune out this problematic result?"

That depends on the product that you want to make. If you’re a company that wants to sail on the status quo and just make money, by all means be amoral.

On the other hand, technology now allows us to analyze and steer social structure at scale. We could reproduce past inequalities in the name of efficiency, or we could think a bit longer about our axis of optimization.

“But cultural relativism!” — I agree. It’s a tough problem, but we don’t all of the sudden need a definitive generalized social plan. Biases can be tackled one algorithm at a time.
He also wrote a book on elementary functions as a sequel to this to act as a precalc text http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Doc/Elementary_Functions_An_A...

This is an interesting book, uses multiplication tables flipped around to show the pattern of zeros that make up the cartesian coord system, introduces determinants and matrix operations, monadic functions used as function arguments, tracing functions/analysis, proof by induction.. wish this was my highschool algebra text.
You don't think it's controversial to tell business to block the other half of the civilized world?
Are you from outside the US?
It is on bittorrent of course. Different spyware than the standard edition though probably.
> The Internet will be sanitized and made safe for all the people who forget their passwords and write them in their monitors.

And how, exactly, is this "sanitization" going to occur? Are you saying that having 15 police officers raid a home and confiscate multiple computers (all but one of which had nothing to do with the incident in question), arresting a completely uninvolved person on his way to school, and taking no action at all against the stupid contractor who set up the website, is an acceptable form of "sanitization"?

> The Internet is for ordinary people now, not curious teenager hackers.

That's not what the police action described in the article is saying. It's saying the Internet is for government and corporations, and God help the ordinary people who get in their way. (Btw, I include "curious teenager hackers" in "ordinary people". Perhaps the fact that you don't is part of the problem.)
Remember the first two E's fellow 90s person. It's the third one that gets you.
The "Bob" example is already a real-world example, though...
The problem with ex-ante regulation is that you can kill really good ideas before they take off. Government regulations should target known problems rather than problems that people imagine will happen. That does mean we need to let some problems happen, but that's a tradeoff worth making in a society that cares about making innovation possible.

By the way, when Facebook was new nobody would have guessed that it might be involved in a Russian plot to influence a presidential election more than a decade in the future, so regulation would not have been proposed anyway.

And back in the 90s, the Justice Department claimed Microsoft was a monopoly that could only be stopped by government action. And then over the next few decades, Microsoft was knocked off its pedestal by companies and market trends that nobody anticipated. If it really had been a monopoly, that wouldn't have been possible.

Governments have a pretty bad track record of predicting the future, especially regarding the interaction between technology and culture.

> You can't know what their self-regulation means.

You also can't know what internal steps a company like Facebook has taken to deal with government regulations like GDPR. But you can measure outcomes. Given that regulations are intended to produce outcomes, that's what you ought to be measuring anyway.
Senate poised to allow Duckworth’s newborn on the floor
Send a PR to that team member with a fix to ensure they know what you've done and agree with the fix.
I'm glad that Google is part of this conversation, and they're now applying tests for bias to new models that they release. (Some of their old models are pretty awful.)

If you want to see a further example, in the form of a Jupyter notebook demonstrating how extremely straightforward NLP leads to a racist model, here's a tutorial I wrote a while ago [1]:

[1] http://blog.conceptnet.io/posts/2017/how-to-make-a-racist-ai...
sigh no
Machine learning models are pretty good at reasoning with (or can be made to reason with) conditional probability, which I think can solve this problem.

For example, people from X race might be more likely to commit crimes in the absence of any other information (marginal probability). However, person from X race is no more likely to commit crimes than a person from Y race, conditioned on something else like where they went to school, what they do for a living, etc..
Ahahahahahaha. Ok.
Precisely, centralization provides a simple architecture for the system.

However, since all the power is concentrated to one "source of truth", it can lead to unfair decisions for the rest of the network.

Decentralized systems are ideal went you want to ensure there's fair decisions for the whole network. It's much more complicated to build, but worth it in some cases eg; crypto currencies, governments etc.

Also it's not strictly a black and white categorization, systems can have levels of decentralization; eg: the internet
Intel's Chips to recruit GPUs to scan memory for software nasties
In the browser, and it works really well.
>I'd argue that the kid was entering through an open window of a public building.

Given that he tried to sequentially download all possible documents by sequentially incrementing document ID in URL it's more like trying to open every window in the public building and see what happens.
> It did, however, damage the privacy of various Canadian citizens.

Did it? I understand that the stupid contractor who put this data on the website did (potentially--but note that nobody is saying that anyone has actually suffered harm because of that data being accessible). But did the teenager who got this bomb dropped on him damage anyone's privacy? As I understand it, he downloaded the data, put it on his hard drive, and left it there; it never went anywhere else.
There's no supporting reference given, and this doesn't resemble Tolkien's description in the slightest in size, shape, or appearance of materials. The door in the film corresponds much better.

See: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Doors_of_Durin
Indeed, a somewhat underappreciated story from the mid to late 20th century in America is that cities were dying. I grew up near the tail end of that era so I well remember it. If you look at the population peaks for a lot of big cities in America in the 20th century (New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit, etc.) you'll see a peak in the early to mid 20th century followed by a long decline. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, not the least of which is rampant racism, but a major consequence of it was that shrinking big city populations led to economic decline, rising crime, diminished tax base, diminished spending on core city infrastructure, and overall a feeling of helplessness and crisis in those cities. It was only with changing demographics and a transformed economy where urban centers became desirable places to live again and economically vital again (starting around the '80s and really taking off through the '90s and early 2000s) that big cities rebounded and started growing again.

But the infrastructure debt from all those years of decay still looms, and cities will be paying that off for decades to come.
Oh, huh. I suppose I was mistaken. Thanks for clarifying that!
When I worked for Lucent I met someone who described himself as a "project management expert" at a regional conference. I thought, "holy shit I suck as project manager I should talk to this guy." Upon inquiry, I learned that he hadn't been on a project in years, and actually didn't teach any project management classes either. Ballast. After I related my confusion to someone else, I got a "Ssshhhh! That guy is some Senator's cousin. They have to keep him on for five years after the Senator leaves office." I.e., his job was more secure than that of literally anyone else at the conference. Did Lucent receive some consideration for this accommodation? Have they and Ma Bell done the same thing for decades?

Our system is composed of mutually revolving fictions. We pretend that campaign finance isn't corrupt, and we also pretend that all corruption that takes place is in the form of campaign finance.
Tableau is the biggest. But there are hundreds of other BI tools that are being pushed hard by vendors on the premise that they can replace code.

This appeals to mangers because it’s hard to recruit people who know R and SAS.

Some of these tools are better than others, but none let you do everything you can do in R.
Sigaction: see who killed you, and more
Well spake
It’s a play on a song lyric

https://g.co/kgs/AgyHpo
I really have nothing to comment except how excellent I found your writeup. Seriously, wow.
> how is Notepad not a good editor?

1. Only understands Windows line endings.

2. Always saves UTF-8 with a BOM.

Only the first one is really a significant issue, but the second one can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Granted, yes, it's a pain in the ass primarily because *nix applications often treat a BOM as data, but it's still a pain in the ass.

> Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.

Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications.
> completely different

Don't lose hope about losing all hope yet! Apparently, "Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles. The breakthrough, spurred by the discovery of plastic-eating bugs at a Japanese dump, could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientis...
Around 24 hours remaining. Come join the unofficial chat room for yc s18 applicants! Link : https://www.hackerschat.net/
It's fine. They also regularly blame the drivers for their manslaughtering "autopilot" software.

Our high tech community does not have time for whining. We need to move forward at any cost.
Security and antivirus protection exist as much to protect others as oneself, much like vaccines. I wonder whether Microsoft considers updates to be protecting the users of a specific machine from a virus, or the community at large from many machines having that virus?
... from an increase in donor supply, not patient demand.
What type of companies are you going for that the interviewers are so young? Shouldn't they be at least senior engineers?
That's not quite correct. The original subway lines were operated by IRT and BRT, but they weren't private ventures. The city paid to build most of the lines and leased them to the operators. The city always maintained majority ownership even when they brought in private investors.
> If there are signs (literal or figurative) that the property owner doesn't want you doing something

But there weren't in this case. The express purpose of the site was to make that information publicly accessible. If you leave stuff out at your curb with a sign that says "Free to all takers", and someone takes something you didn't mean to put there, how are they supposed to know you didn't want them to take it?
Don't assume that lobbying is the only form of corruption. There's lots of illegal stuff too. Federal officials seem reluctant to investigate more than sporadically. It's almost as if self-interest affects their actions too.
Thanks for doing this. Exactly what I wanted to make my long daily commute productive.
Supreme Court Set to Hear Landmark Online Sales Tax Case
Interesting link, thanks. It looks like the readings are just along a major roads in Los Alamos?

I had figured there must be some independent monitoring here, because many retired nuclear engineers live in the area of the community by the cleanup.

With the history of the lab here, there are many sites that are contaminated, but most of them are within the lab bounds. Of course, dust doesn’t respect a fence. There have been some worrisome incidents, like when a water pipe burst in Los Alamos and sent water through an unregistered historic buried dumpsite that contained nuclear or toxic materials.

I looked into rented a workshop across from an empty field with the fence around it, and looked into the history of the site. It had been the waste dump it for the first several years of the lab during the Manhattan project. It turned out they had cleaned up the site a few years ago. Would I have been exposed to any radioactive or toxic and dust if I had been there during that time? Who knows. It’s not clear if they would’ve told me if I was. At the end of the street there was a milling building for uranium, plutonium and beryllium and the water treatment facility for the site, which poured all of the water straight into the ground. They’be been cleaning that up recently.

In my own work, I generally prefer to leave toxic debris undisturbed until I am ready to deal with it safely. Like asbestos, it doesn’t harm you when it’s sealed and undisturbed. It’s often worse to clean it up poorly than to leave it there.
This is a ridiculous comment unworthy of this community.

Safari doesn’t follow web standards that other browsers follow. That’s worthy of frustration. If they build a browser, they should implement standard APIs.
> If you asked your mom, "hey, do you think they meant to have people be able to access those documents, where you can only get to them by editing numbers in the URL," she would say "no."

No, she would say "I don't know what you're talking about, can you put that in plain English?" And then you could get her to give any answer you wanted by phrasing the plain English appropriately.
I'm not an expert in Canadian law, but are there any elected officials in the chain of the decision to conduct a raid? If so this ought to be severely career limiting. If it was an elected judge who approved the warrant, for example.
This is a pretty disingenuous question. If you've spent any time in software development, you're well aware that tools of all sorts get used to do tasks for which they were never intended, and crazy unintended consequences result. There's no reason to think that it will be any different for pre-trained machine learning models for things like sentiment analysis.

Here's one example of how it could happen. Someone publishes a high-performing model to gauge the tone of a writing sample. This model includes the anti-Bob bias described above, such that the appearance of the word Bob is tantamount to including a curse word, and greatly biases the model toward negative sentiment. Because of its high overall performance, companies of all sorts incorporate this model into their workflows for things like grant applications, loan applications, online support forums, and so on. For example, they might use it to detect when someone is using their help form to send an angry rant rather than a legitimate request for support. Now, any time someone named Bob wants support, or a loan, or a grant, or whatever, there's an increased chance that their request will be flagged as an angry or abusive rant and denied simply because it contains their name, Bob.

In fact, we can remove the layer of indirection and note that some people have names that are spelled the same as a curse word, and already have similar issues with today's software, making it literally impossible for them to enter their real name into many forms. This example doesn't involve machine learning, since profanity filters are typically implemented as a pre-defined blacklist. But there's no reason to think that a sentiment analysis model would fail to pick up on the negative associations of profanity.
It’s hard to take him seriously in terms of mass transit when he talks about vacuum trains as though they’re not a terrible idea. Then you remember he owns a company that plans to ultimately replace airlines in some markets with rockets, and a car company, and a person not overly taken with his “charisma” wonders if his interest in mass transit is in scuttling it.

If he was serious about mass transit there are existing, proven technologies he could get behind with his billions, rather than hyperloop. Instead he proposes a technology that is entrancing to people who don’t know enough about engineering and physics, and that is exciting. Unfortunately the tech isn’t workable, it’s just exciting, but it could take a decade or more for that to become apparent to most people.

Wikipedia has an excellent article which lays out the history of the concept going back to the 18th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

I love the understatement of “prohibitively expensive” too, very droll. Any experimentalist who has worked with strong vacuums knows how absurd the idea of a hyperloop is at this point. The expense, the maintence costs, the airlocks, the pumps, all would be an incredible expense that could never be recouped in the builder’s lifetime. The actual tunneling would have to be totally revolutionary too, with incredibly long, nearly straight sections. The turning radius would have to be on the order of of a commercial airliner’s turning radius, which is absurd.

Credit to the man though, it hits that sweet spot requiring specialist knowledge to see through the hype, much like promises of nuclear fusion as a major power source within a couple of decades. The big idea is so attractive, and the problems all involve technical details. It’s not quite a con, but it’s close.
The politicization of bias in this realm is unproductive. We know where it leads. There will be 'committees' of people who are not trained in statistical thinking, who haven't even taken a statistics class, who are not qualified to make any statements and who's interests are not in line with making the best product acting as nuisances and aggressors to people who are do have the expertise and who strive to make the best product.

The best course of action is to treat this bias like normal bias with non-politicized, inanimate objects. How would data scientists that encountered similar bias while running machine learning models of the motion of waves act?
Even some US tech companies have shutdowns between Christmas and New Year's and force everyone, including salaried employees, to take vacation or unpaid leave.
Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns? My email address is in my HN profile.

I don't know you have don't particularly care about your financial situation, so I'm not gonna read them or share them with anyone else. I'll just keep them on my hard drive.
When talking about something like crime rates by race, your statement incorrectly assumes society enforces laws fairly/equally. For example, based on the numbers alone, black people are much more likely to commit drug-related crimes than white people. However, studies show that black people are stopped a lot more often and have unequal sentencing outcomes.

It's important to remember that AI doesn't have context, and just because it's using "data" to make decisions doesn't mean the decisions are unbiased - the underlying data may be biased.
Why not just use something like matrix/riot.im and host your own sever?
Building the app on your own might provide some mental peace, but I don't see what it really contributes other than just reinventing the messenger wheel.
Ah, I see. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with that part of (edit: North) American culture.