skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been struggling with addiction in various forms for my entire adult life, so I have a decent understanding of it imho.

When I first learned what a smartphone was, I knew immediately that I would become addicted to it if I let myself.

I simply chose not to get addicted to smartphones by never purchasing one, and it's working out quite well so far.

I know they're awesome little nuggets of technology, but I just don't want to be that connected... so I don't own one.

For the same reasons that I choose not to continually purchase the latest gaming console.

Spending $1,000 on something every 6 months (amortized cost of the smartphone + connectivity charges) that eventually becomes worthless isn't far off from a serious drug or alcohol addiction financially speaking...

And now all of my "straight laced" friends can hardly even carry on a casual conversation without looking at their smartphones every few minutes has only reinforced my way of thinking.

They use smartphones as passive babysitters for their children when they're on short car rides without hesitation.

The look on a 3 year old's mesmerized face as they stare into a tablet disgusts me to no end.

I now choose to never own a smartphone.

I know they're a detriment to society.

Perhaps when I am old, dying, and actually in desperate need of "contact", I'll splurge on one.

But until then, I'm perfectly content receiving and composing emails from a full-blown computer with a keyboard... and sending the odd text message through my dumbphone.

I work in the tech industry, and refusing to own a smartphone hasn't slowed me down yet!
> Because it's unthinkable that movies with male main characters could actually just be better than movies with female main characters

Or, more realistically, it's not unthinkable that movies with a male lead could be better reviewed than movies with female main characters, especially when you open the field up to non-professional reviewers. We've see how ape-shit people went at movies like the recent Ghostbusters remake or even the new Star Wars series just because they put women in the kinds of roles that had traditionally been played by men.

It's an interesting question of when machine learning models that reflect actual human biases are correct and when we should try to adjust them for that human bias. In the case of movie reviews, you could make the case that you'd want the models to reflect the biases of the reviewers. Just because a reviewer is being sexist doesn't mean it's wrong for the machine learning model to correctly classify the reviewer's sentiments.
This isn't just a technology problem. Most humans are also really, really bad at distinguishing causation from correlation. The very notion that these are even different things is utterly alien to most people.

An AI that was even slightly good at it would be far ahead of what we get when humans run things.
I've never gotten Siri to successfully play "Cuz It's Hot" by "My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult". Also the only place I have the song is "WaxTrax! Black Box: The First 13 Years (Disc 3)", which is also pretty much impossible to get Siri to play. Sigh.
I had one, the colours were brilliant but the autofocus, operation and lowlight were all poor.
The problem is when we hand AI full reigns over a system that should have humans with the final say, because doing it with humans is "too hard" or "doesn't scale." At least with humans you have auditable decision making and recourse via the legal system, even if it can be hard to fight. AI are essentially black boxes that unconsciously learn the biases of the datasets they are given.

When AI starts determining rather consequential things like how long to send someone to prison for, that's a problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/us/politics/sent-to-priso...
My bet is they will revive the iBook brand.
On foggy days (most days in SF let's be honest) the tower disappears into the clouds, while all others sit below the line. I wonder if it breaches the fog on the upside? Anyone been up there? That would be quite a sight. I know the golden gate bridge often does, at 746 ft, while salesforce tower is over 1000 ft tall, so it seems possible.
It would be hard for every charity to talk to every tax authority.

Every payer files 1099s and sends the payee a copy. It would be no hardship for charities to file analogous forms and send analogous copies to donors, although I suppose the chance of false filing would increase. To prevent that, just issue charities some secret identifier they write on the form that goes to IRS and don't write on the copy they send to the payer.
I'll never understand why a payment system needs to scale horizontally.

Modern computer systems can scale to 500 or more processor cores. Each core runs billions of instructions per second.

A system for a billion accounts on the scale of Uber probably has a million active users at a time, probably a quarter that involving payment.

Is Uber saying that they can't support 250k payment transactions per second on the largest system today? That's maybe 1000 transactions per second per core on the largest systems, or about 1ms per transaction. Why is that impossible for them?

Or, put it another way, why can't one transaction be completed in less than 1 million CPU instructions?

And that's for the very largest company like Uber.. can't even imagine a typical startup needing to scale horizontally for payment processing.
That's how I feel about visual descriptions in many books. I have a weak visual imagination, so most of it goes straight through me without leaving an impression. I wonder if non-visual sensory description is especially valuable to people like me? I'm not particularly interested in food (or in fantasy for that matter), but the snippets of description in Kuiper's comment helped me to understand why those non-visual sensory elements can make a setting feel real.
Elon is doing way too much context switching between Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company even though he is no ordinary human.

Recently in an interview he said he was sleeping on the factory floor of Tesla because he didn't have time to go home. That's going to lead to burnout, mental and physical issues. I am a big advocate of work smarter not harder.
Interesting story. But it seems to me they're just substituting addiction with distraction. The Apple watch ad always made me cringe: they basically listed how the wonderful moments of our life are distracted by digital devices. These devices used to be feet away: radio, phones, computers... now I have to bloody wear it on me? No fucking way.
No, I mean literally, if I paste those strings into my etc/hosts it won't block any of those sites. It simply doesn't work. You can still load the sites. It takes stronger measures to block them. I have to edit my hosts file all the time for work anyway, so I ended up installing SelfControl and I turn it on when I feel like I need it.
Pardon the naive question, but is a high-rise corporate office like this one (and firms in NYC) preferable to a sprawling "groundscraper" campus (Google, FB)? Which layout costs less? How does this affect management and organizational structure?
Really? I'm pretty sure "Alexa" is known for responding to the TV.
The problem is, security updates should stick to security, and should be clearly separated from feature updates - especially from the ones that remove features.
"Jim Crow" referred to laws, not just spontaneous capitalist behavior, didn't it?
Cold War 2.0, with all the bullshit that comes with it. Having lived through the insanity of constant hyped up threat of nuclear attack the last time around, I really think we should do what we can to avoid it this time. It wasn't a pleasant way to grow up.

Having grown up in the West my schools, media, and government worked very hard to paint a specific picture of life in the USSR. Now, knowing many Russians, I understand that the picture was in many ways different and more nuanced.

The last few years I have seen a steady increase in general hysteria creation against Russia and Putin. Not that Putin isn't a despot, just that level of threat he and Russia represent is just seriously overblown, and their motives are grossly misrepresented.

Looks like the War on Terror isn't generating the financial returns those in power had hoped for, so we need to go back to that good old standby - the red menace.

The quickest way to put all this shit to bed is to build a framework that completely outlaws profiting from war in any way.
Meanwhile in Jeff Bezos's bank account:

https://finviz.com/insidertrading.ashx?oc=1043298&tc=7
Did you enable Windows Hello?
I got the fuji x-pro2 for this reason. I used to carry a bunch of canon gear... till I stopped bringing it anywhere because it was too heavy.

I traded it all in for a fuji, and 2 small primes, and I bring that camera everywhere.
Baba Ijebu Lottery Past Result to Forecast on Tuesday 17-04-2018
Can you elaborate? I thought that sensor was at least OK in low light
>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.

I only use a 32-bit OS and a 32-bit processor for Win7. If it doesn't work in x64, you've just given me a reason to never "upgrade". Then again, if my computer didn't throw a hissy fit over it, I'd be using FreeDOS as my primary OS. Either that or just get an old MS-DOS 6.2 installed.
Tribal Tiki Tattoos-Polynesian Cultural Designs
Lots of people who work construction draw all winter.
You should ask yourself the question whether it was Facebook or the media that made you distrust Facebook.

Because I can’t recall a single instance of when Facebook or Zuck lied to the public... but I recall plenty of lies the media has spread about Facebook
"most people miss" that because that isn't what he says he is trying to do. Musk has said on several occasions that he is trying to fix some of the earth's problems.

By all means, speculate on Elon Musk's hidden psyche, but don't expect everyone to agree when the man himself says something different.
I think the durability of that tolerance was what the parent was pointing out.

As in, it's potentially only useful as a bridge treatment once. If you decide to lapse your long term anti-depressant after several months and suddenly need another bridge treatment as you ramp back up again, the durability of the tolerance from your initial ketamine treatment would prevent it from being useful the second time.
Lea Kissner, Who Leads NightWatch, Google’s Internal Privacy Strike Force
You could argue that, I suppose. I think comparisons to Hitler are inapt when someone attempts to tar something irrelevant to Hitler's particular crimes (e.g., his vegetarianism) or particularly when someone attempts to compare their ideological opponent to Hitler on specious grounds. But I think there is room for apt comparison to Hitler: it would be a mistake for humanity not to learn from the experience of letting him rise to power.

Godwin himself wrote a little bit about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20170209163428/https://www.washi...

(And I am totally open to criticism that this particular comparison is inapt.)
Currently, Windows 10 is also the only non-bullshit OS for tablets - one that makes it a productive device, instead of purely consumer one. Alas, tablets ain't very popular anyway, so I doubt this impacts Windows numbers much.

I'd guess Microsoft gets most Windows sales from regular people buying regular laptops with Windows preinstalled. Most of them probably don't even know there is something else other than Windows.
The NYT writer did more research than most people would. If you're blaming the user for not teching correctly, you've already lost.

If the review I read is correct, that's an ordinary debit card that one refills by selling bitcoin. Which has approximately no value to most people, because they already have debit cards that work just fine.

It could be that bitcoin will eventually end up being useful as a currency, but its high volatility means that day hasn't come yet, and won't come soon. Prominent bitcoin advocates are happy to give up on it as a currency altogether. E.g.: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
DIY LED Eye Lashes – Video
Notepad will be tabbed soon by Windows Sets.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/tabs-come-to-every-w...
I'm a big advocate of "don't tell people what to do." Musk seems to have a pretty good handle on his own limits. He's been doing crazy work hours and sleeping under his desk occasionally for over a decade. Just because it hits the news doesn't mean he should change his habits if it works for him.
And I thought getting a customer support person who says, "they system won't let me do that" was bad enough!
A web server is a thing people use to make files publicly accessible - it has no other purpose. It has stronger expectations against privacy than a trash can.

As such, your analogies to situations (locked houses, unattended jewelry) with the opposite expectation just disprove your point. Assuming a file is private even though it's publicly accessible on a web server is as nonsensical as assuming an object is free for the taking even though it's an unattended diamond ring.
I’m not worried about sentient machines. I’ve done a lot of work with AI over the past few years and we are no where close to anything sentient. It’s really just advanced search mechanism where the biggest danger with the tech it self is that dangers we misinterpret results and use them for something horrible.

The real danger I see comes from ownership. ML is good at predicting things. Nano tech along with genetics will make you immortal and have near magical abilities, and currently only a handful of people will own these technologies.

We are much closer to any cyberpunk dystopian than a robot revolution. In a way it’s always been like that with capitalism, if we don’t regulate the free market, then the free market turns people into slaves - and right now we’re letting the market regulate both society and tech.
Kendrick Lamar Just Won a Pulitzer Prize
> AI are essentially black boxes that unconsciously learn the biases of the datasets they are given.

Please don't confuse "AI" with the current state-of-the-art of the latest deep learning model. Many of us researchers are working on interpretability and understanding of causality.

Calling it "AI" makes it appear final, as if in 50 years all machine learning-based decision systems will behave exactly as they do now, without nuance.
One thing is location. Very hard to get a lot of land and approval to build a sprawling campus in the center of a city like San Francisco.
His brother does that. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/dining/kimbal-musk-food.h...
The Ultimate Ivory Tower (1999)
In fairness certain types of advertising have very little roi but continues to be used because of past association or the network effect.
His brother, Kimbal, is involved with square Roots, doing modular LED hydroponics systems for growing local fresh veggies anywhere.
I may be accused of nitpicking here but the Pareto Principle is, although related, distinct from the Pareto family of distributions.

I don't intend to derail the conversation so, rather than typing out an explanation of obscene length, I will refer all interested parties to the following:

Pareto Principle
https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-paret...

Basics of Pareto Distributions
https://actuarialmodelingtopics.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/par...

https://subversion.american.edu/aisaac/notes/pareto-distribu...

Example of some limitations in the application of Pareto Distributions
https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0504217.pdf
> Linus being gentle to noob doesn't buck the trend, but fits a pattern - Linus only serves his harshest criticism to senior devs who ought to know better.

Very similar to Gordon Ramsey being very nice and gentle to kid chefs, but very demanding to "professional" chefs.

As professional as reality TV allows
If it is insolvable for the current deep learning systems then they aren't worth the time and effort that has been spent on them.

Your solution will not work, ever. All such companies will adjust their processes to maximise their own benefits, irrespective on any legal consequences. For most, the profits (in whatever way they define profit) will be the more important thing than any legal requirements placed on them. It is the nature of the people running these companies.
You can run the web app in your browser. It's no different than what Google does with ChromeOS. A fully capable web app. I haven't used it in a while, but on the feature front the only place it seemed to lag was collaboration, but I think even that is now on par with Google.
> You lose functionality though, like being able to check doors etc. remotely.

You don't. That's what VPNs are for.
The Last 140 Characters
Nope, there isn’t.

It’s just another one of these crazy myths floating around
Welp, glad they got acquired before this happened. Though perhaps this breach happened because the employees that were protecting the site and company left after the acquisition (pure speculation).
No I am simply pragmatic. Blockchain is an empty promise
> The only solution I can see is forcing any company that imposes life-defining actions on people (credit bureaus, banks, parole boards, personnel offices, etc) to use only rules based on objective criteria and to prohibit systems based on a "lasagna" of ad-hoc data like present day AI systems.

That is probably the exact opposite of what you really want. If the problem is that someone's name is Bob and the AI thinks Bobs are evil, what you want is for there to be 100,000 other factors for Bob to show the system that it isn't so. As many factors as possible, so that the one it gets wrong will have a very low weight.

Even the objective criteria will have biases. There is a significant racial disparity in prior criminal convictions, income, credit history and nearly every other "objective" factor. The more factors you bring in, the more opportunities someone in a given demographic has to prove they still deserve a chance.
And I can't also get bullshit "feature" updates, and my device can't be remotely bricked, and it doesn't need the mothership servers to be up - so again, my device won't die when the company gets acquihired, stops pretending to provide value and pivots to writing blogposts about their incredible journey.
I could agree with some of it. But he’s also said many times that he feels the only way to keep humans from going extinct is to make humanity a multi-planetary species, so while he maybe trying to fix some things his pretty clearly stated goal is to get humans off this rock permanently.

http://earthsky.org/space/elon-musk-mars-manifesto-humans-mu...
High tide happens twice a day so I agree with the old man ;)

I get what you are saying though, and I don't think that it's dumb to try to make progress and help people. I am just pointing out how irrational the world is and how many other problems there are that people turn a blind eye to.
Sure, but remember the lowest-bid contractor here used an integer. Baby steps.
Yubico and Microsoft Introduce Passwordless Login
Windows runs on IoT devices, Raspberry Pi's... essentially, there aren't many mainstream hardware platforms Windows can't run on. And .NET Core runs on all of them, too.

This is not about Windows technical capability - which is effectively every bit as good as Linux in this space. This is about, "OK, developers, you'd rather have Linux than Windows on your IoT device? Cool. Now get connected to Azure for that IoT data, we'll help you keep that device secure and up-to-date." It's about market share for Azure.
They are hypothetical. I asked for "some practical use where they're sufficiently better than existing technologies that they are displacing existing businesses," which is pretty clearly not hypothetical.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain proponents always have hypothetical use cases. The original Bitcoin paper [1] gives a hypothetical use case, a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." This still remains basically hypothetical; even prominent Bitcoin boosters have given up on that vision. [2]

I'm done taking hypotheticals seriously in this space; I've seen too much hype and approximately nothing in the way of results. Maybe someday you'll be proved right about your use case. Maybe you'll have customers who not only buy it but keep using it and come back to buy more. But until then, you should expect people to be skeptical. Previous blockchain/cryptocurrency promoters have, for me and many others, used up all the reasonable benefit of the doubt and more.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[2] https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
Traditionally, Rider and Driver payment systems were two separate systems. This caused a lot of complications as the business became more complicated. Traditionally, Riders paid Uber and Uber paid out to Drivers. However, with Cash payments, the payment system also required Drivers to collect cash and pay Uber. Then with Eats, Restaurants were neither Driver or Rider.

The new payment system unified all of these into pure money movement where any entity can move money to any other entity. This enables all current and future products to have flexibility in payment models. (Think about how payments would be modeled for Uber Freight or with the new Uber Transit partnership [1])

Source: I work on the Uber Payment System

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-uber-masabi-mobile-train-...
His restaurants in Boulder Colorado are great.

https://www.thekitchenbistros.com/
Theoretically, the software may be easier to fix. In practise, it only happens if there is a profit to be made to get it fixed. If there is a profit to be made, then there are no guarantees that biases will be removed. It then depends on the political bent of those pursuing the fixes.
The tower itself is pretty bland if not downright ugly, but hopefully it will spur development of an even taller building(s) with some true character.
If I wanted functionality past the most basic kind, then I would use the full, native app.

Web apps are not a sufficient replacement for a proper application and if a developer can't be bothered building an app properly then they shouldn't be surprised when I don't use it.
I'm reminded of https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com

It turns out that white collar crime is predominantly committed by white men. A system trained to detect white collar crime using, say, enron emails, might suggest a white guy's emails over someone whose name doesn't sound like an enron employee, or who shared pictures of their cat.

I mean, I suppose you can argue that hey, maybe that bias is usually correct. Maybe it usually is the white guy. But personally, I'd probably control for things conflated with gender or race and then look for indicators that differentiate between criminals and innocent people. You will probably have a lower AUC, but better differentiation between criminals and innocent people is what matters.
OK. I don’t disagree with that but I also am not sure how it is related to my comment.

I’m not defending Microsoft, and I’m not a fan. I am merely speculating on their perspective.
I suspected this might happen after Musk said that Tesla would be profitable soon.

If they’re losing money when they make cars, the logical choice should be to stop making cars. By doing so they should achieve profitability.

This is why Musk is an icon. He sees opportunities others don’t and is willing to defy convention.