skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Could this be a direct indicator of a powerful subconscious bias in Amazon's existing hiring process?

Yes, but only in the obvious sense that we all already knew: tech companies hire more men than women for technology-focused roles. That's not to say it isn't an issue; it is, but it's nothing new, and almost certainly not unique to Amazon.

Without significant oversight and manual tuning, any training dataset based wholly or in part on current employees is going to demonstrate a bias against women, because there are strictly fewer women. Moreover it's likely that (for a variety of reasons, both intrinsic and extrinsic) fewer women succeed in the interview process as a ratio compared to the number who actually apply.
The issue here is that this more or less blames the messenger and not what I see as the root cause.

For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like).

It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America.

Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)
At best ai amplifies existing patterns and biases when handling repetitive work. Over and over we hear how Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others will solve the problem of problematic content and bad actors through ai and neural networks. It's a fraud and the digital potemkin village of our era.
> If you can't get something legally

"Can't" is a pretty strong word.

If something isn't available for streaming, it is very likely to be available on DVD or Blu-Ray. Even if the media are region-coded, region-free players may be perfectly legal in your jurisdiction.
It's hard to fathom a moral system that thinks you have a greater obligation to a monopolistic company and a multimillionaire singer than any random poor guy. According to your attitude, someone is a bad person if they don't pay for the latest Avengers film, but I doubt you would condemn someone who doesn't give to charity with the same vehemence.
Imagine a sports stadium that is completely empty except for two teams playing the best game they ever had. And then getting paid $0 and their bosses are ready to pack it in and cancel everything. Now imaging a giant second stadium build out of wood that eclipses the industry built one that goes 45 stories taller than the first one. This one is packed with people that simply helped build that larger stadium surrounding the original and overlooks that game being played.

So.. just downvoting and not even a single comment how this doesn't apply? To me, that's simply people that want to continue the party without having to explain themselves.
They probably count each repair as a "lost sale". If someone repairs an iPhone for $100 apple sells one less iPhone for $800. In other words on their theoretical balance sheets each repair is a $700 loss of revenue. Of course this is bullshit but that doesn't change the fact that lawmakers let themselves be influenced by it.
So you are suggesting that the purpose of the Bloomberg piece is to actually get access to Apple's data centers? Seems a bit conspiracy minded to me. If that was the end goal, surely there would be easier ways than having your "agent" be quoted in an article regarding the root problem and then hoping that his company is hired to provide inspection services.
Continuous aka base-load power is considered a defect as it's not load following. You can load follow with nuclear but then it becomes ridiculously expensive. France gets around this largely by buying and selling to other countries, but that does not scale.

Really, going 100% nuclear takes either massive over supply or large scale energy storage just like solar. Wind however can supplement solar while still costing less than nuclear and allowing you to more closely match the demand curve.

A little peaking power allows you to avoid significant grid storage at very reasonable costs, and as I said fix transportation etc.

PS: The need for grid electricity storage is overblown. Storing energy for more than 1 day means you very rarely use that stored energy making in non-viable. When you can have 2x as much solar and still only pay 4c/kwh that's pointless. Within the day it needs to compete with an over supply of energy most of the time.
If a MSFT patent has any relevant to open-source programs, such as VFAT, they're now open to other OIN members.
That gives rise to a very interesting concept: ML-based bias assessments. If you take some real-life hiring data (or other applications such as sentencing or generally human behavior data) and train the AI on it, then run it through a bunch of tests to see whether there's bias, that can reveal trends in the underlying training data.

I can't imagine this not already being a thing, but I haven't really heard of people using this method.
One locks memory to keep it from being swapped to disk. You can imagine if you have sensitive data, you want to keep it as ephemeral as possible. Do even security-focused go programs typically lock _all_ of their virtual memory, or just the sensitive pages? I don’t know. But if a bunch of programs hogged hundreds of megabytes of unused RAM each, that’s the problem alluded to on low resource systems.
Yes, this Microsoft does seem to have left much of the Gates and especially Ballmer machinations behind - at least as regards its openness and collaboration.
It detected waves in something instead of nothing.
I understand your comment but to me and others working on web3 projects, decentralisation is always measured in 3 categories, political, architectural and logical so from my perspective this isn't shifting goalposts, it's being accurate.

I think I've already shared Vitalik Buterin's article elsewhere but in any case, https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

I saw a twitter thread today that covered the arguments against EOS (as an example) by judging them exactly on how their architecture, logical and political systems doesn't fulfil the requirements to be considered "decentralised" that might be interesting. Here: https://twitter.com/jamesspediacci/status/104981160787686195...
I'd really hope that a poor, primarily agricultural country is not actually a great example of what this could look like.
Your argument would have more power if music weren't freely available on the radio. And if someone else paid for the music and played it, I can listen to it for "free" as well.

Musicians are stiffed by the record labels, not by the fans. The fans are the ones that keep them rich, keep them popular, buy their shirts and go to their $200/seat concerts. At worst, their records are loss-leaders for an even more lucrative business.
Thanks. I opened the page and chrome started chugging.
I closed the page without reading the article
The Best Board Games for Kids, According to a Board Game Blogger
‘Hacker’ to Live Stream 51% Attacks as Educational Tutorials
So a patent license is granted when

a) you are a member of OIN

b) the infringing software is core to the Linux system

Is that correct? What about other OSS projects that are unrelated to Linux?
Completely agree, life isn't suffering unless your perspective is that because I or someone else must wash dishes, one of us must suffer.
They're basically giving you:

- the "static webserver"

- the sandbox for commit hooks

- instant CDN & cache-busting

- 1-click domain setup

- 1-click SSL setup

- git-branch powered a/b testing

- git-branch powered deploy previews

- Functions-as-a-service deployment and routing

and that's the free tier
But you don't care at all about confidentiality?
It sorta is, but it's different enough that it's not ringing enough alarm bells internationally. It's also happening in Poland atm (whole government + judiciary branch is controlled by the right / far-right atm, and while the EU is trying to punish them for it (revoking their EU voting rights), apparently the punishment requires a unanimous vote and there's one country (Bulgaria?) not voting for that.), and will soon in Brazil with a right-wing leader having a fair shot at winning the second round of elections - and he's a terrible person and getting away with it.

History repeating, etc. Just subtly different, and from the other side of the fence.

Mind you, the US never has been "the good guys", the country was invaded and the natives murdered and displaced massively (that's called "genocide") by colonists, slavery, etc. In WW2 they had concentration camps (for the Japanese), after 9/11 they have concentration camps (for "enemy combatants"), in all cases blatantly flaunting international law and getting away with it without any consequences.
depends on who is hosting the images. you are right, i mostly meant gravatars.
The Wender-Utah scale for adult ADD is available online, and could give you a firmer indication, though obviously this is something you would want a medical professional to confirm and help you treat.
The C spec says zero in a pointer context is null (and the other way around)

Can you elaborate on “as good as uninitialized”?
Back in 2014 when I got it for 3 years, it was at around the same price as AppleCare at the time for an equivalent device. I don't remember the exact price, but I do remember thinking that the price was about the same as AppleCare.
Maybe, but it seems more likely that the model just didn't work.

From the article: "Gender bias was not the only issue. Problems with the data that underpinned the models’ judgments meant that unqualified candidates were often recommended for all manner of jobs... With the technology returning results almost at random"
Michael has become so menacing that the Weather Channel just evacuated
That is just you. I have seen enough people who, after having taken a train ride where nobody ended up checking their tickets, complain that they wasted money on a ticket. I have also seen enough people who don’t take rules seriously because “everyone else is violating them too”.
> Copyright is itself an artificial barrier, as is copy protection and laws like the DMCA that make copy protection a legal as well as technical barrier.

Yes, copyright is an artificial barrier, but a barrier to what? It's not a barrier to fair competition. It's a barrier to circumventing a creators right to bargain about the price of her creation.

Copyright itself isn't "handed down by God," but the idea that people should own the fruits of their own labor is an old one. That's all copyright is.
Patrick's writing is sublime.
If Microsoft is doing this selflessly, then why aren’t they simply putting their patents into the public domain?

Consider the open innovation network as a kind of club, with good intentions.

When a company like Microsoft joins it might seem like the pinnacle of success, but with it really means is that the club has become a mafia.

It won’t be long before OIN uses its patent leverage to affect control over the behavior if its members.

Think about it for a minute… Why wouldn’t such a group or simply convince corporations, like Microsoft, to put their patents into the public domain? If you have to join a club to gain access to something, but it’s not really open source and it’s not really some kind of charitable contribution.

Another way of looking at this is, Microsoft has just one goal, being a publicly traded company, which is to increase the share price of its stock… Why are people so stupid always constantly fall for the same tricks, believing that such companies do anything that is actually charitable?
In the gay case, both people who left the dating pool are potential mates. In the straight case, only one potential mate left.
>I have empirically proven that empirically proving that things work is not sufficient to get past people's objections

So? Proving that empirically proving something is not sufficient to get past people's objections does not prove that TCR or whatever is right. You first have to prove (but in a respected way) that say TCR works, and then you can discuss the objections.
Funny, I keep getting confused between CloudFront and CloudFlare and assumed this was another AWS product but it obviously isn't.

Do workers somehow operate inside your AWS stack via distributions of CloudFront? If not, that's probably not going to work, we have so much in S3, etc.

But, if that assumption is incorrect, can you point me to a document that suggests a transition path?
No, it doesn't work out that way.

First, in order to determine what people will do, the relevant word is not "need" but "want".

#6 is that stockholders want growth of return on their investments (because, hey, extra money is good for them). And they'll want that growth to be as big as possible, no matter what the inflation is; so stopping inflation won't remove the pressure for growth.

On the other hand, if you want to force people to be satisfied with what they have and not strive for more, well, that's against a lot of our psychology, it's not going to happen - compared to that, getting all the governments to do what needs to be done (while still striving for as much growth is feasible given the restrictions) is easy.
it's a way to track you.
Paradigm: Death Based Development (DBD). If the tests fail, the software engineer who wrote the code is executed.

Step 1: I can't do DBD because I don't want to die.

Step 2: I can do DBD if I'm willing to die.

Step 3: When I'm willing to accept death as a natural part of the software development cycle, I can do DBD.

Nice, I like this.
Why not "women are just not as interested in math, logic and computer science to pursue it AS OFTEN as men"? Why are you not considering this possibility?
This is a direct and clear example of bias which made it easy to flag the ML algorithm. But what about ML algorithms that are inducing benefits to groups in less obvious contexts? What about groups that are not so easily identified as being protected classes by simple, human-understandable model features? What about cases where the features are just merely correlated with a subpopulation of a protected class?

If we're being honest, a system only needs to be in a decision-making capacity for discriminatory behavior to be scrutinized, since in many cases human operators will not be able to identify the specific features being used to make decisions about people -- the features could be highly correlated with some subpopulation of protected class. If you take that to be true, the question reduces onto what decision-making roles ML algorithms have that could be discriminatory, and it's hard to argue this is not a massive part of their current and expected roles.

I think this is going to be a long, winding ethical nightmare that is probably just getting started by human-digestible examples such as these. One can imagine things like this one being looked back on as quaint in the naivety to which we assume we can understand these systems. Where do we draw the line, and how much control do we give up to an optimization function? Surely there is a balance -- how do we categorize and made good decisions around this?

As far as I know, a cohesive ethical framework around this is pretty much non-existent -- the current regime is simply "someone speaks up when something absurdly and overtly bad happens."
Dark Web vendor with totally amazing beard sentenced to 20 years in prison
Definitely not the same without the light gun :(
Thank you everybody. Your comments really helped me a lot.
Ask HN: An employee at a competitor signs up to your site. What do you do?
Background: The first competitor in this space started back in 2012. I had a look at their product last year and thought I could do better.

For the last year, my product has been a sub-set of their features with a better UI/UX (in my opinion anyway!). I recently started to differentiate though and released a feature they don't have and am working on releasing other new/differentiated features.

Other background: They're definitely the biggest in this space, but recently, they've been losing a lot of customers to a different competitor that started in 2014, but they don't seem to have copied any of the differentiated features that competitor has released (yet).

Today, I saw that someone from their company signed up to my site. They only have ~10 employees, so they definitely know I exist now.

Is there anything that you would do in this situation, or just keep moving along?
> Had DNSSEC been deployed 5 years ago, Muammar Gaddafi would have controlled BIT.LY’s TLS keys.

Um, he more or less did. Because he could have changes the A or CNAME records and gotten a DV certificate. And that certificate would have been legit, because bit.ly is genuinely subject to Libyan jurisdiction.

Sure, CT would have detected it. And any sane use of DANE (which might require an extension) would require CT plus DNSSEC. And, heck, DNSSEC would benefit greatly from a CT-like validation of domain signing keys.

None of this means that a failure to deploy DNSSEC is a good thing.
Or just sleep at the appropriate times and cut out screens hours before bed. You don't have to water fast for your circadian rhythm.
2 mods, at least $100k/yr
Not a hate, but a minor gripe: the light gray text fails WCAG accessibility guidelines.
I do this in some programs, it makes many pieces of coding much easier if I know I will never have to move some objects as they grow.

The ideal for me would be a function that marked some memory as "these addresses are taken, do not give them out to malloc, or anything else", but which still required me to actually "ask" for the memory before using it, so it didn't look like I was using 64gb of memory at startup. Is that possible?
"...governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years."

This is the issue.[0]

Governments are the middlemen between citizens that we the people decide to put in power through voting to represent us and our issues like climate change.

But democracy has been hijacked by putting additional middlemen between we the people. The second middleman is the capital election, specifically ~132 Americans who donated 60% of the SuperPAC money.

So our representatives spend a significant portion of their time in office calling these people to get funding for the next election cycle and when they vote on issues they think of these donors. Follow the money.

Yes we can fix data centers or cargo ships or deploy nuclear power or utility regulation, but at some point regulation for these as well will be dependent on the people we vote to put into power to represent us.

At the end of the day, corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and shareholder value. If leaders lead, companies will follow.

I have an idea!

Why don't we, the very large community of Hacker News with 3-3.5M+ monthly uniques[1] petition one of the most innovative and powerful institutions to fund more projects that will fix broken governments around the world? "Government" is only mentioned one time in the YC RFP[2], maybe it should have it's own category.

Send them an email: hn@ycombinator.com or http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ or contact your friends who are in the YC network.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581
[2] http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
>BNBR

Be Nice, Be Respectful

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Quoras-Be-Nice-Be-Respectful-p...
Microsoft open-sources its entire patent portfolio
How many of Microsoft's cornerstone patents are soon to emerge from patent-protection?
It is significant to note that:

1. You don't have to lock all your memory (although it may be hard to capture all the intermediate buffers if you don't).

2. You still need to clear the memory buffers after they're no longer going to be used, otherwise other processes can read /proc/kcore, etc (or cool your RAM and extract it and put it another system)

3. It is possible to encrypt the swap partition with a randomly generated key at boot
CO https://github.com/tj/co in popularized this technique a few years ago. It implements something similar to the function you present here. Babel actually transforms async/await to generators (https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-plugin-transform-async-to-g...) when targeting environments that don't have native async/await support.
Good point, let's check plausibility:

The report notes 2000 cases per week in the Shenzhen store. With 50 weeks per year, 500$ damage per phone, you need 20 store-years to reach a billion.

A quick check [1] shows that Apple has 40 stores in China (and that's not counting authorised repair centres), and the problem began 6 years ago.

So even assuming the other stores are not as problematic as the Shenzhen ones, the figure could be in the right ballpark.

Next, Apple has about USD 250 bn revenue, and 50 bn net income annually [2], so absorbing a billion here and there is not implausible.

[1] https://www.apple.com/retail/storelist/
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/key-statistics?p=AAPL

EDIT for clarity.
Agreed, either upright or sitting rows are great.
E-cigarette maker Juul is the fastest startup to reach decacorn status
I’m curious: how is it that this submission has not “reused” the submission I made eight hours before? In my experience, sending a link that is already there simply upvotes the existing submission.
Is your smartphone ready for AI?
They started changing for the better as soon as they got rid of Ballmer in my opinion. He was toxic for the company and for the industry as a whole. It's taken a few years, but I don't think there's much of the "old" MS left anymore in terms of business practices and ethics.
Not really relevant, but if you have a recurrent c-diff infection, eating a warm turd is pretty close to the empirically proven treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
Sounds like they've successfully emulated their real world interview process.