skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't know if these systems will get better without external interference either. Another post on this page talks about fixing systematic corruption within African countries as being more helpful, but that's a hard problem also.

One solution I could think of is a foreign investor investing a lot of money into the campaign of a candidate who isn't corrupt. The caveat of that solution is the perspective that it would be foreign intervention in the political matters of a separate sovereign entity, thus generating discourse among natives.

Another solution is to raise money to raise political awareness, and use that money for programs that get natives to understand the differing positions of candidates (and towards the infrastructure for voting itself).

BUT it's a lot easier to focus on the immediate relief of general ailments such as life threatening diseases, and proper utilities to make the lives of the general public easier. This way natives of poorer countries won't have to worry about things we take for granted in the west, and can spend their time focusing on the systematic issues that caused those time consuming problems in the first place.

My line of thought in a way aligns with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Before one can begin worrying about psychological needs, one must have their basic needs met.
Teaching kids respect is a positive thing. Teaching kids not to steal or lie, likewise.
Glad you like the idea! At the moment, the model requires a fairly large amount of data, which is why the app only offers large well-defined cohorts to select from (e.g., accountants, retirees). I like your idea though, and it may be possible to use some of transfer learning to work on smaller groups of people or even individual customers. I'll try to implement that at some point in the future.
I think it's all about education
ARM Posts Compiler Patches for Their New “Ares” High Performance Core
Most young people do grow up in some spiritual environment, at least in America. And all Scouts are required to respect others' faith.

I call straw man - what specific problem is being referred to? An imaginary youth raised in a cave?
Google Street View Car Under Water
I recently realized that meaning cannot be done using pattern matching only, which is what (current) machine learning is about.

The key insight came from article on bullshit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17764348

I believe understanding (things having meaning) comes down to whether you can produce an example from the given description of the situation. If you can produce an example, then you can say you understand the description.

The problem is, you can have situation descriptions that are contradictory (have no examples, thus have no meaning) yet they are arbitrarily close to situation descriptions that have examples (and so have meaning).

A good example are those Escher-like impossible objects, which look very much like real objects, but humans can easily see they are meaningless (they cannot be interpreted, and thus imagined, in 3D). Another good examples are sentences from the above paper. The bullshit sentences are the ones for which you cannot construct a mental example in your head.

I suspect this happens for the famous flaws in deep learning as well, the deep learning network cannot learn that some inputs are contradictory.

I believe that this is actually ultimately related to the boolean satisfiability problem. In theory, one could determine whether some learning agent is only using pattern matching or is actually having understanding (is able to recognize logical inconsistency in the input) by teaching it different SAT instances, and the agent that would be able to learn the difference between arbitrarily similar SAT instances with and without solutions could be considered to have understanding.
> we might have different definitions of what photoshop-related is, but I often use pixlr.com to cut faces out of photos and put them on other things.

This is a tiny fraction of what Photoshop does. Even back in the mid-2000s, when I was a graphics designer, I rarely used Photoshop for simple work like that. It would have been the equivalent of using a nail gun for a single nail to hang a photo frame. You could do it, but the $10 hammer in the shed will work just fine.
>> ‘The politicians are the guilty ones,’ said one cavalry officer. ‘I am all for revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang all politicians, diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict impartiality.'

This section was the stand-out for me. Some things haven't really changed very much, have they?
No you don't. I know you don't because you have no idea who the top 5% of applicants are. Not after interviews, not after 6 months on the job, not even 10 years in the job. You can't distill something as complex as humans working in teams that form a part of a larger organisation into a single number like that. That's not how the world works. For example Bob was doing great work but then his wife cheated on him and he is doing less great work. Is Bob in the top 5% or not?
Is the approach here effectively about extracting from the (existing) implementation a kind of operational specification to help ensure the non-existence of undefined behavior ...?
I get following message when I open the link.

“Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism”
With the current CAR-T technology, you’re “turning on” the T-cell so it attacks certain cell types. You only need a few of those cells as they can multiply within the body.

What you’re talking about is the opposite, turning the T cell “off”. You’d also need to do that to every T cell or alternatively, destroy every T cell and restart with a batch of new cells.

Very different problems.
This seems to be a weak free will theorem: "Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate, since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom." To me, they seem to be saying that the freedom of free will is a limited freedom from determinism, not the freedom of being able to choose a future.

The theory seems to be developed within the Copenhagen Interpretation framework of metaphysics, and I wonder if it is compatible with Many Worlds.
Alright, a glimmer of hope for a decent Ryzen notebook has just died :-/
Pressure grows on Zuckerberg to attend Facebook committee hearing
I agree, except for the notion of security “research” being a significant market factor.

The marketplace gives very few shits about security vulnerabilities, despite the constant stream of outrageous defects. The real market force is selling consulting and security gizmos imo. Nobody is ditching peoplesoft because it’s a a security disaster — they double down and buy accessories to secure it.

Big companies like Microsoft got security religion when the prospect of liability started becoming real, particularly when Blaster/Welchia paralyzed big networks in the 2000s.
Facebook admits failings over incitement to violence in Myanmar
"freedom to act as you see fit" is usually a human right guaranteed legally by the Constitution, but discrimination is a cultural idea which is slowly gaining the power of legal force to prevent people from doing what they would normally choose. To be "discriminating" used to be a compliment, it meant you could intellectualy discern the logical differences between two things, much like how we use "observative". But now it means something more like "making choices someone personally disagrees with or thinks is unfair to a certain preferred group". They are indeed, diametrically opposed in that sense. If it is only a cultural or social opposition to someone's choices, then sure it could be a good thing, but it is becoming more and more a legal construct to oppose a person's freedom to act as they see fit if you think they are being unfair.
Donations likely contribute to the body of knowledge about cancer. Then someone takes that and develops a new drug, charging a high price along with it.

An interesting approach is the cystic fibrosis association in the US that directly invested in a new CF drug. They made a ton of money and rolled it back into research.
It is not true that UTF8 is the right design "everywhere". Perhaps it is the right design when you have strings that are stored and later read by various programs, but it's not necessarily right for in-memory strings.

Python 3 internally uses ASCII, UCS2 or UCS4 for its strings depending on which is most space efficient but still capable of representing the string. It can do that because Python strings are immutable* and because it is impossible for user code to see what the encoding is (to see the bytes of a string you must explicitly convert it, at which point you specify the destination encoding and Python ensures the translation is correct). If you join a UCS2 string with a UCS4 string then the result is automatically UCS4 and there's no way to tell from user code (except by memory usage)!

There's a good reason for this: indexing into a UTF8 string takes O(n) time because you must parse all the bytes before that point in order to count the number of characters. Iterating over a string by index would either take O(n^2) time or you would have to use some sort of awkward string iterator. If you do not provide any way to index by character (rather than byte position) then I would argue that your data structure is not really a "string". I suppose an alternative implementation would be to use UTF-8 but have an auxiliary data structure that maps between character indices and byte positions.

* Immutability matters because if you had a mutable string in ASCII and you changed one character to be a code point >127 then you'd need to copy the string before making the modification, which if possible at all would be O(n) for what you would expect to be O(1).
Use a directional antenna and aim it at various houses looking for an uptick random MAC addresses.
Children urged to play outdoors to cut risk of shortsightedness
The bit that sticks out for me is that the usage "me old cock", which I strongly associate with London, is recognized in Newfoundland.

Gotta wonder what weird etymology the phrase has to become "local" in two such different and far-flung areas.
Yes, if by personal security you mean encryption of all your traffic with anonymity only towards your LAN/ISP; since your server's IP will be the sole egress point.

If you're looking for anonymity as well I would recommend you take a look at Mullvad [0] who offer a great service with full Wireguard support [1].

I've ran Wireguard on a $5 DO Droplet for a while, but decided to support Mullvad instead and get the benefit of their infrastructure for the same monthly price.

Not a plug or anything I just genuinely am impressed by the performance and ease of use. For transparency's sake, AzireVPN is their primary competitor in the Wireguard space.

[0] https://mullvad.net
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/download/wireguard-config
Textio looks like a a great product, but IIUC its use case is very specific -- how can you make your job description more enticing and gender-neutral?

Toasted is meant to be more of a big tent product: you're not just working with men/women, but very specific groups of people (e.g., retirees and accountants) and you want to use language in the way that they're using it, which is helpful for things like writing ad copy as well.
"What if the placebo effect isn't a trick?" - then it will surely be patented.
I've...never seen a roundabout with lights. Granted, the state I live in doesn't do them much, but I've visited places (like MA) that do them a lot, and they're all very much like European roundabouts, just with inferior signage.
> Having an Ubuntu VM or VPS available to host a VPN is a reasonable assumption to make.

Is it? I personally & professionally prefer Debian over Ubuntu: by default it’s free-software–only, and I find that it’s somewhat more stable & predictable (which are important in a production server system). Of course, some people don’t care as much about software freedom as I do, and others may have had different experiences with respect to stability & predictability.

Ubuntu is nice on the client side, given the reality of proprietary drivers in which we live, but even there I prefer e.g. Mint if I’m not using pure Debian.
I'm not sure what you define as a 'working' knowledge of Physics, but to get to a research level of physics requires more than a few introductory physics course also. I'm not saying the Feynman lectures is a substitute for learning any specific part of Physics, but it is useful for understanding basic concepts and also understanding how those concepts can fit in to our everyday lives.

What I disagreed about in the post I replied to was the position that it wasn't "intuitive" or a good first text for beginners.
You can factor out whatever functionality of your system is that uses crypto in a separate process and then the crash is simply "my crypto process died", which you can handle and recover from. I think it's ok to force people to cleanly separate functionality from their main process when its failure doesn't have a meaningful recovery process and a half-assed recovery can lead to catastrophic security problems.
Why would you believe they’d have our extremely temporary set or morals? Human empires have lasted for thousands of years and the one thing that binds 99% of human history is soul crushing enslavement of each other.
Yes. One should never smile - very much not a human thing to do. Thanks, twtw.
I been juggling the following three papers for a bit and trying to brush my maths up. I don't know why I feel a hunch between them, but I do know that the hunch is to do with this problem.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.06824.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0533.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2779.pdf

I will almost certainly be wrong about whatever it is. However I may have more updates on how wrong and what it is I am wrong about, in maybe a decade or so ;)
@doctoring - I am at the early stages of a start-up focusing on oncology. Would love to interview you if you have time. Feel free to reach out to me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunnr/
Android fans get fat November security patch bundle
Why We Love Emails (And You Should, Too)
An introduction to redo
Toilets can be cheaper than you expect - in some places cultural barriers may be the main problem. Here's an extract from an excellent book called Poor Economics [1]:

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

The conventional wisdom is that today, at $20 per household per month, providing piped water and sanitation is too expensive for the budget of most developing countries. The experience of Gram Vikas, an NGO that works in Orissa, India, shows, however, that it is possible to do it much more cheaply. Its CEO, Joe Madiath, a man with a self-deprecating sense of humor who attends the annual meeting of the worlds rich and powerful at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in outfits made from homespun cotton, is used to doing things differently. Madiaths career as an activist started early: He was twelve when he first got into troublefor organizing the labor on the plantation that his father owned. He came to Orissa in the early 1970s with a group of left-wing students to help out after a devastating cyclone. After the immediate relief work was over, he decided to stay and see if he could find some more permanent ways to help the poor Oriya villagers. He eventually settled on water and sanitation. What attracted him to the issue was that it was simultaneously a daily challenge and an opportunity to initiate long-term social change. He explained to us that in Orissa, water and sanitation are social issues. Madiath insists that every single household in the villages where Gram Vikas operates should be connected to the same water mains: Water is piped to each house, which contains a toilet, a tap, and a bathing room, all connected to the same system. For the high-caste households, this means sharing water with low-caste households, which, for many in Orissa, was unacceptable when first proposed. It takes the NGO a while to get the agreement of the whole village and some villages eventually refuse, but it has always stuck to the principle that it would not start its work in a village until everyone there agreed to participate. When agreement is finally reached, it is often the first time that some of the upper-caste households participate in a project that involves the rest of the community.

Once a village agrees to work with Gram Vikas, the building work starts and continues for one to two years. Only after every single house has received its tap and toilet is the system turned on. In the meantime, Gram Vikas collects data every month on who has gone to the health center to get treated for malaria or diarrhea. We can thus directly observe what happens in a village as soon as the water starts flowing. The effects are remarkable: Almost overnight, and for years into the future, the number of severe diarrhea cases falls by one-half, and the number of malaria cases falls by one-third. The monthly cost of the system for each household, including maintenance, is 190 rupees, or $4 per household (in current USD), only 20 percent of what is conventionally assumed to be the cost of such a system.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Pov...
I listened to an episode about the placebo effect on the "Only Human" Podcast awhile back. Its truly fascinating, and has made me question the power of the mind in a way I hadn't before. It also has some really interesting ethical problems, is it okay for doctors to lie about placebo treatments if it actually helps?

> Kallmes performs vertebroplasty, a surgery he has helped to develop and standardize, that involves injecting medical cement into the fractured bone to stabilize the fractured area and relieve pain. He says he gets great results from his patients, and teaches the method to other doctors at conferences.

> But here’s the thing: he has no idea why vertebroplasty works. So a few years ago, he decided to test it against a placebo. Kallmes found that pretending to perform vertebroplasty – making it seem like he was injecting a needle into the spine but without the cement – had similar effects. About 40 percent of both groups experienced immediate relief from pain after the surgery. He published his results in the New England Journal of Medicine.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/real-doctors-fake-medicine...
Why the world deserves a better toilet – Bill Gates
I ask a variation of this question. It is along the lines of "how would you like your career to progress over the next 3-5 years?". I am it because I don't want to hire someone for whom the organisation doesn't have a career path for. Any answer is fine. I'm not looking for a particular answer just an honest one.
That and the fact that upper management also wants a way to compare employee performance ACROSS teams or departments to decide who's a "rising star", who deserves a promotion or a raise (because the raise budget is always limited so they want to pick the most valuable performers).

Hence the "need" for a standardized performance review, which is bullshit anyway because a true equal assessment would mean that all employees are assessed by the same person/group, which never happens.
Russian computer failure on ISS is nothing to worry about
One of the problems with our society is that the government has it's hand and it's funding in almost everything. I don't think public institutions should take sides, which means they should get out of interfering with private institutions. If the government didn't take a large percentage of our money to hand out to organizations we disagree with, then maybe we could support the things we do agree with. I wish they didn't have a congressional charter, maybe then they'd be more independent.
Sometimes an extra 10 months means seeing your child graduate college / get married / have your first grandchild.
Yep. That is the difference between ethics and legality.
Yeah, I’m trying.
I was in Scouts for a couple of years. Religion was not really a focus at all. The message was that we should respect each others choices with regard to religion and spirituality and that was about it. Morals, good citizenship, and respect were otherwise discussed without much reference to religion.
Horses for courses....roundabouts are great for low to medium traffic conditions. Sometimes the lights are there for times of the day when the traffic is heavy. The lights go out when traffic calms down.
At least they have been moving towards Node for the scripting part (Photoshop even ships with Node, you can make panels in HTML5, even use WebGL).

Although I wish the documentation wasn't just PDF files you can't copy/paste from, not an ideal way to provide code snippets.
Who works somewhere for 10 years these days?
Remote code hijacking flaw in Apache Struts, patch ASAP
GraphQL is not OData
>Slightly freer, and slightly less safe is not a winning political argument.

True, however "slightly less prone to abuse" is a very strong argument, especially if you don't really trust the people who hold the power at the moment.
On that same note, I wish we were more willing to pay for our tools as a community. If we were, I think more neat and productive projects like this might exist. Yet, developers seem to be historically cheap, and our love for open source (which I do love) seems to be mixed in with our willingness to spend money on our tooling.
And a few years later the FBI will be using the tech to shoot people's wives after tricking them into violating some technicality of firearms law (just one example of abuse, plenty of others exist).

Then a decade or two later every patrol car will have the tech.

Trickle down effect is very real for law enforcement.
Open-Source Kitten Takes a Nybble Out of Arduino Market – Engineering.com
Could the Monero system be modified to create a voting system that maintains the secret ballot? I.e., pull out the currency aspect and use the untraceable transactions aspect to record votes.
How open source in education creates new developers
For University presidents, in the USA, they usually have both. Though I'm not sure that they always use both at the same time.
But he's using Python 3.7?
> But as I age, I increasingly see the degree to which phenomena are interconnected, and the knock-on implications regarding complexity and unanticipated consequences.

> Still, it would feel good to know what "wise" is.

I think that's a good partial definition of wisdom. I would add that at that point, life overall holds very few mysteries to you, people nor events in life don't shock-surprise you.

I don't think I'll ever consider myself wise :) Although sometime after 30 I started to see rather clear patterns in human behavior, what leads to what and what to (not) expect. So far all this experience is being reconfirmed over and over, with very few exceptions.