skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There will always be people offended by something.

Trying to remove bias from a system is about trying to remove bias from a system. People tend to agree that removing bias from a system rather than intentionally creating a system that discriminates.
Fine. Show me where insect populations have not been decimated. Find a environment where glaciation is increasing, or record low temperatures are being consistently recorded year over year.

Short term gains over medium term doom is hardly something to brag about.
> Why don't you curse at people when you see them in the street? It's not illegal. Why are we nice to people at all?

Right? But why do we expect ourselves to be nice, and other people to be nice, in direct interpersonal relationship, but we allow - hell, glorify - being malicious in business setting?

> "The computer should never lie to me" is a good starting point. That is, whatever I perceive the computer to be telling me had better reflect what the programmers know. Anything else is bullshit. (And perhaps illegal)

I very much like this idea.
if (false) {
// my daily 20 lines here
// ...
}
They’ll have a fun time with Korean where depending on speaker and audience different word declensions are used.
You don't even have evidence that regulatory compliance is substantially different or more costly in either continent.
Show HN: How to send an activitypub message to a mastodon user with Node.js
Understanding Layers and Containers
pepper_sauce's example is a good one, the ability to mold the language to what features you need today is a big point.

But even beyond that I think the big purpose of macros is the ability to mold the language the application you're applying it to. This is the Domain Specific Language (DSL) idea.

For instance, take Protocol Buffers. The .proto format is a language that lets you define your messages and denote which fields are required, optional, etc. You run a compiler against these .proto files that spits out a generated library for the platform you're on.

This sort of workflow isn't as onerous as it used to be with all the CI/CD push to have tools that build your application in one step. But it is still a separate language with its own compiler that must be maintained entirely outside of your project or language ecosystem.

If, in a hypothetical universe where Lisp dominated Google, protocol buffers had been written in Lisp you wouldn't need a separate compiler and language. A library of macros like defpackage and defmessage could be written that would generate the code for sending and receiving each message type you define inline with the rest of your application. It would all be Lisp code and would benefit from all of your Lisp tools, like linting, debugging, and testing.

And if it was written in a Lisp-y tradition, such a DSL would likely be riddled with hooks for your application code to be able to attach to dynamically, say if you would like every receipt of a message to be logged or if a message fails validation you would want to page the on-call to figure out who's sending bad messages and why.

So, in short, macros allow you to extend the language for reasons even beyond syntactical conveniences like DESTRUCTURING-BIND. It allows you to really shape your tools to the application at hand, and allows others to shape the tools you share to their applications.
@Quarrelsome: "Them" wouldn't work here, because it's one specific person which has a concrete gender. 99% of people would assume that the investor is some company with multiple people if you say "them".
Think of all the lives that went into building the beginnings of the industrial age: miners, construction workers, pedestrians electrocuted or run down by automobiles. Even today this continues in slightly different ways - as one example, thirty-seven thousand of our fellow citizens here in the US died on our roads last year. And we just think to ourselves that's just how it works.

And that's before getting into our cultural celebration of heroic sacrifice, or other ways we trade in human lives, both our own and others.
Bias is one of the new hot topics in ML. People act surprised that a face recognition software trained on a database of white people is unable to properly classify pictures of people from all around the world. The algorithm is only learning the data it was fed.
Same here in Spain.

I mean, let's be honest, it's just a chat application. It is almost trivial to build and maintain. And since it uses your phone number, there is no friction to switch to another app--if they decided to charge for it, Telegram would eat it alive in months.
9 ways to get through crisis in business
Great, now Skynet is going to believe there are 38,000 genders when it goes online.
Show HN: Let A.I. build your app
We're using A.I. to analyze the screens users upload and transform them into tasks, requirements, spec and even writes code.

We're in a beta taking in users to help give us feedback. Would love to hear thoughts

https://crane.ai/

We're thinking of planning a webinar and also doing live demo and curious if anyone would be interested.
I am not sure this is how arguments work. Saying "if <something> then <something else>" works only if <something else> actually follows from <something>.
I used aggressive native plants from my area. These included Jerusalem artichokes, Indian Hemp, Joe Pye Weed, etc. in the sunny areas. Virginia knot weed, etc. in the shady areas. They colonized my yard very well and even kept the English Ivy at bay.

I had no issues with erosion. The plants lived for years and established rhizomes and extensive root systesms.
Your argument boils down to "everything is political". I understand that some people think this -- but I don't.

I believe the goal of this writing is to convey to the reader the scale of the bombings and some fraction of their effects on the populace. A secondary aim is to evoke emotion in the reader. I think that's it, I don't see a political aim.

It's facile to say "war is immoral". Inasmuch as anything is immoral, war certainly is. But it's unclear to me how we ought to apply that axiom because it's unclear to me that the world would be better off today if the US hadn't entered the war, or the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, or if the Allied policy had been something other than pursuit of unconditional surrender.
This is fine. Guessing gender based on things like name is terribly error prone. Imagine if you have a name like Taylor. But I’m sure everyone who wants to be annoyed by this will find a way to be annoyed.
That's more or less what we do. One section I seeded with grass and mow regularly. It's only around 50% grass now (after 10+ years), but it's short and green and looks like grass. Another section I cut with a scythe once a year in autumn. It looks cool in the summertime when it's in flower, in winter when it's cut down it just looks like the rest of the garden
I'd certainly not discourage having a play around with it!

I started trying it out with FreeBSD 10.0 a few years back. pkg was rough around the edges back then. If you had a lot of packages installed, like lots of development tools and desktop environments, it wasn't hard to get it into a situation where it would segfault or run into dependency problems during an upgrade. Right now, with 11.2, I've not run into any crashes for a good 2-3 years or any intractable dependency problems in a good 2 years or more. It's probably not perfect, these are very complex tools which are hard to verify, but it's certainly eminently usable from the point of view of an admin/end user/casual ports contributor like myself.

In fact, when upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.10 a few weeks back, I did actually run into a problem with apt refusing to upgrade because it couldn't work out the upgrade path. I had to remove a few packages which were causing problems, then re-install them after the upgrade. Whether that was apt or the packages having genuinely broken dependencies I'm not sure since I didn't investigate in detail.
My first thought as well. You still savin' the seals?
It's still more useful than simply banishing them to the void.
> The only decent song they
> played was ruff ryders anthem.

> My coworkers were arrogant and
> unfriendly. Imagine a bunch of
> clowns that only rock off whites
> or yeezy’s.

Goodness gracious! The horrors!

Then again...

> They quickly examine the shoe,
> check the bottoms and inside to
> make sure its not worn, sniff it,
> and put the green tag on it.

...

> sniff it

I think I can understand the moodiness now.
Rather than reply to any of the various downthread issues, just a few clarifications:

* I don't know exactly who Rich is responding to, but I can't imagine it's for rando users who drop off drive-by TODOs for maintainers. More likely IMO it's in response to a number of people who have contributed significantly to clojure itself and to supporting projects and resources that have spoken up in recent times with various critiques.

* I'm super uncomfortable with any comparison to this kind of "dispute" as being anything like that between parents, etc., though I can see how some might think of it like that. Really, it's a disconnect of expectations and a lack of communication, which I'm glad has been resolved definitively.

* I do still use Clojure (though more via ClojureScript than otherwise), it's just not my primary rig anymore, and I'm strictly a user. The contribution process was a minor factor, not the driving rationale for my looking elsewhere; though, as I said in the posted tweets, I surely wouldn't have tarried so long if I knew earlier what I know now.
I see what you're saying, although I'm not sure it's really moving in a direction I'd call agile. He clearly paints the fully "radical" end as unthinkable lunacy, when it's entirely doable in practice. And looking at figure 5.4, it's very much a document-oriented process. When compared with a modern, short-cycle Agile approach (continuous delivery, unit-of-work size in the 1-3 day range) all of the documentation he describes ends up being pure waste.

This part strikes me as especially absurd:

"How does a project manager decide whether to adopt a radical or conservative approach? Basically, there is no right answer; the decision is usually based on the following factors:

* How fickle is the user?

* What pressure is the project team under to produce immediate, tangible results?

* What pressure is the project manager under to produce an accurate schedule, budget, and estimate of people and other resources?

* What are the dangers of making a major technical blunder?"

The contempt for users wrapped up in "fickle" is ridiculous, and ditto making business needs about "pressure". Most importantly, he hasn't even begun to recognize that a shorter cycle yields significant business benefits, even though that was being written about at least a half-dozen years before this book.

So I read this more as typical waterfall thinking with some concessions to practical reality (which is how waterfall has always been done) than anything relating to a modern approach. He doesn't say, "You must stop the world for 100% of your project!" But the fastest he's willing to describe is, "Stop the world for 50% of your project!" The notion that you could stop the world for 1% or less of your project (which is what happens with weekly cycles for a project of 2 years or more) is to him beyond ultra-radical. (Let alone a good kanban approach, where the cycle time drops into the hours-to-days range.) When instead I'd submit it's in reality the most conservative approach, in that it minimizes all sorts of risks.
I don’t. No guarantees of anything. But we can probably do better than random Chinese dude with no other projects or contribs
I'd like to point out how long-hanging fruit this is for Google to address gender imbalance and gender inequality, especially given Google's much larger issues with their policies around inappropriate sexual behavior. You'd think more significantly, Google could work on establishing better policies and a more equal workplace culture.
Wait... So because the real world data doesn't align to our ideology, we're going tell it to ignore the facts
Sure, but that is a separate argument. I agree that working at Google/Amazon/Apple probably gives most people the best income over time. The point is that if you work at startups dilution is not your enemy.

Early Uber employees got diluted like crazy, but they will probably do well when they cash out (or already did in secondary offers).
Presumably discontinued because it ate into their ability to show ads, which means that this sounds like a fruitful opportunity for differentiation by search engines that don't rely on ad revenue.
Well there's still an advantage to that flexibility. Sure it's fun for a random project to have average value to every specs, but some project require much more RAM than CPU, or much more bandwidth, or the more usual much more storage. If you need any big amount of storage on Digital Ocean, you need to take one of their beefy machine, even if you don't need that much RAM or that much CPU. Sure there is object storage, but that's a whole different storage system and it doesn't play well with a database server.

When you actually need specific specs at a huge scale, it's not much more complex to do it over AWS.
The discreteness of reality does not affect Math. Real numbers are continuous regardless of their applicability to nature.

And there is nothing weird with imaginary numbers. It would be weird if half of the numbers didn't have a square root.
Unfortunately many thousands of quipus were actually destroyed after the Spanish conquest, because it was known they contained information.
Tech industry in 2018:

ML driven automation widening wealth disparity? Eh.

ML ushering in the age of the persistent surveillance state? Eh.

ML being used to manipulate elections and hijack democracies? Eh.

ML might auto-suggest wrong gender in a text editor? STOP. EVERYTHING. THE RISK IS TOO HIGH IT MIGHT OFFEND SOME USERS.
The BSD-BTC License, Version 1.0
Not that I support this. But it does help you expand tremendously in developing markets.
I always thought it was a meme too, and surely no one was dumb enough to believe or try it... then I volunteered at the med tent at a Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming. I can confirm at least one use of jenkum in the United States.
> The use of herbicides and pesticides is completely unregulated.

Every bag of the stuff says, "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling." Sounds like regulation to me. You don't have to ask permission to put it on your lawn, but you've got plenty of rope to hang yourself with a warning label like that.

> I had a small native plant yard that attracted hundreds of pollinators and arachnids. I was treated like and criminal forced to cut most of it down.

This is a shame. Native yards much more beneficial than monospecies turf everywhere.
Uber Rival Didi Chuxing Uses Machine Learning to Revolutionize Transportation
"You" and "They" is proper usage, it has been well before this whole dialog came into play. It's a catch-all. There's nothing about a made-up pronoun that captures an ambiguity about an individual, let alone their individuality. They have to express that themselves. Pronouns are not what jeopardizes or validates individuality.
I'm kind of conflicted about that. A strongly explanatory variable is valuable to have in order to control for its effects. Voluntarily removing it reduces the usefulness of the derived statistics and in this case I guess seems to make ratemyprofessor just a niche version of hotornot.

Perhaps a middle ground would have been to allow students to rate "hottness" and explicitly controlled for it when ranking professors, but never making a given professor's "average hotness" viewable to users?
Clearing the Smoke on How to Smoke Fish, Game and All Manner of Meat
+1 for Netlify
You are only eating 500 calories a day? That seems really low but i am not an expert.
I haven't noticed a difference between the two modes, this is the pair that I own:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757WVSN8/ref=oh_aui_de...
Privacy Patterns
I think the problem is orthogonal to what you're upset about:

1. People expect public organizations to not be bigoted.

2. People are generally fairly bigoted.

Therefore, if you're an organization training NNs on data produced by 2, you have to do some editing, or you're going to get in trouble over 1.
> I'm pretty sure there are individuals claiming that NOT suggesting their pronoun deprives them of their identity, dignity or whatever.

This would be similar to how feminist movements in languages that systematically distinguish men from women push to get the language changed so that women are referred to as men ("there shouldn't be any difference between a waiter and a waitress"), while feminist movements in languages that don't draw the distinction push to get the language changed so that women are referred to explicitly as women ("we should acknowledge that women can be waiters too").

If feminism demands one of these things, it surely can't also demand the other.
they deserved for what they have done.
I don't believe this is a move based off of the sensitivity at Google's workplace, especially given what we know now of Google's policies around workplace harassment. I would hesitate to extend it to Google's culture as a whole, or any political movement that is being partaken in here.
> Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.”

Err, so the AI correctly predicts that statistically you probably intend "him", but we limit the utility of the tool because that would be discriminatory? I know it will get it wrong sometimes, and you can say it re-inforces stereotypes, but if it will get it right most of the time based on strict statistical inference, seems like it could at least be configured. It seems to be a case where the AI is a bit too accurate... I don't disagree with their decision, I think given the circumstances it's actually a brilliantly safe move and keeps out of the fray as much as possible.

> “The only reliable technique we have is to be conservative,”

I know this is just whimsical, and a horrible logical equivocation on my part, but that's kind of funny that a large tech company decided being conservative might actually be useful in some cases to help protect against liberal outrage...
For people who are eager to think this is a don't-assume-gender charade: try misgendering a cis person next time you're out, and see how much they don't care. _You_ are who this is for
> There will always be people offended by something

Including, apparently, the fact that some people are making an effort to care about other people.
How to Become a DevOps Engineer in Six Months or Less
Reminder: White Liberals Hate
>> Everyone "needs" a phone, not everyone "needs" an xbox.

I would add "not everyone 'needs' an iPhone" to this.

iOS is not the only major OS in the phone market. And like Macs, a significant chunk of people (including normals) choose iOS, knowing that they're participating in Apple's walled garden.

I'm not a huge fan of Apple's rent-seeking behaviour (which is why I left Apple), but because Android exists and is flourishing, I don't think you can necessarily call Apple a monopoly. They only have a monopoly on their own customers, which isn't very different from a lot of businesses who have created their own platform.
The Problem with Charitable Giving
The article seems to take the position that Intelligent life on earth is zero sum and there is no victor. I'm not sure that is the case.

Then the rest of the article details the concept of theory of mind in philosophy and how that is not congruent with how neuroscience understands the brain. I don't see where the conflict is here unless you want to believe in the theory of mind.
There's no NPAPI plugin required for desktop users to view annotations. All of YouTube works using standardized web tech, and mobile browsers and desktop browsers are the same underlying engines with different chrome. There's no technical reason why annotations couldn't work on the mobile site, though from a UI perspective you'd need to size them appropriately for fingers to interact with. It's not that Google can't, it's that they simply don't want to.
Can someone drop a TLDR for the at-work crowd? would be V grateful
> a product like Spotify, to name one, is cheaper when bought through the Spotify website and more expensive on the App Store

That's Spotify's choice though, right? They could charge iOS IAP subscribers the exact same price as non-IAP subscribers and absorb the 30% loss in much the same way a bunch of supermarkets absorb various unpopular taxes.
Constantly. From 1066 onward until the Tudors finally lost Calais, English monarchs were also barons or counts or dukes of lands in what is now France, whether in Normandy or Aquitaine or Gascony, or other places, and they were constantly getting snarled up in conflicts with other French nobles or the French king.
True, doing antecedent linking would be neat. I think that would be a good solution in order to get highest 100% accuracy. Although, if it linked the antecedent incorrectly, it could still put them in controversy.
It's extremely likely that this person isn't responsible for the website, or knows anything about it. Criminal or shady activities in Russia (and everywhere else) are often laundered through cutouts.

You can find an example of this in "Magnitsky act: behind the scenes" where Bill Browder allegedly laundered his corporate holdings for tax fraud through various handicapped people, and eventually gangsters who were conveniently murdered.
Does the intense radiation not interfere with communications to the drones/robots?
Gender is a big thing to get wrong in person. I am a man, If someone referred to me as "she" or "her" I would correct them. I wouldn't expect any less from anybody.

When it's a machine doing it though, some unknown piece of metal spitting out a form message, it seems it would be easier to forgive.
IF when discussed usually means fasting daily. So maybe your food window is only between 4 - 8 pm. The anti-aging stuff you saw/read (if its the same that i did) was more about actual fasting where you might not eat everyday and here they did find some linkage to aging.
Oh, they're only getting started. As with the recent Twitter ToS changes, you'll be committing violations of concepts that you have never heard of.
Show HN: Social Amnesia – Forget the past
replace(/^(him|her)/gi, "them")

Here you go Google, I fixed it for you
iPhone owner since the very first iPhone - I know ;)
Hahahaha superb thinking.
Good point, compared to 40 million for lawns. Maybe proportional to usefulness. ;)

And water is a huge issue too. The native plants thrive in wet and dry conditions without attention.
Python 101: Episode #35 – The virtualenv Package