skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's perfectly true that there are many reasons why determining merit can go awry, but the thrust of your argument seems to me to defend making choices that one does not believe are correct.

Simply being more conscious of the possibility you are wrong is not a useful way to improve your decision. There was an episode of the Seinfeld sitcom where a character decides to do the opposite of his first impulse, because he's so often wrong. It was funny because that is obviously not a good way to improve decisions in real life where there are nearly infinite ways to do things badly.

If you are trying to pass a math class, and you keep getting problems wrong by doing what you think is correct, choosing to do things you think are wrong is not likely to improve your results.
The average for those with student loans, which is still a minority.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/24/5-facts-abou...

(Stay away from for-profit schools.)
Because we don't care. We want to drive our giant SUVs 2-3 hours a day so we can live in a McMansion in the exurbs, and we don't give a shit about what this is going to do to future generations.

Furthermore, roughly half of Americans don't believe this is even a problem, and don't care about what any scientists tell them, because their religious leaders and favorite politicians tell them otherwise.
I know! It's ridiculous. I can't believe people still don't understand how many people will die in agony in {{ world.timeleft }}. The only solution is to wave our arms harder and faster above our heads to try and start a conversation and get others to think about who we are as a people.
How did you come across the job posting ? And also whether you are Swiss should also make a difference as to whether you get the job ? Whats your take ?
It's a major deficiency of TFA that telecom was unmentioned. The Daughters Bell are a far larger drag on our economy and society than Amazon ever dreamed of being, and have been since before Bell Telephone wrote the Communications Act of 1934. I'd have more faith in Warren if she had led with telecom, but since she didn't I frankly expect her proposal to include a big fat "loophole" for ATTVZN.

The way to look at the 1996 boondoggle is ask ourselves if FCC could have ever been expected to provide even a token enforcement of its terms. The answer is of course not, because FCC was created to protect Bell Telephone and that's most of what it has ever done. Given that, of course all the investments in competing telcos would fail and be gobbled by the incumbents, enriching execs and bankers in the process. Given that, what we've seen was only ever exactly what was planned. The 1996 Act has allowed Bell to shed money-losing rural exchanges, do away entirely with common carriage, pay for wireless infrastructure with money stolen from wireline investors, rearrange assets in ways that would have violated previous consent decrees, pretend that we ever tried competition in telecom, and burrow in even more tightly to its vampire-bite on the neck of USA residents. That was a pretty good con, that Bell execs ran on us, with the assistance of the corrupt in government and the credulous in media.
The Rise of Subscription Gifts
Please don't buy the hype. I'm going to guess that almost everyone would agree with preservation of environment and wildlife. But the drilling in northern Alaska is not what one may think. Drilling sites have small surface foot prints and reach out via horizontal drilling. Additionally, oil exploration on the north slope of Alaska has been going on since the 1960's with a remarkably good health, safety, and environmental responsibility record. Look at their record and what they've been doing. It may be a rare case, but Alaska's north slope environment has not been harmed by exploratory drilling sites.
I used to work at Amazon and the idea of spinning out Marketplace just seems unworkable. It's like saying that Microsoft should spin out Xbox... they are 100% dependent on each other.
A little bit different but still, as with all movie locations, someone sets a movie at some place, someone at local gov (or owner) gave the authorisation, expect then that a lot people are going to go there. Same with a lot of famous movie places/houses/...

I'd say that the opposite idea would be more something like Abbey Road's Beatle picture: that one likely didn't have planning/authorisation, but changed the place for a long long time.
That would be great. Android has a competition-destroying business model: giving away the OS for free, while subsidizing OS development with ad revenue from unrelated services. It killed companies like Symbian who just sold you an OS in exchange for a license fee, without trying to marry that to services you can't easily switch away from because they have all your data.
Why can't pi be used as a PRNG, and why does converting each digit to its parity lose a possible PRNG property? Sure it removes a lot of entropy, but it does so by destroying information, not from creating/overwriting memory.
> I'm saying that it's disingenuous to suggest that those who ordered his killing were motivated be some sort of generalized antipathy to journalism.

I'm not saying those who ordered his killing did so because he was a journalist, I'm saying Donald Trump shrugged his shoulders in part because Khashoggi wrote for the Washington Post. Donald Trump is known for holding grudges and for treating those he views as loyal differently. For instance, he suggests the federal government should de-fund disaster relief for California (didn't vote for him) wildfires while saying the government will give "A+" relief for an Alabama (did vote for him) tornado. He is a strictly transactional man. He's called out the Washington Post specifically and has looked into hurting Amazon as a way of punishing Bezos for owning the Post.
I think the first remedy should be prevent acquisitions after companies grow past certain size.

Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple innovated at their own in the beginning, but once the cash from network externalities started to pour in, they stared to buy market share and buy into the markets. Google did not invent Gmail (Postini), Android Inc, YouTube, AdSense (Adscape), Google Analytics (Trendalyzer), Google Maps (Endoxon).
Why do we need the government’s help to break up Amazon? We need open source alternatives, line OpenStreetMap to break up Google Maps monopoly.
I would download all those, but there's also a lot of Google stuff pre-installed on my phone that I wouldn't have downloaded: the Google search bar, Google assistant, Google music, Hangouts, Google+, just to name a few.
As far as I can tell, that article should properly be titled "A belief that life is a meritocracy is not only false, it's morally wrong".

Most of the author's problems seem to revolve around the fact that real life is not actually a pure meritocracy, not in the idea that meritocracy itself is a bad ideal. Even his examples where people show bias in assessment of others when they believe they are operating in a merit-based system are just examples that the system is not actually merit-based.

What I find disappointing is that the author does not even bother to offer even a hint at an alternative.
The first 2 years of college is usually your core competency, including high level mathematics, statistics, and other things like ethics, technical writing...and other general education like history, foreign language to make you a more rounded education.

If you do well in high school you can obtain a lot of college level general education credit and knock off a year.

The last 2 years are probably more like what you did in 1 year.
Article doesn't mention it, but I suspect one benefit is weight control.

If you eat something different every day, it's hard to be mindful of consuming too many calories. Especially given the high levels of fructose corn syrup in just about everything.

You can go broke even with a high paying job if you don't manage expenses. You can also get fat eating all the right foods but in too much quantity.
Perhaps grocery stores have done well to keep their brands on lower shelves and not end cap their own stuff. Amazon brands will often appear first in the list of results, which would be akin to putting Great Value products front and centre on all Walmart shelves.
> A huge amount of entropy is destroyed

And why is that a problem for generating random arrow presses?
Well, the device I'm typing this on was sold by a massive, vertically integrated technology company. So I guess that's one helpful usecase.
pickle is gross.
Everyone I talked to, as well as any article I read about Zuckerberg's privacy statement, is not believing it. There are major trust issues Facebook and its CEO have created for themselves.
> Says you. Even an average talent can identify an excellent talent. People who stand against meritocracy are the people who have never even reached average talent.

https://cramster-image.s3.amazonaws.com/definitions/DC-2238V...

Normal curve as in measuring IQ. Most people on it are in the middle. The people on the extremes are exceptional. Plenty of studies show that the correlation between being on the edge on that curve and being extremely successful are tenuous at best, most very successful people have average IQ. How do you explain that if there is a real meritocracy. Shouldn't people who are extremely exceptional in terms of their IQ be extremely successful?

> That is the kind of trick you think works when you are a child, but actually doesn't work among peers.

It's a common practice in medicine or law... to take on cases that they can actually win. Do you live under a rock?
Yeah I moved to Canada in uni and it is still so weird when I go to a random place where they don't remove footwear. I'll usually remove my shoes even if there are other people who still have their shoes on.

I'll also ask anyone and everyone who visit my apartment to remove their footwear at the door.
Is It Good or Bad
It can be used for good but do we want something like that in america. You basically can track anyone you won't if you find out enough info.
> People who stand against meritocracy are the people who have never even reached average talent.

Or just people, who experience(d) a highly competitive environment, where excellent performance doesn't imply advancement, and advancement was often preluded by average performance.
What I find aggravating about debates over regulatory capture is that there's no space for saying that both government and private industry are bad, because concentration of power is always bad no matter where it occurs.

Regulatory overreach is real, market failure is real, and regulatory capture represents a failure of all parties.
thanks for you reply. I would agree that the Columbia and Bedford disasters are a much closer fit for this theory.
Zapata FlyboardAir (2018)
I’m using a self hosted instance of Nextcloud, and it just works.
Towards the very end of the 90ies, some introductory CS course had a nice diagram of how general architecture features like memory management, multitasking, networking, multi-CPU, multi-user OS, virtualization and maybe some others had slowly trickled down from research prototypes to mainframes to personal computers to handheld devices to embedded controllers. Everybody in the lecture hall was mentally continuing the lines and I remember prodding my neighbor, joking about when a successor of the Palm III he was using for taking notes would run a multi-user OS. Android, with its full-blown Linux kernel underneath, came just in time.
Rayiner, thank you for your reply to my comment.

I might have worded it poorly, but it wasn't my intention to imply that the author of the article blames the law for it. I was merely trying to point out explicitly why this article is about women, and that it's not due to discrimination by the government through law. Furthermore I don't even think that this happens indirectly as you pointed out as possibly the case with your comparison to voter ID.

I also tried to mention explicitly that the "gender norms" you refer to are apparently mostly not imposed by men on women, but women on women. The article doesn't discuss this at all, instead mentions men spending less time with housework (which they probably even do in single households), etc.
FB cannot be privacy focused, the business model prevents it, there history belies it. How many times do you bang your head on a wall before you say no more?
I read an article a while back about the team behind Bing. I think they had some of the best people working there and they must feel pretty proud. I think after the project picket up and they started managing them from top up most of them left. I tried looking for the article but can’t find it anymore
To answer the question why I made the animation: there isn't an ulterior "I found an AI gotcha!" motive, I saw a tweet where the API returned different things depending on orientation and expanded on it. It was also an opportunity to test a few animation hypotheses via gganimate.
not really, even just alternating between two meals satisfies the condition of 'something different everyday' and it wouldn't be hard to track calories whatsoever.
Looking at the vast majority of Amazon Basics goods, I just don't see how they would have needed to use marketplace data to come up with what products to sell.

Batteries, clothes (lots of clothes), backpacks, these are all products that are cheap to produce and where brand loyalty plays a large role. People generally trust the name Amazon. It's not rocket science to realize people want cheap clothes and batteries.
Currently at the Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School) and happy to answer any questions about it! I imagine a few alums are reading :)
I started Sage, and worked on it a huge amount 2004-2012, but less so recently (due to working mostly on CoCalc). Actual contributions to and work on Sage by the community have gone UP a lot since 2012, as this plot (https://github.com/sagemath/sage/graphs/contributors) at Github shows. Much of that work is from research mathematicians that are adding large swaths of important functionality (e.g., in differential manifolds) to Sage. But there's also a very welcome push for quality, e.g., the number one recent contributor, fchapoton, has been fixing every little detail in the codebase revealed by https://lgtm.com/ and other tools, and there's also been a lot of work to fully transition Sage to Python 3 (which is difficult since so much is written in Cython and make nontrivial use of comparisons).

I would have likely made Sage pip-installable from day 1 if I had known that pip would turn out to be so popular. It was really unclear what was going on with Python packaging 15 years ago. I'm really glad that one package manager (pip) has become so good at this point.
The thing is that modern lie flat business class seats like United/Polaris are already way more comfortable than first class was in the “old days.” There’s a big win to flying business. The incremental win of flying first given that you still need to deal with much of the same airport/commercial airline stuff is fairly limited.
America’s Light Bulb Revolution
>I don't think she realizes that splitting up amazon and amazon basics will do little to nothing.

I think amazon : amazon basics is a great example of antitrust/unfair monopoly the same as google search : almost all consumer facing google products.

Both amazon and google search are the dominate online market leaders in their respective categories. In amazons case they unfairly use their market position to begin offering amazon private label products on their platform. They know what users are looking for, spend the most on, and they can give their own products dominate positions in the UI. In the case of google they too unfairly use their position as a market leader against their own customers (advertisers), so say you are a hotel booking platform and spend $x with google, google knows the market (searches, clicks, etc...) so google launches their own hotel booking, gives their in-house service priority in search results over existing market incumbents and self bids on google search advertising for key industry terms to drive up costs of advertisers to keep in business.

It’s kind of like standard oil buying up the railroads so they owned the supply chain and no other oil could be moved. It’s unfairly using your market position, not to compete, but to be anti competitive to the detriment of consumers.

I’d like to see the tech giants prevented from unfairly using their market dominance to stifle competition. As we saw with the break up of standard oil...competition is good for consumers.
Ahhh 1992....the year I discovered QNX and Mosaic.

This post brings back so many memories...Novell! the first damn network system that was ever worth a shit on a IBM PC-compatible. Installing that software finally put and end to the nightmare of "sneaker-netting" all my office PCs.

OS/2 failure! Who would have thought that shit-DOS would withstand the challenge of such a superior (see QNX!) and deep-pocketed competitor? What were we all smoking back then??

Jobs and NeXT!...man did I covet one of those ridiculous priced machines, but with no market penetration and my company focused on cheap compatible hardware, it made no sense to develop with it.

Linux!...see QNX!

I could go on and on...it's rather amazing...without me knowing it I've become my own history book.
I'm glad that at least someone here sees the problem, but I am not surprised by the typical reaction of AI apologists in this thread. You always get at least one of the two responses:

"OMG, this is amazing, it's just like humans. We're probably close to AGI."

"Ha-ha, humans are stupid, so the algorithm giving unexpected result is just a proof that it's better and less biased."

Here, we have both in response to the same demo.

Still, I honestly don't know why some people are so biased in favor of neural nets and have zero interest in edge cases and flaws (the most interesting parts if you want to gain deeper understanding of how the algorithm actually operates). Wishful thinking, I guess.
Specifically, those drops are where the top/bottoms of the image are very slightly cropped out.

When making the animation I didn't intend for the occlusion, but the fact that the occlusion causes the prediction to drop to zero is itself an interesting data point. Many objects in real life are occluded.
That's an absurd analogy. How are you supposed to know if a completely unauthenticated URL is meant to be private or not?

If we're going to try to force physical analogies to represent the digital, I would say it's more like every store, house, and public building looks exactly the same and you don't know if the door is locked or what's inside it until you try to open it.
Is there such a thing as the "normal extinction rate"?
I agree that -- all things being equal -- the market could probably sort these things out. But, the point is that things aren't equal.

I could definitely see a situation where a company uses a cash ban as a facade to reject a certain clientele (namely, poor people that can't afford the technology or don't have the means to get a credit card).
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

Pinball game was licensed, not developed by Microsoft AFAIK
This is interesting, but note that this is a specific technical usage of the word. There are other, more general uses:

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quietism and also one dictionary definition:

1a : a system of religious mysticism teaching that perfection and spiritual peace are attained by annihilation of the will and passive absorption in contemplation of God and divine things

b : a passive withdrawn attitude or policy toward the world or worldly affairs

2 : a state of calmness or passivity

Many of us become quietists in the sense of 1b.
I use Resilio Sync. I have a NAS that is running Resilio, but a computer that you never turn off could also work. All my computers and even family members have folders being synced to my NAS using Resilio. Then my NAS backs up those folders and files to BackBlaze every night.

It makes it nice because I can still access all my files using the selective sync feature and if I am moving between computers, I can drop anything in those specific folders and have access to them on any computer running Resilio. As well as be confident that it will be backed up and encrypted.
I also take issue with the third party in the middle. But in the end, if everyone wants to go that way, and you're adding extra costs by not doing so, why should everyone else have to pay for it?
Ultimately there could be less cash-accepting places and driving higher costs than their cashless counterparts. You would still be able to use cash, but you'd be the one paying for it to exist, and not everyone else who has opted for cashless. Which seems fairer to me.

Unless we collectively decide to take action against giving payment providers that much power and private data, but I don't think that was the driving force behind this policy.
I think Bing engineers laugh uncontrollably when people at HN claims DuckDuckGo is a search engine.
> It would help give China a fairer chance in the AI race.

Interesting platform for a US presidential candidate to promote regulations against US companies to promote world corperate “fairness”.
Should we all have to be in agreement to finally take meaningful action? If we were in a space station with thin walls and some folks want to set up a shooting range for their own enjoyment we'd stop them by all means. We wouldn't care if those people believe in vacuum outside the space station or not. Might seem far fetched, but we are very much in the same situation.
Thank you for your input, mikekchar. Even if anecdotal, it mirrors my experiences and what I hear from Japanese acquaintances as well. I agree that the cultural shift might just take more time, but is already happening. I see parallels to earlier developments in the west.
I wish there were video :(
As someone who played a lot of that game I can tell you it was not luck dependent at all. Entirely skill based, there was even a daily practice mode which would net you free plays. If the claw grabbed the piece it wouldn't drop it unless it got to the end. Most boards could easily be done with 5 plays.

Nintendo has kept scummy micro transactions to a minimum for as long as I can remember. Even Pokemon Picross had a maximum spend on micro transactions (after $40, any further premium currency was free)
Environmentally speaking, doesn't it make more sense to get oil from close-by instead of importing it from far way?
Norton Rose Launches Consultancy for ‘AI, Blockchain and Crypto’
that would be cool, but yeah a bit pricey.
Why?

This means that the US Government, which issues the currency, basically has less power than Visa and Mastercard. It's the currency of the nation... They should be required to take it unless they have a legitimate reason not to.
I'd be much more willing to pay $10 for something that resembles an actual game than get some branded gacha crap that's free to download but really has no gameplay beyond being a slot machine that doesn't put out money. Its hard for a lot of people to fathom that those types of games actually make a lot of money. Even for something like Pokemon Go, which in my opinion is pretty playable without paying money, I have two friends who put over $100 into the game. Microtransactions prey on people who lack self-control, I guess I'm just lucky I'm not predisposed to that kind of thing.
This might be the first time I've ever read an article like this and thought "I actually do all of this". Perhaps the "Senior" in front of my job title isn't as undeserved as it can sometimes feel :)