skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the issue is that people forget to account for the massive SCALE of human activity in their lives. We mostly only know a few hundred people in our circles, and for a lot of us, not a large precentage of that circle is criminal, or engaged in unethical/immoral behaviour.

But when you scale things up - at massive quantities - you have to account for the illegal/immoral/unethical behaviour scaling up as well. It may be completely inconceivable that criminal behaviour occurs in circles of power - but when you are dealing with people who are involved in the lives of millions, upon millions - literally tens of millions of humans, or even hundreds of millions - criminality at scale starts to become a thing.

And yes, a group of a few thousand no-good types can hide their activities in the realm of humans-at-scale. This has been proven time and again throughout history, and anyone who thinks 'its impossible for people to be that well organized' are fooling themselves.

Humans are incredibly good at organizing themselves to get things done - nefarious or otherwise - and anyone thinking otherwise is just manifesting a form of personal anti-social neurosis. If its unreal to you that conspiracies could form at scale, you need to read more history and pay attention to how so many of our cultures and societies throughout the world have been constructed. Heck, even the American state began as a conspiracy that nobody could believe would result in anything much ..
Stop thinking that this is some universal definition of free speech.
Free speech can only fully be free speech if it's everywhere otherwise it should be called liberal speech.

Lookup the difference between freedom and liberty
Doesn't this apply to a majority of activities, period? (See recent discussions on "bullshit jobs")?
New approach could make HVAC heat exchangers five times more efficient
I think Carmack is basically using feature flags - but that's just the platonic ideal polished version of this, not the fundamental goal.

The less AAA/polished version is to do this in code instead of in data. Maybe you comment out old.h in favor of new.h, or have a #if 0 ... #else ... #endif chunk in your .cpp files. This can be a lot quicker than adding conditional logic to hundreds of call sites, or implementing hundreds of forwarding stubs, if you don't have a nice dynamic module boundary already. You can make a define, two build variants, and side-by-side compare things that way too. Not quite as nice as runtime switching, but potentially a lot easier, if you've kept things from spilling into common headers too much and have reasonable link times.

Another alternative is to do this on your second computer, carefully synced to the same code/config/debug settings/feature flags/???, and hopefully with the same specs. This manages to work even if things spilled out into headers, but can require some painful coordination to keep in sync.
It's in mangers best business interests to ignore ethics when they stand in the way of profits. They have a massive conflict of interest. That said, of course there are business ethics courses but sadly economics are generally taught as being inherently amoral, especially in the US. Changing this would mean nothing less than abandoning laissez-faire capitalism, which would be a massive cultural shift in not just economics but (US or Western) politics as a whole.

Programmers on the other hand, just like engineers or doctors or any other craftsperson, are only conflicted because ethics can get in the way of job security.

If businesses were the military, managers are the officers giving orders, programmers are the soldiers pulling the trigger. If your officer tells you to do something extremely immoral, it's your ethical duty to object even if it means you will be punished. Even if it will only be recognised as the right thing to do when your officers are brought before a court by another nation.

EDIT: As HN has ratelimited me again, I'll reply here instead: Yes, in the case of doctors the moral duty is in part enforced through licensing. But anyone thinking an absence of a legal duty means the ethical duties are entirely down to personal preferences seems to have a very short memory of history.

There's a reason in my military example I explicitly said "even if it will only be recognised by another nation": laws are arbitrary, fundamental ethics are not. The Nuremberg trials are an oft-quoted example because it was a case of people being tried for blatantly unethical acts that were perfectly legal in their own microcosm (mostly because the people supporting those acts were also the ones writing the laws).

If you're a soldier and your commanding officer orders you to perform massive human rights violations (even if your country does not consider the UN Human Rights legally binding) it's your duty to refuse, even if you suffer drastic consequences for that refusal. "Just following orders" has become a cliche for non-excuses thanks to people using exactly that justification for committing unspeakable atrocities.

Also, fun fact: the German military distinguishes between binding orders, orders you can refuse and orders you must refuse. A typical example of the second category seems to be "go and wash my (private) car". An example of the third category would be a criminal act. But even despite those distinctions a soldier might be legally punished for refusing to do something unethical. Extremely immoral orders are generally also orders to do something illegal (and thus illegitimate in this case) but that mapping is neither guaranteed nor necessary.

My point is that "doing the right thing" doesn't mean doing something that'll benefit you and "doing the wrong thing" doesn't mean something you'll suffer direct consequences for. Whether the consequences are legal, personal or financial (e.g. by being fired from your job), sometimes following your ethical duty comes with a cost. Nobody said any of this was fair.
What if you limited it to be on the day ? The week ?

What if stock markets where about the long term ?
There's some horrendous stories of this happening in PNG. The police are present and try to stop the mob but they are outnumbered 100-to-1 by a group of villagers intent on murdering some poor innocent woman accused of being a witch and causing illness in the community.
They stand by and watch as she is lynched.
Pest: PHP testing framework inspired by Jest
Show HN: NeuraCache – Retain your knowledge. Ace your exams.
My point is not that the financial sector is unnecessary, it's that the majority of the activities are not of benefit to society, which admittedly is something hard to define.

Following on from that line of thought, it could be argued that a lot of companies don't provide any benefit to society, so the financial sector is just enabling these firms and thus of no benefit to society.
While not related to high frequency trading, per se, the Google research on the gap between nanosecond and millisecond latencies (AKA "attack of the killer microseconds") springs to mind with this article. Typically the hardware bottleneck in HFT, I assume, is network latency, which leads to colocating trading servers near the exchanges themselves...so how do you improve on that? Smart NICs/FPGAs? Better non-volatile storage (there's hardware on the market today that's getting us to read latencies in the single digits on PCIe bus at least)...? ASICs for HFT specifically? This is obviously a marketing piece put out to attract quants to Goldman Sachs given the lack of detail, but I naturally wonder where that $100M is going to be invested.

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/4/215032-attack-of-the-k...
I think it's also because of family. When you're young, you might be single or childless - fresh out of college. At 35 you might have a kid or two and you want to save enough money to put them into a good school and retire early.
I don't understand the source of the confusion. We are animals that eat plants and other animals, so we are omnivores. What is unclear or controversial about this?
I don't understand: Is 35 normally considered too old to make something of yourself by society?

I'm turning 28 this month and I feel like I'm quite far ahead compared to my peers, yet feel like I'm absolutely still fumbling through life. And when speaking to friends older than me, the majority seem to still be fumbling through as well.

Every rotation around the sun my opinion is solidified that we're all just wingin' it, no matter the age and success can happen whenever.
Practical Byte-Granular Memory Blacklisting Using Califorms
There’s a real discoverability issue with those kind of pages. They should be listed somewhere in some submenu. You can’t expect people to go through all the documentation like they used to go through manuals in decades past.
My wife left me. (“How success destroyed us”)
Like when you see a pizza dough being spun...
As someone that didn't get an on-site interview because of a failed coding challenge, despite 15+ years experience, relevant open-source work, and previous development done for companies under the DH umbrella as a contractor, all I can say is: you guys need to have a better hiring process.
Humans being bipedal and "vertical" might have something to do with it too, if the idea is to signal oneself as not being "head-on" it might not be so intuitive with a human, whose "front" (including the face) is always looking at the dog from above, and whose side is not that distinctive.
Isn't this just economic geography?
This tone has been prevalent in tech writing for years. It's like we all learned to write by listening to TED talks. When I first started coming across the tone as I was learning to be a developer, it was all really fresh and exciting. Everything was so aspirational.

I try to just gloss over it now and let it be, because you never know who might be getting motivated by it like I was, and I would hate to think I ruined their excitement by being jaded about it. But it is still pretty annoying to read.
But this tip goes towards minimum wage is illegal in California where all these companies are based.
What an incredibly beautiful and humane article
So paying hardware manufacturers and programmers for their work doesn't benefit society? It is not like firing these people would see more cancer research or other stuff you might regard as more beneficial for society.
> We really need mandatory ethics courses in CS.

Voice recognition isn't really possible without someone listening to train the system.

If the option is "don't have a voice assistant at all" or "have a voice assistant that sometimes has a human listening", I suspect the public would mostly choose the latter.

When you call a company helpline and get connected to a human rather than a robo-voice, most people are happy about it. It's curious they treat voice assistants the other way round.
Alternatively, the users could choose to annotate their own data from time to time I suppose. Maybe there’s some way to incentivise this.
El Cronicante (Un Libre Pensador)
> I'm no cryptographer, but setting up what is effectively an anonymous (EC)DH session first seems to provide no extra protection from an active MITM because it's unauthenticated

It makes the protocol easier to reason about coherently, which in TLS 1.3 was a priority for the first time. The cryptographers reasoned about an abstract protocol and produced various types of proof about the properties this protocol has, and then the engineers in the TLS WG figured out which bits to send on the wire to communicate that protocol in a way that doesn't blow up too many middleboxes.

We can consider two separate possibilities:

1. The usual case, the two parties were actually Alice and Bob. Bob (and optionally Alice) now bind proof of identity to the secure channel using CertificateVerify messages, which is possible because they are, in fact, Alice and Bob, and we have an authenticated secure channel between Alice and Bob.

2. The MITM case. Alice is talking to Mallory. Mallory may also be talking to Bob. Mallory cannot show Bob's binding to the Mallory-Bob channel to Alice as proof she is Bob. It's bound to the wrong channel. She can't make her own proof, that's the whole point of the public key cryptography used for the proofs. So Mallory can't prove to Alice that she is Bob, and so Alice won't send her any messages for Bob.

But also yes a subsidiary rationale is the one a sister message explains, that encrypting things stops a middlebox from tampering with them. Consistently over its lifetime _everything_ in the TLS protocol that a middlebox can read, even if it's explicitly not safe to meddle with it, gets meddled with. This rationale has driven QUIC work more than TLS 1.3, the QUIC WG even argued about whether to have a single unencrypted bit (the spin bit) in their protocol because they concluded middleboxes would undoubtedly tamper with it even though that's hauntingly stupid.

The long-term lesson has been that middlebox vendors (usually ostensibly "security" vendors) don't know anything about cryptography, or security, or networks, or possibly even about basic computer science ideas like counting. Their customers are often convinced that these idiots are protecting them, and the most we can safely do about that is try to discourage them from "protecting" anybody else.

Acual, real products your CIO can insist you spend money on to "protect" your network do things like run regular expression parsers over the opaque bytes in the X.509 certificate to look for malware, or lazily copy the random bytes from an attacker's packet into the "random" bytes of their own packet and are then surprised that all the cryptographic security doesn't work ...
Very nice idea. As an ISV with a freemium open-source extension, I would happily pay for an official security review that I could present to our users. Our extension is secure by design but having a 3rd-party expert (e. g. Google or Firefox reviewer) confirm this and get a "Reviewed" badge would be great. The drawback is that this could slow down extension updates, as you do not want to loose this badge with the next update. But that is manageable.
Yes, but I don't think your refuted my point. 16 bits (96dB SNR) is pretty good for an 18MHz signal processing system. Comparing it to a 18MHz 8bit AVR with a 10bit, 15ksps ADC is probably missing what makes this potentially cool.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a pretty niche thing that doesn't have a lot of applications. DSP is great, and it's not going to get overthrown anytime soon. But if you were looking for things that make signal processing in the analog domain exciting to think about, I stand by high equivalent bit depth for the processing bandwidth and power consumed as a valid advantage.
As a neighbour in Denmark, it's not the case here. I think it's a mistake and he means visa.
It's a shame the larger corporate machine wouldn't wear it, but you could, say, have a lower (or subsidised?) minimum wage for the first 2 years of business operation?
The environment is being destroyed right here and right now.
Are you willing to risk it being destroyed more because you want toilet seat warmers and a clothes dryer?

Sorry if this makes you feel more guilty.
"The vast majority of our competitors will likely lower their rates even more than 0.25%" is silly FUD

Personal Capital & Betterment are lowering their rates on their high yield accounts by the same 0.25%
>We can address the homeless problem pretty easily if we could decrease the minimum wage for them... Jobs that would pay very low wage wouldn't be difficult jobs, but they also wouldn't care if the person is only half mentally there. Small pay, small work, you can be promoted and given raise. A factory for instance could even build a campground with facilities."

Congratulations, you've just reinvented fuedalism, complete with the keep. Not trying to be flippant, but this is a perfect example of how 'rational' geeks can trivially rationalise literally anything, by ignoring context and history. Protections like minimum wage, safe working conditions, minimum work age etc didn't arise de novo. They exist (all be it in a much more limited form in the US than elsewhere in the developed world), because of repeated public outrage at the abuses their lack engendered. Repealing them to 'create jobs' as though that were in itself a nebulous good is the same logic that has prisoners in chain gangs (universally from poor, and overwhelmingly black) recreating the era of slavery in Texas.
I think this is a mischaracterization of what "the response" was except maybe from laypeople. The idea that real people's input was analyzed as part of the system (for Siri, Amazon etc) was always well documented and I never saw anything in the official documentation or the media response to these technologies that suggested otherwise.

In my opinion it's only now which they see that they can capitalize on this misunderstanding that tech journalists are portraying the situation like nobody knew and this was some kind of big secret. Why didn't they make such a big fuss in the first place, when these technologies came out?

Maybe it was wrong to not highlight those issues right from the start but I think it's also wrong to act like nobody knew. It was well understood, but tech journalists at the time wanted a positive story instead of a negative one. Now the negative angle is more profitable and the tune has changed.
Rails experience preferred for the Architect role. But come talk to us for other roles. We're in BGC. Ingat kasi maulan :-)
Actually he probably meant that 100 million are being used to redirect efforts and resources destructively. Your argument can be used just as well to defend an "investment" of 100m into efforts to dig up aluminium, turn it into dust and throw it into oceans.
I completely agree, so much that I even started a company within the space and wrote a blog post the other week on how we need to reset our moral compass around data and tech: https://www.legalmonster.com/blog/it-s-time-to-reset-our-mor...
You realise it's problematic to emphasise typos, right?
But why? Who is the victim here?
Peak Productivity Planner: Undated Planner for Productivity and Time Management
I hypothesize that the lack of biomass in direct sunlight is mostly because the right seeds aren't yet planted there.

Some cacti or other plants with waxy skin and deep roots would love the extra sunlight.
I always remind myself that Paul Gauguin started painting for the first time at 35, and almost at 40 decided to stop being a wealthy stock broker to live as a painter. Regardless of the ethics of that decision (he did leave everyone in his family behind, after all) I do think it's pretty impressive that he picked up a profession like that so late and developed it in such an impressive way (I love his artwork, I think it's incredibly beautiful).
Count-Min Sketch: A probabilistic data structure for stream summaries
Sure, corporate privacy abuse is a different beast and bad for different reasons but your mistake is thinking of this as an either-or scenario.

Yes, you may not care about whose audio you're listening to. But someone might. They may not even know the person prior to listening to that audio and still pose a threat.

Stalking is an obvious problem. But what if they think they recognise a voice and then act on that information when they meet the person they (mis-)identified? Or in your sex noises scenario: sure, they may be anonymous to the listener, but so is revenge porn to most consumers of it: the ethical issue isn't whether they can be recognised but they lacked (or withdrew) consent.

People in tech generally seem to have an extremely hard time to grasp a basic premise: consent.

Consent must be given. Consent must be informed. Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Whether it's consent for physical interactions, social interactions or storing and processing my data -- and make no mistake, it is my data, even if I only shared it passively or explicitly gave you permission to use it.

This isn't about security. This isn't about intellectual property. This is entirely about consent.
I listen to the Twit podcast, which is usually very good. One thing they do, however, is to stop themselves from saying the word Alexa, and if someone accidentally does so, they beep it out.

Why? Because they don't want to set off any so-called smart speakers.

I'd argue that going so low as to change the way we speak just to accommodate these devices is quite terrible, and if you have to watch what you say so that a smart speaker don't misunderstand you, then it's not very smart.

Their listeners shouldn't complain that their hosts use the word Alexa. They should complain to the vendors that their products are garbage.

I wouldn't use one of those even if they weren't garbage, but at least I wouldn't be infuriated every time I hear someone on the podcast stop themselves from saying the name of the product that's the topic of their discussion.
As long as an extension can be owned by a company, you can bypass restrictions on transferring the extension by transferring ownership of the company.

Unless you think plugins for HTTPS Everywhere, Google Translate, and LastPass should be signed by an individual developer - in which case you'll have to solve the problem of what to do when that developer moves between jobs :)
ugh, techcrunch seems to automatically swap pages on you if you scroll down. What an awful ui decision
> I'm curious as to your opinion on why the functor in Haskell only has a passing relationship to functors in category theory.

If we assume Hask, the universe of Haskell types and functions operating, is a category (which is hotly debated with some regularity, as there is no formal definition of Hask). Then the Functor class in Haskell really only describes one specific subset of functors: endofunctors on Hask (i.e. mapping objects (types) in Hask to objects in Hask).

This is a rather limited subset of all functors. You can also see this in the laws for example. You probably know the 2 functor laws "fmap id x = id x" and "fmap f . fmap g = fmap (f . g)", but Haskell's Functor is limited enough that these are actually redundant. In Haskell having a proof of just 1 functor law gives you the other one for free (as a free theorem, Wadler's "Theorems for Free!" is a good intro, and another paper. It basically covers "why is more generic code easier to reason about").

> The resource I am reading on category theory makes it seem highly relevant to Haskell and software design in general.

I'm not saying there aren't some useful ideas to be gleaned at both the superficial and deeper levels. The whole lawfulness of functors is great for being able to reason about code without knowing what it actually does, and all of lens is deeply inspired by category theory.

All of CT is about composition and reasoning about it, which we could certainly use more of in programming. So I encourage anyone curious to look into. I'm just trying to provide some nuance to the...enthusiastic overhyping of CT, because I don't want people to be scared away of wonderful tools and languages like Haskell, just because they think they're not smart enough to get all that fuzzy math :)
It's not FDIC covered during the transitional period, and they don't say how long the transitional period is either.
This makes the assumption that time in and of itself has no relevance. Sure the money is reused, but ultimately what is valuable is labour output, and usually that has time relevance. Further, if we consider the activity as steady state, that now means a % of the labour force is semi-permanently unable to be used for something else.