skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> we've (mostly) decided that unfairly classifying someone based on correlated but non-causal characteristics is wrong, EVEN in the extreme that you're right more often than you're wrong if you make that assumption.

Ironically, the only places where it's legally prohibited or frowned upon to use these heuristic techniques are situations that people have arbitrarily (heuristically or conveniently) decided.

For example: It's "not fair" to hire someone because they're white (and consequently have a higher chance of being wealthy and hence a higher change of being educated.)

But it's "fair" to choose a love partner based on their height, their waist-to-hip ratio, their weight (and hence having a higher chance of giving birth to healthy offspring, better physical protection, etc.).

Maybe it's hypocritical, and I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Maybe being hypocritical helps us survive.
While interesting, this is not surprising. One of the most commonly utilized datasets for learning ML is the Boston Housing dataset - https://www.kaggle.com/c/boston-housing

In it there's a problematic feature tagged simply as "black" and it is defined as the proportion of blacks by town.

Any pricing model that is built off of this dataset is inherently racially biased because the data has been collected and the feature tagged - but what's the alternative? Not to collect the information? Or collect it but completely ignore this feature?
That's a fair observation. I do go back and forth but in the end it's enough to swing me, in the principle-of-least-regret way.
> Schrödinger's cat must be alive or dead once we open the box

I recently had a conversation about this in another thread. It seems to me, and nobody tried to convince me otherwise, that the Cat would be the Observer. Therefore it would be dead, NOT dead AND alive, as soon as it observes the poisonous gas in its box.
Yea, I loved by TI91 (I think that was it's designation); very durable, long battery life, a real work horse. I still have it. Don't remember how to to anything on it. The thing is, a full computer, python notebook, and keyboard are quite an advancement over that even. I get that $100 is high, but it's in the range of other BS like always-new textbooks. My only regret about these calculators is that they really are old tech now. In almost any industry or research we don't use calculators almost even, we always use full laptops. Kids should train on the best tech we use in the field, that's the laptop.
While there may be some bias, it is as much yours. Even people who live in bad neighborhoods avoid driving through them when possible.
The AI connection is that these are the type of datasets that feed AI systems. It shows that you have to be careful when curating your dataset, so that you don't further bias.

I just hope the masses don't glom onto this, start shrieking that "AI is racist", and attempt to take AI completely out of the picture.
I'm sure all the employers on HN are just chomping at the bit to have you on their company health insurance plan after that post :P

But on a more serious note, if you're considering the remote work life, I do recommend it.
>In fact, any airborne addictive substance should be blanked banned.

So long to baking cookies.
Perhaps a reference to Prison Break, where a character had a map of the prison tattood to his body? Just a guess.
Coder deletes open source add-on for Chef in protest over ICE contract
This post is an order of magnitude higher than any other post on the front page. I think people are finally starting to see through the serverless hype.
What's e.g. China and Russia doing in this space? Or the US Gov't for that matter? I can't imagine that national governments are just waiting for Google and IBM to do the research and publish their results. Is it possible/likely that NSA or some other national equivalent is way beyond these results already?
Illegal operations.
Garbage in, garbage out
For 4 of the largest companies in the world that have a global presence, that list doesn't seem that long?
Not a fan of Conda, the cli is terrible, their unofficial builds are opaque and in my experience the very few packages that are not available on pypi are rarely worth installing (usually the worst kind of "research code"[1]).

Simply using pipenv and pyenv is enough for me (brew install pipenv pyenv). You don't ever have to think about this, or worry you're doing it wrong.

Every project has an isolated environment in any python version you want, installed on demand. You get a lockfile for reproducibility (but this can be skipped) and the scripts section of the pipfile is very useful for repetitive commands. It's super simple to configure the environment to become active when you move into a project directory.

It's not all roses, pipenv has some downsides which I hope the new release will fix.

When I need a temporary environment to mess around in, then I use virtualfish by running `vf tmp`: https://virtualfish.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

1. https://github.com/menpo/menpo/blob/master/setup.py#L17
HTLV, EBV, HPV

you better believe we have! It’s just rare (thank goodness).
One key, on a Nitrokey. Use pgp auth for ssh, sign all of commits
In your opinion, are qualitative labels like "attractive" or group membership such as someone's skin color or ethnicity within the domain of facts or not?

I.e. is the issue in the fact that the particular annotators were subjective and annotated some particular facts wrong (and the labels for skin color could be filled from, for example, census data which is self-reported) or that these whole type of labels shouldn't be attempted to be made as they're not facts?

If the latter, what do you think about the categories like "adult" or "sports car" that are also part of ImageNet; can we draw an unambiguous factual boundary between images of adults and teenagers, or "normal" cars and sports cars?
Note that my comment is in reference to Python3, since Python2 will not be maintained past 2020.

If you’re on a Mac, just use the brew installation (brew install). If you’re on some type of prod/containerized setup, use apt’s python (apt-get install).

I would not recommend building Python from source unless you _really_ know what you’re doing on that level, as you can unintentionally shoot yourself in the foot quite a bit. From there just using a virtualenv should be pretty straightforward.

In this way, you’re letting the package managers (written by much smarter people than you and I) do the heavy lifting.
Lower-Income Americans Are Increasingly Job Hopping
...but will the trunks be recycled?

If not, then it is just delaying the inevitable.
Either use Anaconda (if you’re using a lot of science libraries, or you also want to install non-python stuff like git, pandoc, or nodejs), or pyenv, which will install and manage multiple versions of Python for you in parallel. In fact pyenv can also install Anaconda, so that’s another possibility. If you’re just running Jupyter notebooks for doing some science or data analysis, I’d go with Anaconda. If you do a lot of library development and testing, pyenv is probably better.

Don’t use the system Python, brew-installed Python, it the official Python installer, if you can avoid it (you’ll want your Python to be up to date and self-contained in your home folder as much as possible)
Remember that we're comparing languages, not programs. A language can be thought of as the space of all programs that can be interpreted by that language. In any language, any algorithm can be implemented arbitrarily slowly. So the only meaningful point of comparison between language X and language Y is the upper bound on the performance of each language's program-space.

That some particular C program exists that is at least as slow as a program in some other language is always true, trivially, and so is not a good interpretation of "as fast as C" regardless of its objectivity.
Seagate: Our disk drives are safe from SSDs for at least 15 years
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
I’m aware of D-wave’s struggles, but my impression was that they had failed at finding a “deterministic” problem where they could show quantum advantage. I’ve never heard a claim that whatever probability distribution the D-wave can sample from a classical computer can also sample from. I’d love to read about it if you have a reference!
I think the ironic thing here is the algorithm is intentionally designed to make a superficial judgement on the image it’s presented with.

If it was trained to identify “human” or otherwise categorize the things in the picture, that’s exactly what it would output.

Next you can train it to attempt to guess basic traits like gender or ethnicity, of course this can only be done based on the RGB values of a 2D array of pixels. Interestingly the NN will not be merely be using skin color but building probabilistic weightings based on any statistically significant features. For added controversy, it’s probably even possible to invert parts of the network to suss out how it’s weighting various facial features toward different labeling.

Lastly the images could be labeled for things like profession of the subject. A good intentioned effort to perhaps detect things like a lab coat could mean a doctor or scientist was followed by oblivious Turkers with predictably poor results.

The problem of course is not with the images but the particular labeling hierarchy, and allowing opinionated labels as well as labels which may be true for the particular subject but which bear no
distinguishing features for which to actually codify (“portrait of a macroeconomist”), in other words, garbage in garbage out. ImageNet calls this the “imageability” of the label.

Calling this racism of course is entirely inapt, because there is no judgement being made whatsoever. Even if the sampling method was well designed and the labeling factually accurate, the system would still produce output which could be considered offensive. Again, because the entire point of the algorithm is to generate statistical assumptions based on a single image.

My conclusion is that some superficial judgments are algorithmically useful and hopefully less controversial. “White male human, ~55 yrs old, 180lbs”. Even things like analyzing clothing and guessing where the picture was taken. Iff the clothing is a uniform, identifying the profession (police, fire, paramedic)

But you have to know where this goes off the rails. Bad enough to label indistinct portraits with the subject’s profession, let’s not do inane things like labeling them with how subjectively attractive the labeler thinks the person is, their economic status, maybe even a 1-10 scale of how threatening they look or if they look like a criminal or not! </facepalm>
> However, you think conservatives would be more open to the possibility of using antitrust as a cudgel against social media companies that seem intolerant toward right-wing viewpoints.

No, most of us actually welcome diversity of thought, and free expression of opposing ideas. Typically we don't want Big Brother to tell us, or anyone else what to do or how to do it.

Big Brother is just some guys or gals; like the crew that hung out in the parking lot at the mall, and after all--who the fuck are they anyway to tell us what to do, or how to do it??
Oh, I see why Jeff Bezos' washingtonpost ran their hit job [1] on Apple now. It seems Amazon basics is getting scrutiny while Apple has almost escaped unscathed. We all know the 30% haircut is ridiculous, but that's hardly the most anti-competitive thing Apple is known to do.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...
It really depends on how you define crime. Usually crime and prosecution is defined in such a way as to impact the lower classes more than the upper classes.
It's not. It's an unalloyed good thing. The concern is with configurations that make it hard to use anything but Cloud Flare. There are alternatives.
I grew up in Southern Hew Hampshire, one of the sprawliest places in the U.S.

The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels.

A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time.

A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.)

As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights.

My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit
stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles.

If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights.

I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.
Why is a home different from everything else you own?

Other states may do this, but many other countries do not.

Why shouldn’t you be taxed on the assessed value of your laptop and car each year too? How about your savings account? Shouldn’t that be taxed?
Yes, but then why invest in an actively managed fund at all, as an LP? whole premise is that fund managers can beat an index such as the S&P500 or total market etc.
Only at Google is employee voice truly heard compared to the rest of FAANG and Microsoft.
Again. You are making things up. This is pure speculation not proving anything.
We've shifted our policy to allow rapid RMA of problematic units, which is more in line with other vendors. Please be assured you won't be stuck a problematic unit, especially with our well-established Talos II line. For Talos II, which has been on the market for two years, we have a well established support system in place, which asks for some basic diagnostics to verify a faulty board (this is rare) before authorizing RMA for repair or replacement.

With Blackbird there was more of a focus on trying to understand any new faults found in the field, given their tendency to disappear when the units were brought back for analysis. Over the months after Blackbird shipments started, we learned that the majority of those were related to improper customer component installation (CPU, RAM, PSU, chassis), and are in the process of expanding the existing RMA policy to cover the Blackbird line.
A human can be...20x bigger than a small cat/dog, easily. It's not that usual for animals to eat something that much bigger than them. Much more common among carrion scavengers, but still kind of notable.
You post made me wonder about a lot

> Unfortunately, the MHC proteins are themselves a highly reactive antigen thahttps://www.airships.net/hindenburg/interiors/t triggers the immune system. Luckily, the body learns during a process called "negative selection" to cull any immune cell receptors that recognize your own MHCs:

This is very interesting that this process is split into two separate domains / privilege levels. That way you can't have a fork bomb that would overwhelm the MHC production process.

> Unfortunately, your body doesn't know the shape of MHC proteins from donor tissue and can't learn to kill any TCRs that match.

Maybe we'll combat this in the future by finding a way to donate or genetically engineer a whole bone from the organ donor, thus having bone marrow matching the donated organ. If we could get localized immune suppression on only those parts, that would be cool. I guess those leukocytes would be attacked immediately.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination

Wow.
It's called an investigation for a reason. You're saying they're suspicious, nothing more.
Can you say more about this please?

What is a proctor, and why don't they like notes?
Sure, if they emit an addictive airborne substance. Thanks for clarifying.
Yep, that's the correct term, English isn't my main language.
> You Might Not Want to Eat Bugs. But Would You Eat Meat That Ate Bugs?

Ummm. Free-range chickens love insects. Trout also eat lots of insects. And pigs. Well, I'm not going into what pigs will eat.
The phone gives you the joys and ills of knowing.

In knowing, you give up the ills and joys of not knowing.
One issue is that they aren't certified by the FDA as a smoking cessation device.
Ah yes, Bezos shedding light on something that has been widely known since early 2012.
I use direnv for most of my development that doesn't need full blown containers. Once you hook it up, it automatically enables/disables virtual environments based on directory.

https://github.com/direnv/direnv/wiki/Python#pyenv
Yep. Python 3 installed via brew. Then every project has its own virtual environment. You can specify the path to the python binary when creating a new env so you can specify whether you want it to use Python 3 or Python 2.

It’s simple. It’s easy to debug. I genuinely don’t understand the point of all this other nonsense like anaconda.

Unfortunately when it comes to data-science-Python it seems like the patients are running the asylum. The APIs and developer ergonomics of tools like tensorflow, pandas etc... are so bizarre to people who are running production, vanilla Python.
Apple already has this. Every med school has apps for administering exams on iOS and windows - partly relying on the use of Guided Access.
I know what a red herring is, that's not that it's a simple fact that goes counter to the claim about catastrophic climate change.

You have no proof for your claim, it's a non-testable hypothesis and the only thing you are relying on is computer climate models notorious for fitting and underappreciating negative feedback loops which have resulted in less than stellar predictability.
> If we assume that each vehicle makes two trips per day on average, and than the number of minutes of inconvenience taken up by pulling over to operate a phone is 5,

Once you need to pull over to check your phone you realize that you can just wait until your destination. I never touch my phone while driving, but I'd estimate the time I spend pulled over to use my phone to be more in the area of 5 minutes per couple thousand km.
We similarly mechanize the growing of organisims in their own biodegraded guts and eat them afterward. Everything sounds grusome when you frame it that way. Being an apex predator comes with advantages as well as responsibilities to best utilize ourselves as we nessarily consume other organisms and not dirt.
Yes, it worked for you - but surely in an adversarial context, there's absolutely no way to trust a previously untrusted device. In the extreme case, the entire interface might simply be a simulacrum app designed to feign success at locking.
I don't know what the NSA spends on R&D, but I have to imagine they don't have a multi-billion dollar budget for secret R&D facilities and talent. It would seem more likely they are monitoring developments in public and private research and responding opportunistically. I'm just making assumptions here, but also I don't think somebody with clearance could correct me here in public :P
You mean British cars are considered bad in the US or the UK? Any imported car would be worse in the US, because additional import costs and harder to get service for compared to local ones. It doesn't necessarily mean that the car is bad as a car.

For another example, French cars are among the best and most popular in France, cheaper and easier to get service for. If you asked a few people there to name some American cars, they probably wouldn't be able to.
I have fully moved over to pipenv and it is what I onboard new people with. Not having a virtualenv that everyone names something differently and invariably gets checked in on accident was a big plus on its own.

For a while I was encouraging people to use conda especially on windows, but with WSL I found it to be mostly unnecessary.

I do still leverage pip install --user for tools that are stable enough and I use frequently.
I was a little too fast and loose in my previous post. You are correct that we want a large [number of qubits] on a chip eventually. The chips are tiny and the fridges large enough for now (50 qubits). It's not clear to me that they can handle thousands of qubits as imagined. The cryostat will undoubtedly be able to house the chip, but the extra electronics / cables must run in there as well. With 1000 qubits and 2 cables per qubit this will be a major challenge.

You are correct about the coupling of the qubits, I was simplifying too strongly there.

I do stand by my scaling point (center qubits harder to reach) but I'm open for counter arguments.

Thanks.
One point about suicide prevention that I think deserves a little more mention: people who survive an attempt typically do not ever commit suicide [1]. Lifetime survival rates range across studies, but they hover around 90%.

Of course, 10% is much higher than the general population rate for lifetime suicide completion rate, which is more like 0.01%, and things are complicated by severity of attempt (you’re more likely to end up in a hospital if you use pills instead of a gun). But still, most people who attempt suicide decide against it after the fact.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survi...
Aren't most cellular automata bit matrices that evolve over time? They also tend to generalize to any size. This seems more like a recurrence relation/spigot algorithm or a cipher network of some kind.. several ciphers have look-up tables used for various things.

The tricky bit isn't just getting the desired look, it's having a non-repeating maze layout that doesn't hit dead ends. Seems hard to me..
FWIW many people advocate preferring the phrase "died by suicide" (slightly awkwardly, but best they can do under the constraints) to reflect their belief (and perhaps yours) that suicide is a symptom of an illness, not a crime.

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-mental-health-advo...
Probably because leaders have to get elected, and "we're going to work through this backlog" is far less exciting in general to "new features!"
Facebooks' lawyers are not sane. ^__^
I've smoked tobacco for 30-ish years. Organic, additive-free tobacco is definitely less problematic for me. Lately I've been growing my own Nicotiana Rustica [0], which contains plenty more nicotine than regular tobacco but is nowhere near as addictive.

I know what I would do if I was selling drugs and didn't give a crap about anything but profits, I would make them as addictive as possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotiana_rustica
As a competitive chess player I have sometimes fantasised that there should be a rule allowing computer assistance providing you wrote the chess engine yourself. I've written a simple engine to complement my chess GUI but such a rule would definitely push me to massively improve it.
...which may be helped by switching away from the historical accusatory language of "commit".

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-mental-health-advo...
How to create charts with no code
Another reason I feel this is oversold: This quantum “computer” cannot run Shores factorization algorithm. But if it could it would only be able to factor integers up to 2^53. The time required to factor a 2^60 to 2^80 integer on a classical computer is measured in milliseconds [1]...

Quantum supremacy in any reasonable sense of the word supremacy is a long way off.

1. https://hal.inria.fr/file/index/docid/451604/filename/smalli...
How is this not quantitative research? It's counting pieces of information. All data analys comes from data. Quantitative research can't exist at all without it.