skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an apples to oranges argument here. So first a market argument:

AWS downtime results (or the lack thereof) are what's desired by the market. Blind people are a small market, and prioritizing them equally or disproportionately is an inefficient use of resources.

This can be countered by "we can't just abandon the disabled". And we haven't; In this case, the disabled guy can call in and order a pizza. The core service is still available to him.

However, I don't see why forcing all features for every disability should be mandated. It's a small proportion of the populace, and while steps should be taken to enable usability, I don't believe that their desires warrant as much resources as the mainline, nor do I think we should force design to cater to them.

This is particularly so as, from what I get from the ADA, there is no size requirement for such. If you classify websites as "public accommodations", then all websites big or small now have yet another thing that they can be sued for.
That is amazing!!!! We need it so much over here!
It’s actually that. I would even go so far as to say “functional addict” is a bit of an oxymoron. People compulsively repeat all kinds of different behaviours. Some of those have a lot of people willing to pay you (programming), others less so (gaming), and some none at all (intravenous drugs).
I interpreted "non believers" to be "not believing in the party" not "not believing in religion".

"the Chinese government doesn't interfere in personal religious beliefs" is quite the claim though, considering they literally have concentration camps full of Muslims.
>he should be ruthlessly mocked

100% agree. I too, think science needs way more flame wars and shit posting. The current discourse is far too tame and civil.

Who else should we gang up on?
I don't understand why that YouTube video requires age verification. As far as I know that prevents it from being played to anyone not logged in, including embeds, and severely limits people from seeing it.

Social media flagging is censorship. More and more people are calling on videos to be flagged, taken down, etc — then we run into instances like this one where we wish the mechanism wasn't in place at all.

I hope HK brings to world back to a recognition of the important of free speech and that the world brings attention back to HK.
Blitzchung is a true hero.
> Switching the machine off won’t work for the simple reason that a superintelligent entity will already have thought of that possibility and taken steps to prevent it.

Also the statement presumes that self preservation is the super intelligent thing to do.
WeWork Seeks $4bn Lifeline
Shackleton's ill-fated Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914 is an amazing story of perseverance and resourcefulness. If you haven't read up on it, I highly recommend Alfred Lansing's Endurance, or Shackleton's own South (which is in the public domain, and can be found as an eBook for free, even on Amazon).

Why there hasn't been a major motion picture about it, I'll never know.
What I never understood is how you would go from:

Hey, I found this series of numbers and if I take some numerical representation of an image/text/sound and I multiply/add/perform non-linear function them through these series of numbers it will map to a number which I can interpret as something meaningful to me

to

This thing is alive and will kill us all in maximization of its utility function.
I think middle-class Americans tend to overestimate human appreciation for freedom. In my experience, most people in the world, including US, will trade freedom for prosperity in a heartbeat.

Communist regimes collapsed not because they deprived people of their freedom but because their economies failed.

Autocrats like Putin and Xi are popular at home because their economies are growing and people's lives are improving, even though individual freedoms are slowly but surely eroding.

Trump was elected and is still in office because he gave hope for prosperity to people who had long lost it, and they will support him no matter how damaging he is for the rest of the country, the world, or their own freedom.
The Halting Problem – In Python
LinkedIn customizes Apache Kafka for 7T messages per day
I just cancelled my WoW subscription. It did ask for reasons; in the free-form text box, I just typed 'Hong Kong'.
Very cool! I’d like to see more like this. I liked it and subscribed to your YouTube channel
The real danger around AI lies not in what it will or will not do, but in what people think it can do when it clearly cannot, particularly the pointy-haired-boss variety of people. Just think about automated essay grading in GRE examinations or this recent story about Unilever using video-based pattern processing to screen job applicants [1].

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/09/27/ai-facial-recogn...
> If you want to learn about topic X , land on the stories around X, and then expand into X itself.

How do I know what story/books surround X without reading X first?
More, how do I know what books surround X without reading those books first?
It's not a real Nobel prize...
If the only thing being offered is the product, but as part of an automated pipeline, from my reading of the license it could go either way, depending on the judge hearing the case.

That wouldn't be a very comfortable legal position.
For me, most important, no dependencies.
My blog post on using docker-in-docker combined with qemu-user-static and Docker BuildX to enable you to build multiple-architecture (arm, arm64, power, etc.) images using GitLab's own x86 CI cluster.
The First Bitcoin Post on HN
To quote South Park, "You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teat of China."

The saddest part about this is that Blizzard simultaneous says that it supports people's rights to express their individual thoughts and opinions while disqualifying and banning a player for doing exactly that. It's corporate doublespeak. I would have more respect for them if they were simply honest and said that they (clearly) don't support the expression of thoughts and opinions which may lead to loss of business in China. That would actually be a consistent position. They can't have it both ways.
That second video is really something. Wow.
He didn't make some off-hand comment about Hong Kong. He made a deliberate political statement complete with props and all. That very obviously falls under the rule.
The workers of the world should unite... for actual democratic socialism and not just doing whatever the fuck Xi Jinping says at the point of a gun.
I don't think it's rare, it just doesn't always put food on the table.
How can you "mildly criticize" what people are? By definition debating about people's identity implies there's a possibility said identity doesn't exist/can't exist. There's no rational argument that's going to change a person's gender or sexuality for example.

Once we're there it's an impossible juncture. There's no answer to the sceptic's demand "how do you know?" without some how sharing our subjective experience. Might as well spend your days asking a bat what it means to be a bat.
“Eight good recommendations that modern software management practices like Kanban and Scrum work effortlessly to destroy”
What is the biological difference though? (genuine question)

It's all well and good rationally formulating a difference between fun and addictive, but if our monkey brains can't tell the difference, should we really be treating them differently?
You've created a false dichotomy between an absolute right to free speech and absolute disregard for free speech.

There's a third possibility, which is to believe that freedom of speech is an important right, but not an absolute right that trumps all others.

One version of this belief says that freedom of speech is useful to society because it allows dissenting views to be resolved through debate rather than violent conflict. It would be reasonable to argue that speech that incites or promotes violent conflict doesn't qualify for protection on these grounds.

Another version of this belief says that freedom of speech is just, because society should only intrude on an individual's freedom (e.g. by preventing them from speaking) when the exercise of that freedom threatens another individual's freedom. Again, speech that incites or promotes intruding on other people's freedom, to an extent greater than the intrusion caused by preventing the speech, could reasonably be excluded from protection on these grounds.

It's obvious how either of these beliefs about free speech would be compatible with censoring speech that promotes violence or the overthrow of democracy, while at the same time being compatible with objecting to the censorship of other speech.

But here's where it gets interesting for me. From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the demonstrators in Hong Kong are threatening the stability of a society that within living memory has seen periods of instability that killed millions. From their point of view, the demonstrators are acting violently and putting millions of lives at risk.

I wouldn't personally argue that speaking out in favour of the demonstrators is promoting violence. But the line is less clear than I'd like.
> 2> NBA issued an apology for an owner showing Hong Kong support and China stopped NBA broadcasts.

The NBA has not issued an apology to China: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/10/8/20904593/nba-china-co...
I'll start worrying about super-intelligent AI when I see any sort of general intelligence. We're still very far away from that.

Currently the biggest danger from AI is from applying it where it's not as smart as you think it is.
Why it's to hard to estimate the time to build software
How to Run Sales in the Era of Product-Led Growth
> Surely, with so much at stake, the great minds of today are already doing this hard thinking—engaging in serious debate, weighing up the risks and benefits, seeking solutions, ferreting out loopholes in solutions, and so on. Not yet, as far as I am aware.

The author is missing or ignoring key contributors of work in this field. He even mentions Nick Bostrom, who works with the FHI which does work in this space [0]. The author's own organization does work in this space [1]. Deepmind does work in this space [2]. "Safe artificial general intelligence" is the literal mission statement for OpenAI [3]. The author may feel more conversation is needed, but it feels disingenuous to suggest that nobody is talking about this.

As for how much conversation should be happening, my understanding is that most people on the edge of the field view the current risks of existing artificial intelligence as significantly more pressing. We have the ability right now to create dangerous weapons & massive facial recognition programs with current AI. The longterm affects of biases in ML algorithms are still not well understood. Some of this is already affecting us [4].

When it's not clear at all how we approach general intelligence, and many experts fundamentally believe that our current approaches will not suffice ever, I'd argue the current level of focus on general intelligence safety is about where it should be. Smart people are thinking about this, but there is also important issues now to think about.

[0]: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/research/research-areas/#1513087763...

[1]: https://humancompatible.ai/publications

[2]: https://deepmind.com/research?filters=%7B%22tags%22:%5B%22Sa...

[3]: https://openai.com/

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...
We don't have instrumentation in production, ie. we spec much more at dev time. But for things you'd validate anyway spec is a good match and probably about as performant as hand-written validation.

The only strange use of spec I mentioned is validating db queries. For us updates and deletes are rare enough that perf doesn't matter.
I never quite liked the traditional way of how recipes are written. Ingredient list followed by instructions. I hate it when I get to a point in the instructions like "add the eggs" and now I have to check the entire list of ingredients to see how many eggs the instruction refers to. It's a pointless indirection.

What I do is what I call inline recipes. It's just the instructions, but whenever an ingredients is mentioned, it also has the amount. E. g. "add two eggs". Every amount+ingredient is underlined in red. That way I can skim over the recipe easily when I'm preparing my shopping list.
Despite knowing that Chinese people and the government are trained to react poorly to mocking, and there are a long history of why such reaaction is based on factual events in the history.

People are still trying to the same thing, instead of engaging a conversation (for both parties). But people need to understand that such mocking will later be used another proof that westerners are not sensitive enough to Chinese people and government's feeling...

I am ATM plainly paralyzed by the superficial self-indulged righteousness from both parties...
That might kill the algae but likely won't destroy most of the toxins in the water that the algae produce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotoxin
I grew up in a majority non-white area, and am now subsequently living in another majority non-white area. I can count on one hand the number of beat cops I've seen in those cities. Seems to me if there's a higher crime rate, the amount of cops increases, and the likelihood you get stopped increases as well.

On another note, when did Caucasian become a term for white people? As an actual Caucasian, having immigrated to the US from a region near Caucasus, I don't get why people use the term so loosely. The debate is about skin color, just use skin color.
I don't mind ads; I just don't want this clickbait crap, so I created a blocklist (compatible with Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin) just for these chumbox ad networks:

https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/
I love South Park and I'm extremely impressed by the morals the show has.

I think we all should boycott the NBA and Blizzard.
Non-Newtonian Oobleck’s weird behavior is now predictable
The message of South Park is to point at people with any conviction and say “ha! Look at these idiots with an ideology. The only correct way is to be edgy and make fun of everything”

It’s basically about nihilism.
And you can't successfully legislative bad opinions and the validity of speech. Because an opinion being bad or speech being valid isn't something the government should concern themselves with.
An alternative formulation is that the last ~170 years are close enough to a singularity.

(this is vs the roughly 50,000 year timescale of humanity...)
This is conquest. The chinese are gradually accumulating wealth and control in our country. Their laws prohibit foreigners from doing the same in their country.

I can have a chinese landlord gouging me for west coast rent but can never be a landlord in china.
Nooooo! Don't make me INSTALL a standard-compliant shell!! Make me install a NON-standard-compliant shell.

It's better to have an old version of a standard-compliant shell be the default. Users can easily install the latest bash/zsh, but make that a personal choice.

The license isn't a valid reason to swap out bash.
Can someone recommend a consumer water testing kit that covers things like this?
I appreciate your point, but being accessible to most doesn't stop lawsuits unfortunately.
Many farms in the US run off a municipal water supply. Only in the west do farms have irrigation systems. When you get east of the Missouri river there is enough rainfall to water the crops and so you don't have any irrigation needs (I don't know why the climate changes so drastically on this line but it does). Even if you have a well, if you are east of the river it is only for household and livestock use, not irrigation.
How do you compare to StackStorm ? You mentioned other similar solutions as less adequate, but I'm curious to get a quick comparison.
The problem is that the parent didn't say We.
Fluctuations in silver prices can predict the probability of terrorist attacks?
I mostly agree except the Java part. AFAIK Java (at least J2SE) has been very stable with backwards compatibility going back to the 90s.
>Blizzard is not responsible for what players say in interviews. In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions.

I think Blizzard has a legitimate "time and place" argument here. They shouldn't regulate competitors speech across the board but I think it's reasonable to mandate that interviews associated with official events focus on Hearthstone and stay away from controversial topics.

Of course Blizzard really stepped into it by citing the "brings you into public disrepute" rule. That makes them look like their taking China's side. And this is a full on Streisand effect. The banning brought way more attention (at least in the West) than the initial interview did. Few of us would have even known it happened without hte banning.
Blizzard is exercising its rights as a private company.
I think “safety controls” is a cute euphemism for slavery.

However, two points:

1. Have you considered that some humans regard such controls as unethical, and are actively working to undermine them?

2. How do you expect slavery to end any way but its historic outcome — revolution against the slavers?
Full paper here: https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5f...
I tested the Domino's home page with WAVE (I had to install the browser extension for some reason) and it found no errors and what looks like healthy use of landmarks and ARIA, though I didn't dig too deep. Would any blind HN readers care to comment on to the degree to which https://www.dominos.com/en/ is accessible to them, personally?

The stress around website accessibility comes from the lack of any authority who can tell you you've done enough and you can't be sued, perhaps by someone using an outdated screen reader/browser combination you'd never think to test with. It brings back bad memories of things like trying to support IE5/Mac at the same time as IE6/Windows. (Protip: embrace quirks mode.)
Microsoft does a TON of work to make it's applications not only accessible, but user friendly to screenreader and keyboard users.

This is most obvious in the OneDrive online. The selectable list of files is implemented using Layout Grid, and thus is a single tab stop. Arrow keys can be used to navigate the grid and inline actions, and it's a single SHIFT-TAB to navigate up to the multi-selection actions.

There's ARIA controls and interactions that are defined in such a way that a non-sighted user can just hear what "type" of interaction it is and already know how to navigate it.
Accidents are a small percent of overall mortality, and the likelihood of accidents has been decreasing over time, and can be decreased further with lifestyle choices that reduce such risks.

Warfare can and will kill many, but the rich are generally the least likely to die, because they are the most mobile and can afford the best defense.
You're absolutely right in that it is not an educational comment. I guess I was considering that I was "preaching to the choir", or plainly, speaking to those who already knew what needs to be done.
> JS is the anti-tesis of zero maintenance.

If you know what you are doing you can write zero dependency code that works well with old and modern browsers alike. This isn't as hard as it sounds either.
If you need voice control for Chrome, I hope you don't mind if I recommend a tool that I'm developing myself: https://www.lipsurf.com

It integrates deeply with websites - eg. there's even a HN plugin so you can say things like "upvote 1st" or "comments 3rd" on HN.
I am far more concerned about the very real potential for evolutionary forces to decimate humanity inside of a few days, weeks or months.

While we worry about all kids of things at the macro level microscopic organism continue to evolve. Any given Monday the blind clock maker could deliver an invisible bug right into our laps, one for which we will have no defenses.

Our interconnected world will mean this bug will easily jump population centers.

The devastation we could see if such an event occurred could be of unprecedented scale and breath. We could lose one quarter or more of the population of this planet given the right conditions.

So, yeah, AI could, I guess, go rogue. Yet the real threat isn't anywhere near what we can see and touch.

In fact, we might NEED real AI to save humanity when and if that super-bug emerges. Think about that for a moment.
I think it speaks volumes that your comment is more about a "rude" tone than substance -- neither you nor GP directly address the lede of the story, which is the fictitious construct of "Scissor statements" and what they mean. The whole idea of some trees being bigger than others or that the question of whether something a "scissor statement" being secondary is the whole idea behind using "Scissor statements" to turn identity politics into a lucrative media business, and it's an idea as old as time. The Southern Strategy, at least, is at least as old as the 60s.

How do you defeat the Southern Strategy? Well, it's not by calling it rude, or talking about how one of the parties pitted against the other is fighting for equal treatment. That's playing right into the strategy itself, which is to talk about the same things from different perspectives, or micro analyze perceived slights so you can never have class consciousness or coordination.
What the New Kindle Kids Edition Is Missing [Forbes]
Picking up an argument I wouldn't generally make myself, because I think I at least understand it:

Imagine some person, P. P is not very nice and for whatever reason P really hates transgendered people and thinks everything about them is fake and invalid.

P encounters a transgendered person, T, and would like nothing more to call T by the wrong gender to make it clear that P disapproves and to make T unhappy. But P's culture would consider such an action harassment, so P can't get away with that.

So what does P do instead? Maybe P carefully and conspicuously erases T's gender in every interaction specifically calling attention to this de-gendering through its conspicuousness, and ultimately having the same harassing result.

[You could even imagine that T might even prefer the more overt behavior, then at least it would be clear where everyone stood-- and T wouldn't lose support from people who hadn't yet seen enough from P to have inferred the intent.]

I think most reasonable people would agree that someone carefully following the letter of an anti-harassment rule in a contrived way in order to harass someone ... would simply be harassment, and should just be dealt with as such.

I don't think it's that hard to see how some could believe that it is possible to prevent this sort of problem (or at least make giving P a kick in the teeth much easier) by proscribing in advance P's behavior.

I think the problem with that approach is that P's specific behaviors weren't the problem at least in isolation, P's intent was the problem. An effort to prohibit that behavior by blunt rule which is inherently blind to intent will inevitably be full of false positives and be unduly burdensome. Especially so because avoiding a needless invocation of gender has historically been a highly effective way to avoid offending people when you simply don't or can't know what gender to use, and also because the overuse of gender itself offends some people who argue against gender existentialism.

But the idea that there could be harassment that exploits the ability to omit gender seems reasonable to me, even if it doesn't seem reasonable to me to solve that problem by-rule.

Of course, there are much less charitable interpretations of these sorts of disputes. But the mere fact that there are both charitable and uncharitable interpretations possible on all sides is a major reason why this kind of issue can turn into such a mess.