skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is dangerously close to trying to repurpose the term “black box” for irrational fearmongering.

The higher the stakes of the decision, the more incentive to approach it like a rational Bayesian agent who would use whatever tool has the best risk / reward tradeoff, totally regardless of explainability — or if “explainability” (which is not some universal concept, but instead differs hugely from situation to situation) is directly part of the objective, then its importance will be factored into the risk / reward tradeoff without any of this dressed up FUD language, and you might even have to pursue complex auxiliary models to get explainability in the primary models.

For a good example, consider large bureaucratic systems, like a military chain of command connected to a country’s political apparatus — the series of decisions routed through that is way too complex for a human to understand and it’s almost impossible to actually get access to the intermediate data about decision states flowing from A to B in, say, a decision to use a drone to assassinate someone and accidentally killing a civillian.

You could consider various legal frameworks or tax codes the same way.

What does “explainable” mean to these systems? A human can give an account of every decision junction, yet the total system is entirely inscrutable and not understandable, and has been for decades.

Turning this around on ML systems is just disingenuous, because there is no single notion of “explainable” — it’s some arbitrary political standard that applies selectively based on who can argue to be in control of what.
Security by obscurity is no security at all.

What is needed is stronger individual rights to access, correct, delete, and control the use of any information collected about us, as well as strong prohibitions on the use of data against our individual and collective interests.
Correct. My (wild guess) understanding is that QR codes took off in China because of widespread usage of WeChat, which is a do-all mobile app, including payments etc.

If your QR code requires user to create an account in your webservice or install your native app to do anything useful, it does not bring much value, unless everyone around has your native app.

Whereas if you integrate via a an app widely used by all people in the country (i.e. the QR code is a URL which opens the widely used app with certain parameters), you're more likely to have people use it.

Classical chicken-and-egg problem and a situation where monopolies do better than a fragmented market.
Artificial Intelligence Research Needs Responsible Publication Norms
You Don't Have to Migrate to Python 3
Yeah, for benchmarking it is important to use real data, because the compression ratio can significantly differ.
You'll have better compression with lossy compression and better precision with user controlled and bounded relative error. see for ex. this benchmark for scientific data: https://github.com/powturbo/TurboTranspose
Only if they have the truth set to compare against already.
I guess you will still be able to do "Add-Ons" -> "Extensions" -> [Gear icon] -> "Install Add-On From File"
This seems like a good use case for the distributed web.

There's a copy on IPFS already: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUFcAKdPUnZwz5AZA6gANbqVfADXw61znPosMJ...
I really hope the first big robotic wave will be humans from low-wage countries controlling robots in richer countries. With fast enough internet everywhere there is no problem having someone in India folding my laundry with some simple robot that can't leave my basement for example.
Yep, as an individual there is a very limited pool of activities that you can and will misrepresent yourself in, and you will tend to do that in low entropy also.
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?

I did pretty close to that for quite a while when I lived in NYC and I'm very, very far from being a fitness nut. I biked from Brooklyn up to Morningside Heights and back every day. 12 miles according to Google Maps and took me about 45 minutes each way. Taking the subway would normally be slightly faster, but not by a lot. And despite the crappy weather, physical exhaustion (really just going over the Williamsburg Bridge,the rest of the ride was pretty flat), hassle of locking up and maintaining a bike, and the distinct feeling that cabbies and truck drivers were actually trying to kill me on a daily basis, it was still much, much more pleasant than cramming myself onto a crowded subway train during rush hour.
I was definitely thinking about corporate blame-shifting when I wrote that, and actually nearly said "legal 'person'" instead.
After losing more than $1B, GM makes a deal with striking workers
It works, but I can even hear the ultrasonic variant. I guess it's more like vibrations from the surrounding case than the speaker sound itself.
NTP was being maintained by 1 guy in 2016: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/time-is-running-ou...

And then some committee came along and thought everything was crap and they'd do it better. Featuring ESR: https://lwn.net/Articles/713901/

An Internet without a reliable way of figuring out the true time would be... messy.
Sounds like it'll be useful for stopping things like "McAfee" from automatically installing their crap into Firefox without asking.
I haven't touched extension development for a while but afaik you could just open the extension package with the browser to trigger the installation process.

The side-loading they are talking about here seems to have the goal to avoid the search-bar crazyness thru adding extensions without user acknowledgement.
This is an interesting article depending, among others, on how your (personal? "national"?) language defines nations and states. I find it hard to map my concepts into English words "ethnicity", which seems related to race, and "nationality", which seems related to states, while nations are ultimately neither.

If your nation used to make you a second-class citizen in foreign states, which is somewhat typical in Eastern Europe, you do have a sharp distinction between nations and states. I.e. nations can live under yoke of different states. In this states, your nation can/could make you an "invader" (funny how it's hard in English to find a word emotional enough to call someone who formerly conquered you!) or a "traitor" (Poles in Russian Empire), or a primitive "barbarian" unworthy of fully participating in our, you know, higher civilization (Poles in German Empire).

Intuitively, your nation is defined partly by your name (see Lithuanian actions to lithuanize Slavic names of citizens) and received language and culture. Funny how the OP seriously considers a "blood and race" understanding of nation, which I think in Europe is a fast road to Godwin law. Aside from being nonsensical, it just feels morally repulsive.

For the record, I do think that the European concept of nation does more harm not good, and in an ideal world we should replace it with civic identification with your free republic. But it does serve as an instrument to organize people for political action. This can be sometimes legitimately good.

Especially I find the OP's critique of American Revolution trite. For a long time now it's fashionable ot thrash both American and French Revolutions, while without them there would be no strong examples for people throughout the world to question power. (They were themselves based on ancient examples, but for them you need classical education.) Our world would be much more horrible without that.
> That's also the case with open protocols like IRC.

No, it's not.

> Sure you can write an IRC client with reaction emoji support, and it will look great in your client, and anyone using a different client will just see garbage metadata.

Then you are bad at protocol design.

> You can only innovate by getting "everyone" to agree on a new standard, and that's hard.

No, you innovate by being backwards compatible with established standards.

Now, maybe IRC has reached the limits of its flexibility and should be replaced, I dunno, but the idea that it is somehow impossible to evolve protocols incrementally with partial adoption of new features is just bullshit.
On a related note, even if the user has disabled speakers or muted the website, you can still make it generate noises: https://thume.ca/screentunes/
One of the things neuroscience and psychology showed us is that humans always have a post hoc reasoning they can explain, but it's not always the actual reason they did something.

So humans explaining themselves is often misleading data, which may be worse than no data.
What do you think about meditation? I feel if I mediate regularly then I feel on top of the world
Immutable cache and subresource integrity get us most of the way there. I don't know if web browsers share those across domains, but I don't think there's a reason not to.
The question of what's right and wrong is a topic for religion and theologists.

I don't mean that in a cynical or nasty way. As the years go by I get more convinced that the rise of atheism is causing some of our biggest problems in western society, and I'm not religious myself. But it seems that for all its flaws, Christianity at least was an infrastructure of people and principles that hung together in some vaguely coherent manner such that people could pose the question "Is this right? Is this good?" and either answer it themselves by reference to a book, or ask it of a full time moraliser (priest).

The reason the OP is expressing unease at this kind of tech worker "morality" is because it's wafer thin in a way that makes medieval theology look like a towering pinnacle of intellectualism.

They aren't making moral judgements of their customers consistently. ICE is targeted only because a bunch of journalists started covering it extensively as part of their anti-Trump agenda. ICE did similar things before Trump but they weren't in the news, so GitHub workers ignored it.

Moreover their morality isn't universal. ICE is bad because it hurts people who only want a better life. OK, so, should there be no borders at all? What happens then to all the American workers in marginal jobs who suddenly lose their income because an immigrant willing to live in practically sub-Saharan conditions took their job? That worker only wanted a better life too, do they not matter? If not why not? Is it because they're white and GitHub workers are racist against whites? What about other border control agencies? What about governments in general?

Christian religious morals are very far from ideal but at least make a show of being universal. You forgive those who trespass against you - it doesn't matter who they are or what they did. You forgive them. You are the good Samaritan who helps those in need. Doesn't matter who they work for. You love your neighbour. Doesn't matter if they voted for the other guy.

You're arguing that tech workers should engage with morality as if it's any other hard question that can be whiteboarded out in a few hours. But tech workers have got nothing to say on this topic that hasn't already been said hundreds of years ago. They have no special insights to provide. The rigour of their moral logic is trivial compared even to a bunch of men in funny clothes reading stories about camels out of a book written anonymously 2000 years ago. Why shouldn't they be reminded of this?
When should you use Gatsby.js?
I strongly believe that the future should go in this direction. And not just for robots but also for AI. Just like cars and smartphones they must be extensions of us humans instead of independent actors. One reason is safety, as probably many people are aware of, and the second is about how humans feel. We don't like dealing with other independent actors who we don't fully understand. But an extension to ourselves, that feels right. That's why for instance dogs are so loved as pets, but wolves are not, although both animals look very similar from the outside.
We most certainly have the computer vision tech to detect URLs from images of the camera stream. That could be an extra feature of QR code readers app if it's not already.
> This can be used for future notes i.e. dno 2030-10-01 "I died".

:O
Elijah Cummings to Be Remembered by Obama, Clintons at Funeral
Possibly because taking useful photos of people's fingerprints from a distance seems like a problem. Taking photos of faces seems more like solved tech.
It's ironic that the "global electronic village" turns out to be just like a real village -- there's very little privacy.
This seems to be somewhat badly written copy on Mozilla's part. To clear up what this change actually means for an end user:

- You can still manually install extensions. From now on, all installations will need explicit user confirmation.

- No extensions can be installed silently. This is what sideloading did, all extensions in a special folder were installed in all Firefox instances on the computer without the user's consent.

This is most definitely a Good Thing, as it means for example no malicious extensions can be silently installed by malware etc. Communicating this change could've been done better, though.
> Saying "To give users more control over their extensions, support for sideloaded extensions will be discontinued." Also seems disingenuous at best...

Isn't this how distributions install browser extensions from package repositories? Now I can pacman -S an extension. With this change I will not be able to.

More control, right.
Wait what? Sideloading means installing software directly, rather than from a first party distribution mechanism. If a user installs software manually they are still sideloading it, that's what the word means!!
A street camera probably can't identify you by your fingerprints.
Actually, you do. Even if CPython is supposed for another 5 years by the likes of Red Hat, the whole ecosystem around it is moving on and you may find your 3rd-party dependencies are no longer maintained for Python 2.
You need one function so you add library. But that library contains dozens of functions and uses other libraries to implement those functions. So now you have all those dependencies even if you don't use them.
It seems like it stopped being volunteer work for the maintainers, but since no one else stepped up, they're stuck with the work. If I volunteer it should mean I can hand over any time and my replacement would be able to take over. Of course if that volunteer work is serving food at the food bank, many can do that. But if the food bank demands I stay and says "we need 20 hours from you this week...", is that still volunteering?
It all returns to nothing. It all comes tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...

Blizzard had a good run. I don't doubt the company name itself will go on as a branding on a whole slew of rehashes and remakes, like a little label to be stuck on a reskin of an original idea from 15 years ago that's been crunched, mashed and reinterpreted as a mishmash of whatever individual elements are deemed popular and "the reason X was a success". But for me, it's over. Blizzard is no more. I would go so far as to say that the company should lose the Blizzard trademark given how far off they are from what that name originally stood for.
He said an HR dip which I think means heart rate. That might be achieved by daily exercise, I think?
Sideloading generally means just not using an official store so this seems to be poorly communicated.
> What is needed is for people to tangibly suffer from lack of privacy. It is obvious to people how they suffer from lack of security.

And because it is obvious we have more and more security theater...
This is obviously more pervasive / invasive. How often did you identify yourself by fingerprint vs. every camera potentially pings your identity as you pass by.
> If you self-distribute your extension via sideloading, please update your install flows and direct your users to download your extension through a web property that you own, or through addons.mozilla.org (AMO).

Everything is fine. This is blocking automatic extension installation. You can still install extensions manually.
Can you share a link to the reddit discussion? I tried searching but I couldn't find the post.
CDNJS - a CDN (content delivery network) for JS (javascript)

CJDNS - DNS software for ip6, by "CJ"

IOW, totally unrelated.
Which factors impact page speed (5.2M desktop and mobile pages)
Riot seemed reeeeally clunky when I tried it, which is a shame because I’m sure it’d be a decent codebase
This reminds me of a recent post I made, urging people to not use EntityFramework.

https://pknopf.com/post/2019-09-22-the-argument-against-enti...

It's almost never worth it.
I'm only attached to language for practical communication reasons, and mutual intelligibility is good enough. I don't care about accents or minor spelling variations.
"- You can still manually install extensions"

Yes, but not as XPI file. For manual installation, you can install similar to Chrome, that's from source code folder
If people are interested in a 6h long conversation on everything to do with sleep they could do much worse than listen to Matthew Walker on the Peter Attia podcast: https://peterattiamd.com/matthewwalker1/
But do all those techniques actually work better for humans than trying to post-hoc explain machine learning? Perhaps both cases are just about inventing stories around the decisions so they can be perceived as relatable.
Previous and current discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21412356
It seems Chrome already does that since June 2018: https://blog.chromium.org/2018/06/improving-extension-transp...
Sounds good for public users, sounds bad for intranet users. Is there some Firefox fork without all those restrictions?
We definitely avoid this approach. Fine grained access control per secret per environment is impossible. We use explicit secret management software.
How were you taking melatonin? I got great benefit from it but only when I always took it at the exact same time every night, turned lights out, no screens, etc. it would still take about 3 hours to kick in. I’d take it and not shut off lights for about an hour and a half, fwiw.
"humans explaining themselves" is entirely different thing than "humans understanding human behaviour". You may have rationalized your choices, but I understand both your choices AND that you rationalized them.
The right to privacy is the right to decide what you want to share or not.
> It seems to be “capitalism bad” but that may be too kind to the book’s coherence.

have you read the book? The book is an exploration, and an interrogation, with so much to learn from that to say that about it seems pretty philistinic.

Maybe you were just summing up the review you linked from Noah Smith. I read most of it, it's a bit meh but Noah doesn't really seem to be trying too much in it. This though: "leftist mood affiliation". That's cheap 'preaching to the choir' language.

If you have a link to a more serious review I'd genuinely like to read it.
Do humans have moral obligations towards plants?
Came here to say this. I can think of a lot of use cases where the feature data numbers will be dramatically different scales and the regularization helps to prevent that “noise” from dramatically affecting your model.
What they achieve in the real world is good. But I can't see the scientific merit. Doesn't the actual work lie in making organisations accept change?
I guess I can understand that moving fluid can at the very least dislodge other material around it, but:

- how do "the toxins" get out of the cerebro-spinal cavities

- if the flow is not unidirectional (with new fluid comming in), why would not the toxins just settle at slightly different place, after those fluid movements end

- how is the fluid itself cleaned

- what about the blood-brain barrier
Can anyone suggest irc plugins that fix phone chat history / syncing?

The big killer for me is not being able to see/ get notifications
> There is a downside though: a copy has to be downloaded for each website, so each first website load is slowed down.

Just stop loading 100 resources on a single pageload. If a website loads just one css and maybe one js there wouldn't be any performance issues, unless of course those files are several megabytes in size.
But it's required by law, at least in the EU. And what do you do when you can't really explain them? You BS people
By the way, in the website there are links to download for free the book Data Dictatorships.
You can aggregate across multiple rows if you use a separate table to aggregate related records. I've done this for a small nonprofit to aggregate event registration data by year by linking the registration records to a new year table. Sounds kludgy, but it works.
When I was at uni my mother had a job as a nursery school teacher. One of the projects they did was to look at forces (quite good really!) So, they pulled ropes, and dropped apples, and sailed boats and used magnets. She asked me to think of a simple explanation of how the magnets worked so that the children could understand them. It is painful to me that I could not do that, and I can't do it now and I believe that no one can!
It's a good line, what is the context / source for that quote?
There is a free plan with 1,200 records per base and unlimited bases.
Garmin Develops Autoland System
I agree, the information that can be gathered and probably has been gathered would constitute an invalid search/seizure for that information to have been got only a few decades ago. Now the information is there for the taking and so whatever personal power struggle with the government is way under gunned. Any one can be squashed at the whim. And ultimately there needs to be a strong press/codes to air/catch the unjust application of the power.
Don’t Let Your College Define Your Future
I have something similar, but it puts all notes from the same week (due to work schedule) in a gnu recutils file. This means I can work with my notes in a structured way using Emacs (with org mode imports when I want that).
It's not like you don't install McAfee on purpose.
I agree regarding adware, I think its just a poorly written post in terms of clarity. It could have been better summarised as

We are removing sideloading (The ability to silently install extensions from your local machine as an xpi file)

- This will not affect the ability to manually install extensions, they will need to be installed from a source code directory (Link to chrome post on same)

- This makes users safer (Malicious extensions will need to be approved and installed by a user)

- This makes it more obvious when an extension is installed (Confirmation dialog)

ETC

Thanks for making me read into it further
Or use a password manager..
Snake Game Feedback
https://github.com/tristangoossens/snake-go

So about 24 hours ago, I added the latest version of my snake game, and i am very happy with the feedback i have got over the day! ive got over 100 stars and tons of feedback which means the world to me, thanks everyone!
Personal interactions between a regular customer and regular staff are very different from interactions between a regular customer and a customer database.

The digital version is much more one-sided. Some people may like this kind of personalization. I find it’s very rarely useful to me and very frequently intrusive.