skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've heard anecdotally a number of times that actuaries peg men with higher car insurance rates. I'm only just learning that there's anything like this in the credit system to prevent gender bias. Does something like that protection exist for auto insurance?

As a side note, Idon't really understand the thread's appeal to credit scores here, considering that the TransUnion rating system is supposed to be the inferior one that Apple is looking to replace.

But most of all, I'm shocked by the number of people here outraged by Apple's behavior who will not even be considering switching off their iPhone (Twitter OP included, hell, he even posted a screenshot of his recurring TransUnion payment still being served via Apple Pay). I actually happen to agree with OP, but this blaise attitude towards real customer complaints has kept me from using Apple products for years.
DHH said his wife actually had a higher credit score than him.
Doesn’t that mean that you set out to interpret messages in that way?

I guess this is the reverse of nonviolent communication. If you always speak and are used to communicating agressively, then people that are being nice suddenly sound condescending.
How did they identify who was a narcissist in order to study their effects? I didn't think there was an objective test for that.
> unless the spec has undefined behaviour (why would it?).

Because maybe you're specifying a partial function. The code to handle the special cases of invalid inputs can sometimes have dramatic effects on code size and performance, sometimes too much to bear for code that should never run in the first place; allowing for garbage output to be produced for garbage input instead of a result that says "this is garbage input" could well be acceptable.

Furthermore, there are some places where we don't actually know how to specify the intended behavior in the first place. Data races are perhaps the best example here; we have yet to find a satisfying specification for data races that is more constraining than "anything goes," and the two most well-known attempts (Java and C++) have both been widely regarded as failures. But pointer aliasing is another area that proves surprisingly difficult: if requiring pointer provenance isn't acceptable, then trying to come up with a reasonable specification is surprisingly difficult.
> One data point really isn't enough to draw a conclusion

My wife's credit history is longer and historically her score higher because I used no revolving credit until recently, and not using credit cards counts against you. Also married filing jointly...

For the Apple Card, I was given her limit several times over.

I did notice that the expected limit is shown before the hard pull on credit. This means they've got a pretty good idea before getting the latest credit report.

> GS ... probably put a ton of diligence into their risk model.

To your point about the risk model, I generally think the credit score the bureaus give us is wrong, while I think the decision GS made on the card limits is probably plausible ... if there's some chance or probability we might split up.

For instance, we work in different states, so data patterns might look like we are already separated? I also don't know if she put her income or household income. My income has been several times hers since long before we got together.

Rather than gender bias, I would imagine that given the probability of divorces at a certain age, executive level, and income bracket, that would put a thumb on the scale for ... what if you were not married filing jointly? Who makes more? What cash payment can they carry without going broke? Weighted that way, we should have different limits, and it's not a gender thing. This is the kind of correlation humans might not come up with, but ML probably would.

If this is purely actuarial, the decision might be correct, while not feeling moral.
If you're really financially independent, that's even more incentive for you to support exposure and transparency. People are being harmed by these models. You would lose nothing, and others would benefit.

>As long as the model doesn’t violate the law, you have no right to it, unless you’re a regulator.

If you have no realistic alternative to being judged by a model, you absolutely should have a right to it. Maybe not the complete implementation, but a verified summary that could be understood by the average person.
>> Because if they can’t that directly invalidates their argument.

No, it does not since this is not how logic and science work. You just stay with a claim that is missing a support but it does not mean that the claim is false.

>> Therefore it’s reasonable to require people making general arguments to provide at least one specific example.

Alright. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy and let me know what is the main thing you are uncomfortable with (if any). If there is a match, then I will provide another example.
> and don’t have a huge second world country at their southern border.

Some might dispute that claim.
I haven't read the whole thread, but I am seeing him bitch about her credit score being higher -- from a single agency. There are other agencies which may have different info.

I know nothing about this particular credit card. I'm not as up on credit stuff as I once was (and the world has changed a lot since then). But when I was a homemaker, I had a credit card in my name with a much higher limit than my husband had on any of his cards. That's not exactly the norm.

There are various factors that go into this. He's not wrong to suggest that there is a very big problem with employees having no idea what went wrong. I'm less confident that it is reasonable to infer gender is the entire explanation.
Sent you an email. It's from a recently created protonmail address, so it might end up in your spam folder.
> For one, because they need a fixed binary representation for the type, to persist it on disk. In a programming language yoi do things in memory, so you don't have that issue...

Memory and consequently programming languages also requires a fixed binary representation. How you represent data is orthogonal to its storage medium--you can write application memory to disk and read it back in, no problem (e.g., swap).

> Still, you could have had union types, or even coerce everything as string, as SQLite does, but it would be bad for performance as they'd need an alternate representation.

The problem doesn't go away by moving support out of the database and into the application; it only makes it worse insofar as the application is limited in its optimizations. At the end of the day, the real world has sum types, applications use them, and they are encoded into databases--they simply aren't encoded _well_ and the database isn't giving you any correctness guarantees as it does for product types (i.e., structs, records, etc).
Alpha release software is not for production.
> People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.

Ok I'll bite:

A defined amount of space: 250 Terabytes.

Please give me an example of an extant name which does not fit into that amount of space.

Bulletproof edit: or the physical space that is the facade of the empire state building.
If she applied after him getting his application approved, this might very well explain her tiny line of credit: the algorithm didn't look at him and her alone in isolation, but at both at the same time, saw a certain combined income, saw he already has a large line of credit issued and concluded "I am not giving them another 3000 bucks or whatever, they already got that, so let it be 50 bucks or something, the minimum we can give to a customer, because really they together used all the credit we're willing to extend already when he got his card approved".

If she applied first, she might have gotten the big chunk, and he might have ended up with the tiny chunk.

Or it might be that the algorithm training data was just biased against women, which is entirely possible as well.

The black-box-ness, even to employees, of course, is a huge problem.
You are continually getting radioactive sulfur and carbon into your lungs from coal--and they're beta emitters.

And, while people talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, they never talk about coal fires that have been burning for decades in places like Centralia and Xinjian--which are WAY worse than all of our nuclear disasters.
It isn’t software
> I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly.

It would be really interesting to run an experiment where this was taken literally. If upvotes/karma/whatever you call it were to be treated as almost a type of currency, and submitting a vote directly cost you a vote from your “balance” what would the discussions look like. You could even deal with inflation by lowering the value of votes people already have by increasing the cost for a new vote.

I don’t think this would get you away from the groupthink and pandering comments, as people would probably try to appeal to the widest audience so they could bank more votes, but I’d love to see if it would cause people to post more meaningful comments as opposed to predictable jokes.
Car loans are dragging Americans underwater
Gradual typing does allow a more graded trade-off between types and tests.

Weak typing doesn’t really allow you to make that trade-off, since testing is going to be directed by failures and you don’t have the option to use types instead. Although in theory you have discretion with regards to tests, in practice you have to write a lot of them. Kind of like how interfaces and `Object` let you write less specific types in theory but in practice you end up writing them anyways.
Implementation details of law and enforcement matter a lot, but in general, I agree with a spirit of it.

As world depends more and more on algorithms, we need to have more security around them. Especially as algorithms are used a lot as cost cutting, so reaching competent human to appeal error is becoming harder and harder.

If we don’t put more scrutiny around tech, we may end up living in kafkaesque world.
"It's time for some all new tricks."
That’s not a great argument though - essentially “we can’t prevent an ML model from being biased so we should embrace it.”

Western society has mostly accepted the idea that—outside of some specific cases—we should avoid building systems and processes that systematically discriminate against people on the basis of a selection of characteristics which have historically attracted it. The exact application of this concept, the interpretation of it, and the boundaries of discrimination or protected characteristics will continue to be subject to gray areas and refinement. The rules are not perfect.

But I do think a better solution to the problem (“we have implemented a whizz-bang new technology which is inherently subject to bias”) is to either fix or discard that technology, rather than discarding the concepts of equalities regulation and civil rights.
A Simple Way to Earn Loyalty and Referral Incentives. Cash Incentives Go Directl
It's honestly not a big cost once you become an advanced user of it. I've been getting paid to do pure FP for like 5 years and the language rarely gets in the way. You can pick how statically correct you want to be, and refactoring in one direction or the other tends to be rather mechanical. And when it isn't, there's typically something interesting there anyways.
A location has already been found and selected, but the Democratic Party has single-handedly blocked it for decades to win Nevada votes through a cycle of misinformation whereby they have convinced votes that Las Vegas will somehow be at risk if the approved repository, Yucca Mountain, is used.
In conclusion, while both tobacco and cannabis smoke have similar properties chemically, their pharmacological activities differ greatly. Components of cannabis smoke minimize some carcinogenic pathways whereas tobacco smoke enhances some. Both types of smoke contain carcinogens and particulate matter that promotes inflammatory immune responses that may enhance the carcinogenic effects of the smoke. However, cannabis typically down-regulates immunologically-generated free radical production by promoting a Th2 immune cytokine profile. Furthermore, THC inhibits the enzyme necessary to activate some of the carcinogens found in smoke. In contrast, tobacco smoke increases the likelihood of carcinogenesis by overcoming normal cellular checkpoint protective mechanisms through the activity of respiratory epithelial cell nicotine receptors. Cannabinoids receptors have not been reported in respiratory epithelial cells (in skin they prevent cancer), and hence the DNA damage checkpoint mechanism should remain intact after prolonged cannabis exposure. Furthermore, nicotine promotes tumor angiogenesis whereas cannabis inhibits it. It is possible that as the cannabis-consuming population ages, the long-term consequences of smoking cannabis may become more similar to what is observed with tobacco. However, current knowledge does not suggest that cannabis smoke will have a carcinogenic potential comparable to that resulting from exposure to tobacco smoke.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277837/
Alpha radiation is easily shielded from external exposure, but for that exact reason it's also the most damaging; gamma radiation, for instance, will mostly pass right through you, while alphas will deposit all of their energy right into your cells. They're shielded by your dead skin, but if you ingest or inhale them, then there's no dead skin to protect you, and all that radiation goes straight into your cells.

In fact, according to the weighting system that converts joules of energy absorbed (Grays) to severity of radiation dose (Seiverts), a joule of alpha radiation is 20 times worse than a joule of X-rays, beta radiation, or gamma rays.

And it's ingestion or inhalation that we're worried about from environmental contamination; not that the environment itself would become so radioactive, Fallout-style, that you'd take rads just from standing around - but that radioactive dust from demolition might get into the air, or that contaminants might leak into the groundwater.
Most humans born today will experience the negative effects of climate change over the next 80 years, with between 10-30% of them dying due to events caused by it.

Dying at 60 from cancer is still a hell a lot better than starving at 15. And that's assuming we have a Chernobyl like even happen every few hundred square kilometers.

If climate change is an extinction level even we should expect to make sacrifices like those in other events that killed millions, like WWI and WWII. I don't understand people who can think that we think we will die for sure because of climate change, but aren't willing to risk a much smaller chance of dying from nuclear accidents.
I find this recursively brilliant.

I wonder how much, or if, he had to fight with the publishers about padding the page count.
MEGA65: A Modern 8 bit computer
Exactly, They didn’t feel it was important. It was not part of the language design.

https://golang.org/doc/faq#generics
I just had a participant with a surname of Null sign up through a piece of software I’m responsible for. It was initially shocking, but seeing Null capitalized seemed good. All this time I thought Bobby Tables was just a scary myth!
You can simulate it with artificial querries with the same data except gender and name and see if women get less or more.
Last year, I integrated a Zuora payment iframe into a popular sports streaming product. We had a customer who couldn’t sign up, because his surname contained the word resize, which is a command that the iframe sends to its host script to adjust the iframe’s height. It was some of the most rubbish code I’ve ever seen. Zuora continued to deny it was their fault, so I doubt it’s been fixed. I worked around it by uppercasing the cardholder’s name.
For car insurance? This is incredibly well known and not at all anecdotal. There was even a popular car insurance firm in the UK that only gave women car insurance if they were women called “Sheilas Wheels” which touted lower fees than “other insurance companies that have to also cater to men”.

https://youtu.be/GzNJh1o84-E
I know this may have been a long time ago, and you decided it wasn't worth the effort making and defending the edit, but making a mention of your references on the talk page for the article could bring the error to the attention of other editors.
Would pointer provenance still be such a big deal if one-past-the-end pointers were disallowed? All the interesting examples I’ve seen are based on one-past-the-end pointers.

I assume something analogous could happen with pointers to freed memory that are converted to integers, but that seems easier to resolve.
Well to be fair if you use a convolutional recurrent architecture, you're doing it without realizing it.
Basic Reinforcement Learning: Pong Automation Explained
There is something ugly about automatic contempt of 74.1 million people.
> There are three costs for a powerplant (Capital costs, Fuel costs, Operations and Maintenance)

In which category should be put the cost of negative pricing from oversupply?

We also have costs associated with policy. A hydro plant can't just dump water with no regard to downstream or they cause flooding. They can also not just drop water levels in lake or rivers with no regard to the environment. Power plants need to cooperate and that cooperation is a kind of cost which is hard to covert to fuel costs.

In the case that a government operate a powerplant we also have the liability cost of making sure that demand is meet. The article talk about the energy Germany produce and cost associated with it, not individual plants. Germany as a nation has costs associated with meeting energy demands, including importing/exporting energy to balance the grid. Not sure external costs like those can be combined in one of the above three categories.
I beg to differ. Signed-overflow and such could easily be defined as returning an implementation-defined value. No UB is required.
I’m surprised Knuth-Plass was noticeable; it’s not greedy cheap, but it’s got to be a drop in the bucket compared to rasterization. Did y’all make sure to implement the O(n) version, or did you do the O(n^2) variant?
Delegate Prototypes and Unintended Side-Effects
Jikes. I appreciate DHH for his open source contributions, but this is straight up embarrassing. The sample size for his claims here is exactly 1. There are probably hundreds of data points that go into the algo that determines the initial credit limit. It could be literally anything, from the number of existing CCs in her name, her credit history, whatever.

Stop crying, stop bitching, grow up.
> The most successful people I know are generally very nice, but can turn on the assholishness very tactically

I have a manager's manager that's great to talk to, and one of his stated talents is he can "take a passive-aggressive situation and remove the passive component quickly and effectively". He's great.
It's an indictment of double think that the party which believes we will all die from climate change (rightly) is also the party that has made sure the one power source we have that could have saved us in the last 70 years wasn't used.

Had we voted republican across the board in the 1960s we could have solved climate change without ever talking about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace
https://typesandkinds.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/haskell-as-a-...

I wonder if the extension proposed in this blog post would fit the bill and be attractive to certain non-Haskellers?
The basic lua VM (not luajit) is only like 11kb compiled. You can't directly do FFI from lua, but you can set up the FFI functions from the C API
Care to explain why types are better during domain modeling? Do you think it affects velocity? No benefits to loose types during discovery?
Even though it wasn't a protected class, GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) originally started as an auto insurance company specifically for federal government employees, a pool perceived to be less risky than the driving population
Is The Economist left- or right-wing?
Genuinely curious -- how do you create predictive time-series models in the frequency domain?

(background: control systems)
The average number of deaths caused by a nuclear each year is neither "risk" (for a country) nor "of making a huge part of the country uninhabitable".
Selling unwanted gift cards online is a huge scammer magnet. I tried to sell a $50 card for $40 recently and wasted a bunch of time with people sending me fake PayPal confirmation messages. Thankfully all of the scammers were pretty stupid and it was easy to tell when they were scamming.

It's just super risky on both sides so very few legitimate buyers want to do it since as a seller you could be giving them fake or used codes.
And my wife's Apple Card limit is 20x higher than mine. Are they're discriminating against men too‽

If I was as rich as DHH, who makes millions per year, I would cancel my credit cards and refuse to do business with companies like Goldman Sachs entirely.

I wouldn't give a crap about 2% cashback and I don't know why he does.

And despite the fact that he's probably wrong about the entire complaint, the least he could do is cancel his cards in protest. Instead, he seems to have accepted the "bribe" (his word) quite willingly.
correct. my vegan in-laws, have been vegan for 40 years now and they are in very good condition for their age. Saying it's "unhealthy" with no nuance is a ridiculous statement. It is in a no-way a fact. People that speak like this give people that speak in facts a bad name.
> I haven't read the whole thread, but I am seeing him bitch about her credit score being higher -- from a single agency. There are other agencies which may have different info.

If you read the thread, he was specifically told the Apple Card uses Transunion, which is why they checked with Transunion, and found her score was higher on that report: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1192945415538106369?s=21
Or you want a state sponsored hit squad
It doesn't parallelize well. Would be cool if you could loan CPU cycles on your phone or home computers while at work.
> had to

Nonetheless chose to in the first place, insofar as nobody's forcing anyone to climb the exec ladder, and there are lots of places to do it — in fact, it requires several in a career usually, to reach the highest ranks, unless it's a familial-type affair.

“God laughs at those who deplore the effects of which causes they cherish.” (Bossuet)

I have this general KPI for myself: if it makes me become a worse human being, then it's bad for me, thus I should either run away the other direction, or buckle up and change things. It can't be ignored or 'endured' for it's the 'bad' kind of pain, the kind that doesn't make you grow but just eats at you. The kind that commands you to fight or flee but certainly not freeze.

And you're right, most places aren't like that. I never forget that >90% of businesses in most rich countries employ less than 10 people. Also know that in an average crowd, there are likely between 3% and 15% sociopaths depending on who you ask, 1 in 10, likely much more in achievers' social circles (because sociopaths are fundamentally not average statistically and tend to outperform the rest of us).

Now you just have to look at your reality and map these numbers. The mediocrity principle probably applies to most of us.