skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But surely you trust someone with some personal/confidential information?
They do have an indemnity agreement with LyricFind, but they're kinda implicated here because they knew about the issue for so long and did nothing.
What’s so frustrating about this is that Status Labs will never be called out for this. And even if they do, they’d probably use their platform of fake news outlets to drown out criticism, because this is exactly what they do for a living.

Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken, and here are these guys making a killing by literally lying to the world.
Government surveillance from first world, liberal governments is not necessarily a bad thing. Surveillance by authoritarians focused on suppressing their population and political enemies is a bad thing.

But yeah, I absolutely agree that the NSA et al are less damaging than Google and friends.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-wa...
Google one is a support plan for consumer services. With some added benefits such as extra drive space. I had a good experience with them.
Thanks! Wow, Cake looks terrible. I wish someone would just fork reddit and stop trying to make it look cute. Dense text may not be beautiful from afar but it looks so much better from a user's perspective than acres of whitespace and endless scrolling.

edit: just checking out your project. Looks more like what I'm talking about!
So Genius gets people to transcribe the lyrics mostly for free and then sells them to other companies for a lot of money.

Google found someone to provide lyrics and that company allegedly scraps Genius for cheaper than Genius charges for direct access.

So this is basically a continuation of the on-going question of whether scraping is legal? That's my basic understanding from reading the complaint. I'm also not sure why Google is at fault, except for a bunch of ranting about the Information Box stealing their business.

Guess there's also the attempt to try to enforce Genius' ToS...
You said the "project was shilled hard when it was first released". Why use a word with such strong conspiratorial connotations? Couldn't you just as easily argue that a lot attention was given to the project without implying that it was because of a shill conspiracy?

What concrete evidence leads you to the conclusion that coordinated shills are responsible for giving the project attention?
The Maps feature I hate most on Android is the "answer a few questions about places you've visited by tapping on these colorful cards."

The UX here is one of the worst I've ever seen. Once you tap an answer you don't get a chance to change it, or even see what the question was you just answered. It's on to the next question.

Many of the questions are insane. Like "Safeway: can you buy meat here?" Hello? Safeway? It's a giant supermarket!

But one design feature constantly leads me to giving wrong answers: every card is a different color, even for questions about the same establishment.

These frenetic color changes overpower the actual business name, so it's easy to get in a rhythm of "Safeway: can you buy meat here? Yes. Can you buy paper towels here? Yes. Can you get an oil change here? No, of course not!"

Oops, what? Did that card say Safeway or Jiffy Lube? Well the card's gone now, no way to go back and check it or fix it.

The color changes are a distraction from feeling confident which business you were answering a question about. With the lack of undo, they make me feel stupid. I like software that makes me feel smart.
The next Xbox is called Xbox Series X
Their website is extremely usable with JavaScript disabled.
As a long time player and fan of Dota 2, it's really exciting to see a company like OpenAI taking an interest in the game. I still remember when they showcased their AI for the first time by beating some of the best players in the world 1v1. It was an unreal feat at the time.
Attempto Controlled English[1] is a cool project: it's a formal language, but a subset of ordinary English.

My own Hode, described in an earlier comment[2], makes it easy for anyone who speaks some natural language to enter and query arbitrary structured data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784617
Snoop means, according to Oxford: "Investigate or look around furtively in an attempt to find out something, especially information about someone's private affairs".

Surveillance is "Close observation, especially of a suspected spy or criminal".

Going by those definitions, I'd sure rather have someone surveilling me than snooping on me. I don't see why you consider the word "snooping" to be cutesy or for whitewashing.
But that's the sort of thing that should be researched: is the question scientifically answerable? The answer is not obviously no. I can think of ways to scientifically test for noncomputability. If I can then certainly much smarter and knowledgeable poeple can.
People just assume like yourself it is not and throw lots of money at a certain assumption. If the assumption is wrong, not only is AGI a dead end, but "human in the loop" computation should be a huge win.
Is there substantive evidence that studying humanities or even ethics is causal to people behaving more ethically?
For systems with automated password resets sent to email, what even is the point of a password at all? It literally accomplishes nothing. Just get rid of the password entirely and make checking email officially a part of the login.
I kind of alluded to it in my reply, but I tend to agree- they spent a lot of time and hard work- looking in all the wrong places! Its hard to imagine how they missed the forest for the trees so badly here.

Worse is- they never really explain where that 30x improvement came from- or if they even understand it themselves? They talk a lot about getting their memory issues under control, but hardly at all about actual parallelism- and it seems that even then they confuse it with merely speeding up operations that are blocking.

I kind of expected this post to be "We did a whoops and had a blocking call to a DB/fs/compression call/whatever. This was all happening in the event loop and not being farmed out to the threadpool by libuv. We fixed it and now look like heroes to our CTO!"
Ads aren’t hurting you or anyone else
That cocaine didn't buy itself.
I'd be curious to see a list of them!
> That being said, I think it’s hilarious

I think there are many things that would be hilarious and also should get people fired.
This was a really interesting and worthwhile read despite the two pop ups.

The Beau Brigham case mentioned is sad[0]...guy seems to have been given a shit lot in life (bedridden with illness for 5 years), payed a token $3.50 for an assassination attempt on his stepmother, then received 3 years in jail. No one should allow their frustrations to build up to actionable murderous intent but you I can't help feel for the guy to some extent. 3 years in jail is probably not the sort of help he needed.

That article also mentions how Monteiro is a registered sex offender related to child pornography. This article[1] goes in to more detail, stating that Monteiro had "58 images of child pornography on his computer, most of which he created" and that "he committed illegal acts in order to access content on the dark web. Monteiro said he compromised and shut down websites while obtaining information about the case". Seems like these child porn sites require users to generate content to gain and maintain access.

Hard to tell from the testimony the intent and extent of good or harm Monteiro did around the child porn stuff. There should really be more published details around the sex offender registry - did someone swap nudes with their underage girlfriend or actively film abuse of their kids? There is a massive difference.

Regardless, Monteiro is doing awesome work around the murder for hire business. Really tricky field to navigate, and seemingly quite taxing and unrewarding. He published this cool public data on murder for hire statistics here [2]

[0] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/08/15/jury-finds-beau-brigham...
[1] https://calcoasttimes.com/2019/07/31/key-witness-in-slo-murd...
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AICLS8bS6Kh4GgRTWkSf...
The mind may be nonphysical.
> Nevertheless, the composition of audiences can still tilt toward demographic groups such as men or younger workers, according to a study published today by researchers at Northeastern University and Upturn, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital inequities

>One reason for the persistent bias is that Facebook’s modified algorithm appears to rely on proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender, said Alan Mislove, a Northeastern University professor of computer science and one of the study’s co-authors.

Hypothetically, let's say that the trucking company in the article used "people interested in cars" as a targeted group. It would come as no surprise to me if this group was > 80% male.

It may even be by another mechanism- facebook's algorithm may look at the profiles of individuals that clicked through on ads in order to determine who to show the ads to in the future. This is a good way to provide cost effective advertisement. This also may be done in a way such that a small fraction of these ads are still shown to $membersOfProtectedClassX, even in cases where said class is statistically unlikely to click on the ad. What small fraction is necessary to be legally unproblematic?

If Joe Schmoe creates a facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job (a job which is 98% male), what percentage of those ads must be served to women to be legally compliant?
New York City Is on the Verge of Disaster
I've done something similar with a role but alphabetical.

A-Z, then AA-ZZ, AB-ZA and so on.
Now you're complaining about a different thing. A thing which I'm not even sure happens. I know for a fact you can disable ads personalization, which should eliminate all incentives for google to track you, in the event that they were doing so before.

As to the rest, people have different views on the ethics of these kinds of voluntary interactions.
If they want to rock the boat who I am to tell them no to.

In these Google cases the problem seems to came from the position they are trying to rock the boat. More as a child rebelling against a parent than as a worker against corporate policies. Problem is they are not as important to Google as a child to its parent, and it´s showing.
Just lie.
Scraping is one thing, redistributing and republishing is another. In a world where scraping is legally protected, displaying Genius lyrics in a Google infobox could still be illegal without a prior agreement on the basis of copyright. There's an argument for "curation of facts", etc...
But there might be even better approaches if human intelligence is not computable. E.g. if the mind is a halting oracles that can get us all kinds of cool things.
Is there any possibility that some of this “snooping” actually keeps us safer? Ostracizing these people is not unlike ostracizing police. Even though police have abused power from time to time, I bet there isn’t a single one of us that wouldn’t call the police if our child has been kidnapped.
Thank you for a very detailed answer! In Germany, where I live, PhD process is different from USA [1]. After getting Master, one can apply for PhD that will be thesis / research part only, without mandatory coursework.

[1] https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/phd-stu...
Since you mentioned Samsung, check out their A-series.

They seems to be pretty affordable.
Maybe because the world and human knowledge are incredibly complex and difficult things to put into logical relations well enough to achieve more success?

Consider that humans learn though having bodies to explore the world with, while forming a variety of social relations to learn the culture. Which is very different from encoding a bunch of rules to make up an intelligence.
Hezbollah didn't exist 40 years ago.

As someone who was raised in Israel - your idea of how Israelis think of working in high-tech is a figment of your imagination.
Yes, we launched our exclusive with CNN. We're happy to answer any more detailed tech questions the HN audience might have here.
The FCC has defined broadband as 25/3 Mbps since 2015. Prior to that it was 4/1 Mbps. The first FCC definition of broadband was established in 1996 as 200/200 Kbps. You can't really play loosey goosey with the definition. The service is either fast enough to be considered broadband or it isn't. The delivery method is irrelevant.
A sad state of affairs to be honest.
Laws do not always stop businesses in search of profit.

There are many laws (e.g. Sarbanes–Oxley, Dodd–Frank, etc.) that were created to prevent unscrupulous acts in search of greater profits.

Business surveillance and government surveillance can be equally problematic if the people behind it have bad motives.
Ring hackers reportedly watching and talking to strangers via in-home cameras
I think it's because Google started and sold itself as the Do No Evil company that inspired 1,000s to more to get into tech; aspire to want to work for or with such a company.

In the end we learn Google does evil for the sake of profits and many those who they inspired have become disenchanted.
That seems rather close to brutalist architecture.
JavaScript itself is not a hack, it works fine for its original purpose - making webpages interactive.

What I consider hacks is the hundreds of different tools and dialects of JS that are used to bend JS into doing something it wasn’t really designed for.

JS is fine in the browser, and TypeScript is also fine there because you don’t really have the choice to run anything different (although Web Assembly might change the game soon). But on the backend you have the privilege to pick between dozens of different languages that are better suited to the task and support the features you want out of the box without layering hacks on top. Why not just go with one of those?
No sympathy for the organizations that implement these stupid password requirements in the first place.

a) Passwords that are secure.

b) Passwords that can be remembered.

c) Passwords that must be rotated regularly.

You can pick two of the above, and it can be done. But you're not getting all three.
ISPs should lay out an expensive fibre network (so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it) and I should pay less money? That's just crazy.
This is a great reason to have discs backed up in digital form (in multiple orgs, not locations). Insurance covers the value lost, but not the content. Archive/Backup All The Things. Physical media archived away someone with no other copies? Not even once.
I feel like JWT is a poor version of aead cookies like rails uses.
I understand what you're saying but I feel like it's splitting hairs.

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/12/11/re...
There is simply no excuse for this. You are a software engineer or you are not, the cadence of change is part of the technology aspiration.

I have no patience for persons who don't belong to the discipline.
Please forgive my pedantry, but I just wanted to note that you’re referring to the AACS (used for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray) decryption key censored on Digg. The DeCSS stuff with Jon Lech Johansen was five years earlier than that. Cheers :)
IDK how to justify it but "snooping" seems cutesy to me as well.
What about their copyright? Can a palette actually be copyrighted?
We switched to Mapbox as well, the only downside we faced was the horrendous satelitte maps. They apperantly bought a lot of satellite imagery, but it still looks way way worse compared to Google or Apple Maps. The weird thing is that when zooming in it gets pixelated, even though the maps actually look more crisp when not zoomed in completely.
The opposite of addiction is connection.
Friend in law enforcement. They don't know if Google is actually swamped but mentioned that these now take much longer to fulfill than they did in the past. Their assumption is that Google must be swamped.

Also: https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/14/surge-in-police-requests...
Because Genius was popular enough it would piss off users if their results didn't show up on the first page.

Clearly Google seems to agree that Genius has the best results based on the efforts they've taken to steal and even hide the fact that they're stealing from Genius.

Just to be clear, Genius may be small compared to Google, but they are the de facto source of lyrics for music. Can you imagine if users suddenly no longer found Google useful for figuring out lyrics? It would genuinely cost them users switching to Bing, DuckDuckGo, etcetera.
Interesting, does it happen every time you try it or just sometimes?
It's really a shame. I used murfie to get albums that were never released as digital albums. Especially old game or movie soundtracks, the ones you wouldn't find on your go-to platform, because they are too much of a niche.
There were a lot of gems. For me, I only wanted to have the FLAC anyway, so I'm not sorry about the physical discs... But of course, I'm sorry for everyone who has their collection there.
Just curious- did you use Joi or anything similar to try to at least verify at some point that you had a valid object?
Do we think Bloomberg’s decision to enter the race coincided with the exact moment he publicized his intent to enter the race? The decisions aren’t made on a whim — candidates decide this stuff over a long period of time. Bloomberg knew he would enter the race long before he announced.
You've stumbled across the Fox and Rabbit Product paradigm:
https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/fox-and-rabbit-pro...
Oz (a functional logic concurrent magical programming language)
At a high level, I am very skeptical. Usually when your model does not agree with observations, the problem is with the model. A few things that stand out to me. I have not thought deeply about any of them, so please correct me if I am mistaken about any of these.

> This primary data set contained 252 species from five vertebrate classes [...] We removed humans (Homo sapiens) from the data set as they were listed with a maximum lifespan of 120 years, which does not reflect the variability and the true global average lifespan (60.9–86.3 years)

So why should we trust the rest of this dataset? Garbage in garbage (GIGO) out comes to mind.

> We used promoter sequences centred around the transcription start site (TSS) (-499 to 100 bp of each promoter) in Humans (Homo sapiens) from the EPD as the data set of promoter sequences. [...] Briefly, as described previously, using Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) v2.2.31 the promoter sequences were mapped to the single top hit in each species.

This would seem to imply a weird correlation structure between data examples that could pose problems for training/test split and/or linear models. I would also liked to see some QC where they show how well this recovered known (i.e. annotated) promoter regions. Are they picking up false positives? Are they missing stuff?

> The glmnet function was set to a 10-fold cross validation which returns the best performing model. [...] This resulted in a total of 42 promoters for estimate lifespan.

So they're doing post-selection inference, so p-values are suspect. Tibshirani (inventor of Lasso) and Taylor recently released a package for post-selection inference, which I do not see them using here.

> Species were randomly assigned to either a training (176 samples) or testing (76 samples) data set (70/30 split).

Rule of thumb: you usually want about number of example = 10x number of features to avoid overfitting. 42 features seems kind of thin. Even worse when you consider that there might be a correlation between training and test examples imposed by the initial selection of promoter sites using BLAST.
Many of Mike Masnick's arguments about how "dumb" this is are ... entirely lacking.

When Genius points out that - after being told what their apostrophe watermark scheme was - LyricFind / Google started stripping that watermark while still copying things wholesale, Mike says:

> Damned if you do, damned if you don't

Which is obstinate to say the least. Mike tries to paint the picture that it's entirely okay, because they removed the mechanism to detect copying, while still copying. Poor LyricFind.

Poor LyricFind, who, while covering their tracks, -weren't- deleting the _second_ watermark, that Genius didn't tell them about, thus showing that this was an entirely wilful, knowing act.

All of his arguments complain/whine about "how dare they, they have no copyright, of course, because they did nothing!", wilfully ignoring that Genius, and any other sites who _actively license_ the ability to reproduce lyrics these days have to generate their own lyrics from first principles - the days of liner notes/lyrics are largely gone.

Mike's arguments for the most part consisted of calling Genius "idiots" for failing his tests as to what the law is, often wrong, or willfully ostrich-like to anything that might derail his diatribe.
Coolest things I learned in 2019
I'm not saying that these companies should exist for the example in the article, a high profile business person that failed miserably and tried to do the same thing a second time, yes it is just downright wrong he has a bunch of apparently fake PR about him claiming he's great and a genius and give him your money.

However, there are valid use cases for such a service. There are things you and I might say or do in haste that quickly get forgotten and are never even seen by most of the population but...

The "1%" are in the spotlight, they can't go an ice cream cone without articles about their ice cream appearing online [1].

What if a high profile individual is falsely accused of rape, or of fathering a child, and it turns out it was a false accusation. Those dozens or hundreds of articles/tweets/videos aren't going to go away. It will quietly be announced by a handful of places "so and so was cleared, person was lying" and for months or decades those accusation articles are going to stay high on search results.

If John Smith gets a DUI, unless he did a bunch of property damage or killed someone in the process, an article isn't going to be written. If a billionaire does it [2] articles get written.

If a billionaire calls someone a pedo in a heated exchange, articles are written about it [3]. If Jane Doe calls someone a pedo (or worse) on twitter, one of her 13 followers might favorite the tweet, if another human being even reads it.

I imagine a significant percentage of people using these services aren't trying to defraud people, but simply trying to hide something embarrassing that has been preserved digitally, widely, that John and Joan Public simply never have to worry about. (nipple slip, porn tape, telling someone to eff off when they're having a bad day, tweeting something in haste like calling someone a creepy pedo, etc).

What if someone was formerly a neo-nazi, and they've spent the past decade fighting against hate (several of these types exist [4]) and living a completely different life? Should they not be allowed to bury their past and be judged on their current works instead of the foolish things they did in their youth?

[1] https://time.com/2982204/paul-mccartney-warren-buffett-selfi...

[2] https://money.com/a-billionaire-22-year-old-was-fined-30000-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/18/578745514/a-former-neo-nazi-e...
https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/19/to-type-or-not-to-type-q...

> Is a 15% reduction in bugs making it all the way through your development pipeline worth it to you?...

https://www.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/aofcik/38_of_bu...

> 38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by TypeScript according to postmortem analysis

I've never seen a number far outside of the 15-30% range.

In my experience, most bugs are operator error. Developers didn't code for branching paths that should've been accounted for, etc.

Personally, I'm a fan of TypeScript. Just don't expect to remove the majority of your bugs via its usage. The old "no silver bullet" adage.