skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> unprecedented transparency

I think where they can go a step further here is to install Spy cams in all of the bathroom toilets so we know how much bathroom time is actually spent going to the bathroom, and how much is spent on cell phones. It may sound invasive but I'll bet the efficiency will go up and that's all that matters at the end of the day, right?

Since efficiency can be broken down into money earned/lost, this should probably start up the top-most level (CEO) since the highest paid positions would yield the most gain/loss depending on efficiency changes. So once the CEOs have spy cams installed in all of their toilets, we can really measure how well efficiency improves!

EDIT:

I'm coming back to this because I don't think this is quite efficient enough. We should have a team of resident defecation experts who can detect exactly when the CEO should start the wiping processes, and gradually phase them out with AI that learns different pooping patterns. It can also give recommendations to the employee in terms of eating more fiber to speed up the defecating process and result in more solid stools, thus optimizing all bathroom time and shortening the amount of wipes required to as little as possible, again, to save more time and thus, money.

Not only that, but eating more fiber can prevent troubles like constipation as well as other health issues, saving even more money for the company when it comes to healthcare.

These are just a few more ideas, but I have plenty more.

EDIT #2:

I feel stupid for not thinking of this earlier, but another good strategy to prevent time away from the desk would be to simply remove all water and refrigerators from the building, and naturally all bathrooms would follow suit. The bathrooms would be replaced with closets filled with amphetamines, which are huge efficiency boosters, and bananas, so the employees don't die of hunger. The amphetamines will keep the heart rate so fast the bananas will be burned off like fuel.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "but what about the pumping rooms for breastfeeding moms? What happens to those?" It's a great question, with a simple solution - Barclays doesn't hire parents anymore. This is about efficiency, remember? Barclays will henceforth only hire asexual and sterile men and women to nullify any risk of pregnancy.

However, for those parents who need to keep their job, Barclays will also offer a free service called "reverse adoption" where you bring in your kids and the company gives them away. This can save dozens of dollars per day from employees getting distracted by things like "family" and "not working."

Between this, the spy cams in CEO toilets, the defecation expert AI, and removing the bathrooms, there will be tons of money saved, a portion of which will go towards financing the amphetamines and bananas. It'll be expensive for all the drugs but the efficiency will be so high it'll be a drop in the bucket!
However here in the states, Kohl's has been surviving kind of on this strategy alone. The quality of the clothes is actually quite low, but they price them at "normal" prices and then almost constantly have massive sales -- 20%, 30%, even 40%. My mom will in fact refuse to shop there until there's at least a 30% sale.

Meanwhile the value-accurate price of the clothes IS that prices that's actually 40% off, but she thinks she's getting a steal.
It was the WHO who claimed on 4 jan that person-to-person transmission was impossible. It was CDC and WHO who said asymptomatic transmission was unlikely ("not a driver of the outbreak", "unclear"). It was the WHO who said closing borders and stopping Chinese from entering the country had zero effect on spread. It was the WHO who still claims that packages from China can't cause infection, despite science showing it can survive on plastics for up to 9 days.

China should have all the data on reinfection, and thus, if they share this data with the WHO like they are supposed to, there should be a factual source from the CDC or the WHO. Where is it?

If we stick to the official facts every time a whistle blower opens their mouth, there would be no point in blowing the whistle. Only one who benefits from that are the authorities.

Like the UK government: If China does not share more information, we are forced to assume the absolute worst.
Some people really don't like cryptocurrencies
The recent Huawei 5G drama does seem to go against the grain of this. After all, if the UK had less power to push back, then clearly nobody has told them.
>Publishers can publish (or decline to publish) whatever they want, but they do have some responsibility for what they say.

It is abjectly insane to label a tweet as something Twitter, the company, is "saying". If we're retooling the law to orient it toward that definition, then the inevitable endgame, after the avalanche of litigation, will be that the concept of posting text on social media or blogging platforms is dead. It kills Web 2.0 in its entirety. It regresses the United States back to the dark ages of a completely one-directional media, where the best you can do as an outsider is to submit a letter to the editor.
> his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless.

While there are large grey areas in the middle where subject opinion, context, and fuzzy word definitions make truth values complicated, there are also some very clear black and white areas for blatantly false concrete claims are being made and spread that have no basis in reality. I think there are ways to regulate and pushing blatant disinformation while leaving the greyer borders up to individual discretion and discernment.
Lightweight db based on datascript with durability and timetravel for clj(s)
Ellison hosted a big fundraiser for Trump literally yesterday and Obama regularly golfed with Ellison. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist but it’s clear the guy is connected and it stands to reason it might influence the government position.

https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/12/tru...

https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/18/bar...

Edit: some suggest Ellison doesn’t play golf, that said Obama visited his courses regularly and I’m sure there were plenty of occasions where they interacted closely before or after the round.
Question: if this lawsuit goes in Oracle's favor, what does that mean for WINE? Isn't that the same issue? WINE provides compatible Windows APIs.

Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)
Don't use URL shorteners.
> homelab subreddit

check out homeserver too...more towards the low end of scale rather than "I've got a xeon beast in my basement" homelab
For sure, doesn’t seem like there’s a need to solve for adversarial Byzantine style attacks here. Even a permissioned proof of authority blockchain is overkill for this (which is most likely what Accenture is building/configuring for them)
NSA is unambiguously doing worse things than any FAANG or adtech company could do in their wildest wet dreams.

"NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

Optic Nerve ("GCHQ" in title is misleading because the NSA played a very enthusiastic helping role in it):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_Nerve_(GCHQ)

ECHELON:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

There's so much they're responsible for that it seems like it'd be excessive to post all of them, and HN has a character limit, anyway. Even the most well-known ones would fill a couple of comments.
Thanks for the reply - good idea about doing a small project that uses the companies API or demonstrates what they do.
To some degree, yes. Maybe not in the same way as a book publisher, but also not zero like a common carrier.
Article is unhelpful since it says in the title that reinfection is possible but doesn’t qualify it to with the use of the medication. Also, doesn’t say what medication.
It really does boggle the imagination to think that somewhere, out there, somebody actually thought this system was a good idea in the first place.
Perhaps, but I do web development and Chrome really eats the RAM.
From the article:

>> At an earlier stage in litigation, the Obama administration took a similar position, urging the Supreme Court not to accept Google's appeal.

Did Ellison do a fundraiser for Obama as well?
Is it just pure hatred ? There don't seem to be much arguing going on...
You shouldn't use a button where every other plane uses a lever, or a new term for a label to describe added functions when you can easily use a modifier of an existing similar label. It means things like that. Pilots know the UI of planes so newer planes should need minimal explanation of the UI to pilots is that the philosophy means, it does not mean new planes should have pretty ui anyone off the street can understand
> Phone companies should not be responsible for knowing or caring what content is shared, even if it's some kind of slander or treasonous plot being discussed.

What if they influenced the content that each side hears, e.g. add strategic gaps where they leave out key noises, to make the phone call go on for the maximum amount of time (because they charge by second)?
To the extent that the synthetic data comes from a generative model, why not sell the parameters of the generative model?
One is Apple or Netflix and the other isn’t. I don’t feel comfortable sharing more specificity than that.
They are not building it to be censorship-resistant. They are building it to be a public alternative to commercial digital payment services.
they're not incompatible: All industries have to be regulated, because they are made to make money, not to regulate themselves. When the regulator is not doing their job properly, there's the uproar.

TL;DR: Government should regulate industries, but it should do it for the greater good or people will complain.
I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a similar amount of investor money only to realize that there was not a market opportunity to capture. That is, many people thought it was cool - we even did co-sponsored data contests with The Economist - but at the end of the day, we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve.

I wish these folks luck! Perhaps things have changed; we were part of a flock of 5 or 10 similar projects and I'm pretty sure the only one still around today is Kaggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4
Make Caps Lock both! I've got mine bound to be Esc on tap, Ctrl on a longer hold. Best thing I ever did for my pinky. (I'm an Emacs user, though I'm sure Vim users would benefit greatly as well.)
>I totally don't get how on earth protecting a "high performer" and sexual offender is good for the business.

It probably isn't, in the long run, but it IS good for the HR chief's career to keep the executives happy, and the "high performing" sexual predator is probably a good buddy of the executives. And as for the good of the business, why should the executives care about that (in the long run)? As long as it performs well for the next few years, that's good enough, because the executives will move on by then.
A set of beginner-focused Machine Learning articles
Jonathan Schwartz was always complaining about Google using SUN's API; they hoped Google would write them a nice fat check and be BFFs but Google decided to be selfish and just used and replaced SUN's tech. I think combination of ex-SUN's people mood and Oracle's lawyer-heavy structure couldn't have led to a different outcome.
It requires all kinds of weird permissions, which also gives me pause. I'll trust it because it's recommended, but ... why does it want access to all data on every website?
They might be simply preparing for that eventuality, and when the law changes they can quickly react. Apparently in the e-mail that the users got, they are claiming that nothing privacy wise will change, and that might indeed be true for now.

I think that also breaking the law might be easier. EU might not bother anymore penalizing them for a member that's already leaving, and UK alone will have very little force imposing penalties on an US corporation.
DigitalOcean closes $300M bank debt financing
And some tape decks supported playing the other side of the cassette without flipping, so had a second play button with the arrow reversed, or for those that did it automatically, one button with both arrows.
I've read multiple articles about that, yeah. Their support in their own platform was clearly half-hearted and short-lived. But my point is that that they seemed to have the same motivations for investing in Tizen as Google seemingly does in Fuchsia.
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said.

Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
Thank you!

Yeah I think MyRocks is rather underappreciated and can give fantastic performance improvements and cost savings for some workloads!
GCHQ leader Robert Hannigan stepped down in Jan 2017. That name will be in future headlines.
For those interested, I also work in this area: https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily...

Arguably, this is still a new field — but IMO will eventually become standard practice. Imo you can completely separate humans from data and still do machine learning (likely analytics). This would dramatically limit data breaches if implemented properly.
Hypothesis: Music Motivates Constancy of Emotional State
You are correct, there are literal truths. Some person factually used some set of words in a particular order. The part that people care about is how we interpret those words. It being fact does not make the implication incorrect.

In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true.

Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way.

There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.
Alternate interpretation: it doesn't affect the way they treat your information because they weren't going to follow GDPR anyway.
That certainly has been how I've seen it play out. Which makes sense as easier to have one rule to fit all and if that rule is based upon the worst case of every countries data laws then you are somewhat more future proofed. After all, not many countries do laws than are demanding their citizens have less privacy - at least in the public sector remit of laws.
That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.
WSJ had an interesting piece a week ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-...

TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.
That's actually his whole point!
I feel like in a normal presidential administration the support of the president is great for companies. With this administration it's a liability.
I'm absolutely willing to take a lower salary. I'm not expecting to start at the top by any means. I'd be thrilled to make $50,000 a year. I intend to start trying to find some freelance work it's just been hard fitting in around the rest of my life as I also have a seven year old stepson. I'm currently building an e-commerce website for a local store that I'm almost finished with. Any advice on how to go about finding stable remote employment? Technologies I should focus on? Ways to stand out from the crowd?

My biggest issue with the commute right now is that the bus doesn't go as far as my job so I ride to the last stop and walk the rest of the way. It's a temporary position doing taxes. I've got nine years of tax preparation experience and I am looking to get into development as soon as I can before my vision gets much worse. Working in a text editor and terminal is something I can do even if I completely lose it, and I want as much of a jump on it as I can get.
Education Should Aim at God, Not the Job Market
‘The Phantom of Ninth Street’: A Bon Vivant’s Lonely Decline
the fact that our database engineer went "I'm not putting that much garbage in my database"!

This is really disingenuous-- a DBA should not be a gatekeeper of what gets put into a database. Storing 200 bytes of extra data per row costs you absolutely nothing. Even if you assume 100 million photos, that's 20GB of data. That's a little over $2 of EBS cost per month. Who cares.
All these banks and financial institutions launching digital currencies miss the whole point: FRICTIONLESS transactions. Right now you have layers upon layers of network companies nickle and diming you. This is literally someone taking a penny from everyone’s account except it is a lot more than that. There’s absolutely no reason for Mastercard and Visa to even exist in 2020. They’re sitting on top of some obsolete imaginary network collecting rent.
Wait, when people disagree with you on an issue then they downvote you.

However, when you are talking about the same government, when they agree with you, will upvote you?

This, right here, is a broken system. People should only be able to upvote or downvote another person, but not both, whenever they are talking about the same government!
So in this case surveillance did some good. It helped prevent a self fish bad actor from potentially infecting other people. Which is more important privacy or the good of the group?

I would argue that privacy is so much more important then potentially killing a bunch of people. If I sneeze Corona all over your face it's your fault for putting your face in front of my sneeze.
Materialize Beta: The Details
That's up to you. You can find USB3 SATA enclosures on Amazon for around the $12 mark. There's not a big heat dissipation issue in my experience and a Pi probably isn't exactly going to be taxing the drive very much.

If you don't mind the terrible $/gb ratio, you can even get USB3 thumbdrives that use an SSD.
UK will breakup soon. It's quite possible there will be a (separate) Great Britain and Ireland in our life times, maybe even a separate Scotland, too. "England & Wales" would be all that's left. "E-double-U". Heh.
Indian Foodtech startup Swiggy raises $113M as part of its Series I round
> If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for? I am actually studying computer science (security and privacy emphasis) at KTH in Sweden and I have been interested in CBDC for some time now. If your company offers master's theses I would love to connect on LinkedIn or via email.

I might have the same employer, and the kind of company we and Accenture are don't primarily focus on this tech, but usually have a wide variety and ever changing list of options for a masters thesis.
February 1st was officially the "first day" out.
I'm kinda stuck in a position of not being able to afford it right now. Plus we really like the school district our kid is in.
On Linear Types and Exceptions
It seems inevitable that when the buzzwords wear off some executive will ask "So we have this central server we trust right? Why not just use that?"
Alexander Cavano- a Great Quality Designer Watch, Without the Large Price Tag
Close-up image of brain cancer cells wins photography prize
If they're treated like any other publisher, probably having that many workers manually vetting everything won't be viable. Which is fine, because it shouldn't be. It confuses me how every time we have one of those posts about how horrible that work is for the people doing it, most posters kinda throw up their hands and go "well whatcha gonna do" when the obvious answer is... simply not do it? If your business requires that, the easy answer to how to not cause that harm is to not have the business.
I'd love to have more helpful information, but there is an information blackout in effect: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQ_ICkxWAAICMMJ?format=jpg

Like said, China should have all the data on reinfection and severity of reinfection. It is China that is being unhelpful, not the New York Post doing its job of a free press.
That certainly is an outcome. Equally does add more credence to the Google move as if the data was in the EU, then the potential to kick up a fuss and roll out laws to insist it is in the UK would play out faster than say that data in the USA.

Equally - I'd say costs may well play out more and what is the cost to host in Ireland compared to hosting in the USA?

Even when we are talking pennies/cents in difference - at the scale of Google - that soon adds up and if they can, they will.
> How am I confident that this is realistic if you literally say its generated?

This is a particularly good question since it's recently been shown that even neural nets trained on real data often pick up substantial, predictable dataset biases.

Practically every single-dataset-trained CNN seems to pick up stylistic quirks in the photos or labels it's trained on. The most visible result is that the CNNs perform better on same-dataset test examples than they do in the wild, sometimes vastly better. More startlingly, it's possible to work backwards from this: the training source of a "finished" CNN can be discerned by looking for certain types of error, and adversarial examples can be predictably constructed based on training source.

Tagged imagesets undoubtedly have stronger and harder-to-remove 'fingerprints' than text data like addresses, but I'd be shocked if the problem was nonexistent for text. My first reaction to "synthetic sensitive user data" for ML is to worry about winding up with systematic errors coming from the generation scheme.
hat tip to Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/hacking_mcdon...
I would take it a step further. What you're talking about is incremental improvements to traditional services or products.

What the poster above you is getting at, whether they realize it or not, is that they are trying to identify markets where ML could exist solely as the service or product.

I don't think the latter is ever going to be possible for ML much like that same comment alludes too.

Maybe makes ML a bit less sexy, but also is probably true of any innovative technology.