skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won’t suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they’re being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what’s meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can’t agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody “human” values?

Those who build the machine will embody it "their" ethical values. Problem solved.
You might enjoy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23129434
> Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!

Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.

I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.

Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.
Unix does the sensible thing and records timestamps in seconds since the epoch. The epoch is always 1970 January 1 00:00:00 UTC. Timestamps in logs and sent over the wire in that format then don't have a timezone encoded because the "timezone" only gets applied when converting to a format that encodes time of day. When used as a wire format this also allows every device to display the time in its own timezone.
Business travel is a large part of airline profits. If people believe many of those business trips will be replaced with Zoom video conferences on a permanent basis, then you would expect Zoom to see increasing revenues and airlines to see permanently impaired revenue.
Shameless plug: use adb-enhanced a wrapper around ADB once you have setup ADB - https://github.com/ashishb/adb-enhanced
Abandonia
Code Quality Is a Dial Too (2013)
Free Course Linux Kernel Development Course
The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history.

Given that the professors/assistants are certainly not getting paid within 2 orders of magnitude of 25k per student . There must either be irrationally high Capex expenditure, irrationally high administrative overhead, or universities are spending large fractions of tuition on other activities.
Because now people start to get rejected for loans because of their race, and that’s wrong for many obvious reasons.
Wasn’t Facebook built on MySQL with the friend graph written in relational SQL and PHP? The idea was but out and then perfected later. In my head this is the same as doing it on AWS or GCP fully on their proprietary stack and then once making some coin you start a refactor or a migration in parallel to your own hardware and stack as costs warrant it.

Dropbox is famous for doing this when they did their move from S3 to pocket — an in house storage layer they built.
this is true, though with the assumption of blogging as it is in today's world where it is lonely and only a search engine can find you. if blogging was done inside a supportive community and network it could be less lonely and you could get frequent feedback and interactions.

If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...

I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.

People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.

That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.

If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?

Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.
Did we really "start closing our borders" that early?

I know we'd restricted direct flights from China or the Wuhan area earlier, but citizens and permanent residents (and their families) could still arrive. We were still allowing international visitors in mid March - they only cancelled the F1 GP in March 12th, the day it was supposed to star, when all the international drivers/teams/fans/media-circus were already in Melbourne.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/13/formula-one-au...
My first 'modern' website, python+flask+CSS+google app engine!!
It's really a small app, but it was good to discover simple web tech after years of data modelling.~

https://death-proba-website.appspot.com/

The app just gives you a comparison of covid death probabilities to skydiving and other activities depending on age and sex. Can be helpful to make personal decisions.

For instance that a 40-49 male, if infected, has probability of dying equal to 75 jumps of skydiving.

(Please read disclaimers on the website)
In the UK at least, research is heavily subsidised by teaching income.
I've heard Haskell programmers talk about Data and Codata, and came away with the loose sense that Data might be like state and Codata might be like a stream.

That one would so confidently assert that "Codata is the categorical dual of Data" has me thinking there might be something here?

Anyone want to tell me how far off I am?
You pay yourself what you need to survive and use the rest to re-invest in the company, extend the runway, do marketing, etc.

You can't walk away from your day job at $BIGCO, start your own company and expect to get paid like you used to, it doesn't work like that (at least at the beginning).

Your pay is having a large % ownership in (what you think will be) a valuable company down the line.
Whenever I hear this, I ask, "Whose ethics?"

When people say that we ought to or should or make some other pronouncement about how we must make AI "ethical," I ask again, "Whose ethics?"
Normally you just run your one JVM app on your VM. The real balance is basically between the heap size and page cache size. You might want to tweak it, as much as the GC algorithm and other memory details. This applies if you understand them.

If you don't, you just start the JVM with defaults, and it configures itself for optimal performance, using its idea of optimal.
> I had some work friends who went to Caltch and MIT for undergrad for same degree as I have...we compared books for courses, etc. 80% of our courses used the same exact book. I'm sure they "learned it better" than I did... but not "10x the tuition cost" better.

I went to Caltech in the 70's. I compared course catalogs with Arizona State U. Required undergrad class at CIT were grad level classes at ASU. When I worked at Boeing I found my BS math abilities were at the same level as those with a Masters.

As for books, at CIT many of the textbooks required for a class were not actually used. The prof would present his own curriculum, with the class textbook there just for background.

To be fair, I didn't take the actual courses at ASU, I just compared the course catalog for topics covered.
You've just described why the most common qualifications held in the Senate and in the House are law degrees first, and MBAs second. The humanities is not the educational background of our political class, it's mostly Law, Business and Medicine.
Labor has changed and is still changing. It's getting more and more difficult to get a job that pays. Meritocracy? Meh. It's bullshit being peddled to shut us up. It's just connections and luck. Even the able ones have to be in the right place at the right time and need to jump through a million hoops. It feels like a never-ending captcha session.

Bullshit at universities is backpressure from the labor market. Backed up bullshit spills over to education at all levels. Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of the end of the labor era.

And now that we can see this laid bare clearer and clearer: What can parents do today for their children?

Education doesn't have the primary goal to procure a job. This was never really the thing. And even at this education is failing more and more. So what needs to be done for children and young adults? What is the goal of education?

As a father I have been thinking about this for years. I don't have an answer for the material needs of the generation of my descendants. However I know that people need a meaning of life especially if they are poor. I am trying to teach my children to look out for their own meaning of life and to work hard to attain it by themselves.

I hope that the world finds an answer how to satisfy the material needs of the people when there's not enough labor for everybody. And then? What can they do if they don't have a job? That's what I am trying to find out with my children growing up. Humanities are important to create meaning.

However one thing is sure: If I detect bullshit permeating an university I am not going to suggest an expensive course to my children!
There are ways to interpret the statement you've quoted in which it's obvious (if by "AI" we just mean "deep learning" or something), and ways to interpret it in which it's just wrong (if by "AI" we mean what people usually mean by "AI", namely AGI). You seem to be interpreting it in the first sense, and additionally you have a considerably more jaundiced view of how widely applicable deep learning is likely to turn out to be than some of its prominent practitioners — Karpathy famously called it "Software 2.0," which to me seems perhaps a bit optimistic.

As far as I can tell, though, the article doesn't say anything both true and nonobvious, which to me is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for it being worth reading. Reliance on Morozov was just a particularly glaring sign of this.
Haha, admirable but I love employers like that. When they proactively remove themselves from the process without intervention from me we've made selection so much more efficient.

I wouldn't want to work there and they would have saved me so much trouble.

Bad GitHub code means nothing. Good original GitHub code means something. And the less these orgs realize that the easier it is to get engineers that are otherwise unappreciated.
My bachelor's degree was basically a scam. It was from a well-known university in Australia, too. Teachers who barely knew anything about what they were teaching, outdated course material, the lowest bar imaginable to get a passing grade. At a guess, I'd say that 99% of the graduates would not have had the skills to be employed in their chosen field upon completing the degree. I only stuck it out through the whole thing because I was a dumb kid who didn't know any better. Now I'll be paying off the debt for the rest of my life.
I had a problem with Facebook use, you could call it addiction even. Because I like some features of it (instant messaging to anybody connected, events), I decided to unfollow everything and everybody.

Now I have almost empty main page/wall, following only the page of Tristan da Cunha (oh, the remoteness!) and nothing else. Nothing to scroll mindlessly through.

I didn't find better solution than to manually unfollow everything that popped up on my wall at that time, but this operation took perhaps 1-2 hours in total but since then saved A LOT of time. The addiction disappeared, I can still message anybody, I can still organize and be invited to events. Great stuff.
Show HN: Get out your pitchforks, I wrote a book on screening technical talent
I know that many of you hate automated hiring tests. Common complaints seen on HN:
- Automated tests focus on arbitrary algorithms, and don’t actually assess how well you create a user-loving mobile/web/scalable/whatever app.
- No one does their daily work under stopwatch pressure, so why should a test be timed?
- I have a long resume, why do I need to take a test?

With that said, I just released a free ebook Evidence-Based Hiring to address these concerns and explain how and why automated testing can benefit both candidates and companies. Hint: it is all about creating short questions for a specific skill. I’d love to get your feedback on the book.

You can download a free HTML, PDF or EPUB version here:
https://www.testdome.com/evidence-based-hiring/book/ebh.html

Entire source in markdown and build scripts for Pandoc are on GitHub:
https://github.com/ZSvedic/EBH-book

Full disclosure: I’m a founder of TestDome, an online testing company. I started TestDome, in part, because the only thing worse than a terrible hiring test is using resumes to screen technical talent.
> The damage caused is the same in both cases though, and it shouldn't take a team of independent researchers to prevent Google from shipping racist products.

Your comment reads like "company X should not be shipping products with issues affecting users" - as long as it was not intentional and they take corrective actions, things are working as well as they can.
There are two problems here.

In my experience most people, including most developers but perhaps excluding many HN readers, don't understand what the timezone setting does. The time on all contemporary computers is always Unix Epoch Time, which is close to (but not exactly) UTC. Setting your timezone doesn't actually change anything about how time works on the computer. It just changes how time is printed. That's it.

So the second problem is that our text-based server world, for all its benefits, doesn't cope well with per-user parameters. I mean ... timezone support on Unix is basically buggy. It doesn't matter what TZ I set in my .profile, nevertheless the timezone of logs is in whatever TZ the server is running in. That's pretty stupid. And even simple calculations like "how many seconds elapsed between this log entry and this one" - which is really common - are very difficult, regardless of the TZ setting.

In my own personal perfect world, all logs would be printed in the first column of log files using the epoch time in seconds, and we'd have a command which would convert from the epoch time to the local timezone. So we could do something like:

tail -f /var/log/messages | grep 'panic' | timestamp

...in which case I would be able to choose the timezone and format of the timestamps to meet the needs of the job i was doing.

So for me, this whole argument over UTC is dumb. It doesn't matter what timezone the system is set to; any zone can be "default". The real problem is that different users have different time formatting requirements, and to date we haven't had tools which deal with that properly.

(even logging all timestamps consistently in ISO format would be a big step up...)
Spiritual ways of goal achievement, wealth, and prosperity I've learned so far
Yeah, who would have thought?
Yes, for sure.

Also see Ian Banks' "Culture" novels.
I agree with you that it is generally wrong, i.e. that other factors should come first. But what if the data suggests it? For example if is known that if you lend to someone from race X, there is 80% chance he would not pay back. Would you not incorporate that factor into your decision?
It should be pretty easy for anyone out there working on such algorithms to remove features that are race-related, or even not collecting such features in the first place. Treat people as individuals, not as representatives of some kind of meaningless tribe.
Good reference. I think "I Have No Mouth and Must Scream" is also standard material for futurist "AI" engineers.

Edit: on the contrary
> we'll have to accept the superior form of consciousness the ASI is.

On what definition of "have to"?

Large numbers of people will not only refuse to accept the ASI's interpretation of ethics, they will also refuse to acknowledge that the purported ASI is any better than ourselves/themselves when it comes to ethics. If you try to settle the matter by giving the ASI the force of law, there will be armed revolts and violent crackdowns.
The key with a generic degree is that it admits you to specialized training afterwards, or careers with on-the-job training like civil servants. In the US there are this many people in these jobs that have any 4-year-degree as their entrance qualification to vocational training:

3.2 million teachers.

2.8 million civil servants

1.35 million lawyers.

0.25 million military officers.

Those four alone are around 5% of all the jobs in the US (7.6/155 million).
Computing & rendering all on the GPU without having to query back to the CPU at all seems a natural fit to me, but I don't have a deep technical understanding of it.

My main thought is just that DL reduces the amount of computate you actually need by allowing you to approximate rather than derive things like cloth physics, how that's eventually integrated seems an implementation detail.
I love how William Gibson reveals Eunice in Agency.

I'd for sure love to be her friend.
Why would you pay $$$ just to coast? Just go rent a resort on the Mediterranean if that's what you want to do.
Does anyone have an actual cost breakdown of every expense that goes into running a university? It would be great to see this for any major private college, and/or a public university.

In most of these comment sections I see speculation about why universities are so expensive. But have never seen the hard data to back it up. Is it really the luxury dorms? The bloated administration? etc... Anyone have the real numbers? And how has the budget breakdown changed over time?
As someone who works in this field: the challenge is more nuanced. For example: Even if you don’t input ethnicity as a value, you might input ZIP codes. ZIP codes however can be very predictive of someone’s ethnic background, and you might still end up unfairly discriminating against certain groups of people.

The Amazon recruiting AI failure is another great example of this, I think it didn’t take gender into account, but discriminated against activities like ‘head of women’s association’ etc.

Finally, what’s ethical is often up for discussion. Depending on context, people will optimize for equality (equal % of credits approved for both genders) vs helping those behind (Higher % approved for those historically disadvantaged) vs helping those that ‘deserve’ it of groups were unknown (finance such that default rates of both groups are expected to be equal, likely benefiting those with already good credit scores). I don’t think any of these answers is wrong, but they are mutually exclusive.

One challenge I don’t see discussed that often is that the current system of many humans evaluating loan applications leads to ‘noise‘ in outcomes so that we (on average) don’t see that much bias. (Eg a few people of certain ethnicity not getting loans because a few people are biased against them)

A single AI system scoring all applications however is consistent in its bias against a group, leading to more obvious effects (eg most people in a certain area not receiving loans because the algorithm is biased against it)

In my opinion, an important part is the right on human review of meaningful automated decisions. Not mentioned that often, but it’s also part of the GDPR.
I always hear about these bad neighbourhoods and it sounds very interesting to me. So it's like, you can drive through one and get yelled at? Mugged? Carjacked? Shot?

Is it true and if yes, how is this possible, I wonder what's fundamentally different than Europe (I grew up in a poor country, I've lived in plenty of poor neighbourhoods, rarely had trouble beyond aggressive drunks and a few muggings). Or is everyone's life so sheltered that a gang of kids seems like nazis on parade?
“Recovered” hmm. But certainly much better compared to a year ago.

First definitely see a doctor. Lots of conditions like sleep apnea or periodic leg movements can prevent deep sleep.

For me, I have found that anxiety was the root cause of not getting enough deep sleep. My life is so full with kids, work, etc that I can feel like I’m in a constant state of vigilance. What’s helped me:

- Journaling before bed, write down all my worries and cares. Feel all the bottled up feels, etc. also any TODOs. Just get it all out of your head

- talking to a loved one a lot about the same. Just getting it all off my chest

- meditation

- taking breaks from everything for solitude and self care

- exercise

- disconnecting from electronics and reading a relaxing paper book an hour before bed

I’d recommend the book The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter.
Because that’s the political trend in the Western world: if the reality does not fit ideology, then try hard to bend it by being vocal and bulling people that don’t agree, and get power in institutions to push them to the mass. Basically the same reasoning USSR used: if communism is failing that’s because we need more communism.

The good point is reality always comme back. It takes decades for the USSR to crumble, but it finally collapsed. In the same way, organization that twisted reality will pay it back one day, for example banks that grant more loans to people that statistically default more will lose more money, thus creating opportunities for companies that has a reality-based strategy to outcompete them.

Another example: let’s imagine a TLA is building a system to mine potential mass shooters. The AI output is 99% male, so the ethics comity step in and imposes 50% of women profiles in output. The next shooting happens. It would have been predicted by the initial system, yet the modified one didn’t because the agency was too busy investing really low probability cases. The problem seems obvious in this case, but when a few selected group keywords are thrown in most people will put aside any logic and approve anything (either by conviction or for virtue signaling).