skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is almost no event that will wipe out humanity with certainty. Our species could survive for millennia in hermetically sealed caves, huddled around underground breeder reactors. There is however a very real risk of wiping out our current way of life; civilization is quite brittle. That would of course mean that we no longer have the means to sustain eight billion people, and most of them would die. The latter is what most people refer to when they say that climate change is an existential risk, because there is a very real danger that our population drops massively over the next hundred years or so. And not because we finally figured out how to use contraceptives.
Fixing something in AI usually means improving it, not solving it. And even if the problem would get solved, there are plenty of other problems to work on.
Caste is not just some arbitrary marker. It dictates quiet a few things in your life - like what dialect you speak, your diet, who you marry, which part of the city/town/village you hail from, and even your politics. So for an Indian, identifying someone's caste is pretty easy.
>COVID-19: Straight Answers from Top Epidemiologist Who Predicted the Pandemic

https://www.bluezones.com/2020/06/covid-19-straight-answers-...

"DB: I have a final personal question. My 60th birthday is coming up. I live on Lake of the Isles and I was thinking of putting an open-air dining room up for a dinner party of 10 people or so outside. Is that a bad idea?

MO: If you’re outside, the aerosols dissipate much, much faster. So any air movement at all will help move those. Again, I can’t say that it’s perfectly safe. Remember the choir participant who sang for two hours and transmitted the virus to 42 out of 60 people.

But exposure as a dose is a combination of time and amount. So, if you’re in a situation where you are basically spending an hour or two in an outdoor area, it’s likely that even if somebody was infected there, you wouldn’t have the same dose at all. As I pointed out before, virtually all the outbreaks we’ve seen have occurred indoors.

DB: Okay, so I can go ahead or are you advising against it?

MO: [laughing] Well I can’t say yes or no, I’m giving you the best advice I have. We’re all looking for the Holy Grail right now.
"

>When 511 Epidemiologists Expect to Fly, Hug and Do 18 Other Everyday Activities Again

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/08/upshot/when-e...
Where are these Trader Joe’s stores? In Washington it seems more affordable than Safeway and its customers not remarkably “elite.”
Well, retaliation is illegal even if they believed the initial complained wasn’t illegal. Of course, discrimination is bad for businesses and they should have taken action against the managers anyway.
Facebook’s Tensions with Advertisers Predate the Boycott
Sorry this profile is private – Gramho.com
I know that this is an incredibly difficult time for you, but I want to congratulate you on your remarkable achievements.

You've put $670,000 into the pockets of your partners, because of an app that you built. But that's just a multiplier of course, because it supported those same partners contributing to projects that benefit all of us. That impact is massive.

Just as remarkable, you did all of this in a way that respected your core beliefs of preserving the privacy of the people seeing your ads.

There are few companies like yours. Well done.
That was my attempt at a good example. Certainly you must admit there are occupations where gender matters? Like prison guard?
Or embraced by those who know how to cook this: it is very easy to spot adequate LISP coder and filter self-serving equilibrists.
(I am full Clojure for many years)
Everybody thinks like that. Illegal acts should cause harm, not benefit everyone.
FYI these are the same channels you can get with rabbit ears
The author of jq is quite talented. I hope jq becomes a gateway drug.
What about stuff like clojure?
Well, can you help me understand how the conversation was detoured in the first place? I tried to read it, but as mentioned I don't use Twitter so it's confusing to me.

If I read it right...a person posted a photo that turned pixelated Obama, a half white person, into a fully white person.

A person, who I assume is some ML expert, explained that it's because the training set used uses too many white faces.

A person replied very negatively to this answer, saying she's tired of it, that he doesn't listen, and talking about injustices in the world.

I don't think either of them are wrong, I just don't understand the leap. Turning pixelated Obama into some random white guy isn't a social injustice. I kinda felt like both weren't even participating in the same argument.
And by the amount of publicity they receive.
This didn’t protect the company very well... someone in HR ought to catch the flack on this too.

Discrimination is bad for businesses. Not just if it hits the press, but those employees being discriminated against aren’t going to be as productive as those being encouraged. Fire bad managers. HR works for the company, not middle management.
Sure, but "there are racial disparities in this domain, and therefore in the data" and "there aren't racial disparities in this domain, but there are in the data" are very different problems. The latter is the topic of discussion and is much less ambiguous than the former.
Just introduce Baikal Seals to the Great Lakes & they'll eat the carp. Plus - water pups!
> it is relatively easy to determine someone's general (varna) caste and specific (jati) caste from their familial name(s) and/or physical appearance.

Is this because people from a specific caste tend to concentrate in a specific geographic region?

I've learned as a Westerner that there's no model I've grown up with that's really the best for making sense of India as someone who wasn't born there. What makes the most sense to me is what an Indian colleague told me - "think of it as the United States of Europe -- that many languages, that much diversity, that much complexity and problems."
Show HN: git-rename-master-branch-to-main
If you slap an "academic" label on it, no one will bother you. Same like how PredictIt is run by a university so they're allowed to be a casino that takes MasterCard and Visa.
How long do you think it would take, as an American, to figure out of someone is from New York, Boston, or Alabama? You'd know practically the moment they opened their mouth.

Yeah, it might take you longer to figure out if someone was from Florida or California, but that would probably come out relatively quickly in how they talk about beaches.

Humans group and identify others (often wrongly) really quickly.
That's why I pay ~$5/mo for satellite radio. I don't even drive that much but it's worth it to not listen to ads the whole time.
Hour shows are 40 minutes. Half hour are 18.
I was told by a colleague that most Indian folks you meet in tech in the Bay Area are the 1 percenters of India. Is that kind of what you're saying here as well?
So now they'll charge you $65/mo to watch ads every 10 minutes? Where do I sign up?
Show HN: Control of Sliding-Arm-Quadcopter with DynamicStructuralParameters
Our paper is accepted in IROS-2020.
I love Discord, and I'm glad for them to be doing well, but their recent blog post about BLM and their new "safety" initiatives as mentioned in this article are 100% performative.

Reporting abuse on Discord is a farcically complex process that involves enabling debug mode, copying an obscure message ID, and filling out a hard-to-find support website form. There's no technical reason you couldn't report abuse with a right-click action, or at least with a button in the app itself.[1]

Unless and until they fix that, any initiative Discord takes on "justice" or "safety" is empty words to me.

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000291932-H...
Max theoretically i can spend (sum of all my income after basic needs met) != max i will spend on video games. In fact, it would be insane to assume that i would spend 100% of my disposible income on one thing.
It's different than on iOS?
What about base + a-la-carte blocks in the same blocks they have to pay for them? Why has no one offered this yet?
Those are pretty strong words. I wouldn't use Lisp for a project I expect to scale, but I can still appreciate it for its merits, including what it represents.
There's also "there are no racial disparities in the training data, but the system still shows a response with racial disparity."

ML has problems with all of these at times. The particular case here with the Obama picture is a particularly vivid illustration of one that can be used to bring attention to the overall problems.
Oh, thank goodness! You're right, it's $40/mo now for ZBrush 2020. ZBrush 3 and earlier was $895 with no monthly option, which is great for CAD professionals but out of reach of hobbyists. I'm glad they have an option now; thanks for pointing this out.

(I'm surprised you're getting beat up for this sentiment. $40 is definitely below the threshold of "purchase on a whim and try to learn it for a month." FL Studio was another great one at $99. Still, I'm sympathetic to people who simply can't afford it – children especially.)
I also like ddwrt. But I didn’t see it mentioned in the long article, which is mostly about the wireless channel. Can you recommend a recent router (or brand) that supports ddwrt?
Its with the names. The caste names are mostly attached as surnames. Its pretty easy to identify and discriminate based on that.

Its similar to black people having white sounding to avoid being skipped over while applying for jobs.
I've only encountered Lua in a game context

The first few releases of the "Monkey Island" series from LucasArts head a grimy pirate-themed tavern called the "S.C.U.M.M. Bar" (for Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion).

When they transitioned to a "3d" experience and switched engines/tooling, the SCUMM Bar was replaced with tiki-style called "Lua Bar": https://monkeyisland.fandom.com/wiki/Scumm_Bar
I guess it's not that surprising that indefinite detention is on the menu given that the CCP also runs concentration camps, and the rule of law isn't really a thing on the mainland. The fact that they're bothering to advertise it means they are making a threat.
What's the chance that a black engineer on an ML team doing work like this isn't also from the 'corporate(or educated) class'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697472

Black cops shoot black men all day long. I don't see why black ML folks are going to be completely immune to all of the pressures that have allowed the domain to get to its current state. While I'm sure many would accept the challenge, it's waaay too much to ask or expect of them.

Yes absolutely this issue needs diverse perspectives and the priorities they bring, but it will fail without objective standards to ensure that technology in the field reliably meets our expectations.
This is great! If you're interested in this kind of bias correction for writing, there's a volunteer team named "Write for All" that is seeking help here: http://writeforall.org (feel free to message me about it).
A "matrix" for DVDs, safely ensconced in their little pods until their master grows weary and evicts them to the discount bins.
https://archivebox.io/
>Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one.

For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries.

It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.
Most US immigrants from distant countries are from rich families (not just India).

It generally takes resources to immigrate. Poor classes don't have those resources.

There are, of course, exceptions when a wave of immigration is driven by war or asylum seekers from a country leadership change.
If I was HR why wouldn't you just fire the manager and move on. I mean whether it was legal or illegal the optics look terrible.
> but Cisco determined caste discrimination was not illegal and issues continued through 2018

How this shit is legal.
We can talk about that when they get down to like, 3x to 5x force.

Right now we are seeing video after video of cops tear gassing civilians for throwing empty water bottles at them, running over civilians using SUVs for "refusing to disperse" and knocking out old folks who are going "Hey man, what if this is a bad idea though?".

The ratio right now is so high, the kinds of conversations you may want to have aren't even relevant.
I'm a very white guy living in California and I often get the impression that caste is something that Indian folks living here are aware of amongst each other, but they don't really discuss it with white people.

On some level it feels to me like it's something Indian folks don't share because they feel it would be misunderstood (which makes a lot of sense). Or maybe it's a kind of "not airing out the laundry in public."

I would love feedback on this. Thanks.
No, it was always about data structures.

Lists, hashes, sets and such that you have available in your programming language, but available as a networked server so any language/app/process can access the same data using the same useful structures.
Medlife Crisis, a cardiologist that makes educational YouTube videos[0], did a somewhat similar (and very very funny) talk about the chirality of of the human body, linking it to the chirality of DNA and beyond[1]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgRBRE1DUP2w7HTH9j_L4OQ

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqv9HHNak0c
> After 25 years of quantitative and qualitative data, we see that race-neutral solutions cannot fix problems steeped in race."[15]

?
Calm down with your cultural imperialism. /s

Seriously though, would something as foreign to US be a protected class?
> terrorism is medium or high impact

This implies that the best solution to terrorism is to abolish national news, in order to diminish its impact.
rename things doesn’t solve the problems, there are no bad words just bad intentions
What's racist is squishy.

Many people would say that identifying people who spend a lot of money at bars or casinos as a credit risk isn't racist, even if it happens to pick up more minorities. The mechanism for the credit risk and behavior seems tightly correlated.

Many people would also say that identifying people who spend some money at clothing retailers that market to minorities as a credit risk is racist. Here, the relationship seems like a hidden way to spot minorities, who happen to be more of a credit risk.

When banks drew red lines around all the minority neighborhoods and didn't lend to people there, because they couldn't consider race anymore, most thought this behavior unacceptable, even though it did genuinely reduce credit risk for banks. ML can't explain its rationale, and very often does the exact same thing inside an opaque box.
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
The official statement, is from Google and ARM, not from me.

From my links above, the TL;DR; snippets are

> Google is committed to supporting MTE throughout the Android software stack. We are working with select Arm System On Chip (SoC) partners to test MTE support and look forward to wider deployment of MTE in the Android software and hardware ecosystem.

> Starting in Android R, for 64-bit processes, all heap allocations have an implementation defined tag set in the top byte of the pointer on devices with kernel support for ARM Top-byte Ignore (TBI). Any application that modifies this tag is terminated when the tag is checked during deallocation. This is necessary for future hardware with ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support.

And from https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/02/Android-11...

> We’re also enabling heap pointer tagging for apps targeting Android 11 or higher, to help apps catch memory issues in production. These hardening improvements may surface more repeatable/reproducible app crashes in your code, so please test your apps.

For the chips without MTE they plan to configure the kernel to randomly target processes for fuzzing.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/04/android-11...

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/gwp-asan

> GWP-ASan heap analysis - Android 11 uses a variety of tools to harden security-critical components in the platform and apps. In DP3, we’re adding GWP-ASan as another way to help developers find and fix memory safety issues. GWP-ASan is a sampling allocation tool that detects heap memory errors with minimal overhead or impact on performance. We’ve enabled GWP-ASan to run by default in platform binaries and system apps, and now you can now enable it for your apps as well. If your app uses native code or libraries, we recommend enabling GWP-ASan and testing as soon as possible.

> GWP-ASan is enabled on some randomly-selected system applications and platform executables upon process start-up (or when the zygote forks)

And from ARM official communication, https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b...

> Only recently, Google announced that it is adopting Arm’s MTE in Android. This is exciting news, with Google showing its continued commitment to security in the Android ecosystem. It also shows the strength of our MTE offering, with the article stating that the technology makes “it very hard (if not impossible) to exploit memory bugs.” Alongside the security benefits, the disruption caused by not addressing memory safety bugs reduces user satisfaction and increases the cost of software development. With all these threats to the Android Ecosystem, you can understand why Google has made the commitment to MTE!

So those are the words from Google's Android team and ARM, whatever ARM CPU are being shipped, or alternative CPUs that Android devices might still adopt or be using.
That’s for all apps, but only for specific parts of the filesystem, so there’s still plenty of room for apps to cause havoc by messing with everything else.

This is separate from the older sandboxing feature that’s designed to fully isolate apps from the rest of the system, which is mandatory for Mac App Store apps but opt-in for other apps.
Ask HN: What kind of ideas are not VC-backable but should exist in the future?
I have been thinking about what the current VC fund structure limits the founder's imagination about the future for a long time.

Please share your wildest ideas.
And That's A Good Thing

If Lisp were mainstream I'd probably see that as a red flag
The concern in your quote is separate from the question of whether we can differentiate between engineers and researches.

As for the ethical problems. Are you familiar with machine learning methods? It really is all about the data; that's not a dismissal, it's a fact about current technology. There are other kinds of A.I. which are not based entirely on raw data like this. Machine Learning has been simplistically described as "curve fitting", which I think isn't a bad description. So here you are arguing that the mathematician researching good ways to fit a smooth curve to a series of points in really high dimensions needs to somehow take into account what those points might represent in someone's use of the technology. It seems pretty unreasonable to me to require that they put ethical constraints on it.
Holy crap. Half-hour shows are basically YouTube videos in terms of length
The New Jim Crow is a great book if you want to learn more.
I remember those! It was free forever then later on that Trillian Pro came around. Adium was my favorite during that time.
> And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective

Same here. Love high ROI tools where the rug doesn't get pulled from underneath me ever year or two. Linux console tools, bash, vim, etc. My vim config dates back 20+ years, with only small modifications. I can log in into just about any *nix machine made in the last 30 years and be able to edit text at least somewhat comfortably. It takes me 30 seconds to set up a fresh Linux machine to my liking: clone a repo and run a script to symlink things to the right places in home dir. Done. I can also comfortably work from anywhere in the world over a crappy SSH connection.

C++ is the same. Glacial pace of change, skills from 20 years ago are still good with minimal modifications. 20 years from now it'll still be in use and it'll still be about the same. Which is exactly how I like it.

Another good thing about these gnarly old tools is that they weed out the dumb and impatient. I strongly suspect Rust is the same way - the learning curve and feature set look formidable. Lesser engineers are unlikely to ever learn it to the extent required to enjoy working in it. There's value in that, so I might learn it as well once they stop screwing with the core libs. I have work to do, I have no patience for such things.
What do CDC have to do with the efficacy of vaccines?
Your comment reminded me of Polis:

https://pol.is/ https://github.com/pol-is/

Taiwan use it for their multi-stakeholder decision making to find points of agreement. Their application of it to the Uber vs Taxis situation was quite interesting.

https://debconf18.debconf.org/talks/135-q-a-session-with-min...
https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5
https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blend...
Three D20 Betting Game
When we say "ML", we usually don't mean regression. We not mean deep learning, but at least we mean SVM, SGD, etc.

They may be less inscrutable than deep learning, but can easily still draw a box around most of the black people in a clever, non-obvious way.
That would be solidly legal, I'd guess. At least under federal law. Discrimination is just the preference of one thing over another. It is not illegal. What is illegal is racial, religious, sex, etc. discrimination.
Woah. It seems like a great repo. How are you changing the words? I mean, is there a database of words?
I think Oculus is pretty cool, but I don't really see the synergy with facebook here.