skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s just one of the approaches, another one is counting excess deaths - delta between predicted and actual mortality rates.

It normalizes against external factors, such as poor testing infrastructure or (in some countries) government pressure to keep the numbers low.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
I thought LeCun was at Facebook?
I am always wonder how would these civilizations would be today if they left to grow alone, without the European affection and love. Like we couldn't even have access to them until we have satellite internet, human rights, European committee, global journalism, things that could hold the 'explorers' from committing civilization crimes and for completely vanish exotic cultures.

What it would be like to have a conversation with a native american about their land and their forest, how far would Aztecs would reach, what relegion does the Rapa Nui people really had, and so many wonderful things we could get from people of Africa and all over the world.

Even then, their ground would be taken, their villages would be burned down and nobody would know. Is it possible to leave such a big continent to people without guns? Is it possible to leave them live the natural life they choose to live, without forcing them to settle in a house like our ancestors did 12.000 year before? And because of that my back hurts, my body is stiff, I have anxiety for virtual things and my connection with the nature is broken.

But no more cultures left to modernize in Earth, let's find another planet to help.
The Art of Discarding for Programmers
Using the right incentives creates great work.

This is essentially what policy and politics are... should be
Yann LeCun is an excellent engineer, and he is making pedagogy about AI. His point is totally valid, but yet, he gets political replys that lose him.

Yan LeCun would be comfortable talking about why back propagation in convNets does better with white tones and shadows, but is not a politician, seller, politically correct personality, able to answer some "You can't reduce the society bias of ML to some kinda data bias ALWAYS #somehashtag".

See my point?
Wouldn't want to be in charge of maintaining the system that has to handle the DVD and DVD drive farm.
Appearance includes hair, piercings, tattoos. Those definitely say things about personality!
9/11 killed about 3k Americans, was it really that bad?
I have a plug-in installed in vim and vscode (and ilellij) that provide me with relative line numbers in addition to absolute line numbers. So, the current active line might display "353" in the gutters for the 353rd line. Both the line above and below are 1. The next lines above and below are 2. And so on.

There is never any "counting lines". If I need line's number, I can do a quick addition/substraction in my head or j/k $offset to see the other line's absolute number.

I can do line-based operations a lot faster than shift-tapping or click-dragging, with exact precision because my editor has been customized to provide the data I need. Eventually you get pretty good at estimating line numbers and character columns too.
Facebook Labeled 'Boogaloos' a 'Dangerous Organization' and Banned 500 Groups
I wonder what a court would rule if you went through your algorithm line by line and demonstrated that is was only designed to maximize profit, and the fact that it was racist was only incidental.

I'm guessing it's illegal to discriminate based on race, gender or ability no matter how much it extra it costs a business, whether its deliberate or not.
They even made a freaking movie about it (Contagion). So I'd say it was absolutely predictable.
> Can you tell me one other religion which has the concept of caste in religious scriptures?

They may not be having caste-based discrimination but they do have other forms of discrimination. That's why you have terms like heathens, heretics and kafirs.

While I agree that Hindus have more of this caste-based discrimination, a simple search shows that it's not exactly uncommon in other religions in India.

https://scroll.in/article/876000/is-the-caste-system-deep-ro...

https://theprint.in/opinion/indias-muslim-community-under-a-...

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2019/sep/01/c...
Jacking up the price and giving me more channels I don't want.

Its gone starting August 15th.
Yes, they could have picked a classification model with social impact instead of a GAN. GANs are mostly toys for art and image augmentation. The bulk of models are supervised classification.
I’m always interested in this opinion.

What IDE features do you think vim is missing that aren’t available via LSP plugins?
The CDC was so pathetic that I no longer give the benefit of doubt to anything done or promoted by the government when it is related to contagious diseases.

This includes vaccines.
The different types of coffee beans: the ultimate guide
As a female seafarer (26 years at sea), I know exactly where she's coming from. Never mind touching, the times I've sat and talked about anything other than work (non-sexual, just friendly) have invariably resulted in at least one or two crew members either taking it as an invitation to harass me or assault me, or caused friction with the rest of the crew.

In my experience, I can be friendly, but I have to stay distant for safety (mine) and discipline (the whole crew).
The best statistical tool we have to figure out the real death rate due to COVID is excess mortality, and these numbers have been higher even than the seemingly overattributed numbers.

There are still a bunch of people who die and don't get attributed, and there are people who die because there's a pandemic on and they don't get healthcare as a result, either because there isn't capacity or to avoid infection.
Tell them that there is nothing superior about misleading people using pseudo science such as astrology.
If you read the book Black Swan, it is exactly one of its defining characteristics that it is unpredictable. The only thing you can do against black swans is making systems less fragile.
Bloomberg is in the business of supplying news to people who actually really care about the details (traders, investors, etc), while WSJ is not. It's amazing how great Bloomberg is and how far they've expanded in recent years: tv, podcasts, longform, breaking news, etc. Like Google, this is all possible because of their obscenely profitable core product (the Terminal), though unlike Google, Bloomberg actually is in it for the long-haul.
The EU limited CC transaction fees to 0.3%. That's the reason why there are no cashback deals for CC here.
You can finally directly register domains with Cloudflare
This issue reminds me of the IQ testing and measurement problem of regression bias, which likewise arises from statistical artifacts from decades past (when tests were administered to much more narrow and self-selecting groups of subjects than today).

The means calculated using much less diverse series of historical cohorts are still being fed back in to present IQ calculations, which thus retain a persistent corresponding "echo" of the biases in favor of those early test results.

The echo is gradually fading, but some say a clean reboot of the baselines is the right way to resolve historical sample biases which still skew IQ testing away from an accurate modeling of the diversity in present test populations.
the why do i have to “download” my document in libreoffice if i want to keep it?
The classic (multi-decade problem repeated again, and again, and again...) is face detection. Face detection models continue to get trained by primarily white developers/researches who continue to use primarily white people as their training set. And then they're shocked when their model performs terribly for everyone who isn't of European decent.

This case is so pervasive that it gets taught in basically every university that teaches ML - and yet those students go on to repeat the exact problem they were educated against.
We can say bye-bye to our nice demos and pre-trained models after this debacle. Who's going to risk their ass just to be caught with some unknown bias?
In this case, ironically, it seems that an AI could incorrectly depixelate faces of suspects caught by surveillance cameras to white instead of black. Which would lead to a bias against white people.
To provide a little bit of context for this work, one of the open questions in astronomy is how core collapse supernovae work. Computational scientists have struggled for a long time to get simulations of core collapse to explode. Typically to get an explosion they have to artificially insert a "piston" somewhere in the system that kicks the system outwards during the collapse and triggers the shock wave.

Over maybe the last decade or so there's been some thought that if our simulations have trouble getting supernovae to explode, then perhaps nature has trouble getting supernovae to explode, too. Maybe a lot of massive stars just collapse directly into a black hole with no supernova. If this were the case then it would explain a discrepancy between the observed supernova rate and the total number of black holes; there seems to be about twice as many black holes as there are supernovae.

When I was in grad school one of the ongoing projects in my department was the so-called "Survey about Nothing" in which they took deep images of nearby galaxies and waited to see if any bright stars just... disappeared. (They did find one candidate: https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1761)

The authors in this paper find another star that just disappeared. The trouble with all this is that if a star disappears it's unclear what exactly happened. Maybe it collapsed into a black hole, or maybe it just temporarily shrouded itself in dust and will be back in a few decades. The new thing about this star is that they have detailed spectra of the star prior to its disappearance, which helps tremendously with modeling the star. The hope is that with more detailed measurements they might be able to place limits on what is currently there and thereby figure out if a direct collapse happened or not.
Go's error-oriented style makes it very painful to write long sequences of fallible operations, particularly if your organization has test coverage requirements. I'll write servers in Go all day long, but scripting is the last thing I'd use it for.
TVs sold in Europe are sometimes advertised as having multiple tuners. OTA viewing is the most common type in several countries here.

With digital TV, several channels are multiplexed into a single broadcast frequency, so channel hopping is sometimes OK even with a single tuner.
How "Investor Mindset" makes or breaks a software developer
> but because she did not explicitly state those on twitter, or because of the way she brought it up, we need to invalidate her whole argument?

No-one said anything that could be remotely interpreted as "her whole argument is invalid".

I'm sure he'd be more than happy to discuss with Gebru where he agrees and where he differs on his Facebook page or at a conference panel. I think he explicitly said this.

He's just decided that Twitter is not the platform for that kind of reasoned debate. Gebru's attitude in this instance - providing nothing more than "I'm tired of this, you need to listen to marginalized communities" - was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I grew up with norton commander so when on linux I'm taking mcedit over vim any day. :-)
You're probably right. I did this before streams were a thing.
It's not just the question of dying, although the numbers seems to be concentrating on that. Some people who don't die are sick for months. Some don't really fully recover, or have lasting effects.

It's a bit like the stats for dying driving. It doesn't include people who survive but lose their legs or can't function independently anymore. In both cases think of the affected percentage which is so much higher.
Personally, I would engaging with the caste system for any purpose other than to destroy it is very wrong. I've seen plenty of upper-caste people assume someone's caste based on their appearance. They may have been wrong, but I fail to see how that is relevant, as I'm not justifying or explaining, just describing. If your particular objection is to the word 'determine', then I think we're getting hopelessly bogged down in semantics.
The issue is that "fashion for minorities" is correlated with being a minority which is correlated with poverty which is correlated with high credit risk.

This makes "buys fashion for minorities" quite an accurate predictor of high credit risk, but also a profoundly racist one.
I still see his account on Twitter so I am confused what does it mean to "quit" twitter? Can you not hide your account like you can in Facebook? Not familiar with the social media platforms so much.
Would they be able to achieve that without using libdvdcss which could cause legal problems? Also, I think most people want HD or 4k these days
You’re missing the broader picture. This is not a problem with data, AI, algorithms or whatever. This is simply a mathematical issue that is fundamentally unsolvable.

Imagine you have two groups of people that have different means and distributions of “input” (could be intelligence, wealth, interests, ...), and this input is somehow correlated with some output (insurance rate, criminality, university acceptance rate). Both input and output are one-dimensional.

Then you only have two choices. (1) You “unify” the distribution and use it as joint input, resulting in one group (the one with the higher mean) getting “more” - many people think this is unfair. (2) Or you can subtract the means first and so make the distributions as equal as possible, which can result in a person from the “more” group having worse outcome than an equivalent person from the “less” group (if the means are close together and the distributions are wide, there will be many such people) - many people would consider this unfair.

There are plenty of examples, current and historical, of society picking one or the other, for different groups and topics: wealth/success/income (old vs young, Jews&Asians vs other Americans, men vs women, whites vs blacks), university acceptance (Jews used to be discriminated against (look up “Jewish problems”), now Asians are, men vs women [1], “positive” discrimination of blacks) - just a few. In many examples historically, we consider (1) fundamentally better than (2) - e.g. discrimination against Jews at universities - but it seems it takes the society a long time to reach this conclusion in each instance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...
Ok, that's enough. We've banned this account for doing flamewar on HN and ignoring our requests to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Great point! Compartmentalisation is one thing but in large orgs, everyone starts focusing on one metric they need to boost (backlogs or PRs or design mocks) and we have no idea how this will affect other teams. We just have good metrics to show.
You may be using vim wrong. Good for you if you like it that way
How is this differentiated from the other player in this space? What's the difference with the Google Analytics, MixPanel, Amplitudes, etc. of the world?
What makes iOS elegant over Android in your opinion ?

You seem to state it as a fact but I believe it is your opinion .
An Intel engineer sends PR https://github.com/herumi/xbyak/pull/95
Because the points of disagreement are the reason she's upset, and the reason there is an argument in the first place.

Of course she's right about all the things that everyone agrees on. Everyone in the conversation is right about most points, if you break down their stance into a list of points.

It's not that the points of disagreement invalidate the correct points, it's that having a bunch of correct points doesn't really tell you much about the thesis.
The quota system is actually called 'reservation' and it's not specific to South India.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

Though the percentage of the seats reserved varies with each state.
Yeah, I miswrote!
> and climate scientists have shifted to activism that it is hard to differentiate truth and science from activism and propaganda.

Any example of this?
That's what the googley eyes are for! Ideally, this isn't the only "greppy" design (:
In Netherlands they already work

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/amsterda...
Maybe this is temporarily? I pay with card now. But intend to go back to cash after covid19.
The concept of a middle class doesn't really apply particularly well to India in terms of it's use in economics. I have found in my experience that people who refer to themselves as upper middle class (in the Indian context) are usually simply embarrassed to admit that they are members of the upper class, since they don't see themselves as such. Economically, they undoubtedly are.

Edit: Having checked, the annual pretax income required to be in the top 1% of earners in India is 77000 USD.
Google is certainly doing some great work with this, both Project Euphonia and other research [0]. However, as far as I know, the Euphonia dataset is closed and only usable by Google. A Common Voice disordered speech dataset would (presumably) be open to all, allowing independent projects and research. (I would love to have access to such a dataset.)

[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/project-euphonias-personal...
I'm keeping my eye out for the Bosch Lightdrive. Presented at the last CES, no specific release dates for products using that technology yet.
Wow. Must be a nice place. I used to live in a super nice 1br for 1300/month in Chicago 4y ago.
I'd say Python has more batteries than Go.

Also I recently learned Go's CLI parser is pretty weak compared to argparse.
This is like saying it's not a civil engineers job to solve the geography's faults. If you can't build a safe and balanced bridge, then don't.

It has real world consequences that can drastically damage communities.
historical stock and flow economic modelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC

(and then there's Cybersyn. It's difficult to evaluate how effective or ineffective it may have been, as the copper drop in value relative to gold by 5x in the early 1970's must've been a serious exogenous shock to the Chilean economy)
I don't think you can set headers on redirects.
Shame you can't link to the original Slate Star Codex copy.
The whole thing is an illustration of what a mess Twitter is. Sorting out what LeCun's overall message is seems next to impossible given the patchwork of ten line messages from who knows who.

But I just wanted to say that in the instance of a neural net that grants bail or not, there's an issue beyond either biased data or the neural reproducing previously biased opinions.

The modern notion of fairness implies that the individual be judged based on their personal merits rather than things roughly correlated with their surface characteristics. Being black is correlated with being poor and being poor is correlated with being a criminal and various other bad behaviors. But that doesn't mean it's fair to punish a given individual, who is only responsible for themselves, for such surface characteristic.

Which is to say that if an AI crunches the numbers in a objective fashion with the aim to make decisions based on various correlations, that can fundamentally problematic regardless of the bias of the original data or people.
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. If you have corrective information, that's great, but provide it neutrally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The phrase used often is 'caste-class nexus'. I think that's a good way to put it.
I sympathize with the desire of average joes to take down footage of their smelling hair and rubbing people the wrong way. We need the internet archive.org. Some of the best website are only to be found there.
I just sold my Oculus Quest after a couple of months. For me the down sides were:

1. Weight and overall comfort. Pressure on the forehead, sweating if you're playing physical games and the room is warm can make the lens foggy; even the rubbery-plasticky smell of it. It's just not fun to use physically.

2. Resolution/graphics. I just wish it could have higher resolution and I won't see the pixels. Would make everything much more immersive.

3. Usefulness/content. It's cool but it gets old pretty fast. I just found myself barely playing after a couple of weeks of the initial excitement.

Motion sickness wasn't a problem for most games, which was a surprise since I get game sickness from FP games on a normal screen and can't play them more than a couple of minutes.

So I guess 1 and 2 can be solved by this technology.
It was definitely terrible for many other countries.
In this thread though we are talking about someone’s experience using piracy to spend a month learning something. $40 seems like a reasonable alternative to that.
Not for coding. The resolution just isn't there yet.

Roughly, per-eye resolution is in the same ballpark as HD displays, but stretched over a 90+ degree field of view. Fonts need to be very large to be legible. You can create a theater sized virtual monitor, but it's just taxing to use. Aliasing artifacts make it worse.

At least for text-focused tasks, I'd take virtually any display built in the past 40 years over a modern VR headset.
Hackney news is not the place for these kinds of jokes because they add nothing to the conversation.
Reddit's Steve Huffman on Banning ‘The_Donald’ Subreddit
Why is knowledge artificially limited by all these paywalls and people holding literature and books hostage to their financial interest? What is better a world where a poor kid can read any book ever published or a world where you can only read the books that you can afford. Most technical books are expensive.
But.. people do eat to much, and the problem would go away if they ate less.

Sometimes it is useful to just summarize a problem as clearly and simply as possible.
Using Senegal would make people look Senegalese, not "African."

> Not all black people are Africans or have African heritage. Far from it, in fact.

Exactly. That's the "rational" point: the mistake was training the data on anything but the target population. Nobody is contenting that it could have been trained on something else: it wasn't and that fact is the problem.

> Also: darker? Darker than what? Are you taking “white” as your baseline

Darker than the white people the algorithm turns most inputs into. Have you seen the results?
No surprise there. Nepotism, casteism and regionalism are widespread at certain companies in India.
Ironically it's kind of a shame, but I feel that the success of Firebug ended up hurting Firefox in the long run.

Firebug was really a pioneer in the devtools, but for so long Firefox just allowed it to be the defacto Dev tools that google ended up lapping them. And they we made to play catch up

Once developers started jumping, they convinced slowly got their relatives or non techs friends to switch.
I agree with everything you say but it might be worth considering the "social" impact and aspects of AI models that are touted to change the world and are being rapidly adapted to our everyday lives with or without our consent. I can understand that engineers are not trained to consider those aspects but leaving them entirely to their non-creator or external bureaucrats might also not be the best strategy since they hardly understand the systems as well as engineers do. I am not sure what is the best strategy for this co-existence.
The hatred for ‘Karens’ is out of control
> the overwhelming probability is that.... yes, it was COVID-19

Even if you had stage 4 cancer and would die in a week anyway?

Then there's the issue of excess deaths caused by _not going to the doctor_ because you can't do "elective" procedures like stents and such, or just because you're afraid of getting infected. You can die of cardiovascular (or other) disease this way, and if you had e.g. asymptomatic covid (like most people who have it) you'd be counted as a COVID death then.