skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A related anecdote: I have a family member with granulomatosis with polyangiitis, abbreviated GPA, but usually called Wegner’s after the scientist that did most of the research on the disease.

Several years ago, someone pointed out that not only was Wegner a Nazi, a lot of his research was conducted on captive Jews. There was a push to start calling the disease GPA exclusively, but to this day most physicians call it Wegner’s. The inertia of the existing name and the fact that most of the world benefited from his research while only the Jews were harmed seems to be enough to keep his name in use.

Similarly, while established terms like “noosing” a lizard may be tangentially related to racism, I don’t think there’s enough will among scientists to change the term. Just because one person is offended doesn’t mean the term is bad. If the way you catch a lizard is by slipping a loop of string around its neck then it’s noosing. If you throw the loop of string and catch the lizard at a distance then it should be called lassoing. But don’t use less correct terms just because of a perceived (but non-existent) slight.

My own field of statistics has struggled with this, as noted in the article. The general way of thinking is to accept that there were some great statisticians in the past that had wacky ideas. My own dissertation rests on work that Ronald Fisher did. I’m fine with taking down a stained glass window of Fisher but I am also comfortable talking about Fisher’s information matrix.
If many others do not agree, then why not just work at a company where they won't change terminology for cultural sensitivity reasons?
A that's nice, yes I miss DejaNews because it provided a search interface, you couldn't search the whole tree unless you had downloaded all messages yourself.
Lego sets let you make Warhol, DC, Star Wars art
We look for villains but the real problem is simply humans in general.

We do so much damage to the world.

Plastic, greenhouse gases, overfishing, etc. to support our way of life.

Lots of other examples...We kill millions of birds with our pets, buildings, and green energy

We need to find a way to reduce our impact on the planet.
Having read the article, and done a bit more reading, I think a lot of the changes described here are good.

Marion Sims’s accomplishments are utterly tainted by the absolutely nightmarish ways he conducted his research. Anything that pretends he’s some sort of hero - including naming buildings after him - can go away and I won’t be too upset.

Likewise, Fisher’s accomplishments were great, but he was employed by eugenics organizations, actively pursued legislation to forcibly sterilize 10% of the population, and wrote essays supporting Nazi eugenics programs during and after WW2. Personally, I wouldn’t be too fond of walking past a mural every day of the guy who thinks that I, and anybody else who shares my line, should be “removed” from the breeding stock by whatever means necessary. We’re not striking him from history or anything - just removing the monuments glorifying him.

I also don’t think it’s the end of the world if we remove a slur from the rarely used scientific names of some obscure species.

Sure, there will always be people who try to take things too far. For example, I’m not sold that ‘noosing’ needs to go - but it doesn’t sound like that one actually has much support. But the changes that the article describes as actually having sufficient support to pass seem reasonable, at least to me.
Disorder is the order we don't want :)
An internet named 'weev' tried to do that when the iPad first came out. He found they had an open json endpoint for completing email addresses from the device IMEI. He ended up in prison for trying to publicly shame AT&T,
Mincir AVEC Plaisir – Perdez 7 Kilos EN 2 MOIS
> All the processes and knowledge were in place to make sure all considerations were taken with our software with regards to security. But... all that good work and intention goes out the window when the marketing and analysis teams could pretty much, on a whim dump any old JS onto a production page via GTM.

That's what's great about content security policies: put a CSP on the page, and when people try to add scripts without going through proper processes it just won't run.
There's plenty of precedent to find dumpster diving (or more specifically using sensitive information obtained that way) unlawful in a variety of situations. Most precedent in support of dumpster diving for sensitive information is in the context of law enforcement searches which are regarded somewhat differently by courts than a random individual obtaining sensitive information with questionable intent. Just Wikipedia mentions a case in which the dumpster-diver was ordered to pay damages in response to sensitive information retrieved by dumpster diving. It's just doesn't seem at all clear-cut that what the person here did is legal.
Are you arguing that they have started doing this in other places because tests are scarce? Because the dead are piling up? Really?
looks cool!

I see "dark mode" as a top-3 feature in more and more software these days. I know people feel pretty strongly about it, but it always feels out of place to me - or is it really one of the top-3 things people think about when choosing whether to try something.
You guys should consider donating to David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[0][1] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans. For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular animal and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little fella [2][3].

There is also the the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[4][5] which fights poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[6] is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed.

[0] http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust

[2] https://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/orphans/murit

[3] http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb

[4] http://www.iapf.org/en/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti-Poaching_Fo...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander
Usually the combination of names for the theory means that researchers recognize both versions as largely equivalent (e.g. Newton-Leibnitz axiom).

The contention that the combined theories must be the definition of computability should be true about each theory in isolation. If a Turing machine cannot calculate any computable problem, then why bother defining a Turing machine? What is the purpose of the definition if not to prove that any computable problem can be solved using the device? The same goes for lambda calculus.
Amusingly, given the starting point for this discussion, what you've described part of how the "OK" sign became associated with racism. In 2017, someone on 4chan's /pol/ board suggested "Operation O-KKK": flood Twitter etc with warnings about the supposedly racist meaning of the "OK" gesture. The initial target of the hoax was the regular "are you all right?" sign, but the inverted "circle game" version came under fire as well. Later, after the hoax had run its course, those who are wont to "own the libs" used it ironically as a joke. Time passes, only the most dedicated continue to use it, and its meaning becomes less a farce and more a serious signal.

(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)
It's terrible when the company tries to steal the personal work of an employee. However, look at the issue from the standpoint of the employer. Why should they allow people to work at the company for a time, then startup a competitor with the information they learned from the first company?
>operating sweatshops

Economists usually consider sweatshops to be good. It helps impoverished countries. For the workers these sweatshops usually pay better or have better working conditions than the alternatives.[0]

[0] https://web.northeastern.edu/econsociety/why-the-world-needs...
Political-correctness orgies like this are instigated by people who are in desperate need of a problem to have. I would be more sympathetic if they didn't make the rest of the world suffer to relieve their own boredom.
blaming the user is the wrong way to go -- you just set it up wrong.

Sometimes the user is wrong. If a person drives their car into a lake and drowns, do we say that cars are broken because they allow this? Or do we point to the millions of other drivers out there and say that driving on roads (and not into lakes) is the expected user behaviour?

An extreme example, sure, but I think it also translates to software. Some people criticize vi/vim for being modal because it confuses beginners. They use this as the basis of an argument that vi is a bad way to edit text or that modal interfaces are bad in general. But tons of other people take the time to learn the vi system of modal editing and they love it so much that they write plugins for everything else in an attempt to replicate that experience. Who is wrong here?
Maybe this applies more to countries with faster trains? They only go ~30mph here and I never had any problem crossing tracks on foot with trains in the far distance, and the rest of my family did it too. These tracks also had a lot of curves though.
I'm as impressed as anyone with GPT-3 samples, but you're sort of ignoring the symbol grounding elephant in the room regarding language models (https://openreview.net/pdf?id=GKTvAcb12b).

Language models are not grounded learners. The language produced does not really correspond meaningfully to our world except in superficial (albeit complex) ways.

Do you have thoughts on how to move forward on this problem? Maybe ask GPT-3 and see what it thinks :P
It's this interesting thing in Germany.

I'm sure I'm getting details a little wrong here, but basically if you're paying someone a certain salary to do a task, you aren't allowed to know how long it took to do it.

Microsoft Word has an example of this: The 'Total Editing time' tracking feature is disabled in Germany (and likely other countries.)
>that doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't have a right to use common language.

Nobody is suggesting otherwise.
I appreciate your comments.

> Bias has a very specific specific mathematical meaning in statistics--the difference between the expected value of the estimate (under the sampling distribution) and the true value.

Right, I'm aware of what bias is, and how it's defined, and while the statement you make is true, it misses the point: regardless of the camp you're in (frequentist or Bayesian), inference involves a prior, and that prior will affect your inferred parameter estimates (it may bias them, it may not, but flat priors do not guarantee unbiased estimates). I agree, under various contrived scenarios, you can show your parameter estimate is unbiased when using a flat prior (yay!) but what happens if you're using the wrong parameterization of your model? A flat prior on \theta is not a flat prior on \log\theta or any other transformation of theta, but if you're a frequentist what do you do about that? If you're not conscious of the prior choice you are making, you can easily introduce bias you don't want even with a flat prior.

> There are many examples of parameter estimates in classical statistics that have zero bias under that definition.

Elaborate. I assume by "parameter estimates" you mean MAP (or MLE = MAP with flat prior). E[\hat{\theta} - \theta] may be zero with a flat prior, but E[\hat{\log\theta} - \log\theta] wont be, so the bias in your parameter estimate depends on the parameter you really care about.

see e.g. [1] for an example where flat priors do actually bias inferences.

> Also incorrect. Bayesian and frequentist methods focus on different conditional probabilities and can give very divergent results even in simple cases. See e.g. Lindley's paradox [1].

OK so let me clarify because I agree that my wording is wrong: while I agree with you that there are differences between Bayesian and frequentist statistics, they are philosophical; they answer different questions: ironically the wikipedia article you linked to actually says it pretty well: "Although referred to as a paradox, the differing results from the Bayesian and frequentist approaches can be explained as using them to answer fundamentally different questions, rather than actual disagreement between the two methods."

[1]: https://mc-stan.org/users/documentation/case-studies/weakly_...

"Although flat priors are often motivated as being “non-informative”, they are actually quite informative and pull the posterior towards extreme values that can bias our inferences."
The environment has not changed much at all in the past two decades.

You spuriously quote a few random cases of sudden death and claim it has been on the uptick but lack the holistic data of the past few hundred years to determine whether that's a true statement or not.

The beached whale could be caused
by shifts in Earth's geomagnetic field, which whales use to navigate: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/weakening-earths-magnetic-field-co...

Diseases are caused by random mutations of bacterial, fungal and viral sources, and have occurred since the beginning of life itself.
Understand the basics of evolution and incentives.

Favorite books for practical psychology - Thinking Fast and Slow, How to win friends and influence people.
I'm one of the people who started using emacs just for org-mode about a year ago. I've been using it daily to manage my schedule, TODOs and projects. It's nice, but IMO overhyped by a very vocal religious minority. I've been spending as much time configuring little things and working around rough edge cases than it has actually saves me. Elisp is still somewhat of a mystery to me and I'm mostly copying and pasting snippets without truly understanding what's going on.

I've encountered so many little issues that resulted in hours of debugging and searching for solutions that the net productivity gain has definitely been negative. True, if I stick with it for 10+ more years, the productivity gain will likely become net positive, but who knows if that will happen. IMO it's quite likely that better systems are going to be invented over the next 1-2 decades. It's clearly outdated.

Only do it if you are willing to invest a large amount of time into learning emacs, and if you are planning to stick with it for decades. The best for me way to describe it is: Emacs is the ultimate procrastination tool. It's great at making you feel productive by letting you do meta things with elisp and configs, when you really should just be getting stuff done.
> The reality is that very observers anticipated an "easy" war.

Just for clarity, I think you meant:

> The reality is that very few observers anticipated an "easy" war.
> The "real and raw" parts of the internet are only enjoyed by people whose lives are so pathetic that they have to fill the emptiness with conflict and bigotry.

So if I want real news instead of the disneyfied version, it's because I'm an empty bigot?

And if I don't accept your judgement on what constitutes "hate speech", It because I'm <insert insult here>?

> Like with codes of conduct in open source communities, the bigots..

So what's you position on Opalgate?
In our country we have unprotected (sign-only) crossings, red light crossings without barriers, red light and barriers crossings and red-white light crossing (with out without barriers). The blinking white light informs the safety system is working and it is safe to cross. Unfortunately, they are actually removing the white lights to match the rest of the EU.
Slightly off topic, but It was interesting talking about elephants with my wife from India, she does not have the same warm fuzzy feelings I do regarding elephants as her main memory of them was her father guarding his field against wild elephants
Is that more of a jagged / ragged array, or array of arrays? Sometimes these are called multidimensional arrays, but these are not the same thing. Dimensions and lengths of the dimensions should be a property of the multidimensional object.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/597720/what-are-the-diff...
> technically any ad can run random js on our sites

If you configure your ad network to run all ads cross-domain, then they are very limited. For example, in GPT (which I work on) you call "googletag.pubads().setForceSafeFrame(true)".

(Disclosure: speaking only for myself)
hopefully it isn't COVID related. Maybe botulism especially if the corpses are not being actively consumed by scvangers.
Please don't use the word "we" in this presumptive way. People who disagree with you are still part of the "we" of Hacker News.
Most of the scientists is the article were the ones to “politicize” science in the first place, using research in statistics or Genetics to springboard into arguing for political policy - that the government should forcibly sterilize millions.

And in Sims' case, he was explicitly taking advantage of the political climate in the southern US at the time. It was not blind coincidence the research was undertaken there - acquiring his test subjects would not have been so easy in the rest of the world (Southern medical colleges used to advertise this particular grisly advantage). So in the same way, this research is also ties to politics from the beginning.

And WRT the one that includes slurs... I mean, I don't think "don't use slurs" should be political.
Yes! Signed up to 6 courses. Never started any of them. I'm going back to learning by doing and a few paper books.
Yes, I agree. That's why my example was a randomized trial. But you could also compare with a baseline from results in the previous year or whatever.
I believe if the device is obtained lawfully, there isn't much anyone can do regarding what you then decide to do with it or any of its contents.

This is precisely why you should drill through hard drives and flash media before removing them from your secure areas.
I used to work for a bank. I suspect that they found it near impossible to get $50 for a CDN approved.
Ask HN: Asana Alternatives?
Looking for something that doesn't overcome you with so much frustration that you lean against the closed door of your office and silently scream
Thanks for the story! Also, I wish 'webmaster' was still a title used in the industry.
Violence against unarmed and vulnerable people is just safer for the police.
Long-time OneNote user chiming in. I've briefly switched to Evernote but due to their frequent screw-ups I switched back to OneNote. Stylus input is a big part for my dev logs, and one good thing about OneNote is that it accepts both handwriting and text without prejudice.

Also, pages in OneNote are allowed to have 2 levels of indent. More than that you can organize with traditional folder structures. The difference is that a less indented "parent" page can still have content; a folder does not contain content on its own.

I would strongly recommend OneTastic as it adds quite a few missing features from stock OneNote (crop image, calendar view, etc.)
Look, I get where you're coming from, but this post was specifically about places to find nuanced discussion on the internet, and in the context of that, responding to

> No one advocates that you should only speak if you lived it, we say that those who lived it must have a say if that is in any way possible.

I stand by what I said. If you're coming to the table for nuanced discussion, I don't think it makes much sense to shout down your opponent with ad hominems simply because others have argued against you in bad faith before. If you're weary of explaining something, I get that, but I don't think coming to a place full of people looking for a nuanced discussion and calling them names when they may basically be on your side already does your cause any good. I understand it, and it's a completely human reaction, but it's alienating.
Not precisely true. IIRC it first came about during one of the iterations of the tumblr trans wars to describe people who identified as things like "AFAB demigirl" and kept claiming that people who wanted to medically transition "just wanted to be able to pretend they were cis" and therefore "weren't really trans", which understandably went down about as well as a shart in a spacesuit with the people with severe physical dysphoria.

There was a stupendous amount of circular firing squad style stupidity to go around back in those days.
> There is a reason to value diversity but it's as far from theoretical as you can get:

I'm not sure that's the takeaway. Diversity ensures change and optimization (in a roundabout way). Stability in cultures is about application of optimization and more often, culling. I guess case in point depends on your time frame reference and what you mean by stability. Rome and the Aztecs wiped out almost as much as they assimilated (and assimilation was generally via enslavement, which is not quite the same).
Possibly because they've experienced their data being used in the past for Micromanagement.

Source: Been Micromanaged in the past and seen scenarios where said micromanagers used such data on others.
> The state of things needs to be brought back to the point where arbitrary JS simply cannot mess up your browser by design

What do you imagine your more restricted JavaScript being permitted to do, where it is safe to run on a banking website?
Facial Recognize in Python
Neat. But might it not just be easier to predict the influence of race and then use that to adjust the output/threshold?
Well XML is still better for that than binary, which I suspect VB was. We did have Xcode project files in git and it was ok.
Actually no. Cannot be too big and automatic. You need to allow a stranded car to break free. You must not crush a car that is only half way in.

Sigh.

Railway crossings are pure evil. There is no fail safe design that I know of without adding a proximity sensor inside the car (I am a railway signalling engineer). Would love to be wrong though.
Three Ways Authentication Has Evolved Since 1960
"Silicon Valley" (the concept, not the physical place) is not a friend of the common people, and this is slowly being exposed. The VC nexus is mostly self-interested elites, trying to hold on to what they've got. Are any of them calling this out? Why go after reporters? Why doesn't this VC engage with Elon Musk, who makes many of the same claims about Covid-19 (and worse), and has a much larger following?
PKI is insufficient protection in this case. If someone obtains the hardware and has a few years to sit on it, it is possible that private keys can eventually be broken (or compromised via other channels).
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Any rich part of town is policed without any use of significant force.