skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a lot of legal precedent for this distinction that depends on your jurisdiction, but largely boils down to how much control the worker has over the work.

Uber and the like claim the workers choose when to work, how much, whether to accept gigs etc. But this is part of the problem: offering gigs at a set rate as take it or leave it is insufficient control. A real contractor would be able to negotiate and adjust this rate.

Uber drivers are employees delivering services core to the function of the business.
It's beyond me how two ex-Google engineers and graduates of top CS programs with 2 years on their hands end up creating a resume generator that a CS freshman could have written in their free time! Not putting you down or anything, sometimes unexpected random things jam your workflow (like unfamiliarity with front end design), etc.
I agree, but that's not the authors fault. NoScript actually makes NYT enjoyable to read, although this article you do have to scroll for a while.
I'd stay on Linux.

I've had too many experiences with sysadmin automation working out of the box on Linux and being a total pain on windows to consider a switch.

For example: a project at $work was to deploy osquery on all our servers, and write some of the data it produces to Kafka. The Windows package was delayed for about 9 to 12 months compared to the Linux packages, due to a chain of bugs, these bugs being fixed but not released, then the release was tagged but there were no official builds etc.

Various config management tools seem to have only half-baked Windows support, and so on.
If you want to have a separate conversation on whether false speech is prosecuted in the United States, we can do that. But this isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand, which is how is "cancel culture" at odds with "free speech."

> And I'm saying "No, I think we ought to appropriately punish people who do make false claims" in response to the original question "Would you like to judge how limited my speech should be?"

Okay, but then you aren't disagreeing with me; just posting a tangential point. In the example posted:

> If an unknown woman issues a public twitter statement that she's been abused, is it OK to get the alleged offender cancelled before a court trial?

There's no indication that the claims are false, and if they are false, that the people making the claims aren't punished. All it asks is "is it okay to share information about an accusation, even if you aren't certain it's true?"
Clojure is a compiled language btw. It's just compiled on the fly. When you're evaluating new functions at the repl, Clojure is generating Java bytecode and dynamically loading it.
“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman—and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones—then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

I could annotate her most recent post (and all of them) pointing out all of the dogwhistles, but this paragraph is pretty demonstrative of the style I was referring to. She starts from a defense of trans women, one that rings false because of all of the qualifications she makes which anti-trans activists will pick up on -- "Like women" "Natal girls and women" etc. etc., and then transitions seamlessly into harmful and dangerous tropes (men in dresses are coming to molest YOUR daughters!) from half a century ago. And of course, all of this is an overstated panic, and the solution of gender neutral bathrooms has been working just fine in the Bay Area and elsewhere. To be honest, that isn't even the most offensive dogwhistle in this article: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

As far as Paul goes, I wonder who exactly he sees to be the powerless? To circle back to Rowling, is it the multi-millionaire author? Or trans people in the U.K.? These wealthy folks are not simply advocates, they're partisans. And not for a generic free speech, but simply the speech they believe is right.
Their mistake is they're trying to do something that all the other established players could essentially replicate overnight. Their big innovation is the shows are shorter? On top of it, their execution is poor. They put out the standard shows you would see anywhere else except edited so that a single episode turns into a half dozen shorter ones. They pretty much positioned themselves out in no man's land between Netflix and YouTube. They really seem oblivious to what's already out there, who their competition is and where they fit in.
It's not "is told", it is "it is writen in the binary itself that the kernel/libc runtime should load the shared library".
> In today’s climate, it’s hard to avoid offending somebody.

And importantly, offending someone today is much more likely to have serious consequences than it was 10 years ago (that's my perception, anyway). A decade ago if you wrote something innocuous (especially while having the wrong immutable characteristics) and someone wrote your employer demanding your termination on the grounds that your innocuous thing could be interpreted as 'hate' by virtue of some absurd mental gymnastics ("well if we change the definition of 'hate' in such a way as to encompass innocuous offenses, then voila, your employee is guilty of 'hate' and should be fired!"), your employer would likely have told that person to piss off.

Note also that a common use case for pen names was to establish credibility when one's identity (gender, race, etc) would be used against them. I don't know that many anonymous writers are trying to conceal their gender or race these days, but I certainly see many, many more rebuttals that are some variation of "the author is wrong because of their identity" or rather "the author is not only wrong but evil/hateful/racist/otherwise-deserving-of-cancelation because of their identity" than I did 10 or 20 years ago.
In that case, I would say HR is at fault not for asking that affirmative action be taken, but for not backing it up by making the job attractive in the first place.

If you can actually attract people to your company, then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue; there are plenty of qualified women for any position. If you can't attract people to the job generally, I think any other factors would largely be noise versus the real problem.
i know my life was flashing before my eyes when i logged out of my old phone and then my new phone asked for 2FA coz like a dumbo i stored the 8 codes in google drive...
This article seems to be yet another long-winded attempt to say that human beings have some sort of "soul" or "vital essence" that computers don't, but since those ideas are out of vogue, it uses obfuscated language to make the same point without explicitly saying it.

See:

> which have allegedly shown that our decisions are not the result of “some mysterious free will”, but the result of “millions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second”

> the quotations are “nothing but” the result of chemical algorithms and “no more than” the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells. How can they then be true?

The article is suggesting that human beings cannot say true things about the world or themselves if human intelligence is no more than chemical algorithms and nerve cells, and that proponents of physicalism are therefore contradicting themselves. This is a fairly bizarre argument.

The use of "allegedly" with regards to explaining human decisions as a result of neurons further reinforces the claim that therefore, there must be some mysterious free will, a human soul, or here a "social context", to explain human consciousness.

The trouble with vitalism or claims of a human soul should be fairly self-evident in the modern age, and claiming that denying it is "scientism" is utter nonsense.

They then mix it up by saying that computers are not in the physical world and do not have a body, therefore cannot be generally intelligent like humans. This is obviously false, what is a robot if not a computer with a body? Computers can interact with the world using sensors and actuators, there's no theoretical reason that they could not match or exceed human physical capabilities (they already do in narrow instances).
This feels a lot like Douglas Hofstadter's elaborate explanation in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid of how computers will never beat the best human chess players.
I wouldn't start using it for things I currently use Linux for. The overhead is just to high.

However, I might start to split my Windows Server VMs into multiple ones, so one VM per function. Currently to conserve licenses, we put multiple roles on one VM (and sometimes they have different requirements wrt. RAM or CPU heavy, or critical vs non-critical...)
This blog post lists a bunch of gradient-free optimization packages, some genetic and some Bayesian: https://sigopt.com/blog/comparison-bayesian-packages-hyperpa.... Nothing from the mathematical programming community in here, so definitely other options too (depending on what kind of problems you are trying to address).

Personally, I like Nevergrad (https://facebookresearch.github.io/nevergrad/) a lot for general purpose optimization problems -- I think it is very well implemented and has a variety of tools available. I also think the documentation is appropriately honest about what is and is not known for how these algorithms work in different circumstances.

If you want something Bayesian (sample-efficient) which is very lightweight, I like PySOT (https://pysot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). Part of why I like it is that it's written by friends of mine, but I also legitimately like its performance across a decent set of problems.

If you want something Bayesian which has corporate support (so that you know it's updated/maintained), I would recommend Botorch/Ax from Facebook (https://botorch.org/docs/botorch_and_ax). They have done a lot of research for it (a recent preprint is here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.05078.pdf) and have put together a very solid implementation including considerations for running online optimization problems. I think the documentation is a bit weak, but the software and research is outstanding.

Another corporate-supported option is Optuna (https://optuna.org/) from Preferred Networks. I also know some of the people working on this and I think it is a good implementation of the kernel density estimation strategy for statistical modeling -- preferring lower computational cost and consistent timing over performance. I had difficulties running it in server mode while I was testing, but if you're running locally that will not be a problem.

As is always the case with optimization strategies, there is no one answer. Different tools perform well in different circumstances. There can be bad tools, but, likely, there will never be a best tool (in my estimation).
Amazon Makes Employees Delete TikTok from Phones, Citing Security Risk
I'm more surprised Amazon (or any company, really) employees using an employer-managed device would have TikTok on them to start with, to be honest.

As the follow-up tweet says: "Completely independent of the specifics in this instance: get a second device before installing an employer's config profile on your personal device"
Getting windows signature devices is a good start. It doesn't get rid of the baked in telemetry, but it does ensure you're getting a fresh copy of windows (with Candy Crush and whatever store apps they decide to install) without any of the bloatware OEMs like to install.
Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23728390
So much talk about UI this and that - how about leaving UI and feature set alone and instead focus on speed and memory foot print?

Though recent versions are better, it still feels slow compared to Office.
> The engineer in me finds this painful and wants to scream inside, but empirically this does work..

If it doesn't make sense it's because it makes dollars...
As a student of history of a few countries, China included, it is hard not to see parallels of today to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session . I have already seen public service and community advocacy meetings descend into chaos as people try to out-woke each other while accusing others of being racists.
My audiophile friends would vehemently agree with this statement :)
What is "religious" is this inclination to treat human intelligence as this magical thing that works outside the laws of nature, as if our neurons and our brain were something other than just chemistry doing very complex things.

That would be quite an extraordinary claim that requires equally extraordinary evidence.
There's no standardized process for producing a "good developer". Every company has a different process and different standards. I think that's a part of the problem and I agree that it's not one academia can solve, but I wonder if there could potentially be another way.
I assume they won't be doing that to the main-stream spyware pushed by US companies.
I'm not sure I understand what's wrong with constantly asking consent. I guess saying "no" could be roughly like responding on request for the Moon - no, darling, you can't have the Moon on your palm or in your room. Is it a contradiction - factually "revoking consent" while doing that (as much as possible) in culture B style? Is it possible?
I might be missing something, but what makes Active Directory so much better than any other LDAP implementation?

My limited understanding is that it has better tooling and defaults, and that it's more than just an LDAP implementation, but is it really that much better if you aren't in the Microsoft ecosystem?
I will never do business with Rackspace again after they hell they put me through.

When your entire security posture falls apart when one minimum wage call center employee gets bamboozled you should not be in business. Fuck that company.
> But if Schily is any indication (and why not?) it doesn't help to have a different party fill that position.

I agree on that one. There aren't many progressives in interior politics aside from Left and Greens, the rest is all authoritarian/law-and-order hardliners. Frankly, it's disgusting.
Generate Electricity from Shadows
All of the languages I want to write software in work the same or better on Linux compared to windows. All of my administrative and user experience is with Linux. Linux seems to have better performance for almost every possible use case, and has ZFS. I just don’t see any compelling reason to use Windows Server for anything other than legacy. MS would have to cut me a sizable check each month for my trouble.
Like the probabilistic bank account balance. "You have between $10 and $1000 with the greatest likelihood being $537 (52% chance)."
> some sort of democracy

Yeah... "some sort" says it all doesn't it?

It's a much deeper discussion that this topic or medium affords. But that very same system took away through various means millions of citizens' right to vote, and routinely generates situations where the will of the majority is overridden by a minority. And there's a lot more where that came from. You are given just enough power to feel in control but not enough to be in control. You have a voice but nobody really has to listen.

I grant you that, there are clearly far more freedoms in the western world in general than in China. But there's nothing better about US's system of values than say the Icelandic one (quite visibly the opposite actually). But...

It all boils down to one simple fact: the US imposes it's own views on the rest of the world via military and economic measures against anyone who doesn't comply, doesn't have anything truly of value to trade, or threatens that military and economic superiority. See Saudi Arabia, one of US's closest ally vs. China, one of US's biggest enemy. Both have the same values yet get very different ends of the stick. There's nothing making this system better other than the military and economic force behind it.

And I'll leave you with a bit of foods for thought: large scale organized crime groups also elected their leaders through "some sort of democracy", and have economic and "military" power to impose their will even over entire countries. What does this say about their system of values? Must be tip top.
Smart. And you use grep to search through your archives. Simple, elegant, effective. I like it.
Last two paragraphs capture a very interesting dynamic.

"Big data analytics could be said to constitute an authenticity jargon in this sense: although they treat the data set under analysis as having something like an unconscious, they eliminate the temporal gaps and spaces of ambiguity that drive psychoanalytic interpretation. In place of interpretation, data analytics substitutes correlations that it treats simply as given. To a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on data sets that include zip codes and rates of defaulting on mortgage payments, for instance, it does not matter why mortgagees in a given zip code may have been more likely to default in the past. Nor will the algorithm that recommends rejecting a loan application necessarily explain that the zip code was the deciding factor. Like the existentialist’s illusion of immediate experience these procedures generate an aura of incontestable self-evidence.

As in Adorno, here, the loss of particular contexts can serve to conceal, and thus perpetuate, domination. Algorithms take the histories of oppression embedded in training data and project them into the future, via predictions that powerful institutions then act on. If the identities constituted in this way are false, the reifications they generate do real work, and can cause real harm. And yet, to read these figures historically is to recognize that they need not come true. This is not an interpretive path that Karp pursues. But for those of us concerned about the relationship between digital technologies and justice, this repressed insight of his dissertation is the most critical to follow."

The official answer to this problem of ML bias is "fairness" research. But really this is yet another cover for the unquestionable authority of the algorithm and the data, just this time with the added benefit of an overlay of the institutions intent. What is the alternative once we stop trusting Google and Facebook to fairly manipulate the outcome? What when we reject the authority of the data and the algorithms altogether?
Interesting project, but its name sells it incredibly short.
Great counter-point, it's not as black and white as it seems.

Google's own 2FA app (Google Authenticator) doesn't even let you export your keys.
Does Amazon provide company phones or just install an MDM profile on your personal phone? I have TikTok installed on my phone, and if my employer said I had to remove it to access my work email, I'd ask them to buy me a work phone. It seems a bit ridiculous that they'd want to control what apps you download on your personal device without providing an alternative.
Is Disney's conversion rate and subscriber numbers a valid benchmark for startup's conversion rate and subscriber numbers though?
Tu quoque is valid in context of blaming Germans for WWII (past actions). Most of the arguments thrown here are about on going problems.
You might want to customize it a bit more to make it clear this is an offical blog. For a few seconds when reading this on mobile I was super confused if this was official or just someone outside MS writing about it.
What a strange comment.

> Brazil's labor laws treat the "workers" as stupid people

This has nothing to do with stupidity, intelligence or anything like that. This has to do with leverage. A multi-national giant corporation like Uber has a lot of leverage over Brazilian workers. If Uber treats them like figurative slaves and gives them too little money, workers have very little they can do against this. It is government's responsibility to protect people from this power imbalance. Yes Uber should have a freedom to charge/pay whatever market accepts and workers should have freedom to negotiate their own benefits. But at the same time Uber needs to implement a minimum care for their workers, and if not government should be able to enforce them to do so.
I wonder how you'd distribute these, therapeutically. Our bodies have mechanisms to let healthier mitochondria out compete less healthy mitochondria within a cell - the oxidative stress mitochondria are under basically requires that for us to stay healthy - but how do you get the mitochondria into your cells. Especially long lived cells like skeletal muscles much less neurons?
We homeschool our children and we also help run a homeschool academy. A lot of the kids love Outschool.
Nobody is willing to pay for trains that take 3-4 as long and are 3-4 more expensive. Maybe you are one of those very, very few people who would do that, but for the most part humans are willing to have 2h of less comfort to get somewhere.

Also, as European who has traveled a lot in train, they are not always so super comfortable over night.

Also, lets be honest, 90% of the discomfort of plane, has to do with boarding, and not plane rides themselves. Those things can be expressed relativity easily.

Building incredible expensive high speed trains across a territory as large as the USA is insane in scope and expense, and minimal in benefit. Specially with electronic planes, cars and autonomy happening.

There is also the reality that there are already huge amounts of airport infrastructure that could be activated with electric planes.

Building a high speed train network is a 30 year project, that in 30 years would be mostly pointless and unused.
Going against the grain here, yes, I would.

Professionally I haven’t been very involved in deployment, but my experience deploying personal projects to, and configuring, Linux servers has taught me that the process is confusing, poorly documented and difficult. Don’t get me wrong, it’s doable and I’ve done it (likely poorly), but after a day of stitching together steps from blogs and frequent back-tracking and starting from scratch, you have to wonder if there isn’t a more user-friendly way.

I’d hope that windows server offers this, though I don’t know that it does, as I haven’t much experience with it. As windows is considerably more GUI centric than Linux that could be a big plus for me personally. I’d certainly check it out, at least to compare the experience to Linux.

But currently, given that windows servers are not free, Linux wins hands down.
You are not kidding on the price of SAN.

I just started a pilot program with the iXsystems TrueNAS, which is the supported enterprise version of FreeNAS.

It was easily a 10th the price of everyone else I looked at. Plus the support contact was inexpensive.

Now if I could just figure out something about our VMware licensing. I've looked at RHEV, but we have a lot of automation built around VMware. It will be very expensive to switch.
Basically, the rasperry 4 has 2 GFlops/watt and that's as good as it will get. So I'm transitioning to raspberry that powers it's own screen for a 15W computer that can run 40 hours with a 50Ah lead-acid battery.