skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That this is an instinctual urge that we are required to suppress?

That doesn't mean it's proper to whip your ding dong out in professional settings (aside from the professional settings that require it). Are you going to fight that fight? For the same reason, it is not proper to hit on people in professional settings.

> Can we acknowledge the fact that most men would be ecstatic to be hit on by a woman or two at a conference?

Yes, we can acknowledge that this could be flattering if it happened rarely. Can we also acknowledge that getting hit on at nearly every professional event would be extremely tiresome?

> That forcing men to change their behavior significantly to accommodate for women in male spaces may in fact place unequal strain on men?

There it is. A machine learning conference is not a male space. A men's bathroom is a male space.
I understand, and generally agree with, the idea that teasing apart genetic and social causes of behavior is difficult and unlikely to yield useful results, and especially unlikely to yield useful results when the people attempting to do it don't know what they're doing and don't have any incentives for getting it right.

I think my true objection is to the idea that we can't make useful inferences, even in principle, based on appearance. I suppose now would be a good time to check whether you actually hold that opinion: I'm assuming yes based on the following exchange that you do.

>> There was a previous [study] that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML.

> Yes, which was also phrenological in nature.
> ...
> The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. Your priors on us being able to predict, independent of social conditioning, some arbitrary social attribute based on someone's face should be very, very low.

If I've learned one thing from looking into machine learning and such over the past few years, it's that the computer is not looking at what you think it's looking at. Yes, it's _possible_ that the computer has learned which varieties of facial bone structure correlate with homosexuality. I find it equally plausible that the computer determined that there was a difference in personal grooming habits or facial expressions between groups. Regardless of what the differences were, though, I think it's a mistake to say that you shouldn't expect to be _able_ to predict many social attributes based on their face.

If you're just saying that we can't determine the underlying causes of social attributes based on machine learning, I agree, but I'm not sure that's really a useful statement. What you said could also plausibly be interpreted as "trying to predict real-world outcomes based on machine learning will result in bad outcomes", I would agree with that interpretation (there is some question of "yes it will make mistakes, but it might still be better than the current system," but much like with self-driving cars vs human drivers, I don't think we're particularly near that point yet).

Still, the comparison of that study to phrenology, and your comments above, suggest you were trying to make a stronger statement, and I'm still not sure what that stronger statement is or even if there is one.
Not necessarily.

(1) It's important to make sure the numbers you're using are directly comparable -- e.g., if #confirmed is the count of unique individuals who are confirmed to have the virus and #tested is the number of tests administered rather than the number of people who have been tested then you won't get the expected results.

(2) There can be confounding variables like choosing to test people with milder symptoms.

(3) False positive/negative rates can be a factor (though they shouldn't be in a halfway decent test). If your false negative rate is x and your false positive rate is greater than 1-x then your positive test result rate will fall as your true positive rate rises.

(4) Etc. The problem is that the numbers you're measuring (reported test results) aren't the numbers you care about (true infection rates). They might align, and they will mostly align with good tests and unbiased data that are correctly and honestly reported, but they don't have to.

Caveat: I haven't been closely following covid news and have no idea how much any of those potential discrepancies might apply IRL.
If you run the random process many times and then look at a histogram of the vector of outputs, the distribution peaks somewhat higher than 2 [0], but the output of the random process does not tend towards any particular number or sequence of numbers.

Indeed, the distribution looks highly discontinuous and fractal. It's a very intriguing question. I suspect thinking in terms of rings (abstract algebra) would be helpful.

[0] "somewhat higher" - I think this is because the sequence "add two then divide by two" gives you back your input when you start with 2, while "divide by two then add two" does when you start with 4; the distribution should peak between these two "stable" points. Exactly where the distribution peaks probably depends on your histogram bin width.
What question are you trying to answer? Nobody asked what is compression and why do we use it. I have been encoding videos since VideoCDs were a thing, so I have a pretty good understanding of how compression works. The fact that I differentiated between spatial and temporal compression should have been a clue. All I was pointing out was that compressing a postage stamp sized video and comparing its filesize to a large megapixel image isn't a fair comparison. (yes, I'm jaded by calling 1080p frame size a postage stamp. I work in 4K and 8K resolutions all day.)
Exactly, high real estate costs just mean that the barrier to entry for new businesses is higher, and that margins (for businesses and individuals) are smaller.
Privatize the profit, socialize the debt.
How do you use your OLED TV? As a computer monitor, or for some other similarly static image?
The audience of h266 and whom will "win" the codec war isn't individual consumers, even powerusers that know what a codec is.

H266 will be adopted by broadcasting and archival and will make mpeg tankers of money. Whatever the next generation of physical home media is after blu-ray will use it, the player for it will read it, and your TV cable box will take h266 signals in to decode. The costs of paying mpeg will be in the cost of the discs, the cost of the cable package, etc.

The real win we should... hope? For is that h266 never sees a personal computer hardware decoder from Qualcomm / Samsung / Intel /AMD / Nvidia / etc. If online video is exclusively distributed with AV1 then none of these companies need touch the festering MPEG patent hell and consumers avoid that parasite leeching money out of their computer purchases.

Because the cable box and physical media player are dying. You can generally opt out of them and avoid filling the MPEG coffers with software patent money. And the big web companies that have the power to dictate what computers are using for the next decade and beyond are all way favoring AV1 with the exception of Apple.
You're right. It's not a loss to the world.
The world is filled up with kleptocracies, dictatorships(which China is) or just about anything in-between.

It is however a loss to the free democratic world.
Prob knows how to use the search feature.
I can't speak for my employer but the IRS certainly views gift cards and similar cash equivalent payments to be taxable income.
Karoshi
Everybody knows that bad targeting and bad ad quality results in a temporary bump in revenue. This is because there are short-term quality assumptions baked into the advertisers' bids. Eventually the bad quality cycles back through the market and prices fall.

Within Google I saw several post-mortem reports where the "impact" was extra revenue, not lost revenue. As in, due to an outage of the xyz subsystem, we booked an extra $$/minute of ads revenue. Everyone knows this is bad, not good.
That would probably be a better strategy. But if you are looking at a naive, single variable, a prior purchase is the greatest single predictor of future purchases. If you know nothing else about a person, the fact you purchased one post-hole digger makes it more likely you'll purchase another, as opposed to some random other internet denizen for which we know nothing. Having worked in email marketing analysis before, this effect was surprisingly robust across categories. It implies you are the kind of person that could use such a product - most people aren't.
This happened to my elderly neighbor last week. The scammers claimed to be from Apple, ran a fake script, did the whole jig and dance, and demanded immediate payment. She lost $8,000. These scammers are relentless and abusive. They're still harassing her even 1 week later.

I'm shocked that Target just simply allows people to purchase so much in gift cards all at once. I'm even more shocked that banks and transaction processors don't mark this as suspicious or fraudulent.

But this isn't just a function of irresponsible companies. The elderly are overwhelmed by technology, and it's too difficult to know what's real and what isn't. After the scam, my neighbor had a near panic attack when she received an innocuous Google security checkup email. How was she supposed to know it was authentic or not?
Poles abroad complain they missed out in swift presidential election
Bingo, this is what every college student should be doing right now. Most colleges have a well established process for deferring your education for a year or more due to various exigencies that can arise during those years.

I would also argue, that this is what most parents should be doing for their younger kids too. We all know that remote learning sucks for young kids. You basically have to sacrifice one parent to just sit at home and help the kids through their online coursework. At that point, you're better off putting them in daycare for a year, working, and then re-enrolling them for the next year. Will they be behind a year? Sure, but they'll also have a big advantage over their peers who got a half-assed education from the past year and were forced into the next grade.
Decentralizing the Internet and Other Ideas
Perhaps one should look at the work being done instead of "relying on metrics"? Just a suggestion...
> This crisis is expected to be severe but short, lowering the risk of propping up inefficient "zombie" firms that should be allowed to fail. That may not be the case next time around.

I can't tell if the author is referring to the ongoing state of the economy here, but this is claimed so nonchalantly. I wonder if this reflects a majority view of those with an economics/finance background. From my point of view it seems we're nowhere near out of the woods yet with COVID-19 and its continuing impact on the economy. How long should a large number of businesses remain closed and a large number of individuals remain unemployed before we're back in a crisis again?
yup!

that is my guess honestly. Not an epidemiologist but surrounded by them.

Everything is about added probabilities...every student that travels interacts with an increased number of people, their probability goes up. there are thousands of students in the same general area, their probabilities go up. The staff (e.g., dining staff) and faculty come from the local areas, probabilities go up. If one student brings it, they are then in unavoidably tight spaces with other students and faculty...probability of transmission goes up.

If I were asked, I would model transmission at a university closer to an aircraft carrier than a city.
Yes but I haven't looked into how much work it would be. I think this might be essential in order to reach a wider audience because I think people want to be able to use the same browser to surf both ALFI and regular websites. Would be awesome for this to work in Firefox and Chrome.
This is exactly what I have done when we leave the country. We leave a binder with emergency info including code words with expected responses to validate that our emergency contact at home is truly speaking with us.

Seemed kind of silly at the time but it truly is a low cost way to mitigate this issue.
Xbox is better but still not as good as the Xbox 360 imo. In terms of software (excluding games), it feels like both consoles took a major step back this generation.

Aside: Voice controls got a lot worse with Cortana than what was available in the Kinect, not that anyone cares about that in 2020. ‘Xbox pause’ was magical in 2012. Universal search was better in Xbox 360, too.

I don’t know why they took such a major step backward with the new design, but everything got a lot more slow, clunky, and difficult to use. Made the whole thing feel like a downgrade.
Whether intentional or not, it's a pretty frustrating experience to not able to do all the course work, and for many courses you can't even pay to do it. bec they're archived the course that's it. You get just the partial class.

Additionally despite being an online platform that ostensibly allows you to work on your own schedule, they still cut off access after some arbitrarily predetermined amount of time and there's nothing you can do to extend it. Again, for many courses, you can't even pay bec they're archived. the only way to finish the course to create a new account.
I was hoping H266 was going to be a neural network based approach, but it looks like that might end up being H267.

Right now neural networks allow for higher compression for tailored content, so you need to ship a decoder with the video, or have several categories of decoders. The future is untold and it might end up not being done this way.
The challenge is to make no more than two buy-sell transactions: "we must find the maximum profit that can be made assuming at most two no overlapping BUY – SELL transactions."
Boeing invited him to tour their production line https://youtu.be/c47kn_Y4y8A?t=343
So what. Let’s not rush to vilify companies for using a government program designed to promote economic stability. Would we prefer that companies don’t use the money and risk closing, firing employees or cutting spending? All of those actions will result in economic contraction which will feedback on itself.

If the argument is really that certain companies taking money deprived other, more deserving, companies from accessing the help they need then 1. Say that, 2. Fix the real issues which are lack of funds or effective distribution of funds to the businesses that are under served.

The government did a phenomenal job given the circumstances and short time for implementation. It’s easy to criticize after the fact but the results don’t lie. There has not been a financial panic or mass bankruptcy yet. By all means let’s support more effective actions, especially where gaps for individuals or certain types of businesses exist but stop trying to find villains to scapegoat because that distracts from the work of implementing new helpful programs.
This argument was used by any number of consumer electronics outlets, and it was never true. Expert floor staff are not fungible. Only poor floor staff are fungible.

It's not even true in department stores. It's simply not true that you can pick someone off the street and train them to sell cosmetics, high-end clothing, or even furniture in a few days.

You can train them to do a bad job quickly, but they're not going to find their stride for a good few months.
> Thank you, but this article seems to say that the technology is used to track Uighurs (I suppose for the reason that some of them have been engaging in terrorist activities) and not to incarcerate them.

That's a weird suggestion. It's undisputed that they have put millions into detention camps, so are you suggesting they all have been engaging in "terrorist activities"? So why suggest ("suppose" ) that they have been engaging in terrorist activities?

> Despite the scale- which we considered worrying in itself and for understandable reasons- this seems to be an automated version of "I suddenly see a lot of mafioso-looking guys congregating here, let's keep an eye to see if there's anything dodgy going on"- which has been practiced with skilled eyes since forever. And it's a whole different thing from "if I see anyone looking Jewish I'll round them up and send them to a concentration camp".

The article literally said they are looking for (tracking) Uighurs because of their ethnic appearance. That is looking for "Jewish" , not looking "mafioso-looking" in your example above
Those displays are not really self emissive - they use quantum dots to enhance the RGB filters, but are still LED backlit or edgelit, they still suffer from backlight bleed like regular LCD
Wow. 19.5h of battery life!
I wouldn't evaluate the pros and cons of a technology based on decisions made by business executives. I would look at objective third-party comparisons of the encoding and decoding before deciding which is better: H.266 or AV1.
I've always been curious... do you worry about job security given how teams are sold and/or restructured every other year and how heavily they dependend on sponsors and results?
As silly as it might sound at face value, smart people can be psychologically manipulated into doing very stupid things.
The unstated assumption underlying all of this intervention is that interest rates must not be allowed to go up. There is not a lack of investors willing to buy bonds - there is a lack of investors willing to buy bonds at the ridiculously low interest rates the Fed has forced over the past two decades. We should currently be experiencing a cyclic market correction where stock yields go down and bond rates go up. But the government is insisting that this shall not happen, as it would make politicians and fiscally irresponsible CEOs look bad. Savers and non-politically-connected small businesses lose out via monetary supply inflation, and are left with nowhere to go besides staying in the stock market bubble or hedging into gold in case this bubble finally pops.
To be honest don't remember any more. I googled it.
Their point was that Asian countries are more in the “eliminate the curve” camp that you are arguing against, and that they are doing much better economically and health wise as a result.
> people rarely make fine grained enough commits to be able to target specific lines or blocks

Take your own advice then: don't hire such people. Why would you insist on maintaining documentation and not maintaining a reasonable change log in your commits, if knowing "why" is important to you?

(I make the advice tongue-in-cheek btw. Better to educate and lift developers up wherever you can than just freeze them out. Not everyone has the experience with these things that we do.)

There's not a one-size-fits-all solution here. Different orgs handle their code history different ways, but having tasted the power Git gives you over certain other VCSes to make the commit log really useful as a record of change, and having taken advantage of that feature several times myself, I wouldn't want to go back.

This follows another comment I just made on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23743973
H.265 seems to be gaining traction slower because many of the older devices, including laptops and some smart TVs don't support it. H.264 became ubiquitous for piracy since it offered tiny size and worked on older devices, making it the perfect choice for those in poorer countries where tech isn't the first priority in a household. I wonder if H.266 will run into the same problems as H.266.
Uber plans to acquire delivery rival Postmates for $2.6B
Can you explain this YOU= thing?
This is a really well written response.

How do you feel like we could enforce #3? I suspect someone would use a VPN to fool any location/verification system, or is there something else going on here?

RE: Target data collection
Determining if someone is pregnant so they can find ways to get that person to shop at Target drives their bottom line. What incentive is there to invest as much in preventing scammers from succeeding? I don’t know what the solution is, but doing something (even an information campaign) is better than nothing at all.
> I'm always advocating for 24/7 low-carbon, low-land, low-material energy (i.e. energy with high power density) like nuclear but it appears that the public simply is not interested.

As a member of the public, I have never been asked where I want my electricity to come from, so my interest has little bearing on what actually gets built.

The public may be asked to make a decision by proxy (R versus D), but that is only one of many decisions that get made, as a consequence of that choice.
Commenters should note the constraint in the problem definition that the maximum number of buy-sell pairs allowed is two.
Yeah kind of like that. Looks interesting.
The majority of people have so little imagination, they would have no idea what to do with their time.
If Apple cares so much about privacy, why does it approve clipboard snoopers?
That^ system-structure is what also rewards[1] people for their efforts for their work and suffering, etc. With UBI, you'd need to replace that system-structure to reproduce those rewards[1]. This is not possible (or rather, the implications are disturbing).

The inability for many people to put the work ethic effort into building their own rewards is evident by the present time. People will take the easiest path possible to soften the realities of surviving[2]. This is also evident from the design choices behind successful, addicting platforms and video games.

[1] (ownership growth, material gains, physical gains (or rather, losses, since we are talking about fat/cholesterol, et. al), emotional growth, social network growth, personal network growth (trust))

[2] (economically, emotionally; all people, not just the poor)

UBI is also dangerous because it cannot be removed without wrecking havoc on society. It must remain successful, especially once the next generation is born into it.
No.

Is that how the headline with question mark rule works?
I think COVID has essentially proven the theory behind the book.
Definitely check out the unclaimed property website for your state. It's fun to see which of your friends and family have unclaimed money, although it's much more likely to be ~$20 than $20,000.

For California, the site is https://ucpi.sco.ca.gov/UCP/Default.aspx
By pressing CTRL+m in NAVI all pages will render in dark theme if you want. Custom themes might be included later.
The limitation of 2 buy-sell transactions and no overlapping buy-sell transactions are orthogonal. My solution listed 3 buy-sell transactions, but none of them are overlapping.

Edit: I see now that it says "two no[sic] overlapping" trade pairs, which invalidates my solution.
How much of the "social connections" angle is coming out of University with a high status spouse?
Yes but they are at least trying to explore an alternative business model that doesn't fundamentally rely on hoovering up every bit of data there is to know about you without you even being aware most of the time (scepticism of cryotocurrencies aside).
This is one of the things I love about KDE’s Dolphin. It’s a file manager with a built in terminal and both stay in sync.
Opus and vorbis have both improved on mp3, flac has improved in the lossless space, and there are other codecs that do better at very low bitrates (think 20-30 kbps).
The correct title should be "The Fed now owns Walmart debt", not "Walmart's debt". Walmart has more than $60BN long term debt outstanding. The Fed has bought exactly $8,668,097.01 of that. You can find the actual amounts the Fed has bought for different issuers at

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/smccf.htm
ML In Production – 3 Minutes Survey – See other's responses
Thank you for your kind words, @trufas!