skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to be controversial here, and say that its possible that light colored skin is easier to identify from background, giving higher confidence to "is face" detection with lower false positives.

Brown is, next to green, the most common color in nature. Lighter color also has a greater contrast with the background when using camera flash or other subject lighting.

To be really blunt, I think white faces are easier to see. A common example in nature, white tailed deer. When tail is raised, their white fur is a clear danger signal because it stands out from the background. Like most mammals, the rest of their body is a shade of brown.

I don't think its racist to suggest that light skin, just like blue eyes, is a conspicuous highly visible signal suggesting a human face.

I find it hard to believe that such a large number of facial recognition models have an easier time identifying white people after years of publicity solely because of biased training data.

The ultimate example is probably blue eyes. Almost no other animal has blue eyes. Blue is extremely rare in nature. I want to see a study on facial recognition, blue eyes vs other colors. I bet money you will find that models excel at recognizing human faces with blue eyes above all other factors
The FAA really dropped the ball on the 737 MAX, and as a result EASA won't blanket accept FAA certification as in the past.
It's not a coincidence. :) My quarantine hobby has been getting into music, audio programming, and electronics, so I very much have Fourier analysis on the mind.
This presenter DOES NOT exist. I simply copied and pasted some marketing text copy and used the product demo vid on the background.

Made with http://synthesia.io I am not affiliated with the service.

Special thanks to https://twitter.com/rememberlenny
> I want a "secure by default" internet with all the things encrypted all the time

Not this way, though. There are certainly security problems with non-ssl traffic, but the cure may be worse than the disease. If browsers continue restricting access to non-ssl sites, lawmakers might try to regulate who can get a cert, and what root CAs web browsers can include. This will turn the web into a walled garden. At first, it will probably be a blacklist of scam sites, so everyone goes along with it, then terrorist, piracy and child porn content, eventually an App Store like model, with the EU and the US acting as gatekeepers.

Using a different, illegal browser or operating system might not be an option, as that's also starting to require certificates, see notarization and secure boot.

The right way would be warning users if a site's cert changes, but without root CAs (like in SSH). The WPA3 protocol, which can also work in passwordless networks, is a welcome development too. A combination of those two would solve 80% of the problem, without creating those risks.
Well, if the user actually checks the signatures and remembers from their last visit that their should be one coming along with the software, maybe. That's a big if though.

Considering there's no disadvantage in deploying HSTS and there's no good reason to serve an insecure website, especially since they already have HTTPS set up, I'm baffled by that decision. Maybe it's just an oversight but that's not too reassuring either.
Microsoft is a developer company and their oldest division is developer tools. They've made several attempts into the game engine / game engine adjacent space over the years, though rarely saw wins outside of low level DirectX. (XNA will be most remembered as an indie dev play, but a key piece of XNA was its content pipeline and Microsoft tried but didn't succeed that well at trying to replace the mostly mish-mash of custom tools that most AAA studios use for content pipelines for something somewhat more standardized; though of course with the easy retrospect failure of being hobbled by focusing on Xbox first/primarily.) So productionizing id Tech 6 isn't an entirely crazy idea for Microsoft in terms of something that makes cultural sense for them. Game Engines can be an important dev tool; especially in the increasing interest in non-game capital-E Enterprise in game engines for visualization tools (including AR/MR/VR).

But yes, Microsoft seems to have a good working relationship with Unity at this point and probably wants to try to keep a good relationship with Epic, so I don't envy whatever product strategist would have to figure out if that minefield would be worth disturbing.
I'd argue the continued "ask you to turn it on" just in the hopes that you might eventually do it to shut it up is also a terrible antipattern.
Some people got access to the beta https://youtu.be/i1vbvikDiI8

Why do you think it's vaporware?
What is the revenue model of unsplash? Could not find a good source after a quick google search.
I broadly agree with this, and am most frequently confused by the fact that a `Range<T>` isn't `Copy` even if `T: Copy`. I feel this was a small design mistake (having `Range` itself be an interator instead of implementing the `IntoIterator` trait) but there is a proposal to fix this that looks like it wouldn't be breaking, and so should be possible:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/2848
It really makes you wonder how out of touch the Marketing team is to come up with that slogan after 5 seasons of Black Mirror and a whole generation of people increasingly trying to disconnect.
Similar story for Ireland.
Roberts Rules indicates that the secretary (the one who records the meeting) is one of the most important roles.

To the point: according to Roberts Rules, the #1 most important item in all meetings is finalizing the meeting notes from the previous meeting (ie: Everyone agrees that the stated meeting notes are correct).

Every meeting, according to Roberts Rules, starts with an understanding that everyone at the new meeting agrees upon the summary of the previous meeting. If you cannot agree to this, then the current meeting cannot progress (because the current meeting is almost inevitably "based upon" the previous meeting). Fixing the errors in documentation is incredibly important.
One of the things that I like about this analogy is that it also points out one of the pitfalls as we age. As our string gets longer, we aren't as good as picking up the higher frequency vibrations, so we risk assuming they aren't there at all.

A failure mode I see of some older developers is assuming there's nothing new under the sun and nothing worth learning, which I don't think is the case. I think it just gets harder for us to see those short term trends.
Physicians have an ethical obligation not to order unnecessary treatments, especially those that could cause iatrogenic harm. That applies regardless of who is paying. Most tests produce some level of false positives, which can potentially lead to more unnecessary treatments.

From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?
> LONDON – Twitter says it’s investigating why its picture-cropping algorithm sometimes prefers White faces to Black ones.

Why are colours being capitalised all of a sudden?
Why does everything have to "add something significant to humanity"?

It's not like "innovation" exists in a vacuum; if I figure out, I dunno, a new motor design for an automatic head scratcher, there's no reason that it can't later be used for something you deem to "add something significant to humanity".

Also, who gets to determine what actually adds to humanity? If you really didn't like scratching your head, or it took you a really long time to scratch your head in the morning, then wouldn't having something automatically do that for you be useful?

Travel websites are an example of something that did solve a problem; despite what you said before, people didn't like having to deal with travel agents (I googled around); they didn't like having to book tickets during office hours, they didn't like how hard it was to compare prices, they didn't like how much of a cut the agents took, etc. Buying tickets online save consumers time, money, and probably helped businesses book flights more easily. Businesses that "add significantly to humanity".

I know you didn't say this, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I think that the binary mentality that you either are working on "useless" or "revolutionary" things is really harmful. I think it puts a lot of pressure on newbies with the thought that they have to change the world, and they might withdraw from STEM stuff because they don't feel like they're making significant enough contributions.
some colleagues lost their lives on this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302 so it is very sad to see this news.
The study says 50% of the world still lives in 'extreme poverty' (< $5.50 / day). It seems the far better question is how do we improve the standard of living of these people in a sustainable fashion? The emissions of wealthy countries seems marginal in the longterm once the rest of the world gets plugged in.

For example, while the US has technically cut down on it's emissions it's done this (in part) by largely exporting the coal it used to burn to China. On a per country basis this is great but obviously it doesn't solve the real problem. The Chinese want the same standard of living as Americans and American's taking less flights doesn't seem like a viable strategy.

This is coming from someone that really cares about this but often resulting policies seem incredibly shortsighted in mitigating our worldwide, long term emissions. With that said, this study's methods are atrocious.
WebXR in Unity
He’s just being racist, it’s not the first time.
Prep your tech for power outages and other emergencies
I think the problem here is more that the semantics are documented in the "documentation", but are contrary to the intuition derived from the semantics in the type system.

`.contains()` is only implemented for `Range<Idx: PartialOrd>`, which to me implies that when checking whether a value is contained in the Range, it has enough knowledge about the ordering of numbers that it should be able to still do a bounds check on reversely ordered numbers.
https://archive.vn/v4eVG
I can make a python script that prints out stuff while I'm streaming, too. He hasn't demonstrated squat.

But, let's say he does have a working compiler. It's very probable that he does. Why doesn't he release it, then?

Well you see, the only way it's possible to really effectively criticize a programming language is to use it. By not releasing the compiler, he avoids real criticism.

So, no, I don't take him seriously on PL design. At best, he's scared of criticism, but wants to be able to criticize others. At worst, he's a fraud.
Simple app that may force you to rethink your smartphone usage
> Besides uBlock Origin, you can use DNS hosts file blocking. This has the extra benefit of making sites fast and reducing your data transfers.

There's no extra benefit beyond uBlock Origin, which already blocks requests before they are made.
> Range<Vec> requires the borrow, so the vastly more common Range<usize> etc.

So I have no idea about rust, but in c++ a big feature of templated code is that you can make type appropriate specializations, is that not possible in Rust or did its standard library maintainers just sleep on the job?
The Large Hadron Supercollider?
With HSTS, you don't have to.
Another trick is to follow up a meeting with the minutes of what was said. It is common in meetings for people to disagree and for no clear decision to come out (particularly on a noisy conference call with 20 participants - I am shocked how poor is the audio quality in 2020, doesn't sound like a hard problem to solve). But whoever controls the minutes controls the narrative and the official outcome of the meeting.

To the point where for contentious meetings you can have conflicts on who will take care of the minutes.
Oh man. I’ve dealt with so much legacy code I avoid reading comments as long as possible, they lie more than I’d like. Sadly something like bit fields are the one place I feel I have to trust the comments god help you if they’re no longer accurate.
I can remember 95% of a 2h meeting, too.

Just not any of the Actions Items assigned to me, or the names of any of the participants.
Actionable items list + ownership. Even if it is simply to have one person (or very small team) spearhead the item, it gives accountability and makes it clear to everyone that the issue isn't just up in the air.
> And now you want more money going to them?

No, I clearly said "I'm not sure how one would structure such funds to make sure they aren't abused". I want more money going to engineers, not the executives. But I do like to think with a forward-thinking mindset about how to make that possible instead of dismissing the problem and saying cutting funds in the right answer, because that definitely doesn't get more money in the hands of engineers to debug problems.

Perhaps more money to engineers + a third party audit company appointed by the court + fire the executives that did wrong, I don't know, but I'd like to be optimistic about it. Taking away funds is only going to strip engineers even further of funds for fixes, make unsafer planes, that's for sure.

The executives that inflated their portfolios while knowing there was going to be safety issues -- I support punishing those individuals. Not Boeing as a company though, since we pretty much depend on them.
I'd be weary of that. Sandboxes have been escaped.
Tim's obviously brought financial success, but where's Steve's user experience vision going?

After Steve passed in '11, it seems his idea pipe got drained. The watch came out in '15, the earbuds in '16 (neither earth shaking) and other than that, it's been small iterations on the same products for 10 years. Where's the new excitement?
If that happens, I'll quit my job and live in a van down by the river. The system has screwed me enough already.
For sure, but you're not going to fix that by making your own data lake using, for example, Parquet-on-S3. You're still going to pay the cost of compute when you analyze that data, and a well-optimized commercial database system is extremely hard to beat. Even if you look at Presto, and you exclude the people costs of managing it yourself, it still can't beat the commercial systems: https://fivetran.com/blog/warehouse-benchmark
Building a virtual Amiga for retrogaming in WinUAE (plus general WinUAE tips)
I have no doubt that we are not far away from winning an IMO gold medal with an AI algorithm. I am not so sure it will come from the lean-team though. There are more people working in the direction, with varying focus on the AI or the automated prover aspect of things.

I have the suspicion that AI-mathematicians will be foremost AI, and only secondary theorem provers. This is because what is mentioned in the article, mathematicians first look for patterns in these questions, and then apply their toolset to them. Only the final step is what theorem provers are currently good in.

But, only time will tell which team will make it first to the finish line.
But I think learning Cobol is only about 25% -- the hard parts are knowing what the legacy codes does vs. what it's supposed to do vs. what you really want to do, understand how and when the Cobol code actually runs on the legacy system (JCLs, schedulers, etc.), understanding what arbitrary limitations you must carry over to your new system, etc. -- all of which is probably not documented very well.
Or you pay $10/mo for Photoshop + the twelve current versions of Lightroom. I don't get much use out of them but I still think it's an OK deal.

At least as good a deal as a lot of the other SaaS stuff I'm paying for and barely using.

If I were using any of their stuff professionally I would find it an awesome deal, not least because it's all a clean expense.

[Edit: Clarity]
I was trying to distinguish between what Elon said vs what the company said in its corporate communications. In Tesla's case the corporate comms types seem to be more honest. In the Nikola case both the CEO and the company comms were misleading.
Oh, they're pushing their thermoelectric stove scheme again. We went through this before on HN. You might be able to charge a cell phone (a nice feature for a camp stove) or get a little LED lighting. That's about it.

Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters.[1]

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...
It’s 1% of the world. So incomes over $100k I think.

This is a world issue. There are billions of people that have never flown on an airplane and probably billions of people that have never been in a bus.

The 1% are largely the only people unaffected by climate change while it greatly effects communities in the global south.
I still build software. Every day. I delivered my first commercial product in 1978. I cannot recall a day that I've never written some form of code. Even if only a line or two. Made notes about writing code. Thought about how to solve a problem and the code involved.

I don't think I've ever worked a day in my life.

Well, not strictly true, I've had several jobs that start out with interesting problems to solve and then became "it's another CRUD app." I quickly left those jobs to find other work.

I'm not cheap but then I'm not well compensated. I don't make FANGMAN income, but I am financially comfortable. I've found joy every day in my work, even if there are many days where the work in utter frustration, by simply seeking out the kind of work that makes me happy. With an interesting problem I will work all the hours my mind and body can muster. With a 9-to-5 "what's the point/what am I learning/this has been done eefore" regular work-a-day job there is no amount of money on this green Earth that could get me to focus or be happy. Well okay, there would be a certain amount, at which point, after 12 months, I'd quit, take the money and go do a different job that pays less but is more interesting.

This course of action isn't for everyone, not everyone has the privilege of saying "F* it! I'm out." when they are doing something they don't find joy in. I've just made sure that I never put myself in a position where I couldn't choose that course of action. The road has been hard some days, and money has been tight more often than I want to recall, and I won't die a wealthy man, but I will have had adventures along the way that keep me still striving to build software every day.

Footnote: My job last year consisted of writing kernel drivers to speed up SSDs. My job at the beginning of this year was control a radio controlled car from your cellphone. Then I built a dashboard for my home that tracks my phones and my cats and the weather. My job, right now, consists of building a stupid simple app (with a lot of screens and moving parts) on a mobile device that talks to OpenWRT to put a pretty and simplified user interface on what is a complex piece of software. I've never had to build a mobile app that tries to simplify a complex router interface before. It is a learning experience. But once I've learned that lesson, I won't be building another one. I'll go find something else to do.

Life is what you make it.
Eh, it's just life. Nothing can be done.
Because it hasn't been released, and it likely never will be. It's impossible to criticize a programming language without actually using it, so any discussion of its merits is moot without an actual release.
that looks great. Yeah, I'm still figuring out the business model. I think a one time purchase is probably what I'm going to do. BTW, after launching it in Product Hunt I saw a few similar ideas too :)
> That's why you would be called a conspiracy theorist if you said that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

I don’t know where you live, but at least around California it’s generally accepted that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and the war justification was bush league lies.
>Oblivion

Obsidian, the company is called Obsidian Entertainment.

That said, the folks at Obsidian (especially the creators of the original Fallout and New Vegas) have said they have no interest in doing a Fallout game. Tim Cain specifically mentioned during the Outer Worlds Q&A that the Fallout ship had sailed.
Show HN: Hotpot – A tool to make graphic design easier
Is substack the new medium? I saw a link to it for the first time a couple weeks back (at least the first time I registered the name) and now it seems to be everywhere.

Yes I'm aware of the phenomenon that makes you notice things more after you notice them once. Not that.
VC-backed startups have entered the chat
Seems a lot like the fight against piracy which mainly makes life more difficult for legitimate users while having a minor impact on those targeted.

What's interesting is that the most effective tool against piracy has turned out to be making content a service instead of a good. It's a bit scary to think what this would mean if applied to all monetary transactions.
Well that's you, here's mine:

> alex@srv002  ~  cat /var/log/auth.log | grep 'Disconnected\sfrom.*\[preauth' | wc -l

> 432

All of those are from today...
Fish sticks w/BBQ sauce and some peas was one my staple meals in college. I still occasionally crave it, but probably only act on that craving ever other year or so.
"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels"

Do they want to bring back slavery, or serfdom?

"How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" (1919)
When would it be a good thing?
I guess the meme-detecting algorithm doesn't work that well, so why not go the outsourcing route and try censoring on false copyright pretenses.
If you need more help you can write me a mail. I am using these tools (tracking tools as well as developer tools) daily.
"All of it is valuable, but not all of it is valuable for work."

^ you could make the argument that almost all of it is valuable for work. The connections you make with other people, even on things that do not relate to work, can have a huge impact on your relationship in the workplace. Even the stuff that just seems like nonsense, joking around, crazy dicussions about things that don't really matter much, etc -- sharing those things can be part of building friendship and trust, and that can be of great value for work.

Of course, sometimes such things can have a negative effect, depending on the person you are meeting with. So you need to be aware of that.

Some people are particularly good at building relationships this way.
The design of this website is fun. As someone in the Pacific islands, the background image looks like lauhala [1] to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauhala#Weaving
Then we'll need more legislative measures to stop the intrusive behaviour.
This is what the 3rd place winner of the World Robot Summit 2018 looks like cleaning a toilet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3QdaPD8bw

Your point about the workers is true, but there are economies of scale here. I don't think it's going to be different in robots than in other areas.

As for the human competition, we often had cases where technology has put humans out of their job. They provide a baseline price that you need to undercut. Today we might use robots to clean nuclear waste sites. Tomorrow we use mass produce them and put them into people's homes. As long as you don't make a larger mess at the toilet than Fukushima you should be fine! :)
Dialogue as Dataflow: A new approach to conversational AI
Do you trust the US government not to do this if they successfully extradite Assange? What about foreign journalists?