skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only have moral arguments for moral questions. Certainly the idea that humans, because they are human and for that reason alone, have inherent worth is not exactly new. It is seductively easy to start thinking you're above other people because of what you have, or what you know, or what you can do. It's not true, but a relatively dirty part of ourselves certainly wants it to be.

"The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person." [0]

“And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” [1]

[0] http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/do...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_Jugulum
Some of the questions:

How is it done?
The images are pregenerated: 2.6M to be precise, all of them are here: https://generated.photos/faces

Technical challenges of better resemblance

We could either pre-generate (see the first comment - it’s an accurate guess), or generate just in time.

The first is way easier - same architecture, more storage (we are moving from instance’s storage to S3 so it will be an easy step).

On-demand generation would be much more expensive as you have to have a GPU server ready, and queue requests. We have it with https://icons8.com/upscaler ; it’s a bit of work and expense.

Additionally, you have to make it a paid service. Any ideas who could pay for that? Our usual customers are https://generated.photos/use-cases

Brad Pitt is not blonde

It definitely has some fitting issues; Brad Pitt is a good example as he dyes his hair. I've googled his hair situation so you don't have to. He most probably has gray hair, dyed dark, then highlighted.

That's a challenge huh! As a result, you can feel some of these guys manipulated hair color: https://i.imgur.com/bC6AxXO.jpg

Anyway, I had better luck with Angelina Jolie. Hairwise, her hair looks also toned, but our dataset has way more colored women: https://i.imgur.com/WmTzRAZ.jpg

Spam bots have a new face

On the boring side, it’s probably not worth it. Generated photography is detectable. A trained eye could spot it; big social media have models trained to a lot it.

Scraping a real life dataset makes more sense to me. Moreover, there are tons of ready ones.

Instead, here are are some of the other uses invented by our customers https://generated.photos/use-cases
> If someone comes at you with a knife, you're justified in a violent response. Period.

Exactly. Only there is no 'oppressive system', but an individual officer responding to 911 call and standing against an agitated individual with a weapon who's about to attack.
Nah, it's straight up Tolkien:

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!
Ring a dong! hop along! Fal lal the willow!
Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!
From personal experience this guys sales pitch is used to defend and glorify the worst work cultures. Having worked at a place for 12 years believing that my contribution was vital and necessary and then seeing that conception unwind in two months was the best education _ever_.
I feel like this isn’t the first time McKinsey has been caught encouraging or enabling some pretty horrific stuff. It’s probably time they get some prosecutorial attention.
I think "on a more serious note" implies that what precedes it isn't serious.
I'm sure that's true.

I would like to say that I am young and I remember getting turned on to podcasts and reddit and good books when I was 15 or so, and being exposed to rational thought and discussion did a lot for my development I think.
Another gem:

>Those records show that McKinsey was helping Purdue find a way “to counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” from OxyContin.
+1000. So succinct. Brian's hissy fit about being "apolitical" was clear and blatant "not my problem, let's ignore any racism and accusations of racism" which is utterly unacceptable at a company that (like any others of this size) is likely to have the occasional (or very common) problem with racism and discrimination.
> We can only speculate on the numbers,

We can, but we can only do this because people in the comments are independently informed. The NYT repeatedly emphasized 60 people leaving (across two articles) but never mentioned the severance.
Interviews with ISIS fighters struck me strongly with that impression. One man in particular -- in Europe he had been a nobody, but in the Islamic State he had status... and his experience was that this status was absolutely worth killing for.
Why is interacting with the examples slow? https://htmx.org/examples/delete-row/
The reason why they are banned is because what he is saying sounds plausible but is very, very likely wrong.

First of all, the number of tests isn't growing at the same rate as the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths: https://imgur.com/2cVrGz7

You can notice the very low positive rate in mid August (150 000 tests and only 500 cases - even if all false positives, thats 0.3% FP rate)

But okay, lets assume that they did something to ramp up the false positive rate, If we look at the daily rate of growth (% increase) for cases, hospitalizations and deaths:

https://imgur.com/bEix1Fo

We can see that there is a perfect exponential 7% rate of growth starting in September and slowly decaying after. But more than that, the rate of growth in hospitalizations and deaths also follows the same pattern almost perfectly but with a 5 day and 16 day delay, respectively!

If you were accidentally getting false positives, you would either not expect hospitalizations and deaths to grow at the same rate as false positives do. Even if they did, you would expect them to grow at exactly the same time without any delays. If there is no causal relationship they should all grow at the same rate, at the same time as any other random subgroup of people

To get the delay to happen, you would have to somehow perfectly fine tune the false positives for hospitalizations and deaths as well. In which case you're better off just making numbers up.

But more importantly, there is a much simpler explanation, which we get if we super-impose google mobility trends % increase in amount spent staying at home, and we shift cases by 6 days (avg time to symptoms), hospitalizations by 11 and deaths by 22 days:

https://imgur.com/UKklUIP

We can see that the rate of growth is almost perfectly inversely correlated with the % increase in staying at home (with perhaps some light seasonal / immunity / other measures effects included).

Additionally we have non-PCR data like the Zoe symptom tracker app largely corraborating more or less the same rate of growth as detected by PCR tests: https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time
Another great app is DEVONthink [1]. It's not as good (if at all) at scientific citation management, but it's a brilliant app for saving a database of information.

Devon supports PDFs, Markdown, images, bookmarks (which can be viewed in the app), and more. The PDF handling is superb. The search is excellent, and it has extensive support for tags and metadata. Sync is very good. I also like that it stores each collection as a separate database file that you can keep in different places.

Among other things, I use it to collect and categorize images, which works really well because you can view any collection/folder as a "gallery".

My only complaint is that the databases are local, and you only sync between devices. I can't share notes with other people for real-time collaboration.

[1] https://devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink
Pharmacies, in practice, have some autonomy in what they do and especially in what they make it easy to do.

If you have a doctor who writes prescriptions by hand try taking it to different pharmacies, you'll find the procedures are rather different.
Anyone who says that seriously is someone to be steered way the hell away from, that’s way too sociopathic for my comfort.
Sure there is; even with so reductionist a view, those relationships can be healthy because they are between equals, and can be done with reciprocity.

With a corporation or politician? Not so much.
There's almost certainly more margin built in to a mountain bike frame, but carbon fiber has a scary failure mode compared to metals no matter what- it appears absolutely fine until catastrophic delamination.
Imagine a 20-something thinking he's seen or experienced enough of the world--any of it--to go on like this.

He essentially lucked into VC funding by exploiting sweatshop labor while riding a hyped ML/AI market. It's a testament to how messed up this industry is.
> matter of water

A.k.a. hydrogen oxide.
The DevOps Reading List
Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.

But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
I think mattmanser has argued the point well.

The first paragraph is the OP saying that the company cannot [0] be racist since they (might) have a disproportionate number of one minority under their employment.

[0] - "cannot without causing the OP confusion", at least
Oh, I am so sorry to hear that happened to him. My favorite physics co-professor of Goodstein's was Prof Ricardo Gomez, who pretty much single-handedly saved me from flunking out. Prof Gomez was one of those people who made Caltech a special place.
ok, so a rebate is less “here’s a reward for OD’ing people” and more “we’ll soften the blow if you continue filling Oxy with no judgment if someone ends up dying” I guess
CVS can choose to set metrics and implement systems to discourage noticing that one person is pulling multiple scripts, for example.

Also remember that CVS is basically a monopoly wholesaler as well as a retailer — so they can play games at that level as well like stuffing the channel to favor the manufacturer that pays them more on the backend. Railroad trusts and standard oil did the same thing in the 1900s.

This is especially true in places where states have hobbled regulatory power. Little towns in West Virginia were dispensing more opioids than counties in other places. In places with more robust regulation, the pharmacists will lose their license.

The whole thing is disgusting and really illustrates how amoral and evil outfits like McKinsey are, and how their way of thinking is a more in your face vision of what many corporate leaders believe.
I think that's an unfair characterization based on citizenship.
fantastic to hear, good luck!
It all really depends on the example. I know tons of developers that skip Unity or Unreal because there is a learning curve and they can already render a cube themselves. They think "I just write a model loader" and ship and not realize how many man years of work they are ignoring in all other parts. Input systems across 10+ platforms, graphics APIs across those 10 platforms, physics libraries, post processing library, all the edge cases of importing that took man years to find, gaming networking libraries and on and on.

Of course is their choice and if they enjoy reinventing the wheel good for them. But they'll spend 6 to 18 months working on reproducing some fraction of the features they'd have for free instead of working on what makes their thing unique.
Looking at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
and you can see that current daily infections (tested and confirmed) is way higher than any time in September as are deaths. So whilst the R number and how it is calculated may be down, I'll not place my caution upon such `good` news.

After all this R of below 1 is based upon a reduction in those testing positive and 3 weeks of a country lock-down and you would expect that number to reduce, otherwise your whole reason for a lock down would be proven to of been futile. So that's good, lock downs do work - science shown that here(again).

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk#other-key...
if you do the math you can quickly prove to yourself that reduced inertia isn’t doing anything for you. you then either have to conclude that newtonian mechanics does not apply to bikes or perception can’t be trusted!

if you do a blind experiment, where you don’t know the wheels under you, or a third party adds weights to the rim you can demonstrate this. be sure to use the same tires, at the same pressure, as tires and pressures make massive differences in comfort feel and efficiency.

source: me, long time triathlete, cat3 bike racer, coach of a professional cyclist and state tt record holder, gear nerd who has done lots of power meter experiments and spreadsheets
But reference counting is (potentially) faster then garbage collection. At least under some circumstances:

- modern architecture having fast atomic fetch_add/sub

- weak memory ordering making atomic fetch_add/sub even faster (if Acquire/Release ordering is used)

- optimize the usage of reference counting by eliminating pointless reference counting, e.g. as done by Objective-C/Swift automatic reference counting (ARC). Or e.g. done when using borrows in rust for everything except the places you know you really need to clone the Atomic Reference Counter (also ARC but a different one ;=) ).

Reference counting was for a long time basically guaranteed to be slower then garbage collection because of slower atomics, no weak memory ordering and "naive" usage of reference counting introducing a lot of unnecessary reference counter increased and decreases.

But with modern hardware and compilers it's no longer as clear cut, at least in practice wrt. to modern hardware.
"Do you expect me to talk?!?!?"

"No, Mr. Bond - I expect you to die."

Classic stuff.
Nice victim mentality for a company with clear and blatant evidence of belittling black employees...
> at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment ... One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes.

In an era of smartphones and viral videos, the fact that we don't have a single audio/video recording exposing the racism seems rather suspect. I'm not saying that is proof of anything. But something to consider.

The idea that coinbase, a silicon valley/SF/etc company, would discriminate, especially against black people, is hard for me to believe. But I'm open to anything. Certainly even if the company doesn't have a culture of bias, it may have a few bad apples.

> If the numbers haven’t changed, it’s definitely because there wasn’t a real intention to do so

This is a lie. Everyone who works in tech knows that companies are bending over backwards to hire black employees. The problem is the lack of qualified employees. Even unqualified black employees are being hired just to say "we have more black employees today than last year". It's been like this for a few years now. That tech companies had no real intention to hire black employees is simply a lie.

> When Mr. Armstrong wrote his blog post in September asking employees to leave their outside interests at the door, he was celebrated and praised by several tech investors.

So this is why we have a nytimes article. It's a political attack masquerading as a employment bias issue. Got it.
Did you mention it's caused by fractional DPI scaling, when reporting the bug?

You can set Dr. Racket to "system" DPI scaling (by accessing the .exe or .lnk properties), at the cost of rendering at 96dpi and being blurrily upscaled. The program is not good, the result sucks, but it technically works.
Power efficiency is an issue in the datacenter as well as you have to get that heat out, which also takes power.
The crazy thing for that article is, it basically says there aren't any excess deaths, which is one of those conclusions where you ought to stop and think "Wait, surely that's a high level statistic I could cross-check?" and sure enough yes there are excess deaths statistics calculated, that's a normal thing countries do - and of course the US stats shot up due to COVID-19.

It's written by an economist, which maybe explains why they didn't check. You won't get far in economics if you insist on checking whether your work matches reality. Ask Arthur Laffer.
[also posted above]

Google is a giant company, so surely somewhere there are some people who behave this way—-among a hundred thousand employees and hundreds of groups you will find at little bit of everything.
But in the groups I have worked for, solid full days are the norm, and somewhat rarely you have to really dig in and work a bit more, and even more rarely, you have so much slack that you can go hone early. But generally people nearly always put in full days.
Asking a developer community how to follow up after screwing up a developer! That ought to be ironically funny. I think I can relate with Gust more, than the company
I added a 300ms delay in the ajax mock library that I'm using (sinon):

https://htmx.org/js/demo.js

to better simulate real network latency for things like progress indicators, etc.
Secure, Redundant DNS Using CoreDNS
> Hossenfelder doesn't claim that all the experts are wrong.

"In his book, Hawking painted a neat picture for black hole evaporation that is now widely used. [...]. It’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it’s wrong."[1]

When I read that quote, I originally took it at face value, because she seems like an expert in her field, and it certainly sounds plausible. But now, in the next writeup of hers that I've come across, I find a claim that the description of FTL and causality portrayed by every legit source I've ever encountered is wrong, and that FTL without violating causality is somehow possible within Einstein's framework. That's two incredible claims in as many writeups. Why haven't I seen similar claims from e.g. Brian Greene or David Deutsch? Is it something specific to her own theories? Is it from some branch of theoretical physics that's not accepted by mainstream physicists? Am I misunderstanding the claims? Etc.

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/12/hawking-radiation-i...
I haven’t read the original article, but there have been processes for extracting oxygen from lunar regolith for a half century now. I’m not sure what’s new about this one.

In general these processes are energy intensive because they involve temperatures high enough to melt rock. On the Earth that is difficult to achieve because you need to keep the furnace hot. On the Moon with its hard vacuum, a large chunk of rock moved onto insulating material doesn’t radiate much heat. So all you’d need, really, is a large parabolic mirror. The Sun is your power source.
They might be referring to the ARM FJCVTZS instruction[0].

It speeds up converting JavaScript doubles to 32-bit integers.

[1] is the Webkit commit that added support for FJCVTZS, it was between a 0.5 to 2% speedup - that's a big win for a mature optimizer.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/50966903/

[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184023#c24
It's worth bearing in mind that initially (and until only a few months ago iirc) tests were only available to certified essential workers - first NHS staff, then civil servants, etc. I actually paid £100 for a private test in May. I've had an NHS drive-thru one more recently.

I'm not sure of the absolute veracity of your 'regardless of symptoms' claim. As I understand it, the R number is calculated based on all the NHS tests done (and private, with some lag iirc). This even explicitly says "You cannot get a free NHS test unless you have symptoms, have been asked to by your local council, live in England and have been told to by your hospital, or are taking part in a government pilot project."

https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test
New Zealand makes great Sauvignon Blanc wine, and one of the most well-known brands is Cloudy Bay. Apparently it became famous after being used as a murder weapon in a (more famous at the time) mystery novel.
So there's a few things here.

> Only there is no 'oppressive system'.

I think this is open to debate, and it's not fair to simply state it as fact given the evidence.

> ... but an individual officer responding to 911 call and standing against an agitated individual with a weapon and who's about to attack.

Indeed, but that's also overly simplistic. A violent response is justified but isn't necessarily preferred, and degree matters. Proper training in de-escalation, hand-to-hand combat, safety equipment, non-lethal, less-lethal and eventually if necessary lethal weapons are all available to officers.

How you pick is a systemic question. How much training and what kind is a systemic question. And the results are measurable. Indeed Canada's per capita police shooting rate is 1/10th that of the US -- and Canada's pretty high as far as rich countries go! New Zealand police killed 2 or 3 people since 2015.

It's overwhelmingly not a kill-or-be-killed situation, and further, the job of an officer is not to eliminate 100% of harm potential for themselves at all costs -- but instead to resolve the situation with the optimal outcome for all involved. The job is in fact risky, which is why the profession is so highly regarded.

I maintain the issue is one of accountability, between police not being held accountable for gross negligence, the unequivocal support from the police unions and of course, qualified immunity. I suspect people just want to feel like they're being treated fairly. If you don't hold anyone accountable it creates a negative feedback loop breaking trust and making the job more dangerous for everyone.
As I said, France and Spain are the two exceptions. In the U.K., for example, illegal immigrants can access the NHS only for urgent care, similar to the situation for hospitals in the US.
What a tragic and beautiful story of a life beset by chronic illness and endurance.

Here’s to Alice James.
No, this is not a catalytic process. It is just electrolysis.