skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

> I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.

While I agree with your points that Apple in general contributed a lot when it comes to how humans perceive technology (for better or worse), I cannot let this argument stand untouched.

- WebKit is NOT developed in the open.

- It has a private bug tracker nobody outside Apple can see. Try to report a bug, even as a bug reporter you can't see shit what's happening with it. And this wasn't the case before ~2009, from personal experience.

- Over 80% of contributions were actually from Mozilla or Google.

- WebKit source code is still released 6 months after it was developed, leaving nobody outside Apple's internal team with the capability to even discuss features or APIs.

- Apple's "Open Source" philosophy is the minimum legal requirement, aka dumping a fucking zip file with random shit to a server and forget about it afterwards. Lots of people from Chromium have been in contact with Apple's legal team until they "really complied" and actually dumped the full source code (again, as a shitty zip file). Apple didn't do this on their own, and they never have.

- The Blink incident. Don't forget this. A shitload of contributors left WebKit because of the previous points, and now Chromium is getting dominant due to Blink. Do you think this is a coincidence?

All these policies how Apple "loves Open Source" speak against the fact. Also, don't forget bash, tcsh, zsh and pretty much all related to the brew ecosystem. These people, while they still love Apple's ecosystem, never benefited a single dollar and neither a single contribution from Apple.

If you don't believe me, pick a random zip file on Apple's "open source server" [1], contact the maintainer of said project and ask them about how they think Apple helps them. The answer is: not at all.

I won't dig into the other facts which made the Web crippled, where we've been before with IE6 and ActiveX. Humanity hasn't learned shit from that lesson. And /u/themacguffinman did that already in his own comment to elaborate this fact [2]

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285306
She is being very selective with the information she is choosing to release. She made demands to Google which they did not accept, but she does not specify what those demands were. She also says that she doesn't have a copy of the post she made to the "Brain women and allies", but she doesn't summarize it either, and given her position, I imagine she could get a copy from someone else in the group if she cared to.

I'd suggest given Timnit is choosing to only tell a very small part of the story here, and Google is obviously not going to publicly comment on an HR matter, especially one this sensitive, that it's best to withhold judgment.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=timnit+gebru
Can you post a link? I can't find it. (I see email from her manager to Timnit, but not the original email from Timnit to the mailing list)
HOPE scholarships are great PR but awful policy. Basically, the poorest people in Georgia are paying for the children of mostly middle and upper-class residents to go to UGA and Ga Tech for free. Of course the state points out the handful of low-income students who also benefited from a HOPE scholarship, but these are the minority of recipients, and they would almost all have qualified for significant grants and financial aid anyway. The most offensive aspect, I'll state again, is the fact that the poorest residents overwhelmingly purchase lottery tickets while the wealthiest residents overwhelmingly receive the scholarships.

It also makes the state university (UGA) much, much harder to gain admission to, since demand for a free college education is high. Applications (and thus necessary GPA/SAT scores) are through the roof... Ivy-qualified students (again, often from wealthy families) are often encouraged to go to UGA for free instead.

HOPE already vastly exceeded its budget once, leading to cutbacks and reforms about a decade ago, with many students losing scholarships or suddenly not qualifiying. A more recent report says it is likely to run out of funds again in 2028. https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/new-analysis-show...
Isn't this standard practice with any vaccine?
All you're telling me is that there are no choices that you like. All of those are viable choices (except the ones that literally don't exist anymore), and there were many more viable choices before FAANG began their dominance that consumers saw and abandoned in favor of the dominant products we have today.

Not that I don't know how you feel, there are areas where I hate all the options too. I don't always get what I want, that's life. It would be perverse for me to force legions of others to dedicate their efforts towards what I would like instead.
It would have been a great time for pilots to be training on the the 737 Max as a different aircraft. The mistake with the 737 Max is that it is a simulator for pilots flying like it was a regular 737. The selling point to not have to train the pilots was the big mistake with the design.
yeah 500 years is like maximum 50 generations for humans, which is nothing on a genetic timescale
This is totally insane.

Imagine if a company did this with air bags, guns for the army, tires or brakes for cars... Or any kind of food for people?

Just a little considerations for the ramifications of shoving this through out panic instead of well founded science shows what horrific tragedy this could cause with no repercussions for this company what so ever.

No profit??

Look up Hollywood accounting to show how the "for no profit" can mean something other than what you think it means.
I'd call it petty more than sleazy. Drama queens on both sides.
Heh, considering how popular Jeff Dean is at Google, she doesn't have a chance here, even before LeCunn incident. Better suck it up and go somewhere.
That's funny. The law in Japan stipulates that a copy of the 業務規則 needs to be in a place easily accessible to employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

Some of these stories are doubtful and obviously none of them are all that scientific… for one thing why are all the reports from Russia?
Try it in two steps:

"Hey Siri, set a reminder <for {date/time|location}>."

> "Okay, what do you want me to remind you?"

"Put dingus on the grocery list"

> Done.
Too late, the free product producers don't stand a chance against the big players. Neither feature wise, performance wise nor the whole ecosystem.
And governments forcing rules upon private companies is the base of a free market to prevent oligopolies and give new players a chance.
In India this is so common that it's not even considered any thing out of the usual, let alone cause a realization.

I have tons of personal anecdotes which would make this post a hell lot longer. But for feelers, these days your ordinary mid level bribe making government employee is worth around 500 crores. For the western readers, that is in the ball park of $60 to $70 million. Higher up the hierarchy, the assistants to ruling party ministers, top bureaucracy, district level administration, or head of government organizations average twice to thrice that easily. The politicians themselves are likely in the ballpark of a few billion dollars worth.

The bribe market in India is so hot, you need to pay bribes, to get posted to positions where you can make more bribe. There's an entire corruption economy. So immense that it would dwarf anything real you could make working hard. Most of these people have regular meets and hire top lawyers to work around legally. They also pay-up the hierarchy for protection.

By the way it's not just some evil cabals meeting underground. Parents explicitly aspire their kids get these jobs. People spend bulk of their 20's just on entrance examinations, just for this.

The scale of corruption economy in India is just so mind boggling, it would be hard to explain any non-Indian just really how immense and all pervasive it is.
These six numbers could've been drawn in any order.
Vaccination cards are already used to track vaccines. I never remember to bring mine to flu shot appointments, but it has the rest of my vaccines noted, with dates and other info. We’ve also already set precedent for requiring vaccines for certain public activities, like going to school.
I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. With salary bands imposing constraints, it's not even possible for you to have made a third of what someone doing "the same job" made.
- updated locales
In the same way the American government currently has a list of all of the assets that every American has in any bank overseas. FATCA requires that if a bank wants to do business with US persons (including citizens regardless of residence) they have to regularly comb their database of clients to look for flags that they may be Americans and report this directly to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). If this doesn't line up with your FBARs they may just take half your money.

FATCA is the reason American citizens can't open bank accounts in many parts of the world -- local laws forbid the banks from transferring the data necessary to comply with FATCA; and if the banks chose to serve US persons anyways, the US government would cut the banks off from the entire US financial system.

This is not only a solved problem, but there's strong precedent.

You wanna play in the big market? You play by their rules. Even if you don't chances are your bank does. And even if they don't, chances are their correspondent or custodial banks do. All roads lead back to DC for American citizens - and anyone one America's shit list.

... and before you consider renunciation, there's an exit tax to be paid in the amount of the capital gains due on all of your assets as though you disposed of them on your last day as a US citizen. And you better believe they'll be checking for your tax compliance on your crypto accounts on the way out. Of course tax evasion is an extraditable offence, too, which really limits your choices.

America has a big carrot and a whole lot of sticks, and it's willing to use both to get what it wants.
Better yet, don't take the money in the first place. Let people keep more of their legitimate earnings.
Android phones (the OS) do allow for multiple markets on the phone, as well as side-loading (which is how the markets the phone's manufacturer or reseller don't install can be added).

Most android phones are either in the good area or in the gray zone of the line that shouldn't be crossed. It's difficult to instruct a user on how to add a third party store, and that has much to do with both this almost always being a bad idea as well as customizations on the devices that might make the instructions not the same for all of them.

I also wonder if android applications have need to install as root, or if the system might have a stub that handles this but then isolates the privilege level by classifying applications as individual users / cgroups.
There is a fun game called Seedship that plays on this idea a bit: https://philome.la/johnayliff/seedship/play/index.html. You play as a ship AI, trying to make the best decisions you can for the cryogenically frozen humans inside, trying to find the best new homeworld.
My favorite opposite of this is companies running k8s, using a ansible to build state on launch..
10x Faster with Clean Code with Visual Programming
It's not really about charity to Google. I just don't consider her Twitter feed a trustworthy source of information, given her general frequency of toxic Twitter drama and her extended, bad faith attack on LeCun. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Google was in the wrong here, and if they are I hope she gets some kind of justice, but I don't think we can just take her word for it.
It seems a bit odd to compare a 3D printed product with "jerry-rigged" devices.

It looks nice but the form factor somewhat looks like what might just be an ESP32 + directional antenna, is the selling point the integration and behaviour profiles of known malicious APs here? Without details and "contact us" pricing I'm really not sure what to make of this. But I guess if the price is low enough it's nicer than putting one together yourself.
Sadly the NestDrop tool in the article you linked is Windows only, and proprietary.

But Milkdrop is alive in open source cross-platform too. https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm
In-Database Machine Learning [pdf]
Stumbled upon this paper. '...automatic symbolic differentiation framework and the gradient descent
operator together with the proposed tensor algebra to be integrated into database systems'. This seems quite a bit more advanced than say BigQuery ML in its current form, which as I understand supports batch gradient descent for some pre-specified models. Any thoughts? Should we expect automatic symbolic differentiation support in future database offerings?
Covid’s timing was devastating for Boeing and the 737 Max.

When the planes were grounded, Boeing kept producing them assuming the issue would be resolved quickly. As of January 2020, slightly before Covid, they had 400 planes built, but not delivered to customers (and so customers haven’t paid for them). Boeing was funding these aircraft with debt.

All of a sudden, demand for air travel drops off a cliff.

All those airlines now decide “I’m just not going to take delivery of those aircraft”. Which also means “I’m not going to pay for them”.

Had the timing gone in the other order, all of those aircraft would have been delivered, and paid for, and airlines would have been holding the bag. (and the covid crisis would have limited the damages airlines could claim, and thus demand from Boeing, if they could meet their reduced schedules with other aircraft).
Very typical for a scientist to have a list of publications. Do you point to some specific piece of work?
> If you don’t have a home air filter, your lungs are the filter.

Since adding an air filter to my home I've essentially stopped getting sick and even at the height of the season my allergies totally stopped being an issue.

> Air pollution has become the world’s single biggest environmental health risk, linked to around 7 million deaths in 2012 according to a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report. The new data further reveals a stronger link between, indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure and cardiovascular diseases, such as strokes and ischemic heart disease, as well as between air pollution and cancer.

The biggest take away for me has been that the immune system has to work overtime to clear out the lungs. Give your lungs a break and let a filter clean the air, not your lungs and immune system.
Gotta be sure to have that number of 0s exactly right.
We need more modern laws that define what credible software security providers are and subjects them to basic regulatory inspection (like oil refineries, for example), but also forces hardware OEMs (like Apple, Oculus, etc.) to allow these security companies to audit and digitally sign all factory-loaded firmware images, operating system installers and the apps that are included with hardware purchases or otherwise installed from new third-party app-stores, container repositories and downloadable/net-bootable distro stores, etc.
If we manage to reproduce from digitally stored DNA, endlessly.

Where it gets interesting is what happens when we start manipulating and improving DNA digitally before we implant it. Basically things like Crispr are stepping stones towards getting there. But we could be digitally creating and evaluating combinations of genes and genomes from very large databases of historical archives of individuals.

The philosophical and ethical questions around this are largely centered on boys of brazil type scenarios. Most of that stuff is driven by popular fiction rather than reality. Another factor is religion and religious objections against stuff like this happening or even acknowledging that this is possible.

But the reality is we already have celebrities ordering clones of their deceased pets. From there to designer babies is not such a huge technical leap. Some religious people might find this offensive but biologically cloning a human and a chihuahua is ballpark the same level of complexity. Never mind things like souls, nativity myths, etc. Now imagine dog breeders going digital and creating new dog breeds digitally before planting an embryo. Not possible today but also not that far off probably. If that bothers you ethically, think designer grains or rice from digitally crafted DNA. GMO foods have been a thing for decades. That stuff going digital would be about as controversial. When that happens it won't stop there.

Mostly the technical issues that make stuff like this unethical have to do with short term technical challenges such as the low success rate of implanting embryos, the high error rates of dna modifications, the correspondingly high number of abortions needed because of failures, availability of stem cell material (until recently this required embryos), etc. This is not a problem for chihuahuas but kind of a show stopper when it concerns our own genetic offspring. Abortions are illegal in a lot of places that euthanize pets and cattle routinely. We're kind of ethically flexible.

There's a good chance that this already is happening and that we simply don't get to learn about it for a while because it is kind of illegal and the people involved are not likely to want to be exposed. But the combination of billionaires, fertility issues, and technical capability makes this more a question of when than if, I would say. Supply and demand are not going to be the issue.
Ethereum 2.0 Phase Zero Launch
In this case it is not. This is essentially a tradeoff.

The covid vaccine lifecycle has been way more short than other vaccines. Naturally the probability of some going wrong is higher.

The scientists, countries and the entire world is taking a calculated risk. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Flying is safer than driving on average. But a lot of bad can hide in averages.

Boeing delivered 387 Max 8 aircraft to their customers before they were grounded in 2019. Two were destroyed, killing everyone aboard. That's half a percent of the aircraft they delivered destroyed within two years. That's obviously much worse that most other aircraft, and far worse than any car currently for sale. You wouldn't buy a car that had a one in 200 chance of killing you and your family before the lease was up, would you?
A lot of people have learned it without that much trouble. It’s possible you’re just not particularly bright, no shame in that.
Do you consider the company on ethically stronger or weaker grounds than NSO Group? And how do you feel about NSO Group?
Google did the right thing and they were civil.

She made some pretty serious demands, not having been met, with such politicization there's no reasonable way to accommodate a longer handoff, and she knew that. Waaay too much risk there.

She set her own terms, they accepted, that's it.

She should have been more transparent in this, because in her Tweets she wasn't forthcoming that it was her terms.

There are a ton of people who are sympathetic to those who are oppressed, but misrepresentations, cancelling etc. on the wrong terms are going to lose general sympathy very quickly.

None of this should be construed as a measure of whether or not Google is 'Good or Bad' or whatever, all these things are individual situations, with their own unique circumstances.
The comments here are weird right now. They seem overly focused on the spat she and Yann LeCun had a while back when it doesn't seem like this incident is about that?

Hopefully some clarification comes out about what her demands were and the internet drops their pitchfork about something that happened long ago
The polar regions never see daylight and reach temperatures as low as a few dozen Kelvin.

https://www.space.com/18175-moon-temperature.html
There's no way your coworker doing the exact same job made 3x your salary. I don't care if he was Biden's own son, no one makes that kind of pay disparity doing the exact same work as someone in the same building as them.
> Ms Gibson, an elementary school teacher and her husband, a 36-year-old cyber security analyst, connected with the National Embryo Donation Center (NEDC), a Christian non-profit in Knoxville that stores frozen embryos that in vitro fertilisation patients decided not to use and chose to donate instead.

Emphasis mine.

I'm prejudiced. And I'm really surprised that this is possible in the US.

> Both embryos were donated and frozen together in 1992, when Tina Gibson was around a year old.

And from a certain perspective, the mother and the daughter are almost the same age.
If someone says (in nicer words) "Do X or I'll resign" and the company doesn't agree to those terms, it's best to accept the resignation immediately because the employee's interests aren't aligned with the company's.

It's also pretty common in roles like sales and PR to be shown the door the day you give notice, especially if you're going to a competitor.
Threat of resignation is not a resignation. Either they follow due termination process, or she might still be employed or have good legal case.
Were you a vendor or did you work in sales/management. I have honestly never seen such a scenario in swes. Would love to know more.
The price of solar dropped because China put it in their five year plans about for about the last 4 plans to dominate that market.
@tastroder you have to get most people are not tech. You have no idea how sale and marketing get impressed by some chart or graph sometimes. Everything seems like black magic to non techies now days.
That's not quite right. Salary bands tend to be guidelines, not constraints. And in ML there are plenty of people getting paid far out of band.
A few people, I have no doubt. When do you think even half the population will be willing and able to afford doing it?

The desperate poor aren’t going anywhere.
Two phones, even two laptops and you're probably still carrying less weight then an original cellular phone with a strap.
The BBC article has far more information and is better written.
> LeCunn calmly and rationally explained that a particular model produced biased results, and that that this was due to the bias in its training data.

But this claim is certainly not necessarily correct, and he shouldn't have been so confident about it. Any part of a system can contribute to bias and that includes the model design, not just the data. If they want the system to work then they need to actually demonstrate it works, not just say it could with X change without testing that.

Though I remember people arguing it didn't work properly at the same time they were saying it was evil (because it contributed to surveillance). Which is odd because if you don't want it to exist, you shouldn't want it to work either.
There you go: https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2020-11-06-Boeing-Appoints-Jinn...

I worked with Jinnah before and he is great at shielding the engineers from executive. If hiring great execs is not movement of corporate mindset I don't know what is.
Notice the domain name. I had no idea that there was such a TLD.
I'd never heard of this fight before, so I just looked it up. My interpretation is that he made that claim, Gebru responded by claiming that that was an overly reductionist view of things (given, presumably, the fact that biased assumptions could affect the coded assumptions as well as the training data), he maintained his opinion, and she felt frustrated that she didn't feel she was being listened to. I did not see her call him a racist, and I did not think either person was acting in bad faith; both seemed frustrated and unhappy that there was a disagreement.

Am I missing anything?
Yup. But given that all the government's want to push this out like it's code on a Friday night, sacrifices were made.