skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a different thread someone recommended charging a small fee for new accounts to prevent abuse. Dang responded that its important for everyone to be able to participate. Between his response and this article I reflected quite a bit about the nine years I have spent on this site, the various weird and mostly wonderful interactions I've had with the community, and the way it has shaped my career and therefore my life.

On this site I have received legitimately profound and sometimes life changing advice and insights from a wider variety of people than I have interacted with in any other format: schizophrenics, the homeless, people from a wide variety of cultures (wealthy and impoverished), and industry rock stars.

There have been disagreements and occasionally arguments. Some of them have made me a little more aware of my own bubble and allowed me to recognize aspects of my world view that were ignorant or that at least failed to consider different points of view.

Much of this was possible because its a place that values the participation of everyone. Articles like this excellent piece of writing shine a light on how important it is.

Edit: I figured some shadow banned people would respond. I was actually talking about at least one person that ended up getting permanently banned that happened to be an influential person to me. Part of what makes this community great is that while we can have heated disagreements we largely do it more civilly than many other online communities. While its an accurate assessment that Hacker News has a liberal bias there are lots of conservatives here that freely share their opinions civilly. They might feel outnumbered and they might sometimes be unjustly downvoted by people that don't understand what a downvote button should be used for, but they are largely able to participate because they keep it civil. I'm pretty politically moderate myself. By no stretch of the imagination could I be considered a "SJW" or a person with a typical San Francisco political outlook (only mentioning these phrases because that was what was alleged to be the only type of person that can exist here). Out of curiosity I took a look at jrcii's account and they were indeed needlessly toxic on a large number of occasions before being banned and yet was still told if they email the admin and promise to be civil they can be reinstated. Instead of taking them up they decided be even less civil. A community can be open to everyone and still ban people that are not acting in good faith.
I don't want to work for a manager who will never think: "Huh, this situation is serious enough for someone to make this kind of ultimatum. Who is right and why? Let me take a moment to think about it with an open mind and pick the most appropriate reaction regardless of what I previously thought."

Sometimes the person making an ultimatum is right, sometimes they're wrong. It shouldn't be as adversarial as viewing yielding as weak. Insisting on always "winning" is in my view the weak position.

Additionally, firing someone is not always legal in some countries, even after an ultimatum, assuming they pick the wording of their ultimatum carefully (e.g. "I may very well resign if/unless [desired condition]") to retain control over whether they will later finalize their conditional decision to resign.

As one example, in Quebec, employees who don't qualify as "senior management" and who have been employed at a company there for an uninterrupted period of at least 2 years cannot legally be fired without what the law considers good cause, period, not even if the company gives them a notice period or pay in lieu. Any alleged noncompliance or misconduct that falls short of the most extreme examples must be first dealt with a graduated process of progressively stronger discipline, and it must be possible for someone to recover from that instead of having the outcome of the process as a foregone conclusion. There is a government tribunal to which an aggrieved party can appeal if they aren't happy with the outcome, with the power to order remedies including back pay and even reinstatement.

Similar things are found in many European countries, though certainly not all.

Of course, ultimatums with more definitive wording like "I resign if/unless [condition that the listener has control over]" -- note the absence of hesitating words like "may very well" -- can irreversibly become an effective resignation worldwide, based on choice of the listener on whether to satisfy or reject the condition.
While Rowling provided the creative input to her stories, they were:

- Edited by other people
- Printed by other people
- (Films were) directed by other people
- Characters in the films were played by other people
- Distributed by other people

If there was no J.K. Rowling, we (admittedly) wouldn't have the stories. But the same is true of all of the other moving parts in the media business.

No-one is self-made.
In my time in college there was a lot of edge case stuff. There were autograders that would test tons and tons of edge cases, so a large percent of my project time was analyzing my code trying to find which edge case I missed that was taking a point off my score. I also participated in CTFs which are all about finding security vulnerabilities (edge cases). If the senior developer is going to be expected to write a lot of code, then I would expect the senior developer to be adept at finding edge cases. If the senior developer isn't going to be writing much code, then yes, a coding interview is maybe not so useful, and a more architecture-focused interview might be better.
A product that focuses on something is going to be better than something that's treated as "just a feature" in something else. And for "chat" they already had (not great) messenger offerings, but didn't make the jump to group chat. And Slack had benefits from being able to position itself as a cool new alternative, and from not relying on already-existing central infrastructure: it could establish itself at the core of new companies that e.g. didn't use exchange and it could easier be sneaked into large orgs as a grassroots thing - just signing up your team for Slack was probably easier in many places than getting IT to give you an extra feature to the central infra.

And now that Microsoft is paying attention, it's doing very well at fighting Slack, despite Teams' weaknesses. (They also tried to buy Slack first) But it took Slack to show them that a new group chat product was needed and valuable.
Is this the current production version of the code or the MVP I wonder.

But looks like a simple, focused and very impressive execution born of his own pain points were.
I think the solution is to rely on hanging indents rather than trying to align with the column of the previous opening parenthesis, bracket, etc.

So instead of this:

def some_method(param1
param2):
statement1

you do this:

def some_method(
param1,
param2):
statement1

Hanging indents work regardless of whether you use tabs or spaces for indentation.
All I'm saying is that's what people mean colloquially.
I have a genuine question:

If a person of color (I am myself non-white) is not performing, what does it take to fire them without the entire world playing the race card on you?

Are we creating a society that makes it impossible to fire a person of color? You know there are bad apples in every race, right? How do we handle such scenarios? Seems unfair to me, myself being a person of color - I don't want the world to treat me like some kind of a hero for being non-white / minority. I want fairness and it is frankly offensive.

I am not pleased with the way we're treating each other. It's supposed to be equal opportunity.

I also want us to have scientific discussion about gender differences (backed by research) and other difficult conversations. Nature doesn't give a fuck about any of this - if our goal is to uncover the way mother nature works, we're going to have to meet difficult truths and not be afraid of it.
The distinction is the existence, from the developer’s perspective, of a separate step called “compilation,” which produces an executable artefact which can be distributed but not converted back to the source code. It’s about programming in practice, not fundamental computer science principles.
The incorrect assumption is that you need to impress those girls at all.
A lot of small towns have prisons as their major employer.
Because without good organizational controls, the developers will put those servers into production with no HA, backups, and insecure configuration.

I’ve seen it multiple times in my careeer.
You can't tell that investing is hard by how much endowment managers are paid. Convincing people you have the secret investing sauce is the most important skill of an endowment manager. All claim they can beat investing in index funds but there is no evidence they can.
By default, content marked NSFW should be appear blurred. There are options to further control the display of NSFW content.
And Fish!
https://www.finewoodworking.com/discussion-forum
That's genuinely understandable. My worry is that it was true back in the days of the boomers, and it has been so ingrained in us that we didn't even notice it shifting, and now lack of awareness of this fact causes a kind of cognitive dissonance preventing us from fixing these issues, not least of which the OP.

We've squandered our wealth for ever-increasing cash flow, and by the time we're done I'm worried that the country will be a empty hulk.
The mistake was expecting much from “PhD AI ethicist” - a title Orwell accidentally left out.
If actually interacting with with homeless people takes you too far outside your comfort zone, I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it:

http://graceofgodmovie.com/

So you can just watch that.
> An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms.

This is a pretty superficial take on what is an extremely interesting sociological topic. (To be clear, I’m referring to the article, not the underlying paper which we don’t have.) Obviously just because social movements “have tried to establish ... vocabulary” doesn’t meant that vocabulary has become a “new cultural norm.” Plenty of such efforts end up being cultural dead-ends.

Take for example a term like “LatinX.” This term has been proposed and is used by certain people, but is extremely unfamiliar and often alienating to Latinos themselves: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/5/21548677/trump-hispanic-vote-l... (“[O]nly 3 percent of US Hispanics actually use it themselves.... The message of the term, however, is that the entire grammatical system of the Spanish language is problematic, which in any other context progressives would recognize as an alienating and insensitive message.”).

The article hand-waves away a deeply interesting question: What should an AI do here? Should AI reflect society, or be a vehicle for accelerating change? It seems at least reasonable to say that the AI should reflect what people actually say, in which case a big training dataset is appropriate, instead of what some experts decide that people should say. In some contexts, for example with “LatinX,” researchers seeking to enhance inclusivity could instead end up imposing a kind of racist elitism. (People without college educations—which disproportionately comprises immigrants and people of color—tend to be less knowledgeable about and slower to adopt these changes in vocabulary.)

The paper seems to imply that AIs should not reflect “social norms” but that training data should be selected to accentuate “attempt[ed]” shifts in such norms. Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t seem obviously true. To return to the example above, is some Google AI generating the phrase “LatinX” (which 3/4 of Latinos have never even heard of: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...) in preference to “Latino” or “Hispanic” actually the desired result?
Buy nothing group in your area!
What I don't understand is why a replaceable battery is seen as an all or nothing proposition. Design the car so that you could add 1 or 2 extra batteries when you need them.

So 90%, 95%, 99% of the time you're using your built-in 150-mile range. But you're not dragging around the weight of the extra 200, 250, 300 miles that you don't need. Your car weighs a lot less so you get better eMPG.

Tesla did a demo of having a battery swap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY That's really cool but if you could roll into Jiffy Lube (now offering Jiffy Volts) and get your extra batteries ...
what’s the energy expense of training GPT-3? It should be very high. Eager to know the upside of such models. Environmental and social impacts of tech are becoming more direct and mainstream in today’s world!
Both your points are true. But for a startup to be successful, it needs to have customers, or at least users. The available market for a company is the dollar-weighted set of people who think that it's cool (or at least necessary). Young people caring a whole lot about climate change or racial justice speaks directly to what potential users are looking for, just like kids throwing sheep at each other and hitting the Like button spoke volumes about what startups would be hot in 2005.
You’re going to be downvoted, not because of your questions, but because you decided to put “please bring the downvotes” at the end of your comment. Why would you undermine yourself by sticking such an antagonistic comment at the end of your post?
The top 1% net worth and the top 1% income are different things, and I’m pretty sure the linked source is only talking about the net worth group (though it’s not exactly clear). Net worth is not necessarily linked to your income in any given year, so I don’t think it’s especially surprising that the income for that group averages out to around 5% of their net worth.
This is exactly what I would expect from an “AI ethicist” to be honest.
Computers are so beefy now that I could download the parts of the internet I use regularly, and it still wouldn't put a dent in my hard drive. I think the entirety of Stack Overflow and Wikipedia is only a few gigs.

Finding what I'm looking for is still a challenge though. I tried taking those offline a few years ago using YaCy, which didn't work so well. Maybe elasticsearch? People say nice things about it.
Given that there is a pandemic on and volunteer work is problematic, I will add that I had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. The primary text for it was called "Tell them who I am."

It tells the stories of homeless women and was written by a man dying of cancer who decided to spend his last days doing something more meaningful to him than punching a clock.
Yes because this happens everytime a PoC is fired. Every single PoC who is fired gets this media attention.
Yes. This is a really excellent movie. I have seen it. I highly recommend it.
Show HN: Book About Underdog Innovation and Thinking Outside the Odds
I have for years been using the reddit compact interface, which to me is almost a pinnacle.

Append .compact to any reddit page and enjoy. It's fast and it's not the dimwitted slow loading mobile crap they've been throwing at us for years
What is the energy expended on training GPT-3? Eager to know the upsides of such models. The environmental and social impacts of tech are more direct and mainstream in today’s world.
> It's not "runaway activism" if you hire ethics researchers who find ethics problems.

Agreed, but there's obviously a difference of perspective about what transpired here and I don't think any of us knows with certainty what the truth is. Finding ethics problems is grand and all, but framing a narrative that misrepresents those problems is highly problematic, particularly if they are in a role that makes them the leading ethical voice of the company.
I don't know what you think this proves.

The lack of people dying from ebola doesn't justify not containing ebola.
I removed it. I know its going to be downvoted though. Because it is going against the grain on HN. But, I am being respectful.

We've created an atmosphere of fear. I don't feel comfortable voicing my opinions even after being anonymous on the internet. That's pretty fucked up.
Medical ethics is a serious subject, and then there was Asilomar on the ethics of genetic engineering. Just because this AI ethicist isn't one, it doesn't follow the field is worthless.
Serious question: You say that engaging with the least sophisticated form of the argument is beneath him, but if that's the form of the argument he chooses to engage in, is it?
Maybe it’s just my browser, but I’d there no way to change the comment sorting?
I think it is causing a reverse effect. It's going to create more racist behavior from employers - "If we cannot fire a PoC or some minority, let's not even bother hiring them in the first place."

This is not good.
My local [car brand] dealer doesn't have a charger for my car. As such, I always make sure that my car is charged before I take it over there.

I mean, they could charge them off 120V, but that's like 1/4 of the speed as you can get off a dedicated charger, or less if they install fast chargers, which is what I'd expect for a $200k/dealer installation.
Should robots be gendered? Comments on Alan Winfield's opinion piece
That is also, in fact, illegal. And it's not very hard to realize someone is doing that.
I agree. There is ongoing research into whether the correlation of low vit D is just the association with other comorbidities or whether there may be an independent risk to low levels.

I expect additional studies to result in the coming months that will show more evidence on supplementation before patients are sick enough to be hospitalized. My gut feeling is that it won't make a difference, but until we have the data I can't know for sure. This study, however, makes me feel more confident that I am not hurting a patient by withholding vit D supplementation if htey are admitted with severe Covid.
Not that I dont believe you, but why dont you share what the options are? The problem is that if you say something along the lines of "family and friends" there are millions of people who for different reasons dont get to enjoy good experiences in that front or any experience at all. Same with health, travel, food, jobs, peace, company, love, justice or hope.
There is no system tray on a Mac. Anyone who talks about such a thing just proves that they know nothing about the Mac.

There is a menu bar on the Mac. And there are various menu bar applications. But there is no system tray.
Edmonton (also where I grew up) was actually a leader in transit in the 70s and 80s, although it obviously hasn't kept up. Having an LRT in such a low density coverage, and good (although slow) coverage by bus using a hub and spoke network was pretty progressive at the time.
" No voting - Relevance is based on chat activity and excluded voting entirely."
Won't this just mean that the top comments will always be flamewars?
Saying that react is boring but also actively developed is a bit contradictory particularly in the land of javascript.
I’m going to stand by my post even though AI ethics should be a genuine field. Call me cynical.
Same. The new interface is an abomination.
Is there an incentive to perform peer-reviewed, triple-blind, controlled studies on people to see if diet and exercise helps? Then there's no way to know.
/r/libertarian becoming socialist is not confused at all. It's been made to welcome libertarian socialists for a long while now, explicitly, and libertarian socialism itself has a very long tradition.
Possibly greatest comp package ever negotiated.
Indeed, it's usually considered poor form to forward emails to broader mailing lists.
Of course.

Wasn't Google prioritizing green energy for their datacenters?
I don't eat meat, but not a full vegetarian (I eat fish) , vbut I also fall into the category of not being interested in the lab grown meat.

I think there are two different categories of vegetarians, the one who do it for moral reasons and the ones who do it because meat is kinda icky.

For the first category, if the meat is produced in an ethical way (lab grown), then eating it is no problem. But lab grown meat is just the same as real meat so if you didn't want to eat it before, why would you want to eat the lab grown version?

A 1-3 split between the two categories seems to plausible as far as I can tell.
Something can't be both. A resignation is an unconditional desire to leave. "If you don't fix this, I can't continue working here", though, is a desire to stay.
Considering a Pennsylvania law maker made fake Twitter accounts to write "as a gay person", when you start saying you're a non PoC and conflating what happened with Timnit to "firing badly performing PoC"s you do not at all sound genuine.

There is no way to prove you are actually PoC. And even if you did, it's incredibly unrelated to the matter at hand.

No one has even claimed she was fired for bad performance and dozens of Google employees have said in no part of their process was academic rigor taken into account.

What you're doing is the literal definition of concern trolling.
is this why big–pharma harvest blue bloods? i'm not sure i believe this hoopla about the tree of life.

but i'm interested in the biomedical applications from obscure species that feature bioluminescence, magic pheromones and how to test the quality of Eel I just put on back order.

i loved your italicized block. don't down vote this one.
> deserves to own a billion times more of a vote in how our society is run

But not for all aspects of society. Pre-democracy, kings and royalties get to make these choices. But in western democracies, you at least have an unalienable vote which is independent of your economic output. This vote means that no matter how many billions get spent, this vote is up to your own decision.
The problem is that due to significant and pervasive behaviour changes, other forms of mortality and altered.

In some places, there are apparently many fewer people dying from the flu, because, well, we're isolated from one another!

Similarly, fewer car accidents. Suicides are probably altered, as well as violence in some cases, in particular domestic violence.

People forgoing treatments for any host of disease due to either fear of going to the clinic, or delayed treatments.

etc..
The motivation is to know the truth and to focus on interventions that can help. Note this study gives us no information on whether taking vit D before you become sick helps or not, it cannot answer that. I think there is very low risk of taking a Vit D supplement.

What it does do is give doctors more confidence that making patients take another pill when they are already sick in the hospital won't do anything to help them. This saves unnecessary costs, possible side effects (albeit high dose Vit D is still relatively harmless), and patient comfort (when you are as short of breath as some severe covid patients even taking pills and eating can be a challenge).

There are many supplements that people very strongly believe help covid without good evidence beside vitamin D, why shouldn't we take all of them all the time? There are people and doctors who are passionate about the potential benefits in covid for: ivermectin, Vit C, Vit D, Zinc, famotidine (AKA Zantac) and hydroxychloroquine.

At some point we have to actually look at the data.