skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's always obvious in hindsight, much like what can be said of something like Dijkstra's algorithm, but the fact of the matter is not everyone can spend the energy to both understand the context of the problem and direct their attention towards the evaluation of ethics within that context. Some people even find it hard to understand the situations of others enough to identify where their technologies can be used for harm.

The problem that AI ethics research addresses are ethical problems that executives and employees aren't paying attention to. It may seem obvious when stated explicitly because of the amount of ease it takes to grasp the concepts (and the seemingly simple derivation of cause and effect relationships), but I assure you it is not obvious to a lot of people I know in the field at least.

There's also a clear misunderstanding of what ethics research should entail:

* AI being forced to chose between two "bad" scenarios will result in an unfavorable outcome for one party

This is a trivial result that doesn't hold much value as a standalone observation and probably wouldn't be touted as a research point in a respectable publication of AI ethics.

* AI could reveal truths people don't want to hear e.g. it might say the best team for a project is an all white male team between 25 - 30 rather than a more diverse team. It might say that a 'perfect' society needs a homogeneous population.

The fact that you made this comment may be a cause for an ethics discussion in itself. You used "truths" to describe the statement "the best team for a project is an all white male team between 25 - 30 rather than a more diverse team." This shows a disregard for the reality that most data is contextualized and biased. Using terms like "best team" and "more diverse team" make the statement like the one you made at risk for having took a misguided conclusion from data.

Maybe the following revised statement would be closer to what we can call a contextualized "truth" generated by an ML model:

"Teams that comprise of white males between 25 - 30 have a statistically larger chance of meeting milestones set by leadership rather than teams with one or more non-white male."

Even statements like that aren't complete as my definition of "meeting milestones" could be sourced from self-reported data (in which case it could mean that white males just self-report more milestone completions).

* AI could disrupt a lot of lower paid jobs first without governments having proper supports and retraining structures in place

A problem to consider, sure, but this is one of the more popular observations and has been echoed over time within the context of technological advancements in general.
> Rust isn’t bad but it’s still not as good as C or C++

Can you elaborate in what way? I was under the impression the amount of low-level control was equal.
Disclaimer: I love Github. From a commercial development standpoint (ie. my day job), it's fantastic.

BUT: What a lot of developers, myself included, feel like is the source control in git is great. The project management tools (issues, actions, etc...) require centralization of certain processes, that for some projects (open and closed source), don't fit well. Sometimes the 'how it works' is a bad fit. Other times, it's where it has to be to work. For example, running CI on a container on Azure from actions. Yes you can move where it runs. But for some projects, localhost is where that should happen. I'm really happy to see people working on this, because it will be just as transformative as git and Github has been.
how'd you even find this link?
hi Brian, thank you for your work and your response. You've chosen to work on the world's most important and difficult project, and for that you should be thanked every day. Apologies if my tone was off, or criticisms too harsh. cheers
Fitting slavery into "A mechanism by which a small input can result in a larger output" feels like a stretch.

But I agree that there is moral and amoral leverage. I of course only love the moral kind.
Facts? I don't have anything cite other than common sense.

We know that case counts generally do not have wild swings. In other words, prior performance indicates future behavior. If the two week moving average of positive case counts is 500 - then we can roughly predict what to expect the following day for positive case counts plus or minus the current infection trend.

My experience has been that people who simply get tested are already isolating/quarantining. That has been my approach. So if 500 people tested positive then I generally believe those 500 people isolate themselves and they are no longer infecting people because of their quarantine. Then 500ish people show up tomorrow to take their place.

That's my point. Once people are identified as sick then they aren't spreading the disease because of "hey don't be a giant dickhead".
> But epidemiologists are a very cautious group.

No... they are the correct norm of cautious, it's the rest of us that are blithely charging around recklessly with wild abandon. It's like how on Star Trek they were always beaming to new planets in their regular uniforms with no spacesuits or anything. The gimmick or conceit there was that the transporter filtered out nasty bugs during rematerialization. Until we have "magic" bug filters jet-setting is a disease vector.

People are talking about "returning to normal" but there's no normal to return to: mass international rapid transit is not normal. Huge cities with millions of people are not normal. Nothing about the last ~N centuries is normal (for whatever value of N up to about 120 or so? Younger Dryas happened about 12Ky ago, eh? The Potbelly Hill dates from around the 10th millennium BCE[1]. Somewhere around there we started in with farms and cities. This has been the blink of an eye in evolutionary and geological timeframes. Everything we're doing is new and radical!)

What I'm getting at is this: this won't be the last virus. Remember swine flu? SARS? Ebola? Zika? Hantavirus? Heck, Lyme? Polio is making a comeback, that's the one that paralyses children.

We keep expanding into new wilderness. The "attack surface" of humanity is growing exponentially.

There's no normal to go back to.

(I really do hate to be such a downer, but I just don't see a lot of people taking the long view. Everyone is understandably eager to get back to pretending that viruses don't exist, but they do. Connect the goddamned dots.)

[1] Göbekli Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
I'm not an expert on astrology, but I see many cultures believe in it. Maybe there is a method to their madness that we don't understand now that you mention it.

I know for TA, you have to look at the patterns and they are visible in the data. The people who are against are the ones who can't figure it out.
Those clojure implementations are not datalog. They are an attempt to get datalog-like functionality in a lisp syntax. At best they translate a subset of datalog concepts into a language that is more general purpose in nature.
Beyond the ergonomics, `std::variant` is horribly outperformed by basic type erasure mechanisms or inheritance. Every time I've tried to use `std::variant` I've been unhappy with the runtime performance vs any other way to solve this problem (the compile time performance is expectedly atrocious compared to any other method).

So you've got poor ergonomics, poor compilation performance, bloated code size, and poor runtime performance. I've written an enormous amount of C++ code from applications to libraries to system development. I literally have never found a place where `std::variant` has any positives that can't be written a different, clearer way with drastically better compile time and run time performance.
Or in the industrial sector: Milling machines running Windows 95/98 (fun times getting it to talk with windows 10 on the network) or working with floppies are still around: Those beasts are too expensive to not run until dead.
DoH will just be the start of another arms race. If you would like to control DoH also user LinuxBender responded to a question I asked about DoH blocklists with these repos in another post. I haven't got around to trying it out yet though.

[1]: https://github.com/bambenek/block-doh

[2]: https://github.com/Sekhan/TheGreatWall

Edit: I am mostly curious to see what devices/applications it will break.
That’s a poor analogy. Vegetarians are an obviously interested party in the discussion. The fact that they’re vegetarians in the first place.
> This law was intended to allow sites to delete abusive or illegal content without being sued.

That's not true at all. The law was created because lots of sites big and small were being dragged into lawsuits over comments or posts made by their users. The nuisance cost alone was having a chilling effect and courts were divided about liability.

The law is very straightforward and obviously good: liability lies with the person making the statement, not with the person hosting the platform.

Repealing it would mean the cost of hosting any user-provided content would be far too high to be worth doing. Even something as simple as a product review would subject the site (and their hosting provider) to liability.
I usually just use switch(std::variant:index()) and then std::get<int>(). Which worked reasonably well. But then I stopped using std::variant altogether, because in the end it never gave enough benefits.
These days I use reinterpret_cast and cast away all my problems.
Against massive initial skepticism, I’m becoming very impressed with Rust. I’m now going to be ‘that guy’ - apologies.

After years of being annoyed by Rust people claiming C++ is dying or too unsafe or whatever, I expected this to be another C# - a sort of C-with-training-wheels for people who care more about productivity than perf. Something I could safely ignore.

This ‘borrow checker’ stuff sounds great for kids, but for disciplined experienced C++ guys it’s at best a non feature and at worst would just get in the way, like GC, right?

In fact, I’m finding the reduced mental overhead (not just from borrow, but from the language as a whole being smaller and more consistent) is a huge win. Even learning the language and stdlib as I go.

I’ll still use C++ proudly where it’s the best choice, but I’d put some effort into trying Rust first. As a cpp-master-race guy, that surprised the crap out of me.
Not only that, I have a TV that is in working order that's 30 some years old. The average lifespan of a fortune 500 company is half that.
A Surface Go, and a Surface Pro X. It depends on the day. The Go is underpowered but much more comfortable to hold and use as a tablet.
Just set your clock to that time and watch what happens.
> How is it any less eliminative for decentralized services?

Not speaking for the parent here but I think you called out a distinction; private. There's a difference between running a private, not for profit, Mastadon node where anyone who signs up presumably knows what the forum is about versus Twitter who pitched their company to investors as merely a platform for people to tweet.

Nobody is upset with Twitter moderating content that violates existing Federal Law, but they were never meant to be a moderating like a Mastadon node on the private side or even like a sub reddit on the public side. Again, looking at Reddit, most don't have an issue with moderated content on the sub reddit, the issue is when Reddit removes entire sub reddits because THEY don't agree with the content.

BTW, I think Justice Thomas' recent remarks have made Twitter and Facebook take note because he hinted that the misrepresentation to investors was the attack vector, not the 1st Amendment.
I've written a lot of C++ code but I'm retired so it's been a while. After reading about SFINAE I had a strong feeling that C++ reminds me of the US Tax code or fits the definition of the word Byzantine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_failure_is_not_an...
To be fair, the root comment started by suggesting mental illnesses in C++ programmers, so charged responses are to be expected.
It's relevant to him and his experience not to mention that of plenty of other developers. Why tell OP to remove it when you can just ignore it?
> researchers are racist

I never argued for that. My point is that researchers (as well as everyone!) have biases, which may manifest in the end as racism or other forms of discriminations. To prevent these biases from manifesting, (AI) ethics experts are needed as oversight.

> the company that employs them is racist

To take the example of the "racist soap dispenser" again: while the individual people who have developed it may not have been racist, they have failed to think outside their biases and ask themselves "can people with non-white skin use the product?". Also, management has failed here, because more diverse staff would have resulted in at least one internal test candidate of color noticing "hey, I can't get soap!".

The result of this lack of diversity and out-of-the-ordinary thinking was that a person of color was rightfully offended at not being dispensed soap. Therefore, the company acted racist even if it never intended to do so.

> the whole country is racist

Just short of half of the country recently elected a President who openly spouted white-supremacist conspiracy theories. For half the people in the US racism is not a dealbreaker for the highest office it has to offer!
Explosive Forming a Sphere [video]
I see you don’t live in the south. Just got off a FaceTime with my sister in law who is currently at a farmers market with her kids. I am intrigued how others would respond to this, I just had to watch on in disbelief (these kind of actions are the norm down here)
An accessible introduction to type theory and implementing a type-checker
Not totally on topic, but on threads about researchers, I see this trend that when we're talking about a male researcher we only mention the family name but when talking about a female researcher we're using mostly the first name.

Case in point, at time of writing there are 26 mentions of "Timnit" vs 16 mentions of "Gebru" on this thread.

I don't think there are bad intentions behind this, but it really comes off as infantilizing so maybe we'd be better off calling her "Gebru"?
Since this is your business, your incentives are aligned: develop a product by means of a tool that needs to be productive and cost effective. In other words, you have skin in the game, unlike the average employed coder. This changes perspective.
> I would argue it is you who are falling for black-and-white thinking that all trust is bad and that currency should be trustless.

I think our differences boil down to one thing: I don't share the belief than trust is better than trustless. Actually, I believe the opposite is true in most situations, because trustless allows abstractions in a simple manner.

For handling exceptions (ex: ETH DAO), we can revert to trust mechanism, but most of the time, we're better off without.

> > Actually, at the bare minimum, it removes political control of the monetary supply, leaving only fiscal policy, which may enable better long term control of public deficit by implementing a Milton Friedman like rule (whether it's constant inflation, deflation, or nothing, all is good as long as it remains constant and predictable)

> I don't agree with any of that. I don't want any of that.

Yet I don't think you are an economist, so I'm afraid your wants are biased. Most people don't want to wait - they want to break open the cookie jar. They want to eat the seed corn.

It's a human bias, with an economic name: the time discount factor, which has been researched in how it leads to substandard outcomes (ex: not saving for your own retirement)

At the society level, 401k and the like is a way of removing trust in your saving ability: the decision is taken for you in advance.

Of course, there are exceptions (ex: you're out of work or sick and need the money now), but that's when the "exception" of trust comes in handy.

> > To be clear I think all narcotics should be legal. It is the narcos who create the harm. I'm 100% pro dugs and 100% against allowing narcos to thrive.

I 100% agree, but yet I think it's better for me not to have vodka and cocaine at home - because if I'm extremely tired but can't sleep, I could be tempted to take the former, then if I have to fly somewhere and it's important I'd be tempted to take the latter the morning after.

So I don't buy any - another way of favoring a trustless system. If I want booze, I go to a bar as needed.

Crypto can offers many features like that, and I believe a smart contract that would automatically save to your retirement account (while exactly equivalent to a 401k on paper) would be better, by sheer virtue of removing the needed trust in the government: I could see a government plundering retirement accounts in a grand announcement of a more redistributive retirement made available to everybody past some given age.
Most abstractions discussed in the article have a runtime cost in Haskell and zero cost in C++.
Well maybe our "naive" approach might be worth investigating. Because we put so little time into ridiculous missions like "distributed issues because git is also distributed", we are able to focus more on the product, customers, and processes. You know, things that actually drive business value and pay out everyones' bonus checks at the end of the year.

We have actually considered doing a complete in-house implementation of the things that GitHub handles, because we do already have an in-house management system that integrates with GitHub's API. But, we realized that we would then be in the business of maintaining what is effectively the GitHub product for a market size of 1 customer.
> I presume hetero

?

> coming from (I also presume) at least a middle-class family

?

That's quite a lot of presumptions.

I note in passing the asymmetry of the use of homo and hetero – the former is offensive, the latter is informal, interesting no? How'd that come about?

––

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/homo

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hetero
No Politicians framed the issue like this. Canceling school in 3 month bursts is a political move because it's much harder to tell a generation of parents their kids won't return to school for 2-3 years.

Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.
Something doesn't need to be false to be propaganda, such as the selective reporting of facts.

Just because I personally will likely be fine catching COVID doesn't mean I should be wanton with my actions that affect its spread. Such reasons include a personal responsibility to help prevent others from getting COVID, or how the strain on the medical system could affect my ability to access medical care for an unrelated issue (example, a car accident or the flu).
I was using it but it was very unreliable in my experience. The PWA app you can install on your phone would work for a few days and just appear to stop working until you reinstalled it. Then with Mozilla firing devs including the devs who work on their core product (Firefox/Browser Engine) and then spinning WebThings out into it's own thing, I have decided to stop using it because I don't believe it has much of a future because the management appears to have gone off the rails.

I will reevaluate it in a year, if it still exists, because it's actually a pretty nice platform to use.
Social consequences for proactive employees who take charge
Can't it be both?

On balance, I'd expect Google is be much better about maintaining their DNS uptime than most ISPs.
There are drive-in concerts in my city in the US. Weddings are allowed to be held outdoors. Some states have allowed limited spectators of professional sports.
Unfortunately, if you want a normal sized font, this is not possible with modern "high resolution" displays
I've been learning Flutter, which is basically Google React and I'm a bit disappointed. I was hoping for something better.
There is no bright line between passively hosting content (in which case your site will become a magnet for spam and trolls) and "curating" content. Repealing Section 230 means making a pro-trump discussion forum would open you up to liability: you cannot ban or moderate anti-trump posters because that's "curation".

The law was deliberately broad and that's a good thing for free speech.
So if I have a firewall level block to both 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 your devices will not work for me at all?
I am working on a pet project, which is an application that would allow people to share files for limited time with short urls.

Do you think that would be useful to many people?
Its probably time to give C++ a rest and stop evolving it. We've probably long since passed the point where any evolution gives a net benefit to engineers, and its time to let other languages take over.
Something like 5 or 10 million people are acquiring natural immunity each week right now (it's maybe not that high, but there are 1 million+ positive tests each week, with quite high positivity rates, which indicates testing isn't sufficient to find all cases). It's a grim statistic, but the raging spread of the virus is accelerating the timetable for reaching herd immunity.

140 million vaccinated (approx the number of flu vaccinations administered last year) + tens of millions with natural immunity does put us close to the herd immunity threshold (the number of people that have immunity from an infection has big error bars of course, and there will likely be overlap)
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Haskell is much more complex than C++, for one example. (How many language extensions does Haskell have now? A hundred?)

C++ is easy to understand when you understand the mental model its abstractions target.

(In some sense you're right: the mental model of Haskell is mathematical, while the mental model of C++ is some sort of multi-core "Harvard architecture" machine. While it's true that math is a lot easier for the human brain to grasp, this isn't really related to language complexity per se.)
I argue that centralization of certain processes is the entire point. How the hell are you going to manage a complex software project if everyone has a different version of the issues pertaining to it? Simply seeing an issue comment instantly update in GitHub as I am scrolling through has saved me tons of aggregate hours in wasted time on changing requirements.
Slate busybodies...

What about those who don't want to be prioritized? Maybe some would prefer to let 5-10 million other people get it first.

Why don't we just let those who want to get it first pay more and get it earlier? Easy, self-ordering mechanism.
She was not fired. She offered to resign if her demands were not met.

The only difference is that the timeline was not of her choosing. She knew exactly what she was gambling for when she wrote those words. Why would Google want someone around who doesn’t want to work at Google? Better to accept their resignation and let them go immediately. It happens all the time. I once gave 2 weeks notice and my boss said I might as well leave immediately since there was no point in hanging around (I was consulting and on the bench). It happens.