skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jeff's response

Hi everyone,

I’m sure many of you have seen that Timnit Gebru is no longer working at Google. This is a difficult moment, especially given the important research topics she was involved in, and how deeply we care about responsible AI research as an org and as a company.

Because there’s been a lot of speculation and misunderstanding on social media, I wanted to share more context about how this came to pass, and assure you we’re here to support you as you continue the research you’re all engaged in.

Timnit co-authored a paper with four fellow Googlers as well as some external collaborators that needed to go through our review process (as is the case with all externally submitted papers). We’ve approved dozens of papers that Timnit and/or the other Googlers have authored and then published, but as you know, papers often require changes during the internal review process (or are even deemed unsuitable for submission). Unfortunately, this particular paper was only shared with a day’s notice before its deadline — we require two weeks for this sort of review — and then instead of awaiting reviewer feedback, it was approved for submission and submitted.

A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper.

Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google.

Given Timnit's role as a respected researcher and a manager in our Ethical AI team, I feel badly that Timnit has gotten to a place where she feels this way about the work we’re doing. I also feel badly that hundreds of you received an email just this week from Timnit telling you to stop work on critical DEI programs. Please don’t. I understand the frustration about the pace of progress, but we have important work ahead and we need to keep at it.

I know we all genuinely share Timnit’s passion to make AI more equitable and inclusive. No doubt, wherever she goes after Google, she’ll do great work and I look forward to reading her papers and seeing what she accomplishes.

Thank you for reading and for all the important work you continue to do.

-Jeff

PS. I love Jeff so much I blogged him in the past - https://bit.ly/36FMHy9
Oh yeah, the creative reallocation of school money is a problem. But this is the society we live in now; a significant part of the population believes that public schooling is a charity.
Come back in a couple of years, when people are running postgres in WASM...
No problem -- it's a common misconception which is a key part of the narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right GamerGate supporters were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their cultural war.)
2K is a generic term for resolutions that have a horizontal resolution of approximately 2,000 pixels. In terms of cinema the DCI standard for 2K is 2048x1080. There is also the flat cropped resolution of 1998x1080 and the cinemascope cropped resolution of 2048x858. 1080p has the same vertical resolution as DCI 2K and it's horizontal resolution is also approximately 2,000. 2560x1440 is 560 pixels more than 2,000 compared to 1920x1080 which is only 80 pixels away. That is 7x further away from exactly 2,000. Calling 2560x1440 2K is too big of a stretch. If you wanted to give it a name based upon its approximate horizontal resolution then you should call it 2.5K.
Is the reason "make business less efficient"?
Also in Finland it doesn't need to be a doctor, just a nurse will do some times. (Depends on the employer).
The Good, the Bad and the Easy?
Excerpt from The Heart Sutra, a TL;DR translation for Programmers
Atul Gawande on Coronavirus Vaccines and Prospects for Ending the Pandemic
How the hell is firing someone who offered an ultimatum not a justifiable reason for accepting said resignation?

By definition the default position was "leave the company"
Huh, in which country is that a thing? I'm guessing US?
Small businesses are important for a whole host of intangible reasons.

They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character.

Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of small towns, and that’s sad because said towns were already shellacked by the death of manufacturing.

It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s excellent customer experience, but the externalities involved are nontrivial and IMO outweigh the benefits.
Actually, it's more so the other way. If you agree with her firing, you can't say anything or you are a bigot
Yes, this is usually how it turns out in practice. You don't need to understand what's going on under the hood, you just string some libraries together and call it a day ;).

/sarcasm off
Global Teacher Prize 2020
I love the idea of a "staging area"! That's a very smart and maps 1:1 with the behavior on most loopers I've used. Anything else would require nearly unbounded memory, and memory is easily the most expensive component of any looper.

The repitching effect happens because the output from the ring buffer is effectively being resampled. Implementing this is a little funky, but with some clever tricks in how the ring buffer is used and some form of interpolation, you can get essentially the same effect.

Here's my implementation, which uses Hermite interpolation: https://github.com/eric-wood/delay/blob/main/src/delay.rs
Yeah I think you're just racist honestly.
Sure; that's a classic useless comment. Counterpoint would be a useful doc, where did the 5 come from?

// Chosen by fair die roll. Completely random
const kEschatonThreshhold = 5;

val a = kEschatonThreshhold;
Tell HN: AT&T Fiber is breaking TLS handshakes
A lot of people didn't realize this was a widespread issue until they saw other people point it out (me included), so I thought I'd post it here. It's at least affecting the Bay Area.

AT&T Fiber seems to be sometimes flipping a bit in the TLS handshake, causing TLS connections to break. This can show up as connections to TLS sites not working on the first try, your browser stuck on "Performing a TLS handshake", SSL_ERROR_BAD_MAC_READ in Firefox, etc.

If you tunnel your browsing through a VPN, that will work around this issue. It doesn't seem like anything else obvious is affected - gaming, video calls, etc. seem to work fine.
Based on what I see in mainstream discourse from politicians and public figures that are pushing the "billionaires are bad" idea, I think you're making a much weaker form of the argument than many are. Most of the people who make this argument really do seem to see it as a group of Good and Bad people, and are arguing that all billionaires are in the Bad group. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC have said that repeatedly in no uncertain terms. And I think this PG essay addresses that form of the argument pretty directly.

What you're talking is a much more interesting conversation to be having. How can we tweak the rules to avoid misaligned incentives? And would it actually be better to end the so-called "exploitation" if it would mean killing most of these jobs altogether, when the allegedly exploited people actually have an ok quality of life and are doing this work because they like it better than their alternatives?
FYI the page remains blank for me for a few seconds. I actually thought it was dead, since the loading was long done, and hit the back button before it flashed the page at me at roughly the same moment as I hit the back button. I've heard of AMP doing this but there are probably more things. From a quick look in the network tool, it seems to be waiting for twenty-odd requests going to your third party chat integration.
Sure it was because he wanted the desktop app to be local, but then he added sync, and now there's an API, etc... Data is already stored on his server.
It depends where "elsewhere" is.

I personally find HN to be generally liberal-leaning but not excessively so, and have noticed a welcome openness to centrist opinions that might once have been dismissed here out of hand as right-wing (and are still being dismissed elsewhere) that I take as a good sign of an increasingly aware local commentariat with respect to the excesses of the more ideological elements of the left and right.
> definitely not civil.

I agree that people should try to be kind and charitable to each other, and this conversation didn't show that.

That said, I think we also have to be cognizant of the way "civility" is not objective/neutral, often relies on codifying the norms of a dominant majority, and also preserves the status quo.

It might not have been very "civil" for instance when Google employees walked out of the office, but I also don't think it was "civil" when Google paid $90 million to someone fired for sexual harassment.

Sometimes big problems can't be met just with civil discourse, it's why many of us still voted for Biden (for instance) even after he told Trump to "shut up."
Most sites are still usable if you cherry pick a subset of the JS they invoke. Blocked trackers like Google analytics or tag manager rarely break things.
1 min video from a lab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrS0igctMi0
Libre, WebAssembly-based, GPU-accelerated teleradiology solution
I hear you.

As a dad: I tried to take as much time as I could, to spend time with my kid when they were very young (sadly, not anywhere near enough).

The times I could during their younger years led to some memorable memories and jokes, which I still lovingly rib them about MANY years later.

I’d rather have been sight seeing or exploring with my kid, but we live in a society where parents aren’t equipped to teach their children.
For existing pedestrians, it would also mean a severe increase in quality of life for no additional cost of living. Everything is always a tradeoff in some way. I’m sure people with horses were hurting when stables started closing too. Its time cities reevaluate what sort of lifestyle they subsidize with land use decisions.
I came to the conclusion that IDs should be application-assisted, if not application generated. Offloading that to DB brings some unnecessary work that needs to be handled on the application side otherwise, and tends to o be bad for performance.

What do i mean by application generated?
1. UUID -> Bad for index, but for some use cases it's ok.
2. Sequential UUID -> Good with index, works most of the time.
3. HiLo (a server gets a chunk of id range from database, and assign that to entities on their own).

This allows for more performant applications especially if you are designing somewhat complex data model.
Thanks for the recommendations! Will give them a look.
I think if you combined the two "different" answers to why it's named JavaScript, you get the truth. Yes, it was promoted as a companion scripting language for Java, but that was in part because Java was so hot at the moment, so marketing had something to do with the decision to name it JavaScript.
Exactly, you have to tell yourself that it is a net positive situation and move on.
you can use application generated sequential ids.
No, I don't think that's the problem, at least not for all. From the limited insight into the publishing industry I have it seems fairly obvious that the fact that Amazon can demand massively lower prices from the publishing houses, while at the same time being able to have more optimized logistics, access to better shipping conditions, ... thanks to scale, plays a large role.
We don't have vaccinations for the millions of pathogens you encounter on a daily basis. Just the ones that are deadly. No immune system can fight some pathogens. You have gotten lucky so far.

Not to mention that while some viruses may not affect you, that doesn't mean you aren't spreading them on to other people that may die from them.

Vaccination is as much a community issue as a personal one.
> I'm not sure I get your point about colored functions. Under the hood the compiler generates what is basically a callback structure not unlike what you get in javascript (i.e. a promise). It gains features like callback hierarchies, cancellation, etc. Loom fixes this by forcing you to wrap things with a Thread. Same kind of mental overhead.

The difference is that I'm not allowed to pull apart the callback structure that colored functions (in Kotlin) cause the compiler to make. Instead, I just have a colored function I have to work with. And it's incompatible (in one direction) with functions of the wrong color.

Colored functions don't compose well. The green thread approach allows you to call anything from anywhere and compose whatever you want. When you choose to make it asynchronous, then you wrap it in a green thread and fire it off. That's pretty different than having two juggle different colored functions AND still needing to fire them off via whatever coroutine laucher.
Reading the HN comments section sometimes feels akin to doing archival research on letters to the editor for the Guardian in 2018. The moral preening, the harumph-worthy circle jerks of pithy middlebrow dismissals and vacuous brigading.

It's astonishing how consistent the tropes are.
No one at Google worries that signing a petition or Tweeting something is going to get them fired. No one in any kind of position of power reads or cares about these kinds of petitions, and it certainly doesn't ever reach the eyes of anyone on a promo committee.
That's exactly what a lot of companies do when someone gives 2 weeks notice. Send them home right away and pay them for the 2 weeks so you can keep them from filing unemployment and have them on the hook for any exit interview / handoff questions etc. They always want you to sign "something" as part of the process, too.
Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. And in that case maybe the M1 IS for you, since I'd be willing to bet it outperforms your existing laptop. Assuming I've found the right computer, my existing (non-M1) Macbook Pro is beefier than your Lenovo, and it gets outperformed by the M1 too[1].

Just seems pretty disingenuous tbh. The argument that you need a seriously beefy threadripper machine to compile your code because you're an 800k LOC C++ developer falls a bit flat when you tell us later that you also compile code on your Lenovo Y700.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/5150606?baselin...
Also:

> the laws of quantum mechanics, a revolutionary theory that European physicists had discovered in the mid-1920s

(I think the history of QM discovery spans many years.)
I think we need to invest more in investigating the criminals making and uploading the content.
Millions and millions of child abuse material are reported to NCMEC but less than 2% are investigated. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
I mean the machiavellian interpretation looks like this to me: Google's AI in Ethics initiative is a PR exercise, similar to greenwashing and other models employed by big business. It fundamentally has to be, because large parts of the underlying business model at Google are based on unethical practices. By hiring researchers from underrepresented groups they additionally hoped to a) profit from the power imbalance of the relationship and b) co-opt parts of the social justice movement by having ethics research focus on issues that do not directly touch the bottom line. Now you have a researcher not towing the company line and being fired for it.
> Adding a column is easy enough, but enforcing that it means something and every one of your prior calculations are now meaningless without taking it into account is difficult.

But again, I don't see how this is any easier to solve in application code than it is at the DB level. I don't know of any programming language or framework that allows you to encode rules such as "this DB column must be used". And even if such a thing existed, it wouldn't prevent you from making mistakes in using that column.

On the other hand, using stored procedures at least prevents errors in the other direction: referencing columns in a way that no longer makes sense (because the type was changed, it no longer exists, etc).
Contribute to keeping it the same? What does that mean? If the system has unfair policies, and you never personally enforce them or advocate for them and occasionally advocate against them, have you contributed to keeping it the same, and are you at fault?
Right. "Industrialization destroying nature" in the book isn't an "allegory" for "Industrialization destroying nature" in reality. It's an illustrative example.
That email she wrote is a jumbled almost unreadable mess and the moment "micro aggressions" was mentioned I turned off. There was a process, she went around it and lost her job. Not everything in life is bias, sometimes you are just an ass.
That approach seems somewhat naive.

I think we should definitely acknowledge that politics do play a role in these mega corporations. This is especially true in the ML field, where choosing something as "innocent" as a training data set would most likely have political and societal implications.

But that being said I don't think the combative cancel culture is helping anyone.
> it is incredibly anodyne

I don't get why anyone is surprised that Google doesn't want a paper saying ‘we should spend less money on ML’ published under their name, when the whole company is ML driven and pushing for growth there.

What other large company would allow that sort of thing?
What is the worst trash in the world is their mobile web ui. Impossible to search in Google and quickly browse results especially if I want to do it in incognito.
> Google (and Google Brain in particular) benefited immensely from Gebru's work

Explain
I get full pay for a sick day and I don't have a cap on sick days. And yet, I have not called in sick in the last two years.

Just because people could do something, doesn't mean that they will do it. The people at our company do not spend all of their time making the system more unreliable so that they'd be paid more to be on call. Hell, if you asked the developers, most of them would probably love to spend more time making the system more reliable, but the bosses usually want developers to add more features.
Probabilistic Approaches for Algorithmic Recourse with Limited Causal Knowledge
The case being made in this thread is that that was how they got her, not why they fired her. I know none of the facts and am perfectly ignorant about this situation, but I have seen people get kicked out for semi-justifiable surface reasons that were totally unrelated to why their superiors didn't like them. So a-priori, the theory that the difference between someone's not-so-significant faults being tolerated or not being tolerated, is their willingness to comply with the goals that for whatever reason the leadership doesn't feel they can make explicit, is a reasonable suggestion.
""They haven't tried anything. Every business being beaten by Amazon""

This again, is glib.

To suggest that you somehow know all these vendors have 'not tried anything'.

How about lobbying government to subsidize their business like the US Government subsidizes delivery? Or the VAT tax breaks that Amazon gets? Or the fact that Amazon is dumping merchandise on the US by selling for negative margins, paid for by profits out of AWS?

A local bookstore has 6 staff. They have no power.
> Do people pretend to be sick to use up their X days?

How would one ever know? And what's the issue if someone pretend to be sick if they have up to X days to "be sick". I don't mind at all what my coworkers do with their lives.
The linked page literally says:

> You are free to [share and adapt] for any purpose, even commercially

You might be thinking of the previous* NC (Non-Commercial) variant, e.g. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

If you really mean the share-alike part, i.e. that when you modify the image then anyone is free to use your derived version under the same terms, and you actually object to that clause, then I'm sorry but that's just stealing the author's free work without sharing whatever small edits you made back.

* incorrect, Non-Commercial is still an available variant of CC also in version 4.0, see u/quadrangle's comment below.
Yes, I'm aware of how FB&Google work.

> when someone gives 2 weeks notice.

But she didn't give 2 weeks notice. This seems to be the key detail.
Relating GP to a '60s era segregation apologist for offering a dissenting opinion is proving their point.
The easiest fix is to ensure you pick a native fallback to your web font which has metrics which closely match your web font. You might have to use a different font-size and letter-spacing while it's loading, even.
There's also a tendency to forget the impact of framing.

One or two micro-optimizations may not add up to much. But a habit of, say, avoiding unnecessary object churn, might add up to a very large efficiency gain, a few microseconds at a time.
Launch HN: Spatial.Chat – Virtual space for events and teams of any size