skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. I wonder though whether they could possibly know the answer to that question to a degree of confidence that would make them comfortable to pursue me endlessly to make their sale, and sell and trade my information and their inferences about me with their advertising partners in order for them to do the same, just with 1000 different variants of the above example.

And I wonder whether they're incentivized to care. In either cases above, my money is still green and smells like money, and makes the same number go up in their quarterly sales goal dashboard.

My point, and I gather the point of the Banksy quote, is that any one instance has a negligible effect on me, but that in aggregate I'm stuck staring down the barrel of a machine that has infinite stamina and resources that's attempting to wear me down, and is likely succeeding in ways I can't detect, nor have the power to detect if I wanted to.

If being exposed to this aggregate process all day makes me less patient with my family at night, to what degree is it worth it? If it makes me less willing to treat someone else with kindness, is it still justified if it's only a _little_ less willing?

No single advertiser is literally laughing at me while doing the backstroke across their vault full of money, but none of them needs to have such overtly malicious intent for the aggregate effect of the entire system on me to be just as corrosive.
It's a fun gimmick.

It's definitely costing them more to do it over the phone.
I's complicated, and she's assuming a lot of high-ish level understanding of law, ML, and society, but the short answer is "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but correlation is what ML systems do."

So, it may, in fact, be true that if you aggregate over statistics in a society, you'll find correlation between skin color and crime recidivism, or likelihood to embezzle money, or some other factors. It's not "okay" to bake that signal into your system for risk assessment because it creates positive feedback loops on societal inequality that penalize people for qualities out of their control, and (at least in the US) we've broadly decided that's not cool (and, in fact, narrowly codified that into law---denying people a loan based on skin color is a crime, and denying people a loan if your ML system decides "Janelle" is probably not going to make good on repayment because the name correlates to dark skin and dark skin correlates to bad loan payment history is still a crime; you can't dodge the intent of the law by adding length to the lever).

80% of the time, I don't think I'd assume someone is being racist if they act like they don't know this, but the subject of the Medium post should, ostensibly, know this.
Ars Technica Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide 2020
> My family only showed up in this country in the mid 80s and have zero responsibility for things that happened well over 100 years ago.

I guess, here is a simple non-rhetorical thought question: Why should your family get any of the benefits of this country's past? I don't know you or where you/your family immigrated from, but your family came here for the benefits of the US. Maybe the US was a wealthier country than where your family left, or maybe more stable, or maybe they felt there was more opportunity for economic mobility. Those benefits/properties where present before your family decided to move, so why should you benefit from them?

Note, I'm actually pro-immigration and support people moving here, but I think it's a good exercise to walk through. All of those benefits were accrued before your family came here, and yet your family gets to benefit from them. Why? As you said, they had zero responsibility for things that happened before they arrived.

So by the same token, if the country had both assets and debts before you arrived, why shouldn't the logic that says you and your family should take on and gain from those assets that pre-dated you, also not mean that you should take on the associated debts?

I can't think of a reason why someone immigrating should only take on the benefits of the assets but be excluded from the liabilities. But am open to discussion.
> One interface per one concrete class

I vaguely remember language support for something like this in the SatherK dialect of Sather. Sather itself was inspired by Eiffel. One-interface-per-class actually is no problem if it's well supported in the language, by simply adding a single special character to the concrete class name.

It worked something like putting some sigil (dollar sign, IIRC) in front of a concrete class name meant that the code was referring to the public interface exposed by the class. (I could have gotten it backward in that maybe you needed the sigil in function signatures/field declarations if you wanted to force the concrete implementation instead of the interface. I think it evolved from the normal Sather dialect, where interface declarations looked pretty much like class declarations except that the name began with a sigil. If it hadn't evolved from standard Sather, I suspect they would have required the sigil if you really meant to intentionally restrict your code to the concrete implementation.)

Java could have headed off a lot of premature abstraction by making it easier to later replace a concrete implementation with an interface. Instead of making "new" an operator, Java should have made "new" a static method returning an instance of the class, with a bit of compiler flow analysis to allocate an object the first time you referenced "this" within "new". The chief advantage is that it would have minimized the amount of code change necessary to replace a concrete class with an interface if needed. If new is a static method, then the interface's "new" can return some reasonable default implementation, or decide among implementations at runtime.

You'd still need to recompile everything, so that all callers would use the invokeinterface bytecode instead of invokevirtual. Alternatively, invokeinterface/invokevirtual could be collapsed into one opcode, and rely on polymorphic inline caches/hot spot inlining to remove most of the method dispatch overhead. A third option would be to have the bytecode verifier perform invokevirtual/invokeinterface substitution at class load time in cases where a concrete class has been changed to an interface or vice-versa.

Making "new" static factory methods instead of an operator would also make it possible for a class to transparently swap in specialized subclass implementations (for instance, specialization for BigInteregrs that fit in 64 bits, or Strings where all codepoints are less than 256). PyPy does a small amount of this specialization internally for Python, but it would be nice to have language-level support.
Depends on where in Africa (which is, famously, not a single country). Ghana has encouraged immigration with the promise of citizenship; Mauritania is not quite so hospitable. Liberia's situation is interesting in that it was one of several examples of America's export of colonialism coming back to bite us (one other being Japan, which went from staunchly isolationist to trying to take over half the world in the scant few generations following Perry's opening).
Can artificial agents understand space the way animals do?
Not "effectively". It is conversion therapy. The situation you're describing is very uncommon, except in places that make it exceedingly difficult for people to transition. So that's where such a therapy would be applied the most. So the ethical question is "is it okay to eradicate a population because they will be otherwise oppressed?" Looking back a few decades: Turing was given estrogen to "cure" his homosexuality. Is that an "interesting idea" too? Granted, it sounds much easier than curing society of its homophobia and transphobia...
I just checked, and there’s no such award.
I hope this leads to nuclear war
I enjoyed Reason and Responsibility - https://www.amazon.com/Reason-Responsibility-Readings-Proble...
Please note that all coherent carbon neutrality scenarios use tree planting for carbon offsetting PLUS a reduction in plane travel. There are more essential services that will require carbon sinks to function at full regime.

Air travel is easily replaceable by low-carbon alternatives that exist today. When you do the accounting of carbon offsetting/carbon sinks capacity, it becomes quite obvious everything unnecessary must go.
Do universities offer full refunds for the whole 4 years of a course if they had to change the curriculum while a student was studying there? If not, why such elevated expectations for a school that’s trying to align their interests with that of their students (school only gets paid if the student is financially successful), but not for other institutions that leave their students with massive debt that is not contingent on their student’s success?
On the contrary, I think she's positioned to be asking exactly the right questions about AI's purpose. Specifically, there's a lot of potential societal harm if we let people base too much action on the relatively simple correlative rules that modern ML sports.
> Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly?

Yeah its called taxation.

> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?

I'm not convinced that this is true. do you have any documentation?

> Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?

Claims are against the legal institutions that still exist. People aren't held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, rather the same institutions that benefitted still exist and can be sued for damages. There's a pending claim against them.

> Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago?

You didn't know that we collect taxes here when you immigrated?

> Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.

If you're opposed to taxation, arguing against reparations is probably the worst possible way to make your point. Slavery and taxation are quite similar (some would say the difference matters but those people are pro-tax).
A Quick Introduction to Software Bill of Materials and CycloneDX
I know why you picked it, and I wasn’t commenting on the quality either. (I loved Compaqs when I was young) I’m just saying that dumpsters are already full of old computers that could run Linux, but people aren’t doing it. They’re tossing the old Windows Vista laptop in the trash and buying whatever is on sale at Best Buy this week.
I remember playing games and basically doing:

creep, shoot, save, creep, solve puzzle, save, creep, die, restore, ...

And then there came along games that were more forgiving and you could just play and if you died, respawn.

but then other games replaced things with: fight, get loot, sort and rearrange inventory, possible weapon swap, go back to town and sell inventory, etc..

I guess it's better that the current crop of phone games with grind (shortcut available for purchase!) , grind (you really should buy this convenient feature), grind, ...

I did enjoy factorio. You have to periodically re-invent yourself. But then what do you do after launching a rocket?
Cullmann e-mail translation (by DeepL):

"I use KWrite regularly to edit source code and the
syntax highlighting is very handy.
However, it would be nice if KWrite had an MDI interface.
I am currently building one and if anyone is interested they can get in touch."

Used over 10 of those years, despite the bugs! many very useful features - danke!
That's unrelated to backdoors (deliberate covert access mechanisms). All parties with access to data, regardless of whether it is via a backdoor, can put that data at risk due to their own security.
That seems to ring true.

At lower levels like where I'm at, players are prone to mistakes and blunders, so having a good eye for tactics allows you to take advantage of those moments in the game as well as prevent yourself from getting into a bad situation.

But at elite levels, tactics have less importance (as he says in the video he estimates it drops to 50%) as every player at that level is extremely solid.
> This doesn't matter.

Maybe I expressed myself a bit too literally, but I wouldn't say that how LLVM handles UB "doesn't matter." Look at how Clang compiles undefined behavior vs GCC (for example)[1]. A bit tautological, but different ways of handling UB can lead to different ways UB behaves.

> LLVM IR is not C, and it is not convertible to C...

This isn't strictly true. There used to be an "official" C(pp) backend, which has been recently resurrected[2]. You can definitely go from LLVM to C -- probably won't be very readable, though.

[1] https://blog.llvm.org/posts/2011-05-21-what-every-c-programm...

[2] https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe
After you say "That's an area of politics" you give two economic theories that reason poverty's production.

Is poverty an indicator of a better economy? Do the poor need to exist in better economies? What makes an economy better in the first place?

These are all questions studied by economists and all influence this "should poor exist" question. There is no reason to qualify economic questions by saying they're political; they just coincide and that is all.
The qualifications reads 'Someone from HR came up with this'
Apple can't just increase market share in the PC market, they have to do it with a walled garden? Pretty cool that you know where future growth is gonna come from before it happens.

Again, and for the final time, there has not been any restriction on ability. You can still run the things you've always been able to run. You just have to go through a warning first. That is not a restriction on ability. You know Windows does similar now, right?

Running unsigned software is not surprising to me at all. Running so much unsigned GUI software that it becomes restrictively annoying... is absolutely surprisingly. I guarantee you I run a lot more unsigned GUI apps than the vast majority of users, and it's still such a minor inconvenience I barely notice.
To be extra pedantic, that's not what volatile does. Volatile ensures that access through the variable must behave strictly according to the rules of the C abstract machine, but the definition of access is implementation defined. A compiler author could define "access" to be "reads from the variable" or "writes to the variable", or neither, and make the entire keyword useless. As long as they document that somewhere, it's compliant with the standard. You think it means "reads and writes" but it doesn't have to.

It's tempting to write a "malicious compliance C compiler" that complies with the standard but makes all the most perverse possible choices.
No. Back to the very first graphical workstations, people have people putting dedicated processors in computers for graphics (ex Apollo Computer using the TMS320 DSP for graphics math). The entire reason for legacy decisions in OpenGL is from non-gaming users, namely CAD vendors, who have been doing this for a long time.
It is truly astounding how little we know about ourselves and how every new discovery unlocks so much potential. If our rate of scientific progress continues to rise I am incredibly excited for the next 100, and 1000 years- even if I won’t be around to see it.
> no likes, no profiles, and no connection to Facebook at all

You can absolutely thumbs up stuff. And accounts do have a profile -- a name, a phone number, a profile pic, email address, probably your apple ID somewhere in the metadata, etc. And this is not connected to Facebook, but to your Apple account. All your activity is sync'd between devices.

> Since there is no “Apple social network” to be spoken of, there would be little reason to include them.

In a sense, iCloud is the social network: https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-102.... Beyond being able to send special effects with your chats, you can also send money via apple pay, video call via FaceTime, and, with Apple One, share your subscriptions.

> They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eyeballs to the screen.

True, but what do you think the metrics execsy are thinking of when they introduce thread replies or Memoji? And with Fitness+, News+, TV+ and Apple Arcade, more and more of Apple is increasingly reliant on customers paying them for the privilege of staring at screens.
How does this work when no one alive today stole any of the property? When none of the people it was stolen from are alive?

What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins?

How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages?

I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
“We are unable to download the file [FILENAME.msi] from the main server.”
They're not even close to being the same thing. The point here is that wisdom is more akin to judgment than mere possession of facts. For example, sufficient wisdom may give one the humility to reflect on the completeness of their understanding before submitting an inflammatory reply.
Ugh, it is shocking how many people don't seem to realize what acetaminophen does to the liver. I had buddies who used to pound tylenol after a long night of drinking to try to help a hangover in college. I'm actually kind of shocked this didn't happen to any of them.

PSA: don't drink and take tylenol, please. The warnings on the bottle aren't a joke.
> I'm also curious how far back these reparations are supposed to go, and where exactly the responsibility is supposed to lie. Should the people who 'employed' the slaves be responsible, or should the people who enslaved and sold them also be considered at fault?

All those people are dead. The only entities left to sue are legal entities that aren't natural persons.

> If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind.

Then governments, corporations, etc. in Africa and Europe can be held to the same standard.
Also, this hack happened in March, so your timeline is irrelevant.
>> Almost sounds like the police can pull over and search whoever they like

> Yep, that's true within 100 miles of the border - an area that accounts for the vast majority of US residents.

If you're outside that 100 miles they can just make something up.
Why not just skip the copy protection routines????
There are a large number of varied proposals for reparations, many of which do not involve collecting money from all white citizens. I think the knee-jerk resistance to the idea based on wanting to watch your own wallet is just that: a knee-jerk response.
Show HN: Investment Club to Access Top Performing VC/PE/Hedge Funds
Currently, there are a myriad of investment funds (I.e. Hedge Funds, VC Funds, PE Funds, Ect) that are generating very strong and consistent returns, often 25% IRR or more.

However, the average investor will never have the ability to invest due to the lack of connections and fact that most have a min. check size - typically $1 M or more.

I have built an application that pools together smaller check sizes with a much smaller minimum and diversifies your investment across VC/Hedge/PE Funds in the top quartile of performance.

Look forward to your comments.
This is super workplace dependent. Some places just want you to churn stuff out quickly and are unforgiving of research and time spent thinking things through. Other places value everyone taking their time, learning, and finding the right solution, even if it takes longer, rather than the solution that works right this second.
Of course, I don't disagree with the reduction. But an economically efficient reduction will reduce from people who can't afford to pay the premium and leave people like me to spend appropriately. This is possible precisely because it is unnecessary. If air travel were necessary then we'd have to ration it by person. Since it is not, we can afford to ration it by the dollar.
That is Serv-U, not Orion. [0]

You might want to avoid The Epoch Times as a source of information in the future, they are unreliable. [1]

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/12/u-s-treasury-commerce-de...

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-epoch-times/
Melatonin patches. Just be aware it's going to start shifting your sleep cycle so don't apply it until you're aligned to bedtime at your destination. I recommend wearing an analog watch and aligning to destination time as soon as you get seated on the plane. These are also great for dealing with jet lag.

Eye mask, you want the kind that looks like a bra and puts no pressure on your eyes. "Nidra" is the brand I usually get, they're cheap, I replace mine regularly.

Noise canceling headphones. I go for cheap sets but get what works for you, something wireless. I have found history podcasts and music both work well for me.

I have a neck pillow that basically looks like a cervical collar and is made from memory foam. Works really well for me but was pretty expensive, and it takes up a bunch of space so it's a tradeoff to consider. And wear a zipped sweatshirt on the plane, use it as a blanket - after turning the air vent on max.
There's likely more slaves now than then. We are doing better on the percentage but doing just as much or more collective harm.
Super cool! Two questions:

(1) Do you have your list of eligible business categories? Have seen several use cases in logistics where Stripe was ruled out automatically because of restrictions on drop shippers and freight forwarders.

(2) Looks like your Twitter link in the footer hasn't been set, is there someplace I can follow Balance for updates?
So, same as every single bit of copy protection?
Pedro isn't exactly doing himself any favors in this situation.

https://twitter.com/pmddomingos/status/1338647370364452864
> Then we better start censoring individual conversations

Too slow!

> China’s WeChat is filtering keywords and images deemed sensitive, without users' knowledge

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/
There has to be some reason for it. If not thermals, then what else about the hardware could explain the difference?
> I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors* of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.

*descendants

The same issues that make UBI a bad idea will probably preclude the individual payment approach to reparations
Yes, indeed. I was thinking of gender roles, specifically, where twin studies are of little help (because "nature" is just sex, not "inherited from parents", and "nurture" is about the influences of society, not your immediate caretakers)