skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Women's representation in CS was highest in the 60s and has fallen pretty consistently since then (starting to rise a bit recently as the industry has started to see the gap as a problem). The general prestige and economic rewards of CS, on the other hand, have risen considerably in the same time period.

If a demographic's involvement decreases as the subject becomes more rewarding, it seems more likely to be because external forces are discouraging them rather than any inherent lack of interest.
Has Big Data made customer segmentation redundant?
It has always been attainable only for specific skill sets. But acquiring those skills has never been easier. In the case of a software engineer you don’t even necessarily need a degree, though it might help.

There’s also more skill sets that pay really well now too.

Yes, there are bigger gaps between what valuable and not-as-valuable skills pay than before. But the valuable skills generally leverage productivity enhancers.

I’m rich now but I grew up working class. We never had vacations to places like Disney or nights out at restaurants or living in an expensive area. But we had each other and good values such as believing in hard work, self reliance, and taking care of each other. This doesn’t take much money and is available to everyone if they’re willing to do the work.
How about the actual technical details in the video? With a compositor on top of X, what purpose does X actually serve other than being an unnecessary complicated IPC layer that duplicates many of the messages?

Also, there have been another HN post with “X is abadonware” or similarly titled, which was written by another X maintainer. But feel free to check the mailing list as well looking at activity.
Such a horribly disingenuous click bait title, that doesn't even line up with what's actually in the article.

>> They advertised for two delivery driver jobs, for example: one for Domino’s (pizza delivery) and one for Instacart (grocery delivery). There are currently more men than women who drive for Domino’s, and vice versa for Instacart. [...] The Domino’s ad was shown to more men than women, and the Instacart ad was shown to more women than men. The researchers found the same pattern with ads for two other pairs of jobs: software engineers for Nvidia (skewed male) and Netflix (skewed female), and sales associates for cars (skewed male) and jewelry (skewed female). <<

In short:
>> The findings suggest that Facebook’s algorithms are somehow picking up on the current demographic distribution of these jobs, which often differ for historical reasons. <<

That's not at all what is explicitly, and falsely, claimed in the headline!
I’m sure the algorithm isn’t checking “if (person.sex == male) { show_car_jobs(); }”,

But rather “if (person.likes_cars) { show_car_jobs(); }”.
Languages you must know #10 (Lisp)
Lisp

Lisp is a shapeless language. It enables you to shape your solution to your problem.

Lisp, unlike every other language I know, enable you to think about the problem and write the solution. Almost every other language has an "impedance problem", like connecting a soda straw to a firehose. Other languages require you to "forcefit your solution" to the language needs.

Lisp is THE language to learn. Thinking in Lisp is thinking about your problem.

Of all the languages I know, Lisp is the ultimate language.

Unlike other languages, Lisp is an "epiphany language". You don't "get it" until you "get it"... and then you wonder why other people don't "get it". From the dictionary we find:

An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphanea, "manifestation, striking appearance") is an experience of a sudden and striking realization. ... Epiphanies are relatively rare occurrences and generally follow a process of significant thought about a problem.

Clearly the "process of significant thought" is about the problem. Lisp is the language of that breakthrough experience.

There are no words I can say, you have to have your own epiphany. (I could, I suppose, make some parenthetical remarks but that would be a bit meta).

Lisp is a "must know" language. It is, in fact, the most important "must know" language.
Demographic statistical reductions are the exact same thing as stereotypes, so of course they're going to be biased. As long as we keep using statistical reductions to predict individual behaviour they're going to continue to be wrong for the individual, sometimes in offensive ways. If you want predictive ads that work for the individual, if eg. women are 70% of teachers then 70% of teacher job ads will still go to women, but men who want to teach and women who don't want to will no longer receive those ads as they're not part of their individual profile.
And you also don't have to take my word for it that virologists were concerned! See all these scientific review articles demonstrating that fact:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11779380/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29270793/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26654122/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30806904/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26922715/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27726088/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26689940/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27426214/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30832341/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19906932/
Yeah I was thinking chest would be more ergonomic.
Sensationalist.

The key point of the article hinges on one particular statement: "These gender differences cannot be explained away by gender differences in qualifications or a lack of qualifications,"

How the heck is Facebook supposed to know about someones qualifications?

Facebook _obviously_ have a set of standard data points they use for ad targeting, such as location, gender, age-span and so on together with dynamically updated data who have interacted with the ad.

Just because the outcome is not what the journalist want doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong or discriminatory.

Sure, it could of course be that Facebook algorithm is explicitly discriminatory, but it's more likely an algorithm such as this one is actually fairly neutral (compared with pre-trained data that can have built-in bias, for example photographs of people with mostly white skin - ad targeting is probably keyword based, and should be trained on actual data from what actual people click on).

Is it discriminatory? I don't think so. Is it "filter-bubble-reinforcing"? Yes, that's more likely. As more men initially click an ad, it will be shown to more men. And vice versa.
Yeah man strapping this puppy on my camper was my plan. It will be interesting to see how it works out
Seems like they've found their niche.

More lawsuits = more business lawyers = more money for local business.

But AFAIK, this has only been possible because the plaintiffs have been able to choose their venue. And in the end, it's a game of numbers.

If venues where chosen at random, I'd imagine the the whole business model would fold - simply too much risk/uncertainty.
Probably because a plus code is harder for someone to screw up.

Find the place on Google Maps, copy the plus code.

Rather than entering lat/lon coords... except did you get the sign right, or maybe you flipped lat/lon, or got a significant digit out.
1 part thanks to 1 part kudos. Full glass. For you! This is pretty cool work you're doing!
This might make intuitive sense but isn't supported by the research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
I'd happily share an email address for money (I mean, I share it for free often enough). Reading and acting on the mail would be another story
> Long-distance intercity rail is for the incidental traveller who travels occasionally

US domestic air travel is growing at 5% a year, compound that over a decade or two and it's hardly "incidental" travellers anymore, it's everyone flying whenever they can. It is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions and is not easily replaced.

https://www.bts.dot.gov/newsroom/2018-traffic-data-us-airlin...
> The findings suggest that Facebook’s algorithms are somehow picking up on the current demographic distribution of these jobs, which often differ for historical reasons.

It seems like it would also be possible that the demographics of the jobs differ for non-historical reasons, and Facebook's algorithms are correctly picking up on the fact that women are more interested in working for Instacart than for Domino's...?
If I’m advertising a $20M luxury penthouse overlooking Central Park, am I permitted to advertise only in the WSJ and Robb Report (or whatever rich people read)?

Does that change if I learn those publications skew overwhelmingly male?
It seems like a good idea on paper but most likely fails in practice: I get it, that it look practical,but in reality,when one is sitting at his desk trying to do some work,the only thing you can is drink coffee or eat some snacks. Anything else is a distraction,no matter how it's wrapped and I think some of the comments on the thread who had something like this make that point too.
Isn't default browser usage potentially useful statistical information? What's the worst that will likely happen if people have that data?
The US labor laws are very different from most of the other countries.

US has enterprise collective bargaining (as do UK and Ireland). Most other western countries have sectoral collective bargaining as the main method, augmented with national and enterprise bargaining.

The main drawback of US type system is that it pits unions and companies against each other more than necessary. It's more adversarial because companies that are not unionized get competitive advantage over nonunionized companies.
All modern computers use twos-complement and modern languages like Rust require it. Not assuming twos-complement is a theoretical nitpick along the lines of not assuming a byte is 8 bits. Nobody does that.
Our Starlink connection (backup WAN) recently switched from a New York ip to one near Chicago. I think we've switched to a downlink station that is geographically closer and we're getting better pings and, possibly, better throughout (needs more testing).

The service is expensive, but it's been a fun way to "participate" with all the exciting stuff SpaceX is working on.
Technically it is impossible to fix this issue. You can remove the explicit gender feature from the data, but I guarantee that the remaining features are correlated enough with gender that nothing would change.

One could debate whether it should be the law that ML is not used in certain services so as to not project society's biases.

However I doubt the claim that this is illegal. Is targeted advertisement illegal? I would love for it to be, but I doubt it is.
Article:

> The researchers weren’t able to discern why that is, because Facebook won’t say how its ad-delivery system works.
I doubt they'll price it that way but I'd definitely consider getting it as a backup where I live because my cable Internet is "OK" but definitely a bit glitchy and inconsistent. Especially as I've been pretty much full remote since pre-COVID I'll pay to get more reliable Internet at home.
I always believe allowing any forms of JIT (in userspace programs) by default creates unnecessary security risks - only a handful of programs use it. The sysadmin should have a choice to enforce strict W^X on all programs and to whitelist JIT-enabled applications only when needed.

The kernel space BPF JIT in particular, is an huge attack vector and has been repeatably exploited (or facilitated other exploits) in the past. If you don't need BPF JIT, I recommend disabling it. Sure, tcpdump or nftable may be slower, but often it doesn't matter, unless it's a cutting edge production system which actually relies on BPF JIT. It can either be removed completely when building the kernel, setting "net.core.bpf_jit_enable" in sysctl to disable it globally, or setting "kernel.unprivileged_bpf_disabled" to disable it for unprivileged programs.
It's still possible that people born today will stop aging at some point e.g. when they get to be 50 years old in 2070.

There are some promising venues like CRISPR, mRNA related research or stem cells.

There is also very serious possibility of super-humanity AGI in the next 50 years.
The point of the article is that there are enough data that are low information in isolation but when combined together can effectively identify ad targets. This is already being done, it isn’t a theory. That’s the point of the article:

clever developers can find (perhaps infinite) other ways to combine things they do have access to into a unique, or even just “close enough to unique to be useful for tracking”, identifier
I definitely remember takes in the genre of "who cares if IE is never updated. What else could you possibly do on the web?" back when websites were mostly static, JavaScript was still a toy, and all the people who could imagine better were trying to convince everyone to switch to [Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox]. Microsoft had the inspiration for XMLHttpRequest right there and couldn't see past its Windows-centric strategy.

There's an alternate timeline where Microsoft leaned on anyone implementing it. We never would have gotten as far as Sun suing Google over the Java API because no one crossed Microsoft.

No AJAX. No web 2.0. No SPAs. It would be a different world.
I've just added the book, thanks.
It's quite expensive. I imagine fiber can still make money.
Apple’s Quiet War on Independent Repairmen
Alibaba: Chinese regulator slaps fine on tech giant
I think the left should be fighting for higher taxes to support basic income or stronger unemployment protections instead of this union stuff. I think that aligns people's interests much better than pitting employees against their employers. Give people the freedom to leave their jobs if they want to. If a union is effective in the USA it will generally hurt the business and that has consequences for the employee.
Authority: "To be maskless, you must be more than 100ft from anyone from a different bubble."

Mr Common Sense: "That's a ridiculous rule, just say wear a mask outside."

Mr Epi: "That's excessive, aerosol is only going to travel a few meters."

Mr Defiant: "I didn't see him. How can I see everywhere. I was putting my mask on."

Mr Whatabout: "But I can take my mask off in a barber shop, therefore I should need to take other precautions."

Anyone who has dealt with a 7 year old will know how pointless this argument is.

If police are using this to harass people that is a problem. But the problem is with the police, they can fit you up already with almost no difficulty. You're really complaining that they're doing it to white people now.
Nice. Now they won't have to improvise when dropping bombs on protester's houses like the Pennsylvania State Police had to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
GTFO of my head.
They've said it's a requirement for the beta. They're limited the number of customers per cell.

If they didn't lock you to a location, folks would say they were going to use it out in the boondocks, and then acutally use it somewhere it's already at the capacity limit they've set.
I am sure that what you say is very true for not a small amount of businesses.

My issue is mostly with my profession -- programming. Sometimes we are so micromanaged and our time is so sliced and diced that all of this short-term thinking easily gets 5x more expensive on a short time frame anywhere from 3 to 6 months.

This has been observed numerous times yet IT managers seem to want to never learn.

It's OK to try and save money. But saving money short-term in order to have a huge expense down the line is just being irresponsible from those managers.
The solar panel on the YouTube thumbnail looks quite dusty.
"Musk, get to tha choppa!"
I don't think job ads are important.
What important are job *searches".

Does FB even have a feature to search job ads? The ought to; they can charge employers and users will seek out ads to look at!
Clearly, but you're entirely missing the point.
I've had a 6800XT running upstream mesa, kernel and linux-firmware and it basically just works. Play proton and native games with pretty good FPS.

Haven't compared it against windows, because haven't felt the need. I'm sure some functionality/perf is missing though.
The government is chosen by the people and enforced by their choice to make decisions. A company without control is cancer. Just look at Nestle, Facebook and Google and plenty of others abusing their size and that people are NOT rational entities en masse. A government should (and they are the only thing that can) step up against these abuses.
> Facebook _obviously_ have a set of standard data points they use for ad targeting, such as [...] gender,

How can anyone read this about job ads and not think maybe it's a problem?
It’s worse than that, insurance companies can be both sexist and racist with no consequence.

A friend of mine moved and was quoted a much higher rate for their homeowners insurance, to which the agent replied “rates are higher in predominantly-black neighbourhoods”.

I don’t know how that’s legal.
I think this depends on what the algorithm uses. Or would "liked page related to the job description" be considered a protected characteristic? My non-lawyer instinct would say that as long as the algorithm doesnt't contain a line that explicitly tells it to consider sex as a parameter to decide who to show the ad, it doesn't breach this law.
A think I have been realizing a lot, is that in all aspects of life, a person of even average intelligence can easily imagine how things ought to be. The licensing office should be more organize, the software should start instantly, the government should be more efficient, etc etc

I don't believe this is true, an average person can easily imagine a local maxima, but everyone's local maxima is different.

For example it might be very convenient for person A if the licensing office were open 24 hours but probably not so convenient for person B who would have to cover the night shift every other week or person C whose taxes would need to pay for it. And so on.

Nearly every sub-optimality from one perspective is an optimality from another.
RC helicopter flying has evolved into something really insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXSfFLGeVZA&t=156s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E24JIetETAE&t=91s
My dad's house in Maine is at the very end of a DSL connection. He get up to about 1Mbps down with a tailwind--which is barely usable even for non-video. I couldn't really work from the house. (And there's essentially no cell service at all.) And the neighbors further down the road basically have nothing at all other than conventional satellite.)
Knuth has a way of adding life to what might otherwise be dry material. At least to those of us who admire the man and his contributions, this essay reads like a thriller. I knew from the start that what he said would not matter to me, but yet I was drawn from sentence to sentence, powerless to turn away.

Is it just that I'm a fan, having read [1] as a science student? I don't think so, because when I recommend that essay to a student who is frustrated with msword, I almost always get a report about how intriguing it is.

Beyond the material, I think a big factor is that it's simply intriguing to hear what a clear thinker spends time thinking about.

1. Knuth, Donald E. “Mathematical Typography.” Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337–72 https://projecteuclid.org:443/euclid.bams/1183544082
Nice list! Curation FTW (^_^)
Domino's and DoorDash have the same qualifications.

> set of standard data points for ad targeting, such as location, gender

That would be illegal employment discrimination on the basis of gender.
I disagree to an extent. Very few solutions are scalable across an entire range of a problem space.

Something being scalable, to me, means that it can cover a _broad_ range of the problem space, but doesn't imply it covers 100% of it.

If we imagine that the "problem space" is managing software projects from 1 person up through 1,000,000 people and you told me that there was a solution that worked for the range of 50-1,000,000 people I would describe it as scalable, even if I wouldn't recommend it to a 5 person team.
I've always liked Ben Franklin's thoughts on this topic: "It is true that, if you can clamber and get to the top of a staircase without using the steps, you will more easily gain them in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top"
There has been a fair bit of work since this time on automated data modeling for NoSQL databases given a conceptual model and information on the workload. Some of this work is my own[0], but there has been a lot of other related activity. One thing that I've been happy to see explored more is cost modeling[1] in NoSQL databases as this makes any sort of automated reasoning much easier. I doubt we'll ever get to the point where data modeling by an expert is never needed, but I think there's a lot we can do to make things easier and more performant for novices.

[0] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7967690/

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350366905_A_cost_mo...
Let it crash philosophy in Elixir and Erlang
I sometimes paste semi-long code snippets and don't remember having anything weird happening
A good list of reasons. I'd add that much of what we consider antiquity in Europe was all about boats. Ancient Greek had their means of travel sorted. What's the Oddysey other than 2D Star Trek? There are no bikes in Star Trek.
Being small kind of a bigger deal than being an island. Air travel doesn’t care much if you’re an island or not. The US is practically an island in many senses except for Mexico and Canada, but the virus didn’t come over land, it came over air in multiple places, especially from folks going on Alpine ski trips.

If we had shut down air travel early on globally (not just China...) and pursued a vigorous in-country test and trace program, we would’ve had a chance.
> It’s sad that it is even necessary in the US.

Isn't it fantastic? The system of (mostly) free enterprise has created an affordable high speed service product that can be accessed anywhere on the planet.
(Author here) Yes, it was an XFS/controller issue, but Ceph reported the failure. :) (IMO it wasn't really a good decision from Ceph to use 100MB XFS partitions as a kind of database, but nowadays ceph-disk (which uses those XFS partitions) is gone, and instead ceph-volume uses a different approach via LVM.)

Regarding configuration management/firmware version: yes - especially, as you'd need to also rebuild disks in the dev/test environment with the identical configuration (firmware, disks,...), to ensure it's actually identical. And even if we neglect load/capacity/usage issues (problems might show up only under specific work loads), there are also further "invisible" layers/components like cables, NICs, switches,… and their firmware versions which are also relevant. Not exactly trivial. :)
I don’t disagree with you, but that will make advertising less effective. A nursing job shown to me and a programming job shown to my sister will both be ignored and wasted. The opposite wouldn’t be true.

Likewise showing me a car shop job would also be wasted, not because of my gender, but because I have no interest in cars, as my Facebook profile clearly shows.
I recently had a good fresh Brezel at BioBackhaus in Dahlem-Dorf. The same ones in grocery stores around the city tend to be stale already.

Bread from Zeit für Brot is available at Alnatura and Denns branches and the Gorillas delivery service.
That's a good thing. You have to be careful using a command line SQL query when typing "SELECT ". If the processing is left to the program, an SQL app in Windows knows you didn't mean "" to mean all the files in the current folder.