skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lighten up people! I actually find it kind of funny how OP
was filled with rage by a cutsey error message. I hope they can laugh in hindsight about how this triggered them to make a serious blog post.
The point is because sometimes even a perfectly reasonable inference from an ML model would be considered a big mistake due to societal considerations that are unknown to the model.

For example, a couple years ago, there was a big hubbub over a Google Image labeler that labeled a black man and woman as "gorillas". A mistake for sure, but the headlines about the algorithm being "racist" were wrong. The algorithm was certainly incorrect, and it could probably have been argued that one reason it was wrong is that its training set contained fewer black people than white people, but the algorithm was certainly unaware of the historical context around this being a racist description.

Similarly, in the early days of Google driving directions I remember one commenter saying something along the lines of "You can tell that no black engineers work at Google" because it pronounced "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcolm 10 Boulevard". Of course, the vast majority of time you see a lone "X" in a street address it is pronounced "ten".

It's kind of analogous to the "uncanny valley" problem in graphics. When the algorithm gets things mostly right, people think of it as "human-like", and so when it makes a mistake, people attribute human logic to it (it's quite safe to assume that a human labeling a picture of black people as gorillas is racist), as opposed to the plain statistical inferences ML models make.
Personally, I trust the IRS more than I trust Intuit. There is no evidence you wouldn’t be able to contest an inaccurate automated return provided to you.

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-turbotax-trap

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-intuit-wil...

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/1...

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=propublica+intuit
What's your price point and spec desire/use case? ARM or x86-64?

There are good ARM SBC alternatives with good community by ODroid and a few other brands for $30-$100. ODroid probably has the biggest and best community outside RPi.

Used thin and zero clients can be had for very cheap and used for low power, low resource needs.

Alternatively, the new ultra low power Jasper Lake CPUs are pretty insane for the price/power and you can get complete mini PCs with "real" nvme or sata storage, dual 4k@60Hz video output, 1 or 2.5Gbit Ethernet for $150-250. Search for n5095 (15W TDP), n5100 (6W), n5105 (10W), n6000 (6W), or n6105 (10 W) mini PC on Amazon. The iGPUs on these are killer and can handle 2-3 4k transcodes too. They make great media/storage servers (that's what I'm using one I just bought for)

I love SBCs, homelabbing, and squeezing as much out of hardware per watt and dollar. Liliputing and ServetheHome have been great resources.

https://liliputing.com/tag/mini-pc/

https://www.servethehome.com/
This deserves a chance at getting a sincere answer, so I’ve upvoted it. I almost asked a similar question on another thread, but backed out. There seems to be a lot of inference going on in other comments about what any commenter finds frustrating or otherwise confounding, but I think it would be good for the discussion to eliminate some of that inference.
I say it too, but I still don't want my software to create the appearance of commiserating with me.
So, I tested this locally and for the first time, immediately after using a variable named “gender”, it stopped suggesting.

I wonder if this is to prevent it from accidentally processing PII or PHI data. Maybe someone else who didn’t get their account on some kind of cooldown can try it with “birthdate” or “DOB” or “SSN”. I highly doubt this has anything to do with gender being a controversial or blocked term for political reasons or something.
All things being equal TRISO fuel should increase the waste volume. But a fast reactor will tremendously reduce both the waste volume (because it can burn U238) and its nastiness (it will have virtually no long half life actinides).

As for steel. Steel is one of the cheapest materials, with an average price below $1000/ton. Nuclear reactors need to use special steels that are resistant to neutron embrittlement, and even those have a price less than $1000/ton. There are more expensive steels out there (for example those used for tools), but generally the price is less than $3000/ton. But let's say that an alloy of steel that resists both neutron embrittlement and temperatures of 750C is $10000/ton. Then a reactor such as Xe-100 which weighs 700 tons in total will be able to procure the steel at less than $7 million, or $28 million for a group of 4; a powerplant with 4 Xe-100 reactors is estimated to cost $2.4 billion, so this cost would be less than 1% of that.

I'm sure there will be 1000 problems that Xe-100 will need to solve before they get their NRC approval and they will be able to economically build their first reactors, but the cost of steel will not be one of them.
I dunno, living through it, feels more absurd than hilarous.
I tried to sign up for steam and my long complex password seemed to trigger a never ending stream of captures. Also, just today ticketmaster decided my firefox browser was a bot and blocked me. Fun times.
What is "Asian"? Growing up as a Pakistani kid in the US, people would always say how I'm not really Asian. To them, only people from east or south-east Asia counted under that label. Any census-style questions still had me marking as Asian, but there was always a bit of dissonance there.

I can maybe see the desire/appeal for a label that means "all Asians except those from the Indian subcontinent, middle-east, or central Asia", but it's always been curious to me that society in America just adopted the word "Asian" for that purpose while excluding so much of "Asia" from falling under that label.
> The bugs apparent trigger word is close to hot-button poli-sci issue. Can we please focus on the Technology.

I totally agree that this story has a high risk of flamewars.

But it definitely has heavy Technology component, too.
This is fantastic, please keep up the series. I've been enjoying it immensely.

Previously:

* Interview with Seneca (https://dkb.show/post/life-is-not-short)

* Interview with Marcus Aurelius (https://dkb.show/post/marcus-aurelius)
Help me out here, is the answer the official answer?
I remember finding a $20 on the floor in middle school once. Felt like a fortune.
A book I found in a design store in Helsinki consisted of an entire novel (one of Dickens’, I think) that had been sorted, word by word, into alphabetical order. For example, all the “the’s” were grouped together.

I guess the artist who made it was trying to say something, but I couldn’t tell what. Order matters? Books are a fraud? Maybe the punchline for a joke, “here is the book you ordered! Get it? Ordered!”
in college I retrieved a copy of waiting for godot from the bowels of main stacks at the recommendation of my girlfriend and found a note on the jacket from another person of the same name (an uncommon one at that) who had recommended it to her beau.
What was that bot that MSFT stood up on Twitter that trolls and memers fed to turn alt-right? I know they eventually took it down and that it stirred up a lot of controversy.

I would not be surprised if someone found some Copilot output stemming from "gender" and reported to MSFT/GitHub for them to simply short circuit or "break" after finding certain keywords.
Sure, I like having a distro that defaults to not using GNU (if nothing else, to flavor the GNU/Linux naming debate), but there's nothing wrong with allowing GNU or others to be used. Further, Alpine already packages GNU tools, so I prefer the most elegant implementation possible.
> The backlash is already mounting.

Is it? To me it feels like it's getting worse and worse, but that might be my bubble.
Neat! Immediately made me think of Naughty Dog where they used Allegro CL to make Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
Meta never had a full freeze.
While still bad in that way, its probably better than 10. It has a heap of its own issues, but my personal experience hasn't been quite as grating as far as the language is concerned. It's a healthy reasonably unoffensive middle ground of informative/understandable and casual. W11 has bigger issues than language.
When I was a kid we didn’t even have ones! We had to write all our code with zeros. Apologies to Scott Adams of course.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1992-09-08
Besides the absurdity of the code crashing because of the word "gender". My problem and curiosity with all of this is...

"What was going on in the head of the person writing the parser?"

I mean, were they thinking that if someone is writing code, let's say, for a gender dropdown and it was only ["male", "female"], it would try to suggest to us to add 26 more genders instead (and worse, suggest a list of genders to add)?

Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??

What was going on in that person's head who is trying to do all of this? What was their thought process? What were they trying to accomplish around gender?

Was it the programmer, or some product manager that insisted on some kind of "copilot adjustment" for this because of a personal political viewpoint or just for GitHub being more woke?

That's the most troubling aspect to this.

I hope to Jesus Christ it was just a mistake.
I just tried Copilot with VS Code and python for the first time. If I define a function with some parameter name, I get suggestions as I type the body. I change the parameter name to gender, no suggestions. I change one letter in the parameter name (gendes, gander), I get suggestions again. There clearly is some code that gets activated when it sees the word "gender".
This is very common on UberEats. I’d say well over 50% of the restaurants are ghost kitchens. I usually Yelp the names. Some of them are low ratings (1.5 stars) but on UberEats they are 4.5…

Very frustrating to “search” on UberEats. Fine if you know the restaurant you want to order from ahead of time.
> The idea of being "proud" to be white only conjures up one thought for even the most lightly informed about our nation's history.

Twice defending Vienna from Ottoman sieges? Retaking Spain from the Moors? The failed last stand at Constantinople before the city, and Byzantium itself, fell to Muslim conquerors? Ending the Barbary slave trade, that raided Europe for centuries, kidnapping two million slaves into the Muslim world? Holding off the Mongol invasion? Or maybe you mean inventing antibiotics and the tractor? Or germ theory and the transistor?

Of course you're right. The trans-Atlantic slave trade (ignore the Arab trans-Saharan slave trade) is the only thing "white pride" conjures up. The propaganda has been incredibly effective, erasing all white history from the public mind except that which can be used to shame them.

> White people as a group have not been systemically oppressed.

Yes, all the barely or not-at-all held-off invasions I listed aren't oppression. Nor was the blood tax much of eastern Europe had to pay the Ottomans [1], nor the Pontic genocide [2]. It was always all sunshine and rainbows for the white man, that has never faced an external threat in all of Europe's history.

You could say this is the founding ideal of the US ("founding" since 1903, when The New Colossus Poem was mounted on the Statue of Liberty). All the battles for freedom and survival are reduced to "storied pomp", and the Colossus of Rhodes, built to celebrate the defence of that city, is re-interpreted as an ode to violent conquest, "With conquering limbs astride from land to land;". Your country has asked you to believe that Europeans and European-Americans never faced an external threat, never had to fight for survival, never lost such a battle, and never contributed anything to the world but violent conquest.

And you obliged whole-heartedly obliged, because you are a good person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
A guide to stock options for European entrepreneurs
Am a doctor. Have a question. What’s the evidence base you’re planning to use in justifying the treatment and recommendations?

There’s often a big divide in things that make sense to treat, and things that should actually be treated. In other words, with what studies will you know if the effect is clinically significant or not?

Not wanting to be antagonistic. Genuinely curious.
Amazon was hiring 5-6 years ago at $160+150 (if you negotiated) for newly grads
What is Github worried about? That Copilot might suggest some code that checks for a "gender" variable being only one of two values? Utterly absurd that we've now reached this point. I already had plenty of reasons to boycott Copilot, now I have another one.
Roaming goes down the drain as AT&T disconnects European travellers
I see this kind of questioning pop up when someone states that something bothers them and someone else deeply disagrees. Is there a name for this kind of questioning of someones foundational feelings about something, as if to allude in every question that it's purely wrong to feel that way?
Link to paper [1]. It looks like the authors construct a basic autoencoder to predict frames in videos of various videos (double pendulum, lava lamp, etc.) and then use the Levina–Bickel algorithm [2] to determine the expected "intrinsic dimension" of the latent space of the autoencoder. They then refer to the size of the intrinsic dimension as the "minimum number of variables required by the system to accurately capture the motion.", e.g. 24 for a video of a fireplace.

Personally, I wonder how much information this actually provides about a system. Since the neural network is non-linear, a single latent variable may theoretically function as more than one state variable.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-022-00281-6.epdf?shar...

[2]: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~bickel/mldim.pdf
There's real social change effected by any influx of people anywhere. People bring their money, which is actually just power, and also their values/culture with them. It's up to residents to decide for themselves whether that's good or not. The money goes a long way in some places, and so can do a lot to lift some people out of poverty. Westerners have many good values, too, however these can displace local culture, which is social corrosion, and they also have their own ways they behave badly too, which must be weighed.

At the end of the day it's up to a society to decide what happens, there are benefits and costs either way, and they need to choose profit or authenticity and purity, or neither, and just coast through life and hope everything turns out OK.
US Labor Shortages and the Immigration Shortfall
I can see the color wheels of most projectors[1] by the colored light bleeding out through the ventilation on the side. I only notice it when I'm moving my gaze, stationary the light just blurs into a steady white.

[1] Except the pricier models, either with separate LCDs for three colors, or with very fast color wheels.
Show HN: RxGo with Generics
Tay AI
FYI, there is in fact a bad word filter in GitHub Copilot. When it was first released, the list was stored client-side in obfuscated form and I had a lot of fun decoding it:

https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628

The Register wrote about it too: https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/02/github_copilot_banned...

They have since moved the bad word list server-side to prevent people from figuring out what's on it, but it's still there. This is easy to verify, just ask it to complete something that would include a banned word; my favorite here is "Israel", and it will just sit there and refuse to complete, either via inline suggestions or in the sidebar view that gives you 10 choices:

https://i.imgur.com/O97YwKc.png

This was what I managed to decode of the list (in ROT13 form to prevent accidental offense):

https://moyix.net/~moyix/copilot_slurs_rot13.txt

No doubt they've added and removed some things since then.
Today, in response to the query, "What is zero divided by zero?", Siri still gives a flip explanation (but now omitting the reference to Sesame Street intellectual property), followed by the one word sentence "No.". And that's when it's working as intended. Astounding.
Okay, now someone needs to do the same study with innocuous end game scenarios. (I know this study links to one other paper that makes this case, but I can't access it, and the abstract has a biased tone)

If you're going to explore worst-case, so you can think through preparedness, then you should also consider the trivial case to make sure we aren't over-responsive either.
The large language models already know too much.

I was able to get GPT-3 to spit out reasonably accurate biographies for a couple of composers I know.

GPT-3 could go even further — one of my composer friends has a reasonably rare first name, and when given the prompt "There once was a man named $first_name", GPT-3 responded with a number of limericks tailored to his particular set of skills.
No, I'm not talking about "preference". People don't "prefer" to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with any meager savings they're able to accumulate being consumed by unplanned expenses until they're eventually forced to take on debt to make ends meet - which only exacerbates the problem by reducing their cash flow even further.

"Just move" or "just get a new job" is great advice for a highly mobile household where the workers have skills in high demand (e.g. young tech workers with no dependents).

For a great many people, "just move" is terrible advice. Moving is financially burdensome, socially disruptive, at times irresponsible, and at other times impossible. Not everyone has the option of just picking up and moving to a place that's more economically viable. They may not have the money to move. They may have obligations tying them to a particular geographical area. There might be legal barriers preventing them from moving.

"Just get a new job" is similarly terrible advice for most workers, for whom a job is not an easily disposable or replaceable thing. It's nice to work in software, where anyone with a reasonable network can organize half a dozen interviews next week with close to no effort. Most people aren't in software, though. A friend with a STEM PhD recently spent 18 months looking for a new job. Now think about people who have less desirable education or skills. "Just get a new job" is not advice that they can act on easily; certainly not quickly in response to rising fuel prices.

I was going to write a long thing here about autonomy and economic circumstances, but I can't really be bothered. In short: people really don't like having their entire lives disrupted, and we shouldn't be building a society that expects that of the average person.
Yep, I noticed this last year when they still stored the list client-side and had great fun reverse engineering it:

https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1433254293352730628
Yeah they probably found something like: assert gender in ["male", "female"]. If this is enough to trigger a backlash then maybe we deserve whatever fate has in store for us.
> A 10X engineer is not someone who just working 10X better than everyone else. A 10X engineer is the type of person helps make 10 other people better than they were before

Everybody (including me) is a hero in our own minds. I doubt anyone sees themselves as the type of person who make 10 other people worse than they were before.
How a Celebrity CEO’s Rule of Fear Helped Bring Down Hot Startup Zilingo
getting worse from both sides
Now if only someone could figure out a magic word that would stop Copilot from being trained on my code.
Which part of the smell test does this not pass exactly?

They just described almost identical behaviour but with an isolated test case. Yeah there’s no video or whatever but it does support the original diagnosis.
I understand and I sympathize. But... you could also cook. Prepare rice in a cooking pot and chicken in a frying pan with onions or shallots. 20 minutes. Or cook pasta and an egg. 10 minutes. Or fried potatoes with sausages and boiled eggs. 15 minutes. Or an omelette with spices and an avocado on the side. 10 minutes. Or a big sandwich if you're in a hurry. And half or more of those times will be spent waiting for the food to cook and monitoring them and stirring them.
I understand that, but the carbon impacts of many jobs are small -- whether positive or negative. If you take a job that has a small negative carbon footprint, use some of the money and focus it on things that have a larger positive carbon sequestration, that's still a (small) net win.

And there are force multipliers. Education is one of them. Science/R&D is another.

Think of it another way. You can pay 3x more fancy vegan food that might be like 150% better for the climate, or use that money to plant trees directly and save more carbon overall.

Efficiency and magnitude matters. It's all CO2E in the end, but not every dollar spent gets you the same amount.
Let's make a distinction between errors delivered to users buying a train ticket on an app (as in the original article) and errors meant for developers. It feels like hardly anyone in the thread is making that distinction.
Maybe the one saving grace in all this, is that the AI singularity will never happen thanks to wokeness.
Just a pointer that this article specifically says that the problem is not so much the tourists as their numbers have not really increased that much tourism has always been a thing but the problem now is from people who have chosen to move there and become the air quotes new locals after spending just a year or so there. Same kind of thing as with how the Hong Kong people feel like the mainland Chinese moving to or buying up apartments and real estate in Hong Kong drives up the prices, the locals in Hawaii are feeling something similar I think.

But yeah your points about the tourism effect of high popular tourist places is definitely good and interesting but just pointing out this article made a distinction between that and the actual newcomers who were moving there, nomads and their ilk.
Conflating wanting the equal and non-divisive treatment for all with white supremacy is very ugly.
Perhaps it was not "do I think this is reasonable," but "is acting in good faith enough to keep me out of trouble."
Just making a note here, the answer was approved by Dave Cheney. If you're unfamiliar with him: https://dave.cheney.net/

He works for GitHub.
Respect, the amount of work to do that is mind boggling.
Is a Shawarma shop asian because the middle east is in asia. How about Afghan food, it is solidly central asia. Is sri lankan asian how about indonesian or malay? Indian?

I mean I think all these are asian it would just feel inappropriate if this ended up with only east asian places labeled as asian. Why not just use the country's name? I hope Googlers know "asian" isn't a race outside of "social construct" regional similarities in cuisine hower exist so maybe southeast-asian but I would prefer to know what country. Are they serving kimchi for sure or nah??
This is one of those posts that sounds like wisdom but isn’t.

Some people are swamped for good reasons, some are swamped for bad reasons.

Some people are not swamped because they are brilliant planners and know their limitations, others are not swamped because they are terrified of commitment or are avoiding responsibility.

So what?

Please, less writing and more understanding.