skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone thinks biological sex is binary, that shows they're uninformed. Like gender, it is essentially a point cloud in n-dimensional space - largely bimodal, but with a few other notable clusters.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter. We are humans. Giving our biology the finger and doing what we want is an option. It is not a remotely new option, but both the accessibility and extent of that option are increasing over time.

Customized regimens of drugs and surgeries are available to achieve combinations of sex characteristics that simply do not occur naturally. Many insurance plans in the US will cover them.

We've just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. I read an account recently of someone doing a YOLO by knocking out their DMRT1 gene with CRISPR. The goal was to alter hormone levels - and it seems to have worked.

I'm living the bleeding edge of some of this, the culture war is real, and it is heating up. All I want is to exist without oppression. This will likely play out similar to how it did for same-sex couples. Visibility and social acceptance has grown. We are now in the period of conservative people trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The effort will probably fail eventually - but much suffering will be caused in the process.

My choice is to stand up for myself - and do what I can to help those who cannot.
Subs like /r/askscience and /r/science have always needed moderation even before Reddit became cancer.

The problem is the unauditable censorship. This is especially important on political forums but it also becomes relevant on science forums when scientific issues are starting to be politicized.

Of course, Reddit can be whatever it wants, but as it stands, you can only treat it as a propaganda outlet, as you have no way of knowing what gets removed.

The way we can make moderation trustworthy is the same way we make software trustworthy: By putting it out in the open so anyone can scrutinize it and raise a stink when they discover something suspicious, and can't be silenced.

There is almost zero legitimate reason to completely scrub any comment, hiding them by default would work just fine. The only reason to really delete a comment would be if it directly puts a person in danger, such as by containing personally identifying information.

Hard censorship must be a rare enough event that it becomes a scandal and everybody hears about it. The normalization of censorship allows moderators to do basically anything they want, because comments being removed is just expected and doesn't raise any eyebrows anymore. "Oh yeah, those 75% removed comments were just memes and hate speech."

The other side of the coin is that flooding forums with memes, hate speech, and inane nonsense is a quick and easy way to drown out meaningful discussion and actual information, so soft censorship is necessary.

They are two different attack vectors, and we need a defense against both of them. To prevent infiltration of the mod team, speech that we accept to be censored completely must require actual effort so mods can't plausibly claim it was "just memes" when comments get removed on a daily basis. To prevent exterior soft censorship by flooding, we ironically need moderation with power to implement soft censorship, but one that we can trust.

We also cannot accept "hate speech" (or any other combination of words) that requires zero effort to produce to be a reason to force moderators to implement hard censorship. That allows anyone to censor any platform they like or at a minimum to force its moderators to destroy the trust the platform's users can objectively have in them.

Of course, this isn't completely implementable due to unreasonable laws in pretty much every country in the world, but a trustworthy platform would at least try to approximate it as closely as possible under the laws they're bound by. Reddit certainly isn't one, at least it hasn't been since Aaron Swartz was bullied out a long time ago.
> You cannot accidentally commit a felony

You cannot but laws around forfeiture are weird. If what you own was involved in a crime it can be forfeitured even though you yourself are not charged with anything. And yes, that includes money too. It's from drug laws but I'd say it would better applied here.

> What you are suggesting would substantially impede legitimate commerce

Maybe it should be a bit impeded if unimpeded led to national crime wave.
> Since you already use GPT-3 to generate digests of articles, couldn't you use it to also generate non clickbait headlines? (either based on that digest or the full article) That could be an interesting experiment.

Could be done! Thanks for the suggestion.
> How much would be solved if instead of "containers" we deployed static binaries

That's pretty much what happens in the Go space, and people are still deploying k8s like crazy there, seemingly failing to consider the trade-offs involved. It's people's full time jobs to manage all of this when it really isn't needed if your ops story was just a bit simpler.

I'm a developer, so for the most part I don't really care what the ops people are doing, whatever works well for them, right? But the way k8s works and because of the "dev-ops" stuff it's also pushed hard on developers. I've worked at companies where it was literally impossible to set up a local dev instance of our app and even running tests could be a challenge, because unless you're very careful k8s gets in to everything.
Do you imagine that you've done enough, and it's only those meat-eaters and plane-flyers who are causing problems?

Just living somewhere with heat and electricity and water, posting on here is adding to CO2 emissions, unless you're doing it from a 100% renewables-powered off-the-grid location. Even if you are, the messages you send onto the internet are routed by entities that consume fossil fuels.

Every building you enter, all the food you eat, every product you benefit from has been made with fossil fuels.

If you seek any goods or services in today's world, if you use any aspect of industrial civilization, you're contributing to the warming of the planet.
If you are as competent as the researchers you’re perfectly capable of pointing out the mistakes made in the research without insults like competency or stupidity. As it says in the rules for hacker news:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

That these rules are not enforced by deleting content but the comments largely disappearing from view (based on community voting) is not a hugely different outcome IMO. It’s also worth noting that you don’t have to participate in such a community if you don’t want to. Their space and their rules.
With Twitter in chaos, Mastodon is on fire
> "Elon Musk has turned twitter into 8chan" is an absurd falsehood.

What percentage of Twitter users are saying this?
for the uninitiated, could you list a few examples when board members (directors) were held responsible? famous court cases?
Yes, quite visible and easy, in that case.
Long way to agree that a company that has divested their fab business doesn’t compete with Intel in the fab market.
The experience before they ramped up their moderation was toxic. They did not act at all against clearly illegal activities. At least not in my european country because they did not employ any moderators in local language until forced to, despite (FB) having ~million users here and plenty of ad income. Did not saw much difference in the english part.

Dunno where you are seeing bad faith here?
So if people steal baby formula then it's governments fault because it requires bu law that people feed their children?
I got that too, accessing from South East Asia. Firing up a VPN with an endpoint in the USA fixed the access problem.
Fortunately you readily find the good advice in lots of other places, so you can simply ignore that book.
> We are using unittest.

Unless you need the library style in order to drive it, switch to pytest. Seriously.

- assert rewriting is stellar, so much more comfortable than having to find the right assert* method, and tell people they're using the wrong one in reviews

- runner is a lot more practical and flexible: nodeids, marks, -k, --lf, --sw, ...

- extensions further add flexibility e.g. timeouts, maxfail, xdist (though it has a few drawbacks)

- no need for classes (you can have them, mind, but if functions are sufficient, you can use functions)

- fixtures > setup/teardown

- parameterized tests
it('fails', async () => {
expect(await somePromise()).toBe(undefined)
expect(await someOtherPromise()).toBeDefined()
})

No chance figuring out where it failed, it's likely just gonna run into a test suite timeout with no line reference or anything.
That seems like it'd easily get confusing, when the assertions are dependent. Which is often the case e.g. if the list is empty, testing the properties of the first item make no sense.
> I'm not sure you'd want to write maths that way. Every WYSIWYG equation editor I've used are very annoying to work with.

Try Marhematica and you’d change your mind. Yes every other tool does it poorly, but Mathematica does it right. It’s fantastic and you miss it everywhere else when you have to leave the Mathematica eco system.
The driving force behind crunchy chilli sensation Lao GAN Ma
I remember writing a small .NET test library for that exact problem - You could pass in a lambda with a complex condition, and it evaluated every piece of the expression separately and pretty printed what part of the condition failed.

So essentially you could write

Assert(()=>width>0 && x + width < screenWidth)

And you would get:

Assertion failed:
x is 1500
width is 600
screenWidth is 1920

It used Expression<T> to do the magic. Amazing debug messages. No moralizing required.

This was a huge boon for us as it was a legacy codebase and we ran tens of thousands of automated tests and it was really difficult to figure out why they failed.
The world is going to miss the totemic 1.5°C climate target
The Commodordion (=

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBCYvoC4muc&t=90s
This reads like pure PR, still I could not find a viable recipe. Any ideas how to prepare it?
> The important thing is that I wouldn't attach a negative value-judgment to complexity, like saying complexity is always evil or bad or serves nefarious purposes.

I would and I do.

> It is precisely the unwillingness to engage with complexity that perpetuates it.

No. It is the chimpout, the excessive disproportionate and cruel response of labyrinth-makers against those who dare to cut to the heart of the maze, that perpetuates the artificial complexity through intimidation.

They would LOVE for you to “engage with complexity” - that means walking into the labyrinth of their construction, a turf they fully control. Nothing gives them more joy than seeing you squirm around the maze, wasting away trying to “understand” Modern Monetary Theory or why The Court upheld starre decisis here but created a new precedent there, like these things are emergent properties of nature like butterfly wings.
Thought I might as well try it again. While it wastes more space than TT-RSS, it’s good enough, and everything else looks nice and works faster, so I switched to FreshRSS as well now ;)
So the #2 problem is that you're not getting paid.

And the #1 problem is actually much worse since "you" aren't paid - in that there is a strong likelihood that "you": 1) are a paid shill to suppress specific content by either domestic or foreign bad actors (government or industrial complex trying to control/suppress narratives), and/or 2) "you" have an ideological bent - and are "passionate" (and biased) on certain issues and why you're volunteering your time.
Even if you are doing it from a renewable-powered off the grid location. Think of all the CO2 emitted to create those components and the logistics to get to that off grid location.
It can totally not be a disadvantage for you, I'm not debating that, I even encourage others to explore Mastodon, there is probable a market for a product like Mastodon for a small subset of individuals. But that doesn't mean it isn't a disadvantage for most people.

In the context of this thread, the blog starts by justifying the authors choice by citing the laid off of the accessibility team, the alternative for the author is Mastodon which brings the complexity of selecting which instances you trust, even when you find a good instance, at some point the owners can shutdown it and you will need to migrate to another instance. If a rogue employee sent your messages to another person, they can be prosecuted, have fun trying to do that to the owner of the instance, yes, you can have your own instance which have a monetary/time cost. Using a commercial product? Oh I really hope you instance never angry the mob or they may go to your commercial provider to demand they drop you. Obviously this doesn't make the accessibility any worse /sarcasm.

Popular Mastodon instance?

* Moderation takes time, who is going to do that for free, everyday?

* Who is paying the infrastructure cost?

Mastodon

* Daily active users is 655k spread in multiples instances 1º
* Private owned instances, self moderate.

* User base of the extremes of the gaussian distribution, the extreme privacy oriented and the politically motivated.

* User base is a subset that will split into another few subsets, high tendency to form echo chambers.

* Difficult to scale, closed system with rapidly increasing entropy (no accountability, highly susceptible to the instance owner desires (affected by time))

* Hard to attract people with a big following social media since the user base is small and the opportunity to grow is very small but the leak of followers to other users with small following base is high. (High cost/Low return)

I love that Mastodon exist, that it brings to the market different types of social media experiences, at the end, the market (people) will choose what is the more efficient version.

I personally doesn't use Twitter or Mastodon, I use rss with a CA instance of nitter in a RSS reader to check what a few people in the data science space tweet and my personal opinion is that the author is motivated by his political beliefs instead of the accessibility or quality of the product Twitter.

Sources:

1º https://nitter.ca/joinmastodon/status/1588168057893318657#m
I feel like this was a tongue-in-cheek proposal, but why would we want to be the thought police here? These are, after all, students sharing their beliefs with other students.

Conservatives have spent decades demonizing higher education as professor-led indoctrination centers. This would have the likely effect of fewer conservatives going to college and fewer conservative parents sending their children. So in that kind of environment, of course the campus becomes more and more liberal, and that’s the pool of people who later become professors, so a higher and higher percentage of professors are liberal.

It’s sorta funny your proposal is to send more conservatives to college to counterbalance the liberals, but that’s a problem with decades-long conservative messaging and not anything the schools are doing.

As an aside, there’s no real solution here for conservatives. Young people lean liberal. I grew up conservative in a conservative state, but college and debates with other students opened my eyes to other perspectives and I’ve shifted left ever since. Exactly like the findings in the study.

The issue is growing up our beliefs are segregated along that urban/rural divide. Where I grew up, conservative kids were the majority. As soon as you mix people between that line (college), you will almost always have a majority liberal lean even in conservative states. Which as you noted will lead to conservatives becoming more liberal, as I did. Although I wouldn’t say pressured, at least in my case it was exposure to different ideas more than anything.

I think that’s ultimately why conservatives demonize higher education as indoctrination. Not because it’s literal indoctrination like a church listening to a preacher, but because their kids raised conservative will meet kids raised liberal and it’s far more likely the conservative kids shift left than the others shift right. That spells disaster for a party.
I am using FreshRSS and Reeder 5 on iOS for over 2 years now. Its great. Blogs, newsletter, news, youtube, podcasts and twitter all in one app. Although, most of the time I download podcasts and than listen via VLC.
None of this matters unless only secret balloting is allowed. Mail in balloting is not secret. Only in-person balloting is secret.

When a person has a mail in ballot, they could be coerced or paid for their vote in an undetectable way. It might not even be the person who is authorized to vote, but someone else entirely - again completely undetectable.

History has shown time and again that people are motivated to cheat at elections, so all ballots need to be cast in a controlled space that prevents these shenanigans.

This is why the vast majority of OECD countries disallow or tightly limit mail in balloting.
Elon is not an Oligarch, unless the US is an Oligarchy (it's not).

> An oligarch is one of the select few people who rule or influence leaders in an oligarchy—a government in which power is held by a select few individuals or a small class of powerful people.
The sun should be highest at noon and lowest at midnight. Summer time breaks this.
First I've heard that one - trying to take it at face value, is the thesis that truth, equity, justice, etc should (must?) be discarded or suppressed if there is money to be made in the short term?
It might. What would happen then? I'd argue there'd be a lot of good discussion.

Why bother though? There are thousands of places you can have that discussion, including on Reddit. You can set up, say, /r/scienceforall right now and establish the rules you want. The /r/science sub has decided that it’s a space which should have heavy moderation - a totally legitimate viewpoint with obvious benefits and costs. You might not agree with the balance, but the beauty is you don’t have to.
Here is an article from 2014 by a (group of) mathematicians who used Mathematica extensively in their research describing the problems they had with Mathematica when trying to calculate the determinant of a Matrix containing large integers (on the order of 10k digits). The bug was reported in Mathematica 7 and was still there in Mathematica 10.

https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf

Back when I was using Mathematica a lot (2005-2010ish) the Mathematica usenet group kept an archive of all errors in Mathematica people had found, but it seems to have disappeared off the Internet.

If you browse the [bugs] tag in mathematica.stackexchange.com you'll find a few as well (although admittedly many of the issues there are user errors rather than Mathematica getting it wrong)
Who said multiple assertions are wrong in the first place? First time I hear about it really
Yes a web scraper. But it's not (just) an end to end scraper: it gives you easy access to the data so you can do whatever you want with it. Display a table for easy consumption, store it in graphite for historical data, ring a bell when a threshold is reached...
I think this has been a great tool to use since I was introduced. Thanks.
It's a hard problem, it's similar to what happens when developed countries ask those underdeveloped to not exploit it's natural resources the way they did to get where they are now.
That’s not moving money that’s buying assets.
That seems to me to assume the people are robots. Or Vulcans, or whatever.

It just seems weird to me. And again: you are taking the financial perspective about making money. That‘s just plain weird to me.

I’m talking about psychological impacts, not money. Having empathy for the psychological impact of the situation these employees find themselves in. Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing. To suddenly have that taken away is certainly not easy. I mean, if you liked your colleagues that‘s people you were around a lot and suddenly won’t be …

And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here.

There have been a lot of layoffs during the last few weeks and months and while, yes, HN commenters typically did recognize the economic circumstances that led to that they also had a lot of empathy for those who were laid off and were able to differentiate and recognize if employers were treating those laid off well (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy) or not so well.

Why is that impossible with Twitter? And I think hardly anyone would give Twitter and Musk good marks here.
This is not moving money.
I think APL was originally created as a fix to this problem. A completely revamped math notation to make it more fit to computers as a medium, instead of pen and paper.
> The problem is the unauditable censorship.

It's not even that. The biggest problem is more basic, that authors themselves are shown their removed content as if it's not removed! You can see that in action here [1]. It's happening everywhere, on every issue, on every side, in every geography and on every major platform.

Start there. We don't even need to ask to see everything that gets removed yet. Asking for users to be able to know when their content gets removed is enough. And as I said elsewhere [1], this transparency must be citizen provided by raising awareness and through newly built Reveddit-like technology for other social media sites. Expecting the government do achieve this for us will only delay the inevitable realization that we must build these systems ourselves. As I mention in the talk linked on this post at 26:10, don't ask someone to fix it for you– that's handing power over to authorities. You fix it.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/about/sticky/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480576
Like them or not, the drones are cool.
Additionally, the speaker who has a hard time with English, I assume they understand it but might not know the "perfect" words to say, isn't going to get better without practice. While one could argue the OP should learn Mandarin, I'll hard disagree.
From the rumors I've heard (might be true; might not) Intel lost a great deal of semiconductor engineering talent because they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over.

Once it became clear that AMD and ARM (and by extension TSMC) were eating their lunch, they had great difficulty pivoting because they lacked the talent and the organizational will to do so -- at least until Gelsinger took charge. I have a lot of respect for Gelsinger and I think he just might turn it around.
I'm in favor of letting people pursue their preferences, but echo chambers are antithetical to civil society - much more dangerous than so-called misinformation (indeed, they are environments in which errors and lies are more likely to flourish), so counteracting then is a valuable goal, in my book.
> Participation != appropriation.

As someone who contributes to BSD licensed code, please don’t tell me my users are “appropriating” my work. I’m happy my code is being used, and the more the merrier.
But even that perspective that you ascribe to India is reductive. It seems in your view, India are the only ones who understand complexity, the West are just arrogant morons. In reality, everyone's equally just looking out for themselves. In the West we don't care about Kashmir, in India people don't care about Ukraine. It's the same, until one day India will discover that Russia is useless against China and the US and the West are not. And then there will be a realignment. When it happens it won't be about any fancy ideals, it'll just be interests realigning.