skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The most popular app in the U.S. deleted mentions of its Chinese owner
Apple is very clear about what they have access to, and what they do not. They cannot share what they do not have, or do not have the encryption keys to.
It's an amusing example though a bit puffed up. Even on LW only a small fraction of the reader-base took it seriously.
Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this.

Can you run the 2016 election 1,000 times and count the times Hillary wins? Of course you can't.

Unlike estimating "what's the chance it rains tomorrow?" you can't even find 1,000 elections in the past with roughly similar conditions.

Unlike a baseball season, you don't have enough samples for the true probabilities to come out.

So, yes, despite all your downvotes, you're right: he pandered to the people who want a percentage number, despite the fact that it's meaningless and they will misunderstand it.
I think they still have mainframes, but that's a few years ago that I'm remembering.
This is so tired. The problem with AIs are that they'll be used to make life worse for people right now.

The US government is using machine translation to assess asylum cases because they don't want to pay for translators. People will literally be denied asylum and die because of this. That's a real AI problem, and it's affecting people right now.

The world would be better off without pundits like this guy distracting us from the real problems.
What else are they good at?
This is a very strange take since it was Nate Silver who gave trump an order of magnitude higher chance of winning than everyone else. Around 30% chance, same for a batter getting a hit in baseball, which happens all the time.
To expand on the personal preference this part can be either a blessing or a curse depending on whether or not you are in a position to be able to force decisions in the codebase. It grinds my gears having to work with nitpickers but I am currently trapped in that kind of setting at my current job. It sucks.
Exactly the approach that is needed.

This approach seems not a lot different from "use your weightings to summarize my new documents". Not that it isn't useful, but it is not the same as preventing hallucinations. You've merely constrained the workspace to your known set of data, which mostly throws away the entire set of trillions of training data points.

Yet, preventing hallucinations straight form the LLM is nontrivial, especially when the LLM is merely generating next-most-likely-words, without any truth value. At the very least, it would require abstracting truthful concepts (abstract objects and relationships) from the data, which is a heck of a lot more than just the clusters of sort-of-synonyms and word clusters that it now has. Then, make weightings between all of those, and generate new series of valid/factual concepts, then put those in words. In contrast to the N parameters (around 100 trillion?), it sound like this would need closer to N!...
> If you think the folding of the company is in good faith, you might just want to take the loss on this one.

This is astonishingly bad advice! It is the fundamental opposite of what you should do in this situation!

If you work for someone, you deserve to be paid for your work. Full stop. There are state agencies to assist with this exact situation that are funded by your tax dollars, avail yourself to them!

What you think happened to the company is immaterial. I am genuinely baffled by the phrase “folding of the company in good faith” as I can’t imagine a good faith reason to tell people to work for free based on how your feelings align in relation to a business entity.

The only people that would benefit from this becoming the norm would be con artist founders that are working to perfect an “Aww shucks, payroll is sooo hard for a smol bean like me!” excuse for getting folks to work for free.

I would also not work for anyone that would even slightly agree with this advice.
"division" is not the right term for it. They are really different companies, even though the majority owner is the same and they use similar branding. T-Mobile US wasn't created by T-Mobile Germany expanding, but rather through Telekom buying US carriers and rebranding them, and thus they don't share infrastructure or corporate structures.
Societal value != journalistic value. And in fact, even if there's a net negative societal value that doesn't mean it shouldn't be around.

Nate silver didn't exactly invent political polling either. That's doing a disservice to the enormous time and money invested in polling over several decades of elections (and the learnings when things didn't go correctly). Polling will be around regardless.
The first one is basically "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" for anthro majors, and then he gets less focused somehow. He'd be my personal Kilgore Trout if we didn't have contemporary science fiction.
I think it's worth taking concerns like this seriously.

Not so much in the "Evil AGI develops a scheme for human control via religion" sense, but the formation of cults with AI as the primary source of dogma seems absolutely plausible and even likely.

Imagine how much faster ideas like QAnon could spread if the materials were all easily accessible via conversation, with an easy entry point for all newcomers, because no matter your level, the LLM will meet you where you are.

I've known types that would absolutely buy into some "This AI is the second coming of deity" story, and they'd love it because they could engage with said deity directly, something they've spent their entire lives hoping to accomplish via prayer.

I think this should be read as "AI in the hands of humans could create..."
I don't see how reductions in business burglaries are excluded from consideration or even diminished in importance.
See: "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" by Edgar Allen Poe

Story: https://poemuseum.org/the-facts-in-the-case-of-m-valdemar/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_in_the_Case_of_M._Va...
In many jurisdictions failure to pay wages is criminal theft. If someone takes money out of my wallet without my consent, that's theft. The fact that it was stolen before it even made it into my wallet doesn't make it not stealing.
People do misunderstand it, that is true. Including you, who thinks it is meaningless. Being imperfect is very different from useless or meaningless.
I suspect that it’s worse than that, it’s somewhere in windows. So you’d probably have to start by hunting for a task then find the binaries associated and hope it’s not too high up in the OS mess.
If you're open to feedback: I'm not strictly opposed to that behavior, but it seems like a reasonable compromise to not do that for URLs explicitly entered in the Omnibox. It seems like that will provide the transport upgrade effect we want, without breaking some of the workflows mentioned in this thread.
Ask HN: Help me name my 'startup'?
RIPmyName.com
Can you guess what service I am planning on providing.

I promise it has noting to do with hitmen.

Is there any subreddit for these kinds of domain name speculation.

I am already hoarding 6 domain names, I wonder how many you are hoarding?
I did not expect to read about Borges here. Great article!
How to explain cardinals vs. ordinals to a six-year-old
"Quarantined" (wrongthink) subs and I think NSFW ones. Probably more now as they continue to trend toward MiniTrue.
> Point me to one law that says you are not allowed to have more than X doctors.

Why can't we have doctors that other countries have agreed are qualified to be doctors?

Also, do you know how certificate of need laws work? It literally says you can't have a hospital unless the other nearby hospitals agree you can have it.

Taxi medallions are truly a "there can only be X many people doing this" system, but even if they're not written that way, these other laws are still intended to restrict the supply of healthcare.

nb my issue isn't whether the healthcare system is "socialist" or not, it's that it's bad. I don't think "just make the government pay for everything" is a solution to things costing too much though; if an ambulance ride costs $9000 the solution is to make it not cost that, not to share paying for it.
Thanks, I need all the luck I can get. Currently, I'm building a couple of products with my stack, and it's going well.

For conditional processing that you and your colleagues did, was it within the browser? I'm doing this as simple step such that I turn a giant "HTML forest" into lean javascript and DOM binding. It's working well for me, so I wonder what the gap is?

Personally, my stack is underengineering since I'm combining the roles of web server, database, messaging stack, queues, caches, load balancer, workflow into one cohesive platform. My dry run video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWYgChA_aYA&feature=youtu.be goes into more details.
(have not yet rtfa)
So... Good? Maybe?

A proper religion consists of personal rules that, optimally, promote a stable and growing society. Coupled with the necessary doctrine and evangelism needed to propagate the Theogenetic package of this god or that. Sprinkle in some persecution of heretics or the religion will just mutate out of control.

If L.Ron Hubbard can pull a functioning and viable god out of his anointed hindquarters then we should at least give the LLMs a shot.
There are no Chrome builds for Linux on ARM, for instance. (There might be Chromium builds but that won't have the proprietary Google stuff like account sync.)
Value Oriented Programming Needs Implicits?
This is something I think about a lot - the actual value of polling in general and public opinion polling in specific.

A lot of public discourse is creeping on several layers of meta, to where we are constantly reacting to how people react to other reactions.

Sometimes I wish we would just let ideas stand on their face instead of constantly engaging in acts of national navel gazing.
Which non-538 models consistently outperform 538's models?

EDIT: (cause I can't reply to the below comment) my question was what model beats 538, not which betting market beats 538. yeah, duh, the Vegas line beats 538, because it beats literally all publicly available models. It'd take a really disastrous gambling market failure for anything else to happen.
Considering that the user, LanceH, was directly replying to:

> I don't get it, what exactly do you think is wrong with the email landscape? Its a standard protocol everyone can use, the only restrictions being when you start using other's services. Maybe I'm just not abreast enough on this.

I would say most readers would interpret that as in response to email, the standard.
> Percentage probabilities are meaningless for an event like this.

No, they aren't.

(They can’t be validated for a single event in isolation, but 538 predicts lots of election events, so their models can, generally, be assessed, and are historically quite accurate.)
Was 538 journalism? I never followed them. Only on occasions of them being quoted with some type of forecast.
These are the people who got their feelings hurt over a culture war and lash out at Silver because he's become vaguely mainstream synonymous with political projections. Nobody with a serious position and serious attention on this would criticize Silver. It was the Buzzfeed types that gave Clinton a much higher chance.
When I read they were using mmap I immediately thought of Andy Pavlo since he warns against it every time he can in the CMU videos. Enough that I thought it was somewhat of a concensus now that mmap should be avoided specially for databases, guess I was wrong.
The fact that you were addicted to pornography means that you probably would have sought out and encountered lots of other people in the same problematic situation as yourself. I would look to your own tunnel vision as to why you tend to see it's perceived negative effects everywhere.

I'll take peer reviewed research over anecdotal data any day of the week.
American unions avoid Mexican unions like the plague.

Mexican unions are very corrupt, and even being near them would expose American unions to insane legal liability.

I see the same problem with regards to Africa. Corruption is … an issue.
Interesting product! I’ve been looking at competitive intelligence tools for a bit. What’s your pricing model?
Those are good, meaty questions.

In an election, the vote is the measure of popular support for a candidate/policy/platform. Democracy doesn't necessarily need polls.

I've found interesting some related essays by Jill Lepore, an American historian, on the advent of polling earlier in the 20th century:

- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-t...
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09/the-problems-i...
> it may even be harmful

It definitely is, I tried to make the same point a week ago :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35707786
Yes, I don't think they pretend to have invented it, given the lyrics of the song. One of the lines is about how they are advancing towards the cutting edge of the world, which does admit they're not a leader.
> Societal value != journalistic value

That's fair. I was responding to ways I've heard Nate Silver talk about the model and polling in general in e.g. podcasts, which is why I've had the question floating around in my mind. But you're right, that's not quite what he wrote here.

> And in fact, even if there's a net negative societal value that doesn't mean it shouldn't be around.

To be clear: I don't mean to imply that FiveThirtyEight shouldn't exist. There's lots of things which serve a human desire but aren't necessarily a social good. Slot machines for example.
This is an interesting idea. I honestly hadn’t considered that we could contribute to strike funds in these countries. Seems like a thing worth organizing
That effectively does make it exponential

x * x === x^2
You're not the only conscious being in the universe. Others have their own personal perspectives and as human's we have the capability to care about their feelings, in addition to our own.

Helping someone else does not doom you to suffering. It's not a zero sum game.
Your two paragraphs have no relationship. How it could possibly "turn out" that there's a 5% chance of Trump winning? Was the election run 100 times?

The accuracy of the polls is another matter entirely. You could estimate the chances that your polling was wrong, given that the selection of the sample is a random variable, people lie, and intentions change, but that's not at all what the general public thinks the number means.
This one has subtitles and a parade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpupc4zxlTo
Depends on the cache control headers, but yes.
I'd argue that the best time to be sounding the alarm is before the tech has reached the point of causing real harm.

Obviously machine translation of asylum cases sounds like a major issue, and becomes ammunition to tell the story of how problematic things could become with continued development. I also suspect arguments will be made like "more cases can be processed this way", which may be true on some time horizons.

This isn't a zero sum game, and if anything, this renewed focus on the dangers of emerging AI tech provides an opportunity to surface situations that are already broken / in danger of harming people.

(I wasn't aware of machine translation for asylum cases, so this article put that on my radar, indirectly).
> Apple can be compelled to spy on you[0].

It’s dishonest to equate lawful warrants with Google’s targeted advertising and exploitation of our information.

Furthermore, Apple is clear about what information they have access to, and what information they don’t, and have consistently, year-over-year, reduced the information they actually have access to.

> Apple is an advertiser.

This is another disingenuous false equivalency. Apple does not gather personal information from our devices for advertising, and always requires explicit opt-in before making use of any data provided to them through the use of their services.
There are a lot of good reasons for it.

First, centralization and consolidation increase the risk of fraud and corruption, and malign influence with regards to antitrust.

Second, almost no new banks are being chartered. What do you think typically happens when you go from Many -> Few (single digits) -> 1.

If something happens because they play the bailout game, the only real option is for nationalization.

Third, their sector mandate is to loan money to businesses that can use that money to turn a profit and feed the economy. They've stopped doing that outside a few corrupt friends(entities).

What you often don't hear about is what happens when they are the only game in town, they know your business is stressed, and they refuse to loan to you on arbitrary grounds (behind closed doors) knowing they can buy it up in bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar for a larger profit.

Like what Amazon did to the baby diaper companies.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/07/emails-detail-am...
• Performance Matters by Emery Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TLSBdHe1A

• Data-Oriented Design by Mike Acton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
Code reviews aren't meant to prove correctness. When I review code, I assume the author thought about it, realized this is the best solution, and tested it, all not happening with the models.
Let us know if you need help with webhooks, we make it super easy...

https://www.svix.com/
Gotta love NK bands subjecting themselves to cultural imperialism by playing western instruments.
I wouldn’t characterize that example as “not smart” to be honest. I’m not particularly smart, but if someone has gone through the trouble of changing their secure socket port from 22, I would realize there would be more work and time involved in finding the actual port, and then it would be a safe assumption that, if found, it would have significantly more security hardening than the average port 22 because clearly the admin knows enough to change ports. So I might even characterize it as smart to not go after ssh ports that are not 22.
> No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.

Do you have a pretty diverse range of experiences on psychedelics backing this up?
Perfect sell. I'm signing-up just from this comment alone ;)
> Eh, eye of the beholder.

It's really not, which is why quantitative models have real value. You don't have to argue that he's biased, you just have to point to the evidence. But your whole comment is indistinguishable from someone with sour grapes who is simply casting aspersions on his track record without being willing to analyze it properly. At the very least, you ought to specifically identify what kind of biases his predictions have shown; he leaves himself wide open to being proven wrong, so it's only fair for you to do the same.
> the kernel team has to hack around it like they do for other popular misbehaving apps.

Like Google Chrome? Or is that not a popular app?

If you think the Office team doesn’t have access to the source code of the rest of Windows and doesn’t get special apis to do things you aren’t supposed to do, you’re in for a surprise.

Where do you think that crazy crypto code Chrome uses to set itself as the default browser comes from? It’s obviously decompiled code from a Microsoft app that sets itself as the default. Because they have privileged access and can do the things they prevent others from doing. And exactly the same goes for Office. Little tricks to set the defaults, to allow their windows to pop up when others are blocked from doing so, privileged access to the update system, preinstallation with the OS, the list goes on and on.

They are superficially separate teams for legal reasons.
I would think forcing people to better appreciate how probabilities actually work is better than avoiding the topic entirely. Learning that 70% is not certain is important in lots of contexts. 30% probability events happen all the time…

Data illiteracy, not the existence of a forecast, is the core problem.
> There are also some complicated cases — for example, for some of the sports models, I own them, but Disney gets to keep a copy when I leave.

As others have mentioned, he's very wise to have negotiated contracts so he keeps some IP, but those sports models might be what generate the most revenue.

Are there precedents for this in the tech world, where somebody can legally bring IP with them to a new role but the old employer/competitor keeps an exact copy? Seems like an unusual arrangement that'd be hard to sell the upside to somebody competing with Disney/ESPN.

Also, that [poker bluff](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cVrlVzoh48) was very entertaining to watch. Apparently Nate's quite the poker player (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#Economic_consultan...)
> Millions of voters aren’t reading 538

True. But millions of them will hear a radio announcer, or TV person, or tiktok video or whatever else say something like "In the latest polling, <X> has pulled ahead of <Y> ..." where "the latest polls" will mean (among other things) 538.

I do believe that this has some effect (if small) on patterns of voting (particular by encouraging or discouraging turnout).
Is it even true? It seems hard to believe Apple doesn't spy on people or sell information to advertisers.
I used to scrape craigslist for local offers. Many times I needed to be the first to call, so I wanted my script to get the numbers.

In about five minutes I came up with an algorithm that defeated most of the obfuscation tricks of the time:

Strip whitespace, convert "five" to 5, remove special characters, and look for ten consecutive digits in the body text. Maybe a couple of small tweaks after that like removing text between digits.

Most people, when they invent their little unique scheme, invent one that is already defeated by the algorithm above. At least for phone numbers.

Anyway, all that to say you're right, it never worked.
> Actually no, the GDPR applies to all European citizens around the world.

Actually, GDPR applies to (1) people who are "in the Union", and (2) people whose data is being processed by processors who are "in the Union". Citizenship has nothing to do with it.
Companies need to hire some mentats.
That lines up with reports in DownDetector [1]

[1] - https://downdetector.com/status/verizon/
Haha a lot of funny comments here. I think overall it's neither here nor there. You should be proud that the "elites" at Google copied your code ;)
I don’t think anyone can answer this to your satisfaction without knowing your personal definition of journalism. Because I believe the question you’re really asking is, “Was 538 what I consider journalism?”

When I typed “define journalism” into Google, this came back:

> the activity or profession of writing for newspapers, magazines, or news websites or preparing news to be broadcast.

So yes, 538 was journalism by at least one definition of journalism.

Here’s one more definition:

> Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities

Another yes! We’re 2 for 2!
> The current product, LoJack AnalProbe™

Outstanding name! Their marketing team has a wicked sense of humor.
Investigations take time. It's possible that they managed to get a disk dump of a compromised server and found a Mullvad config file, for instance, and they were just trying to follow the trail back to the criminals that carried out the attack.

I'm guessing the authorities were hoping that Mullvad lies about their no logs policy, like some cheap VPN providers do.