Ivoirians

It's pretty absurd to ignore broad scientific consensus (which includes a pretty large number of Harvard immunology PhDs) while buying into the lies of a single authority who happens to argue what you like to hear. Cherrypicking one discredited scientist out of a million who backs up your beliefs is very clearly "anti-science".

Just to address the actual article, which is filled with demonstrable lies, see the "What else does Tetyana Obukhanych say?" section here: https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/appe...

That was actually the one line in the article that got me riled up and caused me to start digging.

>Is there evidence of actual favoritism in Google’s search engine? Well, the European Union certainly thinks so, having fined Google $2.7 billion last year for having biased search results.

The fine was for an anti-trust ruling, where it was determined Google was promoting their own shopping results (showing them at the top of the page) over organic shopping sites, stifling competition. Favoritism for their own service, maybe, but nothing to do with pushing or manipulating results.

So that's why I suspected he had an agenda to push and was willing to spin the truth to argue for it.

You can argue that study [4] showed Google tended to have more Clinton-favorable results, but I don't personally think that shows manual manipulation. It's worth a critical read--in Issue 7, he seriously alleges that Google somehow realized this study was being conducted halfway through, and started serving unbiased results to subjects with Gmail accounts. If you accept that conclusion, okay, but I'd tend to believe that the results aren't as statistically significant as claimed.

People don't act against their self-interest unless deceived. There are misleading ads that are immoral like "payday loans can get you out of debt", but the vast majority of ads (that I see) are informational, like "store X is having a sale". That's just giving me information to make a decision about ("$N is a reasonable amount for me to spend on this thing I didn't previously want").

I could make a similarly wrong blanket statement about news articles. "The news is fundamentally about misleading you into believing something against your interest". I could make a blanket statement about conversations between two people. "Listening to someone talk is letting them manipulate your brain into thinking something it wouldn't without this prodding". There are deceptive ads, news articles, and people, but you don't have a good moral argument against all ads, news articles, or people.

Of course, I can't say for certain this is a reaction, but it seems to me like they're addressing the actual meat of the original article--third party apps can do whatever they want with your emails once they have the keys, like let their employees read through them. The issue was that the policies dictating how apps could use that access didn't seem to have much teeth; thus, the new security review.

Also, this announcement says it first came out in October 2018, while the WSJ article came out in July 2018?

What an awful choice of a title. (Used to be something like "New Google policy charges devs $15k to access Gmail API")

Also, this isn't a bad move AFAICT (tightening policies and access to a very important API), but it's evidently a reaction to the backlash from that WSJ "exposé" about the scandalous fact that email providers allow third parties to read/manage your inbox... if you give the third parties permissions and access tokens. That was just dirty reporting and intentionally misleading average readers--the comments on that article were all akin to "I knew Google was reading my emails!". And I don't see this change mattering much to those people.

If you delete a video from your Youtube watch history, it doesn't get used for recommendations anymore.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?hl=en

People keep saying it happens, but I've never seen a Google query that didn't full-match a phrase in quotes.

Also, if you click Tools, you can change "All Results" to "Verbatim", and it will do what it says on the box. I tried leaving it on and got annoyed after five minutes.

Works for me. Link to a query?

I'm not arguing whether or not those services actually "make you the product", I'm just railing against this annoying rhetoric that "being free" in itself somehow makes a service exploitative.

How much do people pay to use Linux or DuckDuckGo? This statement is parroted so much and adds so little to every discussion.

What I heard is that we have data on plant growth on Earth (1G) and on the ISS (0G), but not at reduced gravity like on the Moon (.17G).

It's self-evident that a privacy-focused service is inevitably going to attract illegal/anathematic behavior. And it's possible that after enough stories like this and "terrorists coordinated on <random E2E encryption messaging app>", average people may decide that the tradeoffs inherent to privacy aren't worth it and start supporting things like Australia's encryption ban.

Technically, these aren't breaches or leaks, they're vulnerabilities.

Whether you believe data was exfiltrated is essentially a reflection of how much you trust or distrust Google.

Original paper here: http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/herrm...

The explanation in the linked article isn't fully convincing, IMO. The paper speculates about several more explanations at the end, and has some more data to support them, e.g. people seemed to be punishing low-contributors in an effort to make them contribute more.

If only the experimenters had conducted some interviews...

So you can't imagine a world in which our understanding of pi or e might impact or be useful to the real world?

More broadly, you can surely imagine how the study of transcendent numbers might inform results in other fields? I don't usually try to justify math by pointing at its applications, but for example, the transcendence of pi leads to a proof that squaring the circle is impossible. Even if things aren't constructable, they can still be valuable to think about.

You lost the bet, according to the last point of https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...

If you read that original WSJ article, Google allows companies to access your email if you give them access to your email. As in, if you install e.g. Kiwi [1] and agree to let them manage your inbox, then they have API keys that they could use to read your emails. Sometimes users just give their username/password to the 3rd party.

But, like I said when the original story came out, those headline writers really know what they're doing. "Google allows 3rd parties to read emails" directly implies your incorrect interpretation. Like, even on the original article, people who hadn't read it were expressing shock in the comment section that their personal emails were being read by Google engineers.

[1] https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/

How does that show AMP is required, and not just that almost every major media site has chosen to serve AMP pages? I legitimately can't find a large media site that doesn't use AMP, so your observation is essentially meaningless. You're looking for a news site that doesn't use AMP (already extremely rare), makes their pages as fast as AMP pages, and is blocked from appearing in the carousel.

It's despicable, isn't it? Like, there are climate change deniers that are overly-skeptical or gullible and buy into the mountains of misinformation. And then there are those like Steve Goddard who sit down every day and work their asses off creating said misinformation (check his twitter). Actively manipulating and cherrypicking data to deceive for personal gain (whether it be paychecks, political favor, whatever).

And they're winning, considering only half of Republicans believe climate change is even happening, let alone that it's manmade. This was probably the stupidest possible problem for the American political machine to make a wedge issue.

Ah, you're right, thanks for the insight.

Thank you--I think I'll start saying this in the future instead. #NotAllConstructivists, I suppose.

Breaking news: Third parties scan full transaction histories and balances from bank accounts of users who sign up for financial planning services (e.g. Mint).

The WSJ really knows how to write misleading, incendiary headlines about tech companies. Like, just read that comment section. Gotta stoke that techlash. Plenty of people have plenty of real reasons to hate Google, but hit pieces designed to drive the non-technical (and apparently some HN readers) to think "Oh no, my Gmails are being sold and read by people"--I guess it's too effective of a strategy to pass up. Just an utter shame.

There is a real problem here, that lots and lots of users that glaze over the "This app can manage (view, send, delete) all of your emails" permission setting without thinking about it. I mean, even I double checked my permissions to make sure I hadn't accidentally given my email access away to a random plugin. What do you do about normal users (like my parents) who will gladly click Next and Confirm on every single popup in front of them, without even attempting to read it?

I'll admit that calling all constructivists crackpots is unfair, as there are legitimate mathematicians studying homotopy type theory and whatnot that goes way over my head. What I refer to as crackpottery is people who argue that a random proof by contradiction is invalid or who reject things like Cantor's diagonalization argument with no justification besides their personal "intuition" or "philosophy" that math should be constructivist. And I think the latter group vastly outnumbers the former, at least on random internet forums. But I'll apologize if I offend any of those mathematicians with my flippant generalizations.

Re: Continuum hypothesis: the way I try to explain this is, take the statement S = "x^2 = -1 has no solutions". In Z, S is true. In C, S is false. What does it mean to say "S is true" without specifying the system? It depends on which underlying axioms you choose. There are extensions of ZFC where you can prove CH is true, and extensions where you can prove CH is false. In both extensions, the proofs are rigorous and valid, and there is plenty of valid mathematics to be done.

But ok, my point is, how can you say the CH is a true statement that can't be reduced to axioms? What does it mean to be "true" besides that something follows from other truths? The choice of axioms matters, sure, but everything that's true within a system follows from the axioms of that system.

My argument is about the rigor of theorems. ZFC may be incomplete, but every existing theorem that builds up the entirety of modern mathematics is (in theory, admittedly) built upon a rigorous chain of truth, traced back to those axioms and definitions.

Most mathematicians who don't study metamathematics or philosophy of math have no reason to ever think about formalism or computability. Godel's completeness theorem stipulates that there are self-contained consistent systems within the language wherein all of their nice proofs are true and universal, and where plenty of truth still needs to be discovered.

My argument is about the rigor of theorems. ZFC may be incomplete, but every existing theorem that builds up the entirety of modern mathematics is (in theory, admittedly) built upon a rigorous chain of truth, traced back to those axioms and definitions.

Most mathematicians who don't study metamathematics or philosophy of math have no reason to ever think about formalism or computability.

An aside for people who think Godel's incompleteness theorem somehow invalidates math: don't forget about the much lesser known Godel's completeness theorem, which states that if something is true in every model

Math is built on a far more rigorous logical foundation than "this program ran on a physical computer, which proves that the statement is valid". Every valid mathematical theorem is a consequence of, and can be traced back to, a set of definitions and well-defined logical axioms. The parts of computer science that are most rigorous are strict subsets of math, e.g. computability theory, logic programming, formal languages, etc.

Mathematicians know about constructivism, they just tend to rightfully reject statements like "proof by contradiction is not a good idea" as crackpottery. Mathematics will continue to be done, constructivists and finitists be damned.

That's certainly a good point--and tech companies are pumping money into teaching minorities to code (check the partners of YesWeCode, WomenWhoCode, BlackGirlsCode, AnitaB, etc.). But you don't have to exclusively treat problems at the root.

I think one of the oft-overlooked ideas behind hiring diversity initiatives and affirmative action policies in general is that creating more role models, leaders, and advocates for minorities does have an impact on making the field more welcome for young minorities.

Googler here. I've seen a few other demos, and there was even an internal dogfood, although I didnt use it myself. But I guess you could still choose not to take my word for it, since I'm just a random guy on the internet. Just wait til it launches, I guess.

Also, I distinctly remember on multiple occasions having to ask "is this <XX restaurant>?" when making reservations in the past. Does this really never happen to people that it feels more likely that Google is faking high-profile demos in the keynote that it can't actually deliver on? And wouldn't they want to pick demos that didn't include or redacted the name of the restaurant anyway?