HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ddiq

34 karma · joined October 15, 2019

submissionscomments
ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
I see what you're saying, but it's just a bit naive. It's not that easy to create a new provider to help political dissidents. A number of web services have been started to do so, and forced to shut down by being cut off by upstream providers. "Just make your own ..." at some point isn't viable, because other companies at every level are making sure you don't succeed.
ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
It's ok to go after the free speech of political dissidents if you slander them with generic insults first?
ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
Chase Bank shuts down prominent conservatives https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/chase-bank-conservati...

AirBnB seeks out and blocks people going to the American Renaissance conference https://gizmodo.com/airbnb-doesnt-want-extremists-on-its-pla...

Credit cards cancel payments to "hate" groups https://nypost.com/2017/08/16/credit-cards-are-clamping-down...

These are all political censorship against people or groups that aren't doing anything illegal, and the standards are applied differently based on ideology rather than any objective standard.

ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
Doesn't seem to matter, since that comment is getting downvoted as well.

I guess technologists don't want to see the future they're creating, and would rather just come up with tactics that barely defend against the surveillance we have now.

ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
If you think this story is limited to, or even about, political correctness, you are mistaken. It could be your insurance rates going up for jaywalking, even with no cars around. It could be your credit score dropping if you have too many drinks at a bar. It's about your personal activities all being tracked, measured, and in the end, controlled by corporations.
ddiq··on The Fantasy of Opting Out
It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people just started using to refer to someone thrifty.

After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra" had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to bypass H8Watch™ detection.

Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1 day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos will be posted to your Facebook feed.

You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I can't risk a public conversation this week."

ddiq··on By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence
An oft-overlooked aspect of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's everyday people that report others to the firemen in the book, very similar to how content is censored these days.

Goodreads will list any book for the time being, even ones banned from Amazon. One example is The Culture of Critique - the link to Amazon goes to a broken page, but links to buy it from other vendors remain.

Link to the book - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/182136.The_Culture_of_Cr...

ddiq··on The empty seat on a crowded Japanese train
Out of curiosity, would you be ok with a non-citizen Japanese person lecturing you on why Americans are bad because they don't have the exact same outlook and attitude as Japanese people?

Because that's what the author of this article is doing.

ddiq··on The empty seat on a crowded Japanese train
There's always an explanation where the answer is racism, even if it isn't the correct explanation.

Wider than the average Japanese person and crowding the seat(s) next to you? They must not sit next to him because he's black.

ddiq··on The empty seat on a crowded Japanese train
Of course, I commented on his picture and it would be pretty hard to notice his width and not his race. I don't see why this is pertinent, though, he's not Japanese and I was commenting on the fact that he's not Japanese, not on what race he was.
ddiq··on By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence
Likewise Amazon removing books from its site is much more effective than any book burning.
ddiq··on New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics
Do you not think studying gravity lead to predictive value before we reached a point of being able to compute orbital dynamics of a spacecraft?
ddiq··on We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
Urban sprawl and planned cities are a pox on humanity. Look at this thread and tell me that these layouts don't look eminently more livable than the modern grid layout city.

https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1186129107408392194

ddiq··on On Recent Controversial Events
Those are flawed studies, as different names is as much a class distinction as a racial one. Even if it were true, however, a white candidate will on average be better than a black candidate with the same resume, because the white candidate had to pass higher standards to get into the same university.
ddiq··on On Recent Controversial Events
You can read more about the baseline known as the 80% rule here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact#The_80%_rule

Since the onus is on the employer to prove that they had a legitimate reason for this disparate impact, often these cases end in settlement.

ddiq··on On Recent Controversial Events
No CEO would say this, even if they thought it, because it could be used in evidence in a diversity lawsuit under the 80% rule of diverse impact, because the CEO was intentionally using neutral rules of hiring that ended in "discriminatory" results.
ddiq··on New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics
That doesn't really follow. We don't need to have a complete map genotype to phenotype in order to have an understanding of the weight of genetic component of certain traits. Just because we don't know exactly which genes cause a certain hair color doesn't mean we can't guess which parents are more likely to have children with that hair color. The same goes for behavior that can be measured and predicted. As long as that prediction is more accurate than a random guess, the prediction has value.
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
Can you look at the data and come to a different conclusion rather than attack the paper ad hominem?
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
Can you find something wrong with the research itself in any of the papers that I linked?
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
This is just not true. The percentage of blacks in a population is a higher correlate for crime than income, poverty, or any other economic factors. This has been replicated many times.

edit: Here are some studies. I would have put them in a reply but I'm being rate limited. Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.

http://www.unz.com/article/race-and-crime-in-america/

http://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10940-011-9134-...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611...

http://www.jstor.org/stable/591624?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12552-016-9164-y

ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
Do you want your system to be "nice" or do you want it do be effective?
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
Machine learning will find these patterns all on their own. They're not worried about being ostracized for seeing the world for how it is.
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
It's a perfectly reasonable stance in a war. Better to have 10,000 people interned than to risk a few more Takeo Yoshikawas running around.
ddiq··on Building China's Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
Racial profiling is just a slur for pattern recognition. If it turns out that 95% of Chinese scholars in the US are more loyal to China than to America, and that when given a chance, will illegally send information back to China, what are you supposed to do?

It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chinese are highly ethnocentric.

ddiq··on Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
You'd think that someone with an IQ of 139 would be able to see why the example of his failure to capitalize on his own intelligence doesn't discount the value of IQ as a measurement of general intelligence.