dlg

“Polynomial spirals, or Spiro curves, the subject of my PhD thesis, fail to achieve this goal.”

Wasn’t your PhD thesis on attack-resistant trust metrics? At least I remember reading it.

Forbes recalculated the wealth of the richest billionaires to add back in what they gave to charity.

I have had the misfortune of having to get D&B numbers (for various Apple things). I believe is the source for lead lists where you start to get dozens to text and phone spam calls per day. Do not pay hundreds of dollars for this if you can at all avoid it.

No. They are by far the safest drivers in Santa Monica. Ideally we get to a point where human drivers are banned.

I was just dropping my kids off at their elementary school in Santa Monica, but not at Grant Elementary where this happened.

While it's third-hand, word on the local parent chat is that the parent dropped their kid off on the opposite side of the street from Grant. Even though there was a crossing guard, the kid ran behind a car an ran right out in to the street.

If those rumors are correct, I'll say the kid's/family's fault. That said, I think autonomous vehicles should probably go extra-slowly near schools, especially during pickup and dropoff.

Wasn't that Scott McNealy? (Though, if I recall your bio from previous HN posts, you'd know far better than me.)

There was a version of streptococcus mutans developed that didn’t produce tons of lactic acid and would have pretty much ended tooth decay back in 2000. Iirc, it was built to outcompete the regular bacteria too. As far as I can tell there’s been no progress in commercializing this-—I assume because of the cost and complexity of FDA approval.

E.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12369203/

Looking, you’re right. Those are regulated at the state level. But it does look like pretty much every state has a law.

In the US, I believe that would not be legal under GINA (the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act of 2008) https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-...

(Edit: per tssva—LTD & life are generally state laws, GINA is health ins and employment)

The change you describe from N+1 to N+2 wasn’t made to defeat your hack. It was made because we got lots of complaints that people thought the filters were buggy/broken when they saw people who didn’t match their filters and because they were seeing irrelevant people, lowering the chance of a match. The set of people who already liked you were being served out of a different service than regular recommendations and it was, iirc, just a Redis list until fixed. (More generally, we never purposely made the recommendation algo worse to increase boosts or because people would only stay if they didn’t meet someone during my era, even if everyone thought that’s we did. I haven’t been involved in several years however.) In any case, sorry!

The YIMBY's are asking the individual property owners be allowed to decide what to do with their own properties. Not letting government dictate what people do doesn't seem like "tyranny" or "expropriation" to me.

It changed its name from the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1990. (Over time they’ve also eliminated some of the sections most correlated with IQ.)

There’s a good history of the SAT and where it succeeded and failed in its goal of making college admissions more fair, The Big Test by Nicholas Lehmann.

Is the creator thinking of doing another printing? If not can someone recommend a service that will print a high quality card deck given the PDF?

Salganik MJ, Dodds S, Watts DJ Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1121066

I am not a lawyer, but I've had to argue about copyright with several.

In the United States, there are two bits of case law that are widely cited and relevant: In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp (9th), found that making thumbnails of images for use in a search engine was sufficiently "transformative" that it was ok. Another case, Perfect 10 (9th), found that thumbnails for image search and cached pages were also transformative.

OTOH, cases like Infinity Broad. Corp. v. Kirkwood found that that retransmission of radio broadcast over telephone lines is not transformative.

If I understand correctly, there are four parts to the US courts' test for transformativness within fair use (1) character of use (2) creative nature of the work (3) amount or substantiality of copying (4) market harm.

I'd think that training a neural network on artwork--including copyrighted stock photos--is almost certainly transformative. However, as you show, a neural network might be overtrained on a specific image and reproduce it too perfectly--that image probably wouldn't fall under fair use.

There are also questions of if they violated the CFAA or some agreement crawling the images (but Hiq v Linkedin makes it seem like it's very possible to do legally) and whether they reproduced Getty's logo in a way that violates trademarks (are they trying to use it in trade in a way there could be confusion though?)

Or if not, their work for 43 of the 100 largest global polluters [0] or illegal corruption in Africa? [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/business/mckinsey-climate...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/world/africa/mckinsey-sou...

Good point but I wonder which way the causality runs? I could make the argument either way:

1) Parent expectations higher -> college becomes more expensive

2) People would love colleges to do everything but they'd always say "we're a nonprofit spending all our $ on teaching/research so can't" and parents accept that -> colleges can get much larger amounts of money -> colleges compete on these non-circular programs -> students/parents raise their expectations.

I'm sure both are true, but I think something had to change. I would have loved all those services in the 90s but it wasn't considered practical.

In 1999, Brown University which had only used 863- added the 867- exchange. A suite of students got 5309 and kept getting calls asking for “Jenny” at all hours. They stopped assigning that number.

Ultimately a Rhode Island plumbing co, Gem Plumbing, bought it from Brown and used it in their ads.

I generally agree with you. However, as a pedantic note, Metrolopis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller and Teller was in 1953 and Hastings was 1970.

This seems to be very similar to the early 2000s demos at Brown University/Cyberkinetics[1]. In 2008 they demonstrated it in humans[2] after lots of work getting FDA approval. The core difference here (from my non-expert reading) seem to be electrodes are along a thread rather than on a chip.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo for a video of the pong demo in humans.

The motor cortex seems to have a clear, learnable signal though it is rather noisy sampling <1000 locations.

Mary Lou Jepsen at Open Water has ideas about how to do this non-invasively [3].

[1] https://www.braingate.org/publications/

[2] https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2006-07/06-...

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...

BiasSync | Backend Engineer (Python) | Los Angeles (open to remote in similar tz) | Full-time

BiasSync is a mission-driven startup working to help companies and employees understand, manage, and mitigate unconscious bias’s impact in the workplace. We’ve started with a focus on race & gender bias but are building tools looking at other biases as well.

We get to work with academic researchers, top diversity & inclusion experts and others to create something that really changes workplaces and is unlike traditional boring D&I training.

Our backend is built with Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, Terraform, and a ton of AWS services—especially Lambda. But we're really looking for passionate folks who can learn, so if you use a different stack, still reach out. Our front-end is build in React/TS and our data science side is PANDAS-centric. We’re looking for a backend engineer to join and help build out

Being interested in diversity & inclusion, changing workplace cultures, psychology/psychometrics, and stats are all plusses.

https://biassync.applytojob.com/apply/99CEE53EeR/Back-End-En...

Or dan.hn at biassync.com

This looks very nice.

Eventful, founded by Brian Dear (a regular HN poster) had this as a feature before it was acquired if I recall correctly. I think the feature had a decent level of success, so it’d be worth talking to him/getting him to post about learnings here.

I'm an LP in TS. I'm not an expert (and certainly can't speak for them), but my sense is that it's about the LP base. I think that Tiny Seed raised all of its capital from individual entrepreneurs (or people otherwise active in the independent software world). Unlike big institutional LPs (or professional fund managers hired by family foundations), we don't care about markups and stuff like that on judging interim IRR. We get the model and are much more willing to wait for long-term results.

I am not a lawyer, but like many Internet entrepreneurs, I’ve had to learn a bit about copyright. There are two cases in the 9th Circuit that speak to this: Perfect 10 vs Amazon and Kelly vs Arriba Soft.

As I understand it, the cases established a multi-part test for whether a particular use of images is infringing. One of the key parts is whether the use is “transformational”—I would argue that most GAN output would fall under this fair use exception for transformational use and thus would be ok (at least here in Calif).

In the aforementioned cases, thumbnailing a la Google images was sufficiently transformational so synthesizing whole new images certainly should be. The tests do, however, depend on the use so I wouldn’t say that re-synthesizing similar-but-different images with a NN is always and automatically fair use.

There's a new dental device company working on re-shaping the dental arch called Envisium (https://www.envisium.com/) out of Harvard. Great early results.

(Full-disclosure: I'm an angel investor in them and not a dentist, so only reporting what I've heard from the dentists.)

There's a (relatively new) book, Radical Markets[0] by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl that looks at how mechanisms for this might actually work in practice.

Core to their argument is that most things we care about in society have increasing returns to scale so that under our current system we systematically under-allocate and mis-allocate to public goods.

While I disagree with a lot of it in practice, I highly recommend reading it if you're thinking the way the parent comment of this comment does.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-...

I don't know enough to have an opinion on either side of this article, but is it journalistically ok to make your primary source for one side James Clapper without noting his history of lying to Congress and the American people under oath?

(Though, as-expected, he won't be prosecuted https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180313/15105739419/clock...)

Would anyone here be interested in a lawsuit and/or campaign to get this changed?

The Overnight app is optimized for this use-case, among other things. (Disclaimer: I’m an investor, but because I think it fills a real need)

I'm friends with Peter. I don't think he'd mind me saying:

He didn't set out to build the empire that he did--he really wanted independence for one person (and it just turned out that what we built was so good that lots of people wanted it). He doesn't want to be in the limelight. So, as the article mentioned, he's chosen to focus on philanthropy and art and just watches our business from afar. He's a smart, great guy.