fixermark

Sounds like the author's concerns could be addressed by allowing programming languages to sub in for foreign languages as long as the curriculum includes pair-programming.

Spoiler for those tired of question-begging headlines:

The author's answer is "no."

Unlikely. Because if we don't come up with an alternative strategy, there is insufficient incentive for the strong to refrain from using the things I just listed against the weaker groups---or the weaker groups to use them first, preemptively, on the assumption the strong cannot be trusted.

We go that road, and in a thousand years, we won't be doing much of anything because we'll be an extinct species.

Never in the history of mankind have we had the ability to go halfway around the world in one day, or hold a conversation with someone halfway around the world with mere seconds of latency.

Never in the history of mankind have we had weapons capable of annihilating a city with one shot.

Never in the history of mankind have we accessed enough energy and matter to change the balance of the global atmospheric gas concentrations.

This is a time in human history where "never in the history of mankind" things should be given serious consideration.

> The US should be prosecuting our own war criminals. Unfortunately, we haven't been doing a good job of it.

That's reason enough to want ICC intervention. You can't just denounce the ICC and then declare in the same post that alternatives aren't going to work. "Nobody holds the US accountable" isn't really an acceptable scenario.

I don't think that, as a global society, we have much psychological protection against weaponized Streisand Effect yet.

I'm a poll worker so I have some experience with the problem. I agree with you that a peripheral is one more thing that can break or be tampered with, and I wouldn't recommend a mouse. Here's what I've observed (at least in the iVotronic systems we use in Pennsylvania):

- since there's only one screen, and it's all touchscreen, users get consistently confused between pictures of buttons describing what the buttons do and the buttons themselves

- the touchscreen is itself a peripheral and prone to wearing out. When it does, the fact it's wearing out is difficult to observe during the election day; there's no cursor indicator, so a poll worker can't check calibration.

- users with fine-motor-coordination issues have to brace against the box to steady themselves to touch the tiny targets they want. There's nowhere to brace against a touchscreen that isn't also touch-sensitive input, and the screens don't accept multi-touch.

A row of buttons along each side of the screen, not unlike the solution used at many ATMs, would ameliorate all these problems. These boxes are already custom hardware jobs, so switching out touchscreens for a couple of button banks would be cheaper, equally usable for most voters, and more usable for mobility-impaired voters. It would improve all three observed problems.

Wishes and horses though; the machines we have are the ones we use.

The problem is that the vast majority of elections aren't counted incorrectly, and you're vastly increasing the cost on an under-funded system for no benefit in five-nines of the cases (and the remaining cases can have a recount triggered by one of the candidates, but not at no cost to them).

With too low a barrier to recount-by-hand, every election becomes contested because the cost to demand a recount is minimal and the losing candidate might win.

Only part I don't care for is the touchscreen.

People consistently overestimate the reliability of that solution, especially for older voters with mobility challenges. Pushbuttons or levers that demand macroscopic elbow/shoulder motion are easier for that demographic to use than sensitive screens requiring fine motor control.

And that's all to say nothing of what happens when the screens become miscalibrated and accept taps a few pixels off. I'm fairly confident most of the "It switched my vote" reports we hear are actually this category of "user-error" (which should really be counted as "machine malfunction").

Depending on how you turn your head and squint, Amazon is doing the right thing today [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19391696].

... though I wouldn't say that this one-off rises to the claim of "demonstrable track record." They have some explaining to do about the working conditions of their warehouses.

You can support the long-tail without facilitating people harming themselves or their children with demonstrable misinformation.

There's long tail and long tail. Amazon can still sell books about how to repair and maintain a 1936-era WLW Crosley Radio without also selling books informing the unfortunate gullible about how to "treat" their children's autism by DIY at-home electoconvulsion therapy.

(sardonic) True, but did you want those users if they aren't even willing to spend money?

I agree with your reasoning and I'm surprised that companies like Southwest seem to aim for monoculture.

... unless the risk and cost model they're looking at is that having multiple planes in the fleet increases the risk that spare parts are depleted for a particular model, ground crews aren't sufficiently cross-trained and errors on their part make flights less safe on average than in a monoculture, etc.

Boeing had this scandal and is still here. In that sense, they're demonstrably not mortal dangers.

It's normalization of risk writ large over corporate lifecycle timescales. "Should we report this? Well, the last time we got 200 people killed, nobody went to jail, so..."

Not really. Aerospace is a very tight-knit oligarchy where the devil you know is entirely too often (historically shown to be) leagues better than the devil you don't. A company ceasing to be a Boeing customer over an issue like this runs the risk that the next company they work with is just as bad in different ways, but now they're ways the company's ground technicians are wholly unfamiliar with.

Correct. Not to play psychic, but I'm assuming the original poster chose to share this as a friendly reminder that as a general rule, Boeing does not have a track record of placing human lives above their continued corporate profitability.

"If Boeing knew about a problem with the MCAS, they'd have told the FAA and corrected it" is not a hypothesis in-line with their past behavior, should anyone be holding that hypothesis in their minds.

I have no inside knowledge of this one, but broadly speaking, these sorts of failures can be caused by a change thought innocent at the time to the core software that is then widely deployed using automated systems. If the core's tests didn't catch a real issue in production (and for whatever reason, the rollout happens faster than the regular small-release verification process can catch the error), things can go sour in a way that's expensive to un-sour.

Amazon once pushed a seemingly-innocuous change to their internal DNS that caused all the routers between and within datacenters to drop their IP tables on the floor. They had to re-establish the entire network by hand---datacenter heads calling each other up and reading IP address ranges over the phone to be hand-entered into lookup tables. Cost a fortune in lost sales for the time the whole site was inaccessible.

Official rulings aren't in yet, so this is all wild speculation, but the dominant hypothesis appears to be that these new planes are equipped with MCAS ("Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System") software that is supposed to account for inherent aerodynamic instability in the design by making it much harder for the pilot to accidentally crash the plane.

Without going into too much detail: there are many tradeoffs in airframe design, but one of them is fuel efficiency vs. inherent stability. Some airframe designs eke out a bit more miles-per-gallon at the cost of having ranges of motion where if the pilot gets the plane into that state, the feedback loops on motion become positive and the plane is likely to tip over, stall out, spin, etc. Boeing's Max-8 design makes this tradeoff, and the MCAS system is supposed to help compensate for this design by forcing the pilot to nose the plane down (to improve airflow over the wings and generate more lift) if the plane is pitched too high.

Problem might be that MCAS can malfunction and think the plane is pitching up when it's not, and if the pilot can't figure out how to disable it, they get very confusing signals--- they're pulling back on the stick to get the plane to climb, but MCAS is pushing the stick forward to avoid an expected stall that a malfunctioning sensor is telling it will happen. End result: pilot and the computer fight each other while the very important business of "keeping the plane in the air" isn't done and the plane crashes.

The headline is bad; it appears Trump acted in response to a letter requesting the action from Boeing.

I think the safety issues with GDPR compliance are minimal (there's a weak argument to be made for inefficiency introduction and contributing to warning blindness, but it is a weak argument).

Larger arguments are in the space of tradeoffs. What could companies be doing with the engineering resources devoted to GDPR compliance (including compliance with the consumer-frustrating applications of the law, like the cookie walls)? Since the US doesn't have a GDPR compliance law (and companies in the US only comply when they want to do business in the EU), we'll probably see with time whether the inefficiency introduced is worth the tradeoffs in a highly-competitive world of software services.

It's worth noting that the United States considers a right to keep and bear arms as important as a right to free speech.

Internationally, reasonable disagreement on rights seen by some as fundamental is to be expected.

> I don't know how to explain it any other way: These things are fucking important.

I believe that thought is treated as an axiom by some and an under-tested hypothesis by others.

... and users appear to disagree on whether there's a wound to seal.

I wonder how often we'll repeat the error of treating user privacy as something the user cares deeply about (against all this observable evidence to the contrary) before we accept that the well-demonstrated-and-documented default is users do not care (and if we want the behavior of websites to change, step 1 is educating users as to why they should care and what the risk models are).

Anyone who didn't see this as the predictable end-result of requiring cookie awareness and consent was hopelessly naive about how large vs. small organizations respond to unfunded government mandates.

The money and time could have been a lot better spent on international awareness campaigns arming consumers with more privacy knowledge instead of expecting website owners to shoulder the informational burden (because those orgs in aggregate have no core incentive to treat user's privacy as an inherent good).

Can you clarify what model some on the Far Left are forwarding that fits their narrative and how it relates to Lysenkoism?

Ironically, using a neural network trained from this wide-sample dataset harvested from the public Internet, one could easily automate that process. And the result would be significantly less reliable without a wide sample of lighting conditions, genders, ethnicities, etc.

Not necessarily. One thing that a wide-net dataset can be extremely useful for is improving the neural net models to better recognize people outside the traditional academic dataset a lot of older-generation neural nets were trained on, which is to say: the sorts of people who have the time and need-awareness to put their faces in some university's dataset for training neural nets (which is to say: white guys ;) ).

You can use faces without names attached to improve the engine's modeling for recognizing human faces in general (and more importantly: improve the system's ability to distinguish human and animal faces).

(Your first comment is pretty interesting by itself, incidentally: both NBC News and your comment make an assumption that is not universially true about the technology. Face recognition is a much wider space than "recognize an individual by their face." Clustering of similar faces, emotion analysis, camera targeting, human presence / absence can all be done without name labels).

"If you can't obey this silly requirement to use extra bits how can we trust you to do all the other things that we need done correctly?" is a slippery slope argument. The response is "We allocate testing resources proportionally to the seriousness of the consequences of failure to adhere to a requirement, as any good engineering project does."

It's probably worth noting that the problem lasted three years and wasn't discovered by an exploit in the wild, but by followup spot-checking of Google certs as a result of spot-checking Dark Matter certs. I don't think seriousness of the issue is in dispute.