jdp23

A classic HN moment: 'dang tells me I'm right, and I'm downvoted to -3 :)

> the alternative is impossible

Interesting phrasing.

Perhaps grounding your moderation policies around concepts you know are undefined and inseparable isn't the best basis for moderating the site.

As for how people see your actions: labeling it as "projecting" might make you feel better, but probably gets in the way of you understanding what they're saying.

In today's environment, you can't simultaneously make the site an welcoming place for people who are anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-trans (etc.) - and for people who are Muslim, immigrant, women, trans and nonbinary people (etc) or allies to any of these groups. What people are telling you is that they see YC - and you personally - as siding with the bigots.

Well, Paul actually did change the ranking algorithm to penalize anything Snowden or NSA-related. He also adjusted the ranking to penalize discussions of TSA policies which directly affect entrepreneurs who have to travel in and to the US. And the discussions at the time were much the same as now - people (including me) saying "hey wait a second these are very much on topic" and others saying "but it makes us uncomfortable to discuss the political aspects of technology, let's pretend it that an arbitrarily-enforced rule of 'no politics' is apolitical"

"This exploit is impressive because it manages to bypass modern protections such as ASLR and NX without being able to programmatically interact with the target software."

Evan and FFTF have been actively working against NSA spying under the Obama administration.

The EFF and EPIC, which have been around longer, has worked against NSA spying under the Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I organizations; the ACLU, all of the above and more.

What about you?

This might be the best diversity-related comment I've ever seen on Hacker News. Of course it was downvoted.

Flagged. This post is clearly on-topic, so to me this looks like a classic example of HN suppressing discussion of racism and sexism in the Silicon Valley startup community. I'm curious how it looks to the moderators.

Kind of the inverse of the Sokal affair, where a physicist got a gibberish paper accepted by a cultural studies journal. [1] Although this seems like a pay-to-present conference, so really just a scam. Still, I liked his quote: "I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

REAL-ID is effectively a national ID card. Organizations like EFF and ACLU have been opposed to REAL-ID on privacy and civil liberties grounds since it was passed in 2005. Libertarian groups like Cato also highlight that it's a huge unfunded mandate on the states. Overall, resistance to REAL-ID has been one of the most effective multipartisan civil liberties efforts - a lot to learn from it.

Here's EFF's page: https://www.eff.org/issues/real-id

And Cato's most recent commentary, by Jim Harper: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/real-id-decision...

Next you're probably going to deny that you're bullying Facebook!!!!!! :)

Totally agree with 'genericpseudo and 'joesmo. YC's created the environment that's so tolerant of racism and sexism. If they don't want people who care about bigotry to abandon the site, it's up to them to change the dynamic.

Jennifer Daskal has some interesting perspectives on this on Just Security.

https://www.justsecurity.org/33577/dangerous-implications-mi...

Here's the research paper, Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing by Patrice Godefroid, Michael Levin, and David Molnar:

"Our approach records an actual run of the program under test on a well-formed input, symbolically evaluates the recorded trace, and gathers constraints on inputs capturing how the program uses these. The collected constraints are then negated one by one and solved with a constraint solver, producing new inputs that exercise different control paths in the program. This process is repeated with the help of a code-coverage maximizing heuristic designed to find defects as fast as possible."

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

It's really strange how far most group moderation systems have regressed from Slashdot's features. The algorithms are more powerful now but users have a lot less control. It's like they used to say about ALGOL-60: it was a significant improvement on its successors.

Totally agree. One of G+'s advantages over FB when they launched was that it was better on a laptop screen. Not only haven't they built on that, they've regressed.

That's not what "condone" means. And, with trigger warnings he explicitly said they don't support them - so it's reasonable to assume that if he meant "support' here that's what he would have said.

> "She is a nurse" is also not a bias. It's a prior ...

Assuming that lower-status professions are female and higher-status professions are male ("he is a doctor") when translating ungendered words is indeed a bias.

> the system will be right 93% of the time.

And "this person is a doctor, that person is a nurse" will be right 100% of the time.

I'm not convinced by your skepticism about correcting prejudiced bias. Debiasing certainly gives the AI a understanding of the world than the original (biased) language dataset, but it's not necessarily less complete - or less accurate. After all, any one corpus is incomplete, and has biases based on the items that were chosen for it - which are likely to reflect the biases of the past, and of the person choosing the corpus. It may not be a "complete" or "accurate" reflection of today's world - let alone the future. So it's not at all clear to me that efforts to undo the bias will necessarily make it less "accurate".

Very interesting results. I really like the approach of paralleling the classic bias experiments. And I think your recommendations in the last paragraph of the "Awareness is better than blindness" section are excellent - although I'd go farther and suggest that the long-term interdisciplinary research program should have a highly diverse team, and include experts on diversity.

I thought the section on "Challenges" could have been stronger. You talk about the bias in "the basic representation of knowledge" used in these systems today -- but it's not like there isn't aren't other possible representations of knowledge. How much effort has gone into exploring knowledge representation (and approaches to derive semantics) that are designed to highlight and reduce biases look like?

Oh look, here's Nicholas Weaver on Lawfare making a very similar point about vulnerability disclosures:

"How is NSA changing the equities process now that "someone stealing the NSA's tools" has to be explicitly included in the threat model? Previously, equities calculations generally relied on the probability that someone else might independently discover and exploit a vulnerability. How does this calculation change when the NSA's own tools might be stolen, without detection? Is there a policy on what to do when the NSA knows that their tools are compromised?"

https://lawfareblog.com/nick-asks-nsa-shadow-brokers-and-lea...

Sigh. Try reading the thread again, starting with 'tptacek's comment that ""The NSA is impenetrable" is not and was not the prevailing narrative, to say the least."

I don't really know how to respond to this. Paraphrasing this conversation so far:

tptacek: "The NSA is impenetrable" is not and was not the prevailing narrative, to say the least."

me: I disagree; it's part of the narrative that pro-surveillance people use to support things like "collect it all" and key escrow

tptacek: I don't understand what our beliefs about key escrow have to do with the narrative

me: explains again what you're missing about how this relates to the pro-key-escrow (and more generally pro-mass-surveillance) narrative

tptacek: everybody agrees key escrow is stupid, and our opinions about key escrow have nothing to do with things that you weren't discussing like where the leak came from

me: hmm ...

It's almost like you're trying not to hear what I'm saying.

OK, one more try.

If all the experts you talk to are against key escrow, why do pro-mass-surveillance folks keep proposing it? They see the tradeoffs differently. And why's that? One reason is that the stories they tell about why it's a net positive have the underlying assumption that there's not a significant risk of they keys being compromised. Conversely and when opponents of key escrow tell stories about the potential downsides if the keys are compromised, proponents downplay this as a risk.

The ''reality'' is that proponents of key escrow solution (and the "collect it all") approach have consistently made the assumption that intelligence agencies are able to protect the keys and data. The impenetrability is so deeply a part of their narrative that it's not even discussed. The cost/benefit analyses are very different if you assume that adversaries are likely to get access to any information our government collects.

Really? It seems to me like it's key to pro-mass-surveillance people's support for the "collect it all" approach - and for key escrow schemes in particular. And it ties into the VEP discussions as well.

No, this is where he's talking about how "The phenomenon of adding more noise than signal is now practically characteristic of misguided policy proposals in this area".

Specifically, he's using the EFF's statement "The problem is that if a vulnerability has been discovered, it is likely that other actors will also find out about it" as an example -- describing it as a "fundamental misstatement" because "the vulnerabilities used by the US government are almost never discovered or used by anyone else".

And then just ten days after his article, we've just seen a bunch of vulnerabilities not only discovered by somebody else but actually released on the web.

Dave's article's certainly worth reading, and he makes some good points. He's certainly closer to the intelligence agency and vulnerability market side of things than EFF is; but that's not the only aspect of the issue.

And as others have pointed out, closeness isn't always an advantage. Dave criticized the EFF post by saying

"This is a fundamental misstatement of how 0days work in the real world—in reality, the vulnerabilities used by the US government are almost never discovered or used by anyone else—and these falsehoods further confuse the conversation about 0day policy solutions."

Except of course that as the Shadow Brokers leak showed, quite a few of these vulnerabilities _have_ been discovered (and for all we know, used). The risk of something like this happens is something that EFF et al. always bring up, and the intelligence agencies and their supporters always dismiss it ... where's the "falsehood"?

> I actually think that, for technology companies, more people will choose providers that are completely non-political.

There's no way for a tech company to be "completely non-political." So I actually think that people will continue to prefer providers whose politics they see as compatible with theirs. And it seems to me that tech companies like Google and Microsoft and Apple (in their public pushback against government surveillance) and AirBnB (bringing in Eric Holder to do a non-discrimination policy) see things similarly.

Specifically when it comes to harassment and hate speech, while I certainly agree with his points of making it easier for people to protect themselves, in the end there's no way to avoid taking a political stance. Twitter (like Facebook and most other large social networks) has a policy that "you may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease". Obviously that's an inherently political position. But conversely, not having a policy like that -- saying that attacking, threatening, and promoting violence against people based on these characteristics is okay and it's up to them to use the tools to insulate themselves from it -- is just as political. There really isn't a neutral position.

[Of course this is the same guy who doesn't see that a decision to let Curtis Yarvin speak at his conference is just as political as a decision not to. To be clear, I'm not saying it was a right or wrong decision; I'm just saying it was political either way.]

Another fine example!

In what ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying?

How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?

Thanks for illustrating my point so nicely :)

For one thing, rather than engaging with what I actually said, you inaccurately framed it as an accusation of misogyny.

What other ways do you see your comment as a good example of what I was saying?

How do you see the other comments in the thread as examples?

It certainly can be a challenge for all-male teams to find female candidates. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/HOWTO_recruit_and_retain_... has some excellent suggestions. How many of these best practices have you been employing?