macksd

Well what I'm concerned about is that I think he was told "we have too many people, so we had to make the difficult decision to part with one of our great employees", and I effectively told him, "dude there's no way that would actually be the reason".

I appreciate the reassurance, though! Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I think the parent comment is right that it's better to just not say anything when you don't know the whole situation.

Studies repeatedly show that almost all currency is contaminated with traces of drugs.

Yep - a guy I shared an office with walked in and told me he had been wondering if he was going to get laid off. I comforted him and told him that I couldn't see why there would be lay-offs - we had tons of work to do.

He picked up everything off his desk and walked out. Turned out he had just been fired, but he had been told it was a lay off to soften the blow. I actually thought he should be fired but the problem had been going on so long and it was the kind of place that just never fired people, so I didn't even consider that possibility.

11 years ago, I think - I still wish I hadn't said anything. But I also wish he had been given candid feedback by his manager much earlier.

This is a really cool idea. I tried a few technical queries I did on DDG today and didn't get amazing results - hence the warning in the About page about this engine giving you things you didn't know you were looking for, rather than specific facts. But the examples others have posted sound promising and refreshing. I would love to read about the algorithms behind this and how modern web design gets detected in order to punish it...

I don't think Crichton intended to imply a cause. But I guess it's just a bias toward believing the media and forgetting the isolated experience. I suppose there's an opposite effect at play regarding the media's treatment of COVID and recent politics, etc.

Nothing. That's why they don't have to keep it on their books.

This was the biggest lesson I learned during my first pre-IPO quiet period. Seemed like everything I read that was inferring things from the S-1 or forecasting the future were immediately wrong or turned out to be wrong in the end. I suspect there's a lot of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect going on in the economy.

It sounds to me like he's claiming credit for ideas behind weather modeling used as much as 20 years earlier, and fractal curves that were being clearly talked about in the previous decade.

Oh that's interesting. I'm very curious if you're able to share the actual wording of the clause?

"indemnify" does not actually mean "we will sue you" so I feel you need to add some more context to what you're saying - it sounds like you've been caught in a bad situation, and while I'm very sympathetic I suspect the real lesson to share with others isn't what indemnify means.

When I hear "indemnify" in a Silicon Valley-esque context, it usually means to insure a client against lawsuits from third parties. For example, I've worked for a company the indemnified our clients against lawsuits claiming that our open source project infringed on any trademarks or patents or other intellectual property issues. Meaning that if someone went after our clients for such an issue with our software, we would deal with the financial consequences.

But it does mean that AI models trained on data might end up just perpetuating racial correlations even when you don't think it's aware of race. It's another example of why interpretability is important: the model might end up depending on correlations you don't mean it to.

Unless you're the US government, then ethnicity refers to whether or not you're Hispanic, and race encompasses all other distinctions.

I'm usually in the "regulation is bad" camp but one thing I find myself saying more and more is that you can't have an ideal market if people are allowed to lie about and hide their prices. It's one of the reasons health care isn't a very good market in the US, and it's one of the reasons people don't like this practice.

Essentially companies are getting away with lying about their prices until after a purchase has been made. In an ideal free market, people can't lie just lie about their prices and get away with it because "everyone does it". So enforcing honesty on this particular point at least would be good of you like free markets.

I've known many homeschooling families very well, and it's a spectrum. There are families where the answer is "they don't", and those children seem to invariable end up with major life skills missing from their repertoire.

I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.

In New York, the taxis with "medallions" are required to take you to places within the metro area. I'm not sure at what point that requirement sets in, whether it's hailing, or once you're in the cab, etc. but it's well-known that you can report them for refusing to take you somewhere.

Black Mirror has a number of similar premises and yeah - it's among the more "twisted" scenes I've considered.

Thank you! I appear to be an hour out of sync and my OS is on Mountain Time

I thought we weren't able to chart their orbits and thus know their orderings until the last few centuries. I'm sure we recognized them as being brighter than stars, visible as more than points of light, with non-sidereal motion, and we gave them names. But I don't think we knew Saturn was 6th "prehistorically".

How much existing advertising technology works seems to be questionable. Lie detectors aren't admissable in court for good reason, but they are still considered useful to help lead investigators in the right direction, especially against people that aren't trained or trying to defeat them.

Consent in a medical context honestly means nothing to me anymore. Do you know how many times I've been asked to sign an electronic pad without seeing what I'm signing, asked for the form beforehand, and be told they can't give it to me until I sign it? It's absurd. They just collect an image of your signature and apply it to whatever they want. They will eventually cave if you make a big enough fuss, but unless you're Richard Stallman, no one is going to keep doing that every time.

edit: My hack in this case is now to legibly write "Can't see form" as my signature. No one has called me on it yet but I'm dying for the next disputed bill.

There may not have to be, as far as we know. From the Wikipedia page[1]:

Many theoretical physicists believe these fundamental forces to be related and to become unified into a single force at very high energies on a minuscule scale, the Planck scale, but particle accelerators cannot produce the enormous energies required to experimentally probe this. Devising a common theoretical framework that would explain the relation between the forces in a single theory is perhaps the greatest goal of today's theoretical physicists. The weak and electromagnetic forces have already been unified with the electroweak theory of Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg for which they received the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. Some physicists seek to unite the electroweak and strong fields within what is called a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). An even bigger challenge is to find a way to quantize the gravitational field, resulting in a theory of quantum gravity (QG) which would unite gravity in a common theoretical framework with the other three forces. Some theories, notably string theory, seek both QG and GUT within one framework, unifying all four fundamental interactions along with mass generation within a theory of everything (ToE).

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

A lot of context in his own post here, and the reply from Dr. Hinton is linked:

https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/critique-honda-prize-hinto...

I stopped reading at [backpropagation] "wasn't created by "lots of different people" but by exactly one person who published first [BP1] and therefore should get the credit". Okay, so he was the first. Brilliant insight. Hugely valuable. He should get credit for that, and I'm very sympathetic if that hasn't happened (I don't follow other research enough to make any strong statement about if he has or hasn't received appropriate recognition). But that was 50 years ago and many equally insightful and impactful developments have gotten us to the point where backpropagation is being done in a practical way. "Exactly one person" is ridiculous.

Yeah - sounds like probably around 40 customers wanting stuff like that. No one's saying otherwise.

The author links to a much more detailed list of mistakes in comparison functions. It's worth reading: https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/0509/

There is evidence that the vaccine significantly (and not just "statistical significance" - I mean really significantly) reduces the risk of severe infection. Many hospitals (including the 3 closest to me, in a state with 70% vaccination) are completely overrun by patients that are predominantly unvaccinated.

>> Unmediated transactions of a certain scale don't require any government oversight

What is this scale? As far as I know you only get away with this because no one knows or cares to enforce the law in that case. But police have been known to shut down kids lemonade stands for not having all the right permits, so I don't believe this is actually true in the law.

I would be happy if this was the case: I used to hire people all the time to do odd jobs for me, but I feel like it's too costly and too legally risky to actually be worth it for me, so I just don't do it anymore. And the people I used to hire aren't exactly relieved.

If one believes in the theory of free markets, this moves the labor market closer to the ideal market by forcing more transparency. I don't like government overreach because it usually makes the market less efficient, but in this case I believe it's doing the opposite. Or at least, it WOULD be doing the opposite if it was universal, but it's not, so yeah some Prisoner's Dilemma-like game theory comes into play.

Well yes, public wikis are one thing. But before you were talking about protecting internal secrets.

Nit: I wouldn't say "originating". That's where this specific exploit is coming from "most recently". But it would seem to not be script kiddies and they're listing like 8 countries. I would assume the bad actors could be anywhere, proxying traffic through any number of other places.

Any time a SaaS gets compromised there's a similar comment here about how obviously this is going to happen when you give someone else your data, and it should have just all been within your own firewall, unexposed directly to the Internet.

I mean right this minute there's a privacy-focused SaaS on the front page for not being as private as everyone thinks. There's also a network hardware vendor on the front page for including back doors. A philosophy like "SaaS vendors know they can't allow security breaches" is really glossing over the need for layers of security and knowing that it's ultimately all on the trustworthiness of specifically who is involved.