parenthephobia

Given the articles on the sidebar, I am inclined to require independent corroboration of these claims.

If Twitter is taking the time to censor tweets critical of the government, then they're doing a bad job. Certainly, if I was Twitter and wanted to silence Dowd without people noticing that I was doing it, I'd just shadowban him.

> Either eleven people decided to un-retweet Dowd within five minutes of each other, or Twitter decided to censor a tweet critical of the government by limiting it’s visibility.

Or, Twitter, being a very large and complex distributed system, sometimes has to show an approximation of things like re-tweet and follower counts.

Or, Twitter, wanting to make it harder for spammers to game their systems, deliberately shows users delayed or only kinda accurate stats.

Or a mixture of 1, 3, and 4.

Separating layout from styling and behaviour is something that many GUI toolkit developers have decided is beneficial.

Most "modern" mainstream native toolkits - e.g. GTK+ 3, Qt 5, WPF - encourage this separation into layout - GtkBuilder, QML, XAML - and style - CSS, Qt Style Sheets, XAML Styles.

So, this isn't a "web browser" problem. Or, this style of GUI isn't the problem with Electron. I find GTK and Qt apps to be plenty responsive enough, even when their GUIs are loaded from XML files.

> Wouldn't it be better to make native application, especially for code editors, where developers spend most of their time, where every noticeable lag and glitches are not appreciated.

I think it'd be better to improve Electron so that native applications don't have so much of an advantage. WebAssembly is a big part of that. Another useful part would be an alternative layout mode that eschews legacy HTML/CSS cruft, for more predictable and performant GUIs.

> In Go, this is one of the most difficult concepts of the language to wrap one's head around. Moreso, it's a concept that makes you bang your head against the wall at first; at least it did for me.

You imply you agree with the parent poster, but if it was "natural" to do error handling this way, surely it wouldn't be the language's most difficult concept?

Whanganui River, a river of great cultural significance to the people that live along it, was declared a legal person after 140 years of negotiation. This is not the same situation as a machine being declared a person because it responds correctly to legal documents.

Whilst there's no reason a machine couldn't be a legal person, in the sense that the sentence describes a possible future, that future is not near, and it will take more than a competent robolawyer to bring it about.

It can't be held legally responsible because it isn't a legal person. It wouldn't have assets, its owner would have assets.

I consider it doubtful that a court would rule that an AI was a person. Natural persons are persons because they are. Legal persons are persons because it benefits society for groups of persons to act together and not be held individually responsible for what they do - with the proviso that the corporate veil may be pierced if the persons protected by it act with malfeasance.

Allowing a person who can determine the behaviour of an AI in every situation to be protected from the consequences of the AI's behaviour would likely not benefit society.

You might say that an AI whose behaviour is so complex as to preclude a mere human being able to control it is a different matter, but even now if I own a machine that I cannot control and it injures somebody, I would still be held liable despite lacking intent to harm.

And even though a sufficiently sophisticated AI will react to deterrents, so does a dog, and dogs are not legal persons.

When the machine refuses to pay his lawyer, who does the lawyer name as the defendant?

Only legal persons can own property. A trust is not a legal person. The legal situation is that a trust's assets belong to the trustee, who must be a person, not the trust itself. A trustee could be a corporation, but it could not be a machine, since a machine is not a legal person.

The trustee is legally responsible for employing the trust's assets in accordance with the terms of the trust. The relevance of this is that the actions of a machine owned by a trust would be the legal responsibility of the trustee.

You can't really say that a machine truly owns something until the machine, and not its owners or operators, can be held legally responsible for what it does with it.

Even if your app is the only app accessing the database, the code in your app can be changed. When you change the validation criteria, do you reread every row from the database and revalidate it?

When validation criteria are changed on an SQL server, it revalidates all the rows - either immediately, or at the end of the transaction. With the DB doing the validation, the default is that all rows are valid.

Also, do you ever side-step your database abstraction layer to send SQL directly? If you ever insert/update/delete rows that way, perhaps for performance reasons, now you have an extra place in your app to make sure the relevant validations are kept up-to-date.

https://robots.thoughtbot.com/validation-database-constraint...

Relatedly, this article suggests that your app should only be validating user input - so there should be no app validation of fields not set by end users - whilst the database itself should validate what your app gives it.

> In essence you are moving responsibility for data integrity away from the DB and in to your app, something I think is quite dangerous.

This is only necessarily true of specific "instances" of NoSQL. MongoDB has supported server-side schema enforcement since Dec 2015, for example. Most likely other relatively mature NoSQL systems have similar features. There's certainly nothing about NoSQL which makes server-side schemas impossible.

The issue is social, not technical. I believe that people that want to use NoSQL dislike schemas - or believe that their use case is too hard to describe with a schema. Most NoSQL databases won't have schema validation set up even if the feature is available.

> The concept of being able to pay a debt to society and for that to settle the books, and to then allow those people to return to society and contribute value again... is alien to America.

Subjectively, thinking about films and TV involving prisoners, all the American ones I can think of (I'm certain there are exceptions, naturally) involve protagonists who are either out-right shown to be innocent or are very heavily implied to be.

OTOH, there are many British ones where the protagonist is definitely guilty, but nonetheless portrayed in a sympathetic or even positive light.

One problem with defining what is and isn't AI in the current age is that as something approaching "real" AI - rather than Hollywood AI - enters the public consciousness, it is seized upon by marketers wanting to attach the new buzzword to their products, effectively diluting the term in the process.

Things that a decade ago would have been described as performing regression analysis, and just last year doing machine learning, may be described this year as being powered by AI.

One time that sort of thing happened at scale was in the 19th century, when skilled textile workers destroyed the mechanized looms that were putting them out of work. Those people were the original Luddites.

The British government responded by making destroying mechanized looms a capital offense, and deploying the army against them.

> Of course, it’s just a regular car he drives into it for demonstration purposes.

Because a self-driving car wouldn't have any reason to drive into the circle, so it wouldn't get "caught".

The actual reason a regular car is used is because this is an "art installation" and not a serious critique of self-driving algorithms.

A more effective trap would be a "no entry" sign on a one-way street (or one side of a dual carriageway), positioned so the car can't see it before entering the street.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883428

If it helps, you could read it as "thugs that work for the TSA".

No doubt there are many fine upstanding people working for the TSA, who don't abuse their power and are angry at co-workers that do. Those people aren't what's wrong with the TSA.

The people who are a problem within the TSA are those who deny repeated requests for water or refuse to allow a person who is not under any kind of lawful detention to use their mobile phone, for, I claim, no purpose other than to assert their dominance.

The mobile phone is potentially defensible, but I challenge you to present a reasonable national security justification for denying the not-technically-a-detainee water. Until you do, I'm going to call those people thugs.

I think that water isn't such a rare commodity in New York that they couldn't just put a jug of water and a glass in the holding room and keep it topped up.

It seems obvious to me that refusing to give water is a calculated act designed to cause discomfort - not unlike unnecessarily giving multiple "obscene" pat downs [their words] - the closest TSA thugs can get to using the "enhanced interrogation" techniques that I think they wish they were allowed to use.

So it isn't specifically the lack of water that's the problem. The problem is the pattern of behaviour that the lack of water and the rest of the unnecessarily combative treatment are examples of. Too many TSA employees are on power trips.

> The Chess AI that turns into AGI isn't realistic - it's values are "be the best at chess" which it can do with existing computing power.

The AGI has whatever values we give it. Existing chess AIs don't seek to maximize their ability to play chess, they seek merely to win the particular game of chess they're playing.

But suppose we build a chess-playing AGI and tell it to "be the best at chess". It must anticipate that we might build a second, superior, chess-playing AGI and give it the same goal. One way to be the best at chess would be to prevent that second AGI being built. One way to prevent that second AGI being built would be to destroy humanity's capability to build AGIs. That probably counts as a loss for humanity.

Suppose the second AGI gets built despite the first's efforts. Now both AGIs have an incentive to destroy both the other, and the possibility of a third. At any particular time, one or both of the AGIs won't be the best at chess, so they'll also have an incentive to get better at chess by actually improving their chess-playing capability. This will involve converting the Earth into processing power for it to use. That probably counts as a loss for humanity.

> Where did the TSA go wrong here?

Perhaps it was the bit where they held him for 18 hours without charge, due process, food, or water.

Edit: Misread the article. He was held for 3½ hours. Still, refusing to give him a glass of water was not necessary, unless water-activated throat-bombs are now a thing.

In a more general sense, TSA went wrong the same way they usually go wrong. Kafka-esque "you're not detained but you can't leave" nonsense designed to side-step due process, comically ignorant staff who think Islam is the only religion brown people can have, whilst not even being effective at detecting contraband.

How can a goal be optimal? What does that even mean?

Your argument seems to imply that if an AGI tricks us into giving it the ability to destroy us, that's basically okay because its goals are "better" than human goals.

Speaking as a human, I don't consider goals that are compatible with the destruction of humanity to be "better" than goals which are aligned with human interests.

In technical terms temperature is conventionally understood to relate to the average kinetic energy of particles in a region.

If a region contains no particles it would be more accurate to say that it doesn't have a temperature than to say that its temperature is zero.

They're not like what are called symbols in any other language.

An ES6 symbol is a unique object with an optional name. They can be used as property names, like strings, which means that code can add new properties to objects without worrying about name collisions. Two symbols are distinct objects regardless of name: Symbol("foo") is never the same symbol as Symbol("foo").

Symbols as used in other languages (sometimes also called atoms) are effectively unique instances of strings. They chiefly serve the opposite purpose of ES6 symbols, which is being able to refer to the same object by name in different parts of code, even across executions of the program, or across distributed systems. i.e. :foo is always the same symbol as :foo.

They're (often) more efficient than simple strings because :foo and :foo will always reference the same object in a given instance of the program, so they can be compared by address rather than character-by-character.

Some languages with symbols have a function, often called gensym, for generating a symbol with a unique name, for when you need to support ES6's use case. e.g. Lisp and Prolog.

> This would only be compatible with object oriented languages.

Why do you think that?

It's compatible with any language with named record types, which is likely to be about any language which can parse JSON in the first place. It's particularly compatible with Erlang, which has named record types and (the equivalent of) symbols, and Erlang isn't generally considered object-oriented.

Usually, paying somebody to do something that materially benefits you isn't called donating. As the article suggests, organizations should think of voluntary open source funding as insurance.

Of course, some companies do just donate money for open source, many more donate in kind - e.g. with hosting services - and still others develop internally and donate source code.

Naturally they do this because continued maintenance of the software supports their business objectives, and not out of an egalitarian sense of charity.

You could pull them to the right of the main text: there's plenty of room. :)

Talk of robbing and forcing implies a level of coercion that simply isn't there.

For the end user, AMP links are clearly marked, and non-AMP news results are readily available.

For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content.

The reason you haven't heard people complaining about that is likely that people don't complain about the lack of oil rig gender balance on the sorts of web sites you visit. A moment's googling, however, finds people who work in the oil industry who are upset at the imbalance there.

Having said that, nobody is claiming that women oil rig workers are better qualified to produce gasoline for women, whilst that is the claim the article makes about women developers. So your question isn't really apropos.

Do you think it's possible that most poor people don't do that, though? Who do you think the $6/mo deals are made for?

What are these expensive ongoing payments?

That has no bearing on the truth of the claim.

It's disingenuous (and insulting) to suggest that the reason poor people can't afford expensive health insurance is that they all have brand new iPhones, or some other unnecessary luxury.

It is a valid rebuttal of that argument that poor people don't all spend their money on brand new iPhones, or the like. One cannot rebut that rebuttal by repeating the original claim.