160 karma · joined January 28, 2014
If communism 2.0 is a better system and wouldn't fail for the same reasons that the USSR did, then talk about those differences. When talking about communism 1.0 (and the many, many socialists/communists living today who basically have not deviated from the mindsets of the revolutionaries of the past), drop the special pleading and take the L.
To clarify what I mean when I talk about what I think they mean (yes that sentence is confusing), consider the following example:
The pits on a DVD are subject to one-dimensional analysis because every position targeted by the laser for a read operation can be in one of 2 states (i.e. 2^1)
The pits on a dual-layer DVD are subject to two-dimensional analysis because every position targeted by the laser for a read operation can be in one of four states (i.e. 2^2, because there are two layers and each layer can be in one of 2 states independently of the other)
If I understand the article right, this technology uses 3 physical layers, and adjusts the size and orientation of each air pocket in the glass. So on each individual layer, a dot can be categorized in any one of 8 states (2^3) and there are 3 layers (2^3) of dots. That should give 2^6 possible states per read operation. So why do they say 5 instead of 6? There could be any number of reasons, such as certain adjustments to size and orientation at a higher layer affecting the ability to read from a lower layer, or error correction built into the decoding algorithm.
But yeah, that's my lukewarm take on their silly buzzwords.
Tangent: On a whim I Googled 'secure enclave risc-v' and, sure enough, there's an extension in development called "Keystone."[0] RISC-V really has such a promising future.
It's unlikely this ruling will be upheld since providing biometrics to unlock a phone is difficult to construe as 'testimony' since it's performing an action, like complying with a court order to unlock your front door in response to a warrant should you not desire for the police to kick said door in.
The biggest gray area currently is whether typing in a password is 'something you do' or 'something you know', and you can find different precedent to support both conclusions in US jurisprudence for the time being. Hopefully SCOTUS will come down on the side of 'something you know' if/when such a case ever makes it before them.
[0]: https://hasura.io/
Also in the article: CBP had 90 days to respond after Kazazi decided to take the matter to federal court, but over a month after their deadline passed are still holding the money, and are refusing to comment.
But that's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. LennyCrop would likely say that your attention to perfect parity in n=1 comparisons counts as moving the goal posts, and I'm inclined to agree. We don't have complete data for this company's hiring practices and it would be weird if we did; no matter what argument you want to make out of this article, some assembly is required.
I hope that people who read this chain ask themselves what they actually care about more: the source of bias, or the size of its impact. I've made my opinion known, but I'm willing to believe that reasonable people can disagree on that topic. It's a debate worth having. Challenging me on my Bayesian assumptions for reasons that are more parsimonious than anything else, on the other hand, is just a distraction.
But I know that minds that have already been made up are slow to change and are more likely to do so in private than in the heat of a debate, so I'll take this parting chance to plant one last bug in your brain -- a paraphrase of one that I used in a very similar conversation on HN just shy of a year ago:
If x% of the white male population is working in the field of software engineering, but only x% * y% of the non-white-male population is, and getting people interested in software engineering isn't a zero-sum game, then making y as close to 100 as possible can only be a good thing. Making a concerted effort to recruit diversely, it is hoped, will have accelerating returns as intentional involvement of diverse contributors will lead to more and more organic involvement of diverse contributors. Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get started with coding are wrong or that those reasons shouldn't affect the industry for some other reason, the fact is that social patterns will self-reinforce if not corrected for and will ultimately have negative impacts on everyone by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
Again: If this wasn't the right way to begin to solve this problem, then what is?
> It seemed that whenever we had our monthly engineering all-hands meeting, the new hire announcements featured three more young white guys
Your point seems to be that explicit bias against groups that are historically over-represented in certain professional fields is of equal or greater moral concern than implicit bias against groups that are historically under-represented. I think that both can be bad, and that reasonable people can judge the magnitude of the harm on both a systematic as well as a case-by-case basis: Prior to the author of this article conducting her live experiment, 0% of non-white non-males were hired for an entry-level position; whereas in the course of her experiment, 25% of qualified applicants were white males, which doesn't sound far away enough from their makeup of the US population to trigger any alarm bells in my brain.
Even if you think that bias-by-writ is always worse than bias-by-complacency, it's still fair for a devil's advocate to put it to you: If this is not the way to solve the latter problem, then what is? If your answer is some version of "leave well enough alone," then I will be unmoved by your heightened rhetoric.
[0] OweFS discussion thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10911913
But treating the symbols in the starter cells as arbitrary is ingenious, imo!
> ...whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.
> Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
Do you know how you appreciate your opinions being evaluated on their merits rather than through a political lens? Social movements -- which is something that the free software movement explicitly considers itself to be -- cannot hold anyone to that expectation and expect to make inroads with them. Just as countless entrepreneurs have commented in various threads on HN observing that making your product is never as hard as marketing it, so too are the challenges of convincing people to change...well, damn near anything, inclusive of how they think about the ethical relationship between people who make software and people who use it.
This new high priority project is, in the most cynical and utilitarian interpretation, very good marketing. More likely, it was proposed and approved by people who see an inherent value in it that you might not. If you still don't understand that value, there probably aren't a whole lot of other ways to explain it than have already been offered to you in this thread.
The goal of getting more hands on deck by going after low hanging fruit (ie people who are capable of contributing to open source but currently aren't doing so because they feel uncomfortable or excluded) seems to be a worthier goal than "fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner."
If you disagree, you are welcome to flesh out your proposal and submit it to the FSF as a candidate high priority project.
Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.
If x% of the white male population is developing on open source, but only x% * y% of the non-white-male population is, and getting people interested in open source isn't a zero-sum game, then making y as close to 100 as possible can only be a good thing. Making a concerted effort to recruit diversely, it is hoped, will have accelerating returns as intentional involvement of diverse contributors will lead to more and more organic involvement of diverse contributors.
Maintaining, and abiding by, a DMCA policy is the price of doing business online in the US and WIPO treaty countries.
While I am not qualified to put together a comprehensive report, I've been following this subject with some interest for a while, first as a skeptic, and now as someone who believes that not all of these people are completely full of hot air.
Even with my change of heart, I'd still bet against anything in your list other than crispr having any quantifiable impact on longevity in the next decade, and even then the first applications will be specific to particular age-related diseases.
Something resembling a more full "maintenance approach" to preventing aging and age-related disease may be within reach within 20 years, but I'd bet against that, too. Sticking my finger in the air and guessing, I'd say that such a complete overhaul of medicine is at least 50 years away. Although I should stipulate my guess is only that pessimistic because I'm biased towards thinking that such advances won't be made in my own lifetime because, hey, it rarely hurts to be a pessimist.
The Bitcoin wiki article on this is incomplete, but informative[0].
[0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance#Are_bitcoins_taxab...
> I can assure you the things in those emails between the press and the Clinton campaign are shameful on a journalistic ethics front.
And programmers get taught to write documentation and not make things work with hacks or produce spaghetti code. The way the sausage gets made not comporting with professional standards is neither unheard of nor is it isolated to journalism.
They're being shameful, yes. But they're doing it because it's a living, not because they have an agenda.
> if you want to buy into the philosophy behind the press and why it's given so much leeway in American law, then their fundamental role is to serve as the fourth estate
Off-topic, but I don't. I view all media -- explicitly biased and ostensibly not alike -- as fully protected under the umbrella of free speech, for which I am an irrationally ardent proponent.
We can make objective claims about our present media not doing a very good job at informing society without getting into that, though. Our principal disagreement seems to be about why that's happening. You seem to want to ascribe agency to it. I think that's a mistake, in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just being a cynic, but I don't think so.
> the bulk of the press has decided to burn their credibility in promoting Clinton
I'm not a fan of Clinton by any stretch of the imagination. I see how Clinton scandals get significantly less airtime than Trump scandals, but I have a hard time believing that isn't being driven by ratings. Trump has been graded on a heck of a curve at times, in ways that can't be considered "objective."
And it was seven coin tosses ;-)
The rhetoric I was replying to implied that the politicians and the journalists are on the same team because they have the same goals. That's not the case. I think keeping that in mind is plenty useful.