spaceheeder

4 mesi fadiscuss

Correct, because putting additional data in GECOS is completely optional. This isn't about having your email client know your birthday, it's about phoning home to gate functionality. Verifiability, attestibility, all the loopholes that you think make this harmless are the croaks of a frog that is unjustifiably confident that the water in the pot won't continue getting hotter.

spaceheeder

7 anni fadiscuss

It's literally not possible for one economic system to simultaneously "take over" the entire planet, so if a socialist or communist revolution ever took place there would absolutely be a first single country or group of countries to "go socialist." The USSR and its allies were, at the time of their existence and the height of their influence, recognized as being fundamentally communist in nature by communist scholars. Whatever deviations from that ideal caused them to fail are no greater in magnitude (or relevance) than the deviations current nation-states have from capitalism that libertarians use to No-True-Scottsman actually-existing-capitalism.

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.

spaceheeder

7 anni fadiscuss

No meeting of the minds unless the author can be proven to have solicited the attention of specific suspects, so no conspiracy charge. That's not to say the author of this site wouldn't be made example of if their advice ever became a nuisance to the police; show them any given soul and they'll find you the crime.

spaceheeder

7 anni fadiscuss

I think (and it's possible I'm being too charitable in the face of bad science reporting) it's a reference to the number of independent variables that affect a read operation, and not a statement about new spacial physics.

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.

spaceheeder

7 anni fadiscuss

Reminds me of a general-purpose version of the secure enclave that Moxie Marlinspike blogged about when he implemented secure contact look-up in Signal. Very cool Google released this as open source. Of course, it does require you to be able to trust the security of the enclaves and (at least in the Signal implementation) requires you to make some different performance trade-offs in order to prevent information leakage.

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.

[0]: https://keystone-enclave.org/

spaceheeder

8 anni fadiscuss

They do need a warrant now, although they did not used to, and obviously don't need one if you hand an unlocked phone over upon request (same as if you go along with 'let me see your backpack').

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.

spaceheeder

8 anni fadiscuss

Hasura's homepage[0] links to their Github[1], so it's definitely open source. The "Enterprise" section of the website seems a bit lite and all the pricing information is on the "Support" tab, so the business model seems to be support-based. I only skimmed so I can't speak to what missing features there might be if you roll-your-own.

[0]: https://hasura.io/

[1]: https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine

spaceheeder

8 anni fadiscuss

Addressed in the article. You're supposed to declare to customs when you leave the country. He would have been leaving from Newark after a four-hour layover.

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.

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

No it does not, but it can imply it if you take it in the context of the whole article. One round of job posting led to three hires by the end of the article; should we assume that was a unique practice? If so, then the number "three" is an unusually arbitrary thing to mention in the quote you selected.

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?

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

Quoting you, quoting the article:

> It seemed that whenever we had our monthly engineering all-hands meeting, the new hire announcements featured three more young white guys

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

Arguably so. I'm sympathetic to her goal and that in particular stuck out to me as an over-correction. It doesn't undermine her point that simply changing the job listings can dramatically impact the makeup of your talent pool. That particular provision ended up being unnecessary, anyways; 75% of applicants for the newly posted position met the criteria for diversity hires.

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.

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

Cursory posts -- whether they're posted by trolls or cynics or anyone else -- that are quickly read and just as quickly upvoted, but don't receive a thoughtful reply, tend to persuade the uninitiated.

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

In the next paragraph the author specifies that they were trying to attract a wider cross-section of candidates. The hires wouldn't have been on-boarded if they weren't the best candidates who applied, but there's no way to know if they were the best candidates available when the signals sent by the job postings disincentivize applicants along axes that do correlate to race or gender but not to job performance. That's literally the entire point of the article, as far as I understand it.

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

Since the strategy here is to split the files up into equal-sized pieces, I wonder if the encryption key of each piece could be encrypted with a public key rather than a symmetric key, a-la the experimental (and now apparently defunct) One-way encrypted File System[0].

[0] OweFS discussion thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10911913

spaceheeder

9 anni fadiscuss

If the app still wanted to support puzzles that had notes scribbled in them then it would need some kind of OCR to tell the difference between a "starter" cell with known-good data and "puzzle" cells it needs to solve.

But treating the symbols in the starter cells as arbitrary is ingenious, imo!

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