> Reading the title alone gives the impression that this is a change to appease the LGBT community or after receiving some similar pressure.
Because that's the real impetus behind the gender hypersensitivy in society lately.
> Using gender neutral pronoun when writing about people whose gender you do not know is simply being polite.
Sure. It's alsom polite to use genders when you do know it. But the point is that if 90% of one profession is male and 90% of another profession is female, then it makes complete sense for it to autocomplete to "him" and "her". For the few exceptions, you could edit "him" to "her" and vice versa.
> I wouldn't want Google to show me autocomplete suggestions for "do you want to meet him" when I'm writing an email to my mom or my girlfriend.
If 90% of your emails were to your father or brother and 10% were to your mohter/girlfriend, wouldn't you want it to autocomplete to "him"? And the 10% of the time, just edit "him" to "her" when you are emailing your mother or gf?
Besides, is your mother or gf going to go crazy if you accidently used the wrong pronoun? Wouldn't they know it was a mistake?
> I expect it is quite more nuanced than his description of dead/not dead and summing up the material on both sides.
It is a bit more nuanced. There are heuristics ( breadth and depth searches ) which assigns positional values and also opening and end game database searches. Using remaining material values is the most basic form of chess engine. If that's all stockfish did, most chess players would beat stockfish.
I built a very simple chess engine for my AI class. I started off with the basic "material values". Then added basic heuristics. Then added database lookups.
Now with neural networks and machine learning, chess engines are even more sophisticated.
> There's a way for small companies to avoid this - take your user's data security at least slightly seriously
No kidding. My point wasn't about that. My point is that the bureaucrats chose not to apply the law - "Looks like the fine was almost a bit too low in this case..."
AKA leaving the fines/punishment to the whims of bureaucrats.
If even the bureaucrats are refusing to enforce the law correctly, it usually implies that there is something wrong with the law.
> Anyone bashing the GDPR for being too hostile towards startups and smaller businesses should read this. Looks like the fine was almost a bit too low in this case...
You make it seem like that's supposed to be assuring? Essentially, small companies and startups are left to the whims of bunch of bureaucrats.
The fact that they have to make the fine "almost a bit too low" just shows you what a terrible thing GDPR is.
I'm always amazed that people will rant about "big brother" one moment and then appeal to an authority figure the next. You think Trump should decide what "truth" is? Is that your argument?
> These news channels had some commonly shared values, operated within those values.
What values? Is the iraq war that value? The NYTimes was created by a banker. The WashingtonPost was created by a racist pro-south democrat. What is this "common value" you are speaking of?
> So yes, I strongly believe that social media is hurting our democracies massively.
In what way? 10 years ago, it was the right wing bigots whining about social media because it got obama elected. Now it's the left wing bigots whining.
What is he going to be tried for? Doing actual journalistic work rather than being a "pretend journalist" that we have working in all our "news" companies?
"If you aren't paying for it, you are the product".
Also, VPN isn't a magic cure for the disease of privacy violation. You are just choosing to trust the people running the VPN service over the people running your ISP. Should you trust a VPN company more than your ISP? I really can't say, but VPN isn't a magic fix.
> Something needs to change, the same way Reddit’s ranking algorithm was changed based on Randall Munroe’s public suggestion.
That was a long time ago. Reddit ranking is even worse than HN's now and is manipulated by political and news organizations now with the help of reddit employees. Reddit is a highly biased propaganda site. It's not a platform anyone should be using. In many ways, reddit is worse than facebook.
I stopped using reddit once I could predict what I was going to see on the frontpage day after day. Sadly, I'm starting to be able to predict what's going to be on HN's frontpage now.
> p.s. Please don't get offended that I said Japan was a tick too small for me. It doesn't have to fit me, I don't live there. I was just making an observation. :)
Why would anyone be offended? If you are 6'3", no place is accommodating for you. No train, bus, airplane, car or homes are built for you since you are not close to the average anywhere. This goes for whether you are too short or too tall or too fat or too skinny. Everything nowadays is built for the average. So you wouldn't feel comfortable anywhere.
> E.g. many of the naive arguments for razing Confederate history can be applied to American history, Native American history, etc. Without nuance, the conversation becomes "we are good and our history is good vs they are bad and their history is bad".
Don't forget the american revolution. It had nothing to do with liberty or freedom and everything to do with greed and the desire for native territory.
History is propaganda and everyone has their version of history.
Growing up in the northeast, we are taught propaganda about how we fought to end slavery. Lincoln is portrayed as the great emancipator. But closer examination of the civil war shows that's a blatant lie. We know the north didn't fight to end slavery. I don't know what they teach down south but I'm sure they have their own form of propaganda.
The civil war, like all wars, was about wealth. "States' rights", "slavery", "freedom", etc are just propaganda to hide the ugly truth.
> Does anyone know how effective incognito mode is at preventing data and privacy abuses like this?
Incognito mode really doesn't do much. It only prevents storing browsing data locally on your computer. Your ISP, your search engine and the websites you visit can store your info on their servers.
> but I imagine there may some clever ways of tracking even across incognito sessions (or between incognito and regular).
Browser fingerprints, IP address, etc are used to track you. Your ISP doesn't even need to be clever since you are dependent on them for your internet connection. There are ways to "hide" yourself from websites, search engines, etc but it's nary impossible to completely "hide" from your ISP.
> I wonder if there are similar courses on CS algorithms for people who didn't study CS in college.
This might be a bit more challenging and less hand holding than the nand2tetris course but if you are up for it, why not go with the best? Sedgewick Algorithm book has been one of the standard algorithm books in universities for a long time.
> I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.
It's possible but I think corporate interests, rather than our energy independence, will be the driving force of US foreign policy as it had been in the past. As long as banks, oil companies, etc stand to make a lot of money in the middle east, our foreign policy won't change much.
Agreed. I like 12 monkeys better as a movie ( just my style of movie ) but brazil is a far more realistic dyspotian reality. Dystopia by the mundane and the bureaucratic rather than a mad genocidal scientist.
You are free to give up your unfair privilege and move to the less privileged parts of the world.
> It is kind of sad that we have this way of carving up the world into arbitrary pieces and calling us "us" and them "the enemy".
Is it? Is it also sad that we carve up "homes" and "money" for ourselves? Would you give us your address and let any individual just walk into your home?
Instead of crying over your privilege and virtue signaling on social media, why not do something about it? You only have your unfair privilege because you choose to keep it. Why?
Something is always tearing america apart. We are always on the brink. The past few months, it's facebook tearing us apart. Last year, it was putin and the russians tearing america apart. The year before that, it was trump/hillary.
> Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?
I hope so. The internet was better when news was an afterthought.
> Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality,
News content is low quality content. It's toxic information pollution.
I wish google/youtube, facebook, reddit, etc would simply ban news company links. It would go a long way to increase quality content and lower toxicity.
> Give China another 20 years and they will surely have overtaken the USA in world leadership.
I guess anything is possible but I highly doubt it. Do you really think culturally, linguistically, militarily, politically and even economically china is going to lead the world? Every major international instution in the world from the UN to the ICJ to the WTO is in western nations.
> Consider their new Silk Road initiative. 3rd world/developing countries and America's numerous enemies alike are lining up to ally themselves with China.
Sure. But they are also working to contain china as well. You really don't understand politics in a local or a global setting if you think china is going to be leading in asia, let alone the world.
If you think the likes of india, japan, korea, vietnam or even iran will let china lead, then you don't understand geopolitics. And lets not forget russia with their thousands of nukes along china's border.
The day that the US doesn't control the world is the day regional competition and violence begins as 2nd rate powers vie with each other for influence within their regions. Nobody, especially china, is going to replace the US as the leader of the world. Once we are done, it'll be back to regional power plays.
Because that's the real impetus behind the gender hypersensitivy in society lately.
> Using gender neutral pronoun when writing about people whose gender you do not know is simply being polite.
Sure. It's alsom polite to use genders when you do know it. But the point is that if 90% of one profession is male and 90% of another profession is female, then it makes complete sense for it to autocomplete to "him" and "her". For the few exceptions, you could edit "him" to "her" and vice versa.
> I wouldn't want Google to show me autocomplete suggestions for "do you want to meet him" when I'm writing an email to my mom or my girlfriend.
If 90% of your emails were to your father or brother and 10% were to your mohter/girlfriend, wouldn't you want it to autocomplete to "him"? And the 10% of the time, just edit "him" to "her" when you are emailing your mother or gf?
Besides, is your mother or gf going to go crazy if you accidently used the wrong pronoun? Wouldn't they know it was a mistake?