I'm not totally sure how a blockchain works so please correct me if im wrong - for a hard fork to happen in Ethereum or Bitcoin, the majority of users have to "agree" by switching to thew new blockchain right?
In that case, the Ethereum hard fork doesn't sound very controversial - even if the devs decided to hard fork for bad reasons later on, no one would be forced to adopt it. They would be "voting with their feet" by sticking to the old chain.
That's the case if there are dozens of different client implementations each maintained by a separate independent team. If there is just one client and no people qualified enough to fork it and maintain we end up with a centralization. The only team can make whatever changes they wish.
Ethereum currently has eight implementations, each in a different language, some independent of the Foundation. At least the Go (official), C++, Rust, Python, Java, and Javascript clients are full implementations. The Rust version is especially nice; it's the fastest, and produced by an independent company run by one of Ethereum's early developers, who no longer works for the Foundation. (The Haskell implementation has fallen behind, and the Ruby one is pretty new, I'm not sure of its status.)
It's relatively easy to make an independent client because there's an actual spec and a test suite.
yeah. adding to this, a great proof that uses new techniques can also generate whole new areas of math to explore or solve other seemingly unrelated problems.
They mentioned using hadoop for file storage - perhaps they are just using HDFS and not MapReduce.
Otherwise, Spark is relatively new, so they might have some older infra/jobs in Hadoop.
Storm and Spark streaming work a little differently (real-time streaming vs "micro-batching) and apparently have different use cases, but I'm not totally sure what the practical difference are here either..
Its both. Now news is mostly consumed online, and everyone is competing for eyeballs. I think technology exacerbates the problem - earlier a newspaper could have a bunch of eyeball grabbing headlines, AND real, informative, boring content in the later pages (or a mix). Now only the eyeball grabbing content gets shared and seen.
It is driven by the same competition, but with article-level tracking rather than newspaper sales, the problem got worse. I don't know how to fix it either, but I agree with the author that its a huge problem. News and entertainment are basically the same thing now.
Thats a great process. If you don't mind me asking, how do you get rid of the phone screen, even assuming you have some github and contacts? Just ask the recruiter?
the trick is not to go through the recruiter. Instead ask Committer on their OSS project or your internal contact to vouch for you to the hiring manager.
IMO, no one wants to acknowledge simple facts for fear of retribution/being labelled racist, instead we keep dancing around this issue forever getting more and more ridiculous.
Also, trust me i can talk about this because i'm not white...
fact - people prefer people like them. Not even consciously, this is basic shit hardwired into us. I don't blame white men for being subconsciously biased to hiring white men, literally any other group would do the same. sure we can try to fight that bias, but its not at all evil or wrong to have that bias, only natural.
fact - taking an "agnostic" approach the way science does, of course the algorithms will reflect "biases". if men are statistically more likely to be programmers, or black people are more likely to commit crimes (STATISTICALLY), then the algorithm will pick that up. They are biases sure, but also statistical realities.
Now we can debate whether we should actively engineer algorithms to fight these "biases" on a case-by-case basis (for example, focusing more on women might be a win if you can find talent no one else can), but there's no reason to start pointing fingers at the "evil white guys" on top who planned this from the very beginning... it's just more stereotyping.
hypothesis - she wrote this crap to gain publicity.
> if men are statistically more likely to be programmers, or black people are more likely to commit crimes (STATISTICALLY),
I think you meant black people are more likely to be convicted of crime. The problems with crime 'statistics' is that on the surface, it all seems coldly scientific, yet they are generated and derived via very biased, very human, very unscientific processes - there is a lot of bad data. The ACLU did research that showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the possession of weed between white and black people, yet more black people are convicted[1] for possession.
Here's a mind experiment: after watching this YouTube video[2], how skewed do you think the statistics for white female criminals (bike thieves) vs black criminals would be?
Yeah, i don't really know enough to argue that. You're probably right about the convictions.
I just think we need to be able to TALK about these issues, so that when a real expert looks at those statistics they can get to the truth of the matter, and say that truth whether it is or isn't politically correct.
The law says racism is illegal in certain situations, and society says racism is undesirable in most situations.
The law and society aren't claiming that racism is statistically non-optimal -- in fact, there are lots of things more optimal than status quo that many people would find totally horrifying.
If are widely replacing human systems with AI systems, I think this is a legitimate concern.
I really depart from the article in two areas:
1. The AI will inherit the biases of its creators. This is possible but far from guaranteed. And relatedly, inclusivity of the development team guarantees nothing regarding the goals of the system.
2. Criticising the people who are warning of the problem and trying to do something about it. This is related to the AI control problem. There is no switch that can be flipped that will prevent AI systems from Bad Ideas. It's not that we just aren't flipping it to preserve our chokehold on captialism. Implementing morality in AI systems is a genuinely monumental problem. And the people who are doing something about it are behaving very altruistically.
Agreed! If we did nothing to correct inequalities in society, the biggest and strongest would rule over all - so yes we must have our own values and stick to them.
And with AI, we must make these values explicit, which is very difficult to do - i agree this is a very important problem to solve, and the people doing it should absolutely be rewarded.
Honestly, reading the article again after your summary i found it very reasonable :p I think the headline just ticked me off.
No one is stopping other people from getting in on the debate, they absolutely should (and I'm sure there are roadblocks in their way, and people who really are racist). It just feels wrong to implicitly all the "bad white people" for that. Blame those who cause the problem. Otherwise we are back to stereotyping.
"The law...". Whose law? "Society says...". Which society? "Implementing morality". Whose morality?
Also, why wouldn't you want things to be optimal, depending what what they're optimizing for? I thought optimizing was the exact point of machine learning and AI.
By morality I was thinking along the lines of socially accepted behaviour in the contemporary United States, and mainstream Christian morality which isn't the official state religion, but in my opinion the basics of it are taken as a given in politics, government, media, and academia.
Overall, I'm referring to mainstream anglo law, society, and morality.
> why wouldn't you want things to be optimal, depending what what they're optimizing for?
The reason is that when you express your goals, you don't fully understand what the consequences will be. There may be consequences that are totally repugnant to you. The child-story level version of this is where you get a genie which gives you your wishes in a horrible way: i.e. I wish to be the richest man in the world, and so the genie kills everyone else. I want a nice big house like my parents, and so the genie kills your parents and you inherit. Et cetera.
Telling the computer to do what you want is notoriously difficult for simple imperative programming, to the point where many people think a large fraction of the population just isn't up to it intellectually, and if you need proof of this you can search for fizz-buzz interview stories. Setting up goals or incentives for a system that behaves in a way the you can barely understand is even more difficult.
If you change the label of the datapoints, say black to apple and white to oranges, you'll change racism to fruitism. It's unlikely that a racist system would do that.
I do agree with the article that feeding biased data will result in a biased system and we need to be aware of that. But calling it racist and sexist is sensationalism.
This also doesn't mention the horrible inflexibility of the H-1B once you have it. Once on an H-1B, you literally have ZERO days of unemployment between jobs. If you are fired, laid-off, or leave your job for any reason at all (say health reasons), you technically are out of status and can be deported at any minute. There is an unofficial grace period of about 30 days, which is really not enough to do any kind of a decent job search (and its unofficial, so technically you could be deported at any minute). So the only realistic avenue for H-1Bs is to find a job before leaving the current one - works for most people, but again, if you are laid-off or need to take time off for any reason, its simply not an option. Its a horrible system.
Not to mention, You have to go out of the country to get your visa stamped every 3 yrs. Its nerve-racking to say the least. The guy in front of me at the line in american consulate in Ottawa was begging "visa officer" saying 'I have a house. I need to go back and sell all of it and move my kids', not quite sure what exactly transpired but I got a feeling this was not an uncommon occurrence. I had friends you were stuck in Mexico for 3 months for some kind of 'verification' and consequently lost their jobs.
What decent person would put up with this humiliation uless you are from a really horrid country that you don't want to go back to.
I did not mention it, in my other comment, but that was another key aspect which put me off. When I was single I could have gone along with it reluctantly, as worst case I could come back home and sleep on a couch of a friend if needed, but now that I have a family dependent on me, no way.
Also your spouse cannot work as a dependent. They need to have their own H1-B or any of the other visas. Consider the probability of both spouses getting past the H1B lottery.
This was the exact reason why I applied for a Canadian PR and moved to Canada. The PR process on "express entry" takes roughly 6 to 8 months. The only issue is that the job market and pay in Canada is not as hot (compared to the US market). This is a small price to pay for peace of mind and having the ability to start your own company without any kind of immigration hassle.
Yes. This is one of the reasons I was considering going back to Europe (I have a European Passport). Yes, the pay is less, but I do not have to worry about all the immigration craziness in the US and do not have to be worried about being laid off and having to leave everything behind. Well worth that pay cut.
How were you able to have "express entry"? (my parents did it and it took my family about 5 years to receive the PR - we did it from Abu Dhabi)
The software job market is Canada is kinda terrible (I am a recent graduate looking for a job - not to mention the salaries in Canada can't compete with those in US)
The express entry program was introduced only last year by the Canadian Govt. They promised to make a decision within 6 months. Previous to that, it did take years of waiting.
this is cool, ive been burned by trying to move a virtualenv before and discovering everything broke. is it possible to merge this into virtualenv? i think it would be much easier to use that way.
In that case, the Ethereum hard fork doesn't sound very controversial - even if the devs decided to hard fork for bad reasons later on, no one would be forced to adopt it. They would be "voting with their feet" by sticking to the old chain.