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If it isn’t clear to everyone, this is a gesture meant to calm public populace fears about “AI”.

First of all, there is no definition of “AI”. It’s a running joke in the community that once an “AI” approach gets good enough to be commoditized it is no longer called “AI” and becomes simply “ML” (machine learning) that we teach to college students.

With that in mind, military drones have used “AI” since at least during the Obama administration. This is a nonstory.

I’ve been to summits like the one talked about that are a bunch of people in government, nonprofit, or for profit executive roles that get together to discuss things they don’t understand and make a resolution that looks good. They are all for show. Nothing useful, meaningful, or impactful comes from these things.

Yes, yes, we should be responsible with the use of AI. Everyone agrees without asking what that really means.

I am once again baffled by folks in the tech industry being totally unaware of what came before them.

You are, in a way, asking what consciousness is and how one could recognize it. This has been a philosophical topic for millennia; this is a reasonable place to start reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

It is a very interesting and deep topic. But let’s not pretend that recent advances in AI are the thing that brought it up for the first time.

I feel like fluff articles like this are written by people who have never actually been in the situation they write about.

One of the first things one learns when working professionally is to say “I’ll look into that and get back to you” or some such instead of “I don’t know” and just standing there.

It never ceases to baffle me how people in the tech industry are completely unaware of everything that preceded them. The meandering exploration described in this article could have been short circuited by an understanding of things are standard topics in organizational psychology. There’s a wiki article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_style

I echo others here in the sense that “mastering programming” is not well defined. It’s interesting to try to define what that might be though. For example, I know people who would qualify as “master Java programmers” if there ever was one, but that doesn’t make them “master programmers”.

I think that in my life I have met one person that I would call a master programmer. He was intimately familiar with C, C++, Java, Erlang, Perl, APL, Ruby, Python, Prolog, Haskell, Scala, and more. You could probably find a person that is more of an expert in any one of those, sure, but that’s beside the point. The reason this fellow qualifies as a master of programming, for me, is that he seems to have complete knowledge of where every language came from, how that influenced its semantics, what the pros and cons of each language’s design are, and could code more or less idiomatically in any one of all those languages and explain why it was idiomatic.

Based on that, I’d say that if there is such a thing as a “master programmer”, it’s probably someone so well versed in computational theory and language design that picking up a new language is just a fun afternoon.

I am sure others will have different viewpoints. This is my two cents.

I'll respectfully disagree.

The fact that the data is from 1915 - 1920 does not invalidate it unless you want to suggest that human nature in 1915-1920 is different than it is now - which would seem a strange point to defend. And the sample sizes are quite decent.

I know that the HM userbase had a tendency to dismiss studies that are incorrectly conducted, but I don't think that this is one of those cases.

I don't see what you could be referring to with the "race" comment besides "Jewish".

Judaism is not a race. Why do you say that it's better to leave race out of it when nobody has mentioned race?

It's clearly not a random sample of the population.

Too Many American Men are Obsessed with Work and Wealth

Alternatively, not enough women value work and wealth. The bias here is clear is day.

It sounds like you haven't actually understood that argument. "The guy in the room" has always been a minor detail. Furthermore, machine translation has existed since before convolutional neural nets, so your whole point falls under the "not even wrong" category.

Philosophers interested in mind and cognition tend to take a great deal of interest in developments in CS and neuroscience.

And they tend to mangle it by inserting rigorous scientific results into a nonrigorous framework that often ends up being a game of word association played using misunderstandings of basic science.

Signs and Signifiers

Semiology is perhaps among the farthest removed from information theory, and computer science in general.

Logic is taught exactly in mathematics and computer science programs as a mandatory topic. Philosophy programs place far less emphasis, often providing it only as an elective.

Ah, a well-informed opinion then.

None of your comments so far have contributed anything to this discussion. Please try to keep to the spirit of HN when commenting.

I didn't mean to up vote, sorry; less than 25% of women are CEOs, and there's no indication of overlap between these two groups.

What is the target user base?

Hence "everyday applications."

The implication of the headline is that the reader should think, "Congratulations on make it to space despite being Muslim."

In other words, shit headline. And the headline's focus on being Muslim completely ignores all of the very impressive things this woman has achieved.

Shame on this "journalist", and shame on whoever submitted the post. (I wouldn't be at all surprised if the two were the same person.)

Your suggestion is nonsensical to me. The two books have significantly, if not entirely, different airs, purposes, domains, styles, and audiences.

As a person that has interviewed for and gotten jobs at multiple Fortune 500s (whose tech departments varied from abysmal to impressive effective) and as a person that has been a part of the interviewing/hiring process several times, I appreciate the attempted formalization of interview metrics and see more than a little value in the metrics described in the article.

To me, though, there is one "metric" that trumps all the rest, and that is personality fit with existing employees. If you have two brilliant software engineers that just absolutely cannot stand each other, nothing will get done. The best interview experience I've had, personally, has been to be placed into a technical interview - "start programming application X that does Y" - with two existing employees looking over my shoulders asking me why I'm doing what I'm doing and why not something else.

The technical justification for my chosen solution to the technical interview question didn't matter much once it was clear I covered a base level of technical ability, but it was incredibly valuable that I and the employees looking over my shoulder didn't want to get into a fistfight after an hour - it meant that we could amicably disagree, support our reasonings for our arguments, and then not have sticks up our asses when the other person's proposed solution ended up being the right one, and then gracefully defer and say "thank you for the conversation and debate." That meld is immensely important.

That said, I do recognize that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge this sort of interaction with increasingly large teams. My experience interviewing and being interviewed is limited to cases where it's been a team of 3 - 8 people. For larger teams, perhaps such a formalized approach makes sense. I do not have any experience that informs me as to whether it is or isn't.

But then I have to ask whether there should be a team of more than about 8 people without a dedicated manager. I don't have anything more than a gut answer to that question, but my gut says no.

Of course, there are entire subfields of psychology that directly and routinely engage with neuroscience. But behavioral psychology generally does not; in any case, the narrative given in the linked article speaks entirely and solely from the point of view of psychology, with no mention of neuroscience. That there are fields of psychology that fruitfully engage with neuroscience does not chance that this article does not mention neuroscientific considerations at all.

The reason that I made my comment is that the article tries to say that a deficiency in facial recognition of persons of another race is a psychological - that is, higher cognitive - effect. If it is taken as an effect of higher cognition, without a neurophysiological basis, opens up the possibility of the argument "his bias against black people made him not care enough to distinguish black people." That argument would bring open the door to arguments sociologically based biases such as being racist, when in fact there is an observed, known, studied, published, fact that the neurophysiology of the part of the brain that distinguishes faces literally cannot distinguish variations in facial features of members of a race a person hasn't been often exposed to, as a literally biological limitation that one cannot blame on sociological reasons. It has the potential to shift the conversation to a fruitless arena.

There is no factual disagreement of the observed effect, you are correct. The particular (potentially subtle) line I was trying to draw is that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between biases known to psychology and biases known to neuroscience.

When an observation of a bias is made in the field of psychology, it is up in the air whether it is a bias in higher cognition or whether it is a bias that is due to a direct physiological effect. Psychology, as a whole, is a field that does not talk about neuroscience, or physiological reasons for behavior; it is a more top-down perspective. (Yes, there are subfields of psychology that try to engage with neuroscience, but they are not the norm.)

What you call "more technical detail" exactly addresses that distinction; the recognition of faces of people of another race which one has not been much exposed to can be directly correlated with a specific neurophysiological observation, not an observation of higher cognition which has no neurophysiological explanation.

It is a very important distinction, even if it seems subtle from the outside.

I'm afraid you'll have to explain your perspective to me as if I'm five years old. In your original comment, you say,

a constant times the $-e_r/r^2$, and the time derivative of that is definitely not zero.

I don't see a term there that is time-dependent.

One thing I find very interesting is the following:

SQLite has its own private implementation of printf() (with some extensions) in printf.c

Why?

The time derivative of that expression is indeed zero.

This article is poorly researched and psychologists are the wrong people to ask about this phenomenon.

The region of the brain (at least chiefly) involved in facial recognition is the facial fusiform gyrus, and was named as such because of this observed role. However, it was later discovered that it does more than that: show, say, a car mechanic a small intricate car part that only an expert would recognize, and his facial fusiform gyrus will activate. Same thing with an expert bird watcher and species of birds.

It turns out that that area of the brain is used for distinguishing objects based on fine detail. As the article mentions, low exposure to other races at a young age will lead to "they all look the same", because there are certain sets of facial features that most often vary within members of a race.

Therefore, yes, it is true that it is not "racist" for members of another race to all look the same to you, the neural networks in this region of your brain may not have been trained to look for and recognize a certain set of features. The psychologists making the observations mentioned in the article are surely making correct observations, but the real reason isn't mentioned at all.

I would cite sources, but this knowledge is from my undergraduate degree in neuroscience from years ago, and I'm on mobile. I'll try to come back later and edit in some citations.

These headlines are phenomenal.

The problem with "the universe is the way it is because circles" is that our understanding / development of mathematics is based on ways of perception formed based on seeing the universe around is. It becomes a chicken and egg issue.

Forfeit?

Emacs would show everything.