HN user
You worked as a financial analyst but yet don't seem to grasp the monumental difference between "women earn 80 percent less than men", which you cited above as the common narrative, and "women earn 80 percent of what men earn" or "women earn 20 percent less than men", which are two accurate descriptions of the common narrative.
I don't think the author was trying to excuse Facebook's business model by bringing up Cruz. She was pointing out that if this 'psychological profiling' technique from CA was really a silver bullet for swaying votes, Cruz would have done better in his run the Republican nomination. It's a single data point that arguably isn't worth much, but it was interesting to me as I'd not heard of any other prominent politicians using the service. Balanced article by WAPO in my view.
Author of the article is the same guy who, some years ago, organized a boycott of Elsevier journals due to their extortionate charges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
He has practiced what he preaches with respect to publishing in open access journals.
Buzzfeed accusing others of using methods akin to religious indoctrination, that's quite a howler.
That's because there's an army of people who are quick to discredit anything coming from blogs and lesser known sources as bunk while falling all over themselves for traditional news sources like NYT. Even when the big sources completely fail at their jobs and end up piggybacking on the story. Like you're doing in this thread.
Neither Deep Blue nor the superior chess playing engines running on PC hardware that came afterwards used machine learning. They relied on basic heuristics as humans do to numerically evaluate a position (material, activity, etc.) with the advantage that they could evaluate many more possible move sequences than a human. They also had opening books to avoid losing games from the outset and endgame tablebases to identify forced wins/draws with a small number of pieces on the board. Only recently did Google come out with a chess playing program that is actually ML-based, and it beat the top rated 'traditional' chess engine.
My point being, despite chess being considered a game that requires deep thinking, the use of actual AI in chess is very very new. As far as I'm aware, Kasparov had nothing to do with it let alone a deep understanding of it. He wasn't even involved in the earlier development of computer chess playing programs as they rose to the grandmaster level and eventually beyond his own level (super grandmaster). He along with many others had confidently predicted that machines would never beat humans in chess. So yes, I'm quite reluctant to believe that he has any kind of vision on this topic.
Kasparov apparently continues to believe that his expertise in chess transfers to other disciplines. This isn't an uncommon phenomenon, even for people with more serious qualifications in a not totally unrelated field. I also shouldn't forget Hollywood actors - their views on scientific matters and foreign policy carry a lot of weight because they're, ummmm, famous.
For the same reason I'm not rushing over to Amazon to snag Garry's books on how to succeed in the boardroom, I won't be spending any time trying to digest his musings on AI.
Setting aside formal debates among politicians, if you want to talk about why discussion of contentious topics by average Joes and Janes has degenerated into its current state of pointless shouting matches, I feel like it has less to do with Fox News, conspiracy theories, fake news, Russian meddling or whatever else is regularly associated with the alt-right. In the run-up to the election and the months following it, a large faction on the left has abandoned any pretense of discussing ideas and policies or of having civilized debate, preferring instead to become very aggressive with insults, wild accusations of racism, white supremacy, misogyny, etc., in order to demonize their opposition. You see it all the time on this forum and others. It's lazy and harmful, and it's being used as a tool to avoid any self-reflection.
Staying silent isn't an endorsement of the status quo. Similarly, we shouldn't have any expectation that company X or Hollywood celebrity Y owes it to us to denounce whatever the twitterverse currently finds distasteful. Entitled people on social media love the fact that they can bait companies into every political squabble nowadays.
Dropbox following the tried and true path of taking credit for tangentially "enabling" the contributions of others. Kind of reminiscent of Apple's statements about the massive impact of their company on the economy and job creation in other industries.
Heck, as long as the bar is this low, Microsoft could write a similar sounding PR statement to put some lipstick on their file system patent trolling - "At Microsoft, we have an unwavering commitment to the fight against poverty. Our storage technology has been crucial to the success of the one laptop per child program."
Were you deliberately leaving out the 4th possibility of Google concluding 'You know what? It is actually wrong to prioritize certain races and genders as a matter of hiring policy, and since it clearly isn't keeping us out of trouble on the public relations front, let's not do it anymore.'
Hey, thanks for answering! It's probably closer to the truth that WhatsApp was just insanely overvalued in comparison as FB has been very aggressive in eliminating anyone that threatens their dominance. I'm a long time twitch/JTV user who's been there almost since the start (close to 10-year anniversary now), so I'll take this opportunity to say thanks.
At the time of its sale to Amazon, I remember wondering how twitch could only be worth 1 billion compared to something like WhatsApp being worth 20 billion. It was purely from an engineering standpoint that I considered what twitch was doing to be vastly more impressive. It's three years later and Amazon hasn't been too overbearing with the changes they've made, but I wonder if JKan believes he got fair value for his company?
I'm scratching my head wondering why they didn't just take the obvious route of offering an optional 'also pay the processing fees' option like paypal does. Phrased in a way that lets the patron know that their supported creators are getting a larger cut as a result. They might have been pleasantly surprised by how many people will go for that as long as it's voluntary and the fees are reasonable.
So Waymo was trying (and succeeding) to patent a basic electronic circuits designs that has existed for decades. This is not surprising at all as the grandiose claims of innovation coming out of SV, perpetuated by unscrupulous and mostly clueless tech news writers who don't understand the technology they're writing about, haven't had any substance behind them for a long while. The USPTO should be embarrassed as well for rubber stamping these applications coming from big companies.
You're mistaken. There are two separate messages - a popover that appears at the bottom of the screen every time you browse a page (whether it be the front page, an article, etc.) AND the more innocuous inline text at the end of every article that you mention.
It's not so much the message as its persistence, timing and size. It shows up every time and takes up half the screen. It would also be nice if the reader was given some time to read actual content before being blasted with the message again. Feels like one of those many many sites that immediately ask you to fill out a feedback form before you've even browsed anything. If it's not a beg, it's most certainly a nag.
Actually, that would be what happens when mainstream media becomes an echo chamber and is rejected by half the populace.