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throwaway4747l's comments

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: Why facial recognition has led to false arrests

I mean, if your algorithm is accurate 99.9% of the time, and you're using it 24/7 in a country with millions of inhabitants, you should expect tens of thousands of false positives every day. This is why some wet blankets have been strangely skeptical of delegating all responsability to The Algorithm.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being

These articles are interesting not by themselves, but for the reactions they stir on HN. It's interesting how aware of cognitive biases and critical minded one suddenly becomes upon encountering a study that challenges one's worldview. It's also interesting to note the shift between two demographics: old-school libertarians/right-wingers who hold that "you should earn your bread in sweat unless you happen to have private means" (Kalecki 1943), and pro-UBI tech workers who rationally see it as a direct subsidy for their industry. Unlike many other viewpoints where one usually dominates I feel this is one of the few where opinion is fairly evenly divided, and the back-and-forth is interesting.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: How two British orthodontists became celebrities to incels

How do you fix it though? I mean you can do thing like legalizing sex work and providing sex robots or something, but for most incels, it isn't about sex (if it were, there wouln't be incels in place where prositution is legal). It's about feeling desirable and desired, it's about social status. How exactly do you fix the feeling of not being desired? You can't force people to like you.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: The New American Status Symbol? A Second Passport

I think GP isn't talking about the passport acquisition process but really the experience of living there. The culture shock is real and you're in for a rough surprise if you think Europe is anything like the US. For starters, you're going to find your that the role of English as a lingua franca is largely overstated. Depending on your personality, you may not completely adapt and end up going back home.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: The Elena Programming Language

That is not dead which may eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death may die. Remember that weird language that looked like Java and was used by nobody except script kiddies until the Web exploded? Or that quirky little language with forced indentation that was overshadowed by Perl and Matlab well into the 90s and the 00s? Open source projects don't have the same constraints as commercial ones, they can remain dormant or unnoticed for years before suddenly taking off.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

I try to maintain some consistency (as you probably noticed) but as I switch devices I honestly can't be bothered to remember the throwaway handle I last used. If that's really an issue, I'll try to stick to a handle that's easy to remember, or keep this one.

Out of honesty however, I should tell you that I value my anonymity and don't want an extensive posting history to be used to track and identify me. As pg said, keep your online footprint small, yadda yadda. So I can space out the intervals at which I make accounts but I can't promise I won't vanish the identity I created after a while.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: The Elena Programming Language

Sorry, how is it a 'crowded space'? Languages aren't startups, they don't have to compete on a market to be viable (unless they're proprietary of course). As long as someone somewhere has an interest in it, it will live on.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: Telegram messaging app proves crucial to Belarus protests

Ctrl-F "Signаl": 10 instances

Seriously, it'd be nice if we could have one thread about Telegram without S-advocates showing up and complaining about "security". Yes, we know Telegram isn't as secure, yadda yadda yadda. Now if only Signal provided half the features Telegram does, maybe non-cryptonerds would have heard of it.

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: The Elena Programming Language

There's no need to be this harsh. We should always celebrate people making things even if they don't benefit us directly, to me that's even the essence of hacking

throwaway4747l | 5 years ago | on: The Elena Programming Language

Doesn't Python 3 exactly do this? Not saying I would use non-ascii characters in variable names but presumably populations that don't use the Latin alphabet have different use cases?
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