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A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

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Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#431

Post by mrguyorama »

selcuka wrote: post #200
notyourday wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. What we need is something that is amazingly simple: * you, a programmer who coded something that caused company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake", have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a manager who managed a project that caused a company X to lose Y dollars because of a "mistake" by your programmer, have to be on a hook for Y dollars. * you, a product owner who accepted the what the manager of ta p…

Start punishing mistakes and you will soon have a hard time finding good people to employ. Only bad (and broke) ones will be available.

Funny, we hold civil engineers accountable and there seem to be plenty of capable engineers to do things that need to be done, and we hold bad pilots accountable, and yet the only reason airlines have a pilot shortage is because they refuse to pay more than $20k a year.

Developers need to stop being so allergic to accountability. It's kind of pathetic

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#432

Post by formerly_proven »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #429
formerly_proven wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms solve problems. Wrong answers are not solutions to (i.e. do not solve) a given problem. Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem.

> Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem. And so they always do. The problem that an algorithm solves is defined by the algorithm itself. The purpose of a system is what it does[0]. Algorithms are useful to solve problems for us - the trick is always in making sure that the problem the algorithm solves is the one we want. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…

That's a bingo.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#433

Post by swiley »

theteapot wrote: post #363
formerly_proven wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms solve problems. Wrong answers are not solutions to (i.e. do not solve) a given problem. Hence, algorithm implies that it provides correct answers within the parameters of the problem.

Disagree. We see this phenomena all the time: Right solution, bad input data. Right solution, wrong problem. Worlds turned to grey goo by replicators working to some technically correct algorithm.

These will never give the right solution, only something close.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#434

Post by glandium »

hvis wrote: post #368
glandium wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Shogi aka "Japanese chess", while for some reason in English, the players are Black and White, in Japanese, they are 先手 (sente, literally first hand/before hand) and 後手 (gote, literally second hand/after hand). Black is first, BTW.

It would be easy to choose a narrative that casts the first player in the bad light as well. Chess is a game of war, isn't it? So whoever goes first is the aggressor. So if Black goes first, that can also play into certain racial biases people have.

Except there are actually no color difference in Shogi. Which player a piece belongs to is indicated by its direction (at least that's my layman understanding). I have no clue why English goes with Black and White.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#435

Post by [deleted] »

systemvoltage wrote: post #107
shp0ngle wrote: post #5

Well. The speech police started changing "blacklist" and "whitelist" in programming context, even when those had no racist history; maybe it's time to change it in chess. (After all, white always goes first, that is not very PC.) Rename "black" and "white" to "second player" and "first player".

I think the words themselves are racist - black and white. I'd be down with getting rid of them from the dictionary all together. Edit: Add brown as well to the list.

[deleted]

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#436

Post by sizzle »

skinkestek wrote: post #417
raxxorrax wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What connotation does green have? Where can I find the land of green people?

Greenhorns are the new and inexperienced. See also: green usernames here on HN. Note: I'm serious and not serious at all here at the same time. No: the colors doesn't matter at all. Yes: If someone wants to get offended they will find a way, even how they are held outside since no one makes jokes about them.

That’s not tied to a specific race though? Sometimes being ‘green’ is an advantage cause you are able to ask inexperienced questions and given more slack when in a new job, etc.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#437

Post by whimsicalism »

bonzini wrote: post #239
whimsicalism wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong - etymology is via bitkeeper which has slave repositories and master repos.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2020-June... for a description of what happened; tldr it isn't.

That link doesn't say anything contrary to what I said, and indeed includes a link to a twitter thread saying that Bitkeeper may very well be the origin of the 'master' terminology in git.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#438

Post by selcuka »

mrguyorama wrote: post #431
selcuka wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start punishing mistakes and you will soon have a hard time finding good people to employ. Only bad (and broke) ones will be available.

Funny, we hold civil engineers accountable and there seem to be plenty of capable engineers to do things that need to be done, and we hold bad pilots accountable, and yet the only reason airlines have a pilot shortage is because they refuse to pay more than $20k a year. Developers need to stop being so allergic to accountability. It's kind of pathetic

I studied mechanical engineering myself, so I hear you.

That being said, software development and civil engineering are very different in terms of risk management. There are strict regulations around what you do and if you play by the rules, you have minimum to no risk. Even if dozens of people die under a collapsing building you are not accountable if everything you had done was by the book.

Software development, on the other hand, is more like wild west. There are minimal regulations, only best practices. One developer can never know if the end product is free of any errors.

Pilots are a completely different story. The OP was talking about "causing company X to lose Y dollars", not human lives.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#439

Post by BoxOfRain »

saalweachter wrote: post #360
BoxOfRain wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's definitely the most sellable one I've seen. I don't like the implication that it's the algorithm that's malicious rather than the person who wrote the algorithm (no algorithm is inherently malevolent or benevolent in my opinion, it's just an algorithm), but I also know this distinction is completely pointless for the vast majority of people and "malgorithm" gets the gist of what people are getting at acros…

While "malevolent"/"malicious" definitely has a "wicked" connotation, you also see it in words like "maladapted" or "malodorous" which are just "bad" without the "wickedness".

That's still dumping a "bad" on the poor old algorithm though, which has done nothing wrong simply by existing and doing what it is programmed to do. Algorithms aren't bad, it's the programmers who write them and the managers who decide they should be written who are bad when things like this happen.

Re: A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

#440

Post by sellyme »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #439
saalweachter wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While "malevolent"/"malicious" definitely has a "wicked" connotation, you also see it in words like "maladapted" or "malodorous" which are just "bad" without the "wickedness".

That's still dumping a "bad" on the poor old algorithm though, which has done nothing wrong simply by existing and doing what it is programmed to do. Algorithms aren't bad, it's the programmers who write them and the managers who decide they should be written who are bad when things like this happen.

I don't see how you could believe this point, unless you think things like "There's no bad music, only bad musicians" as well.

Perhaps an elucidating counterpoint is an algorithm written in such a manner that it is deliberately worthless, as a joke (e.g., StackSort, Bogosort). Obviously they're not the result of a bad programmer, they're just an inherently bad algorithm.

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