it will allow Bezos to put Amazon women on the moon.

Thanks for attempting to Correct the Record, there, AC, but you left out this bit about the Clintons from The Hill article:

"They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill."

and that helps to put the bit you tried to quote in a fuller context. So here's the full paragraph you butchered:

"The final court case also made no mention of any connection to the influence peddling conversations the FBI undercover informant witnessed about the Russian nuclear officials trying to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons even though agents had gathered documents showing the transmission of millions of dollars from Russia’s nuclear industry to an American entity that had provided assistance to Bill Clinton’s foundation, sources confirmed to The Hill."

I'd say your redactions paint a different picture than what the thrust of the article was about.

Well holy fucking shit, this needs serious upvoting.

"They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill."

and "In documents it released on Monday, the FBI confirmed that former FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement about the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation months before interviewing Clinton."

Do yourself a favor and get Google Earth. Have a close flyover of Haiti. Check the dates of the imagery and make sure to dial it back to dates well after the post-Haiti disaster relief. Find the factory built with CF efforts. Look at the housing in the area. Look on youtube and find out what the Haitians think of the CF and the help the contractors gave them.

This is part of the research you need to do. I've done it. Find out what "doing charity work" really meant to Haiti's population and not just the US contractors that were paid to build iron-gated vacation home neighborhoods to live in while they, "did charity work". I've seen the 85% number you cite, and believe it to be accurate as far as what is technically legal to say on paper about such things. But I went at least a step further to find out what "doing charity work" resulted in. I was not impressed. I didn't start my research with Google Earth, of course. It was after I saw the stuff on youtube about the failure of aid in Haiti. (Not just youtube, there's a PBS report that is fairly damning.) I was fairly suspicious, as such things seem to be easily fake-able. Just some guy showing some damaged buildings, interviewing poor people. Could be anywhere. That's when I turned to Google Earth.

Short of going to Haiti, my research ability is pretty limited. Still, satellite pictures are hard to fake. Seeing entire neighborhood after neighborhood of rubbled buildings, still being lived in, with blue tarps for roofs doesn't tell the whole story, of course, but it does more to corroborate failure of the CF than the CF narrative of success in Haiti that has been touted.

I'm not endorsing anything that Trump or any right-wing news groups have said about CF. That's certainly tainted bullshit, but just because they are full of bs doesn't make what the CF any better. I have no doubt the Trump Foundation is nothing but a poorly disguised PR/money making scheme. The CF seems to be a far more successful version of the same scheme. And when it is discovered that Ivanka is maintaining a list of TF donors and using it to fast-track those VIPs to sit-downs with Trump, I'll be screaming right alongside you with outrage.

Who is "they", exactly? Do you mean the Russians? Their efforts are mere molecule in a sea of US sponsored astro-turfing and social manipulation.

Have a look at the research efforts at IARPA (IARPA Research).
Then consider the solicitation by the US Air Force for an application that facilitates astro-turfing. (Online Persona Management Service)

Finally, consider the "modernization" of the Smith-Mundt act, (National Defense Authorization Act) and I ask, again, who is "they"?

What do you mean "Russia didn't get caught during the election"? Were you not paying attention? Do you not recall Donna Brazil and others in the DNC yelling "THE RUSSIANS!" on TV when she got caught cheating for Hillary? Did you even read TFA and check the links and dates it was referencing? Because if you had, you would have found the reference to the June 2, 2015 NYTimes magazine article by Andrew Chen, which is basically the same information being "revealed" (for the first time, to you, apparently) by the Guardian's reference to the RBC article.

Deep investigative journalism on Russian trolling had been reported on over a year before the election. It did not matter. And months before the election, supposed Wikileaks connection to Russia was being promoted regularly in the news cycle in any major media outlet (that wasn't FoxNews). Again, it didn't matter.

The reality is that, in spite of the well-publicized Russian influence well in advance of the election, people still voted the way they did.

about. The author seems to have very high expectations on a device they've not really used, so this is really a bunch of hand-wringing.

I used SIRI before Apple bought it. Been using Alexa and a Dot since they became available. Bought a Google Home when it came out. The Alexa and the Google Home get used daily at my house by me and family. As others have noted, they are hugely useful in the kitchen for "hands free" interaction. (Even as I type, I hear kids in the kitchen using Alexa to play music. Oh, and sorry Cortana, the family decided you are creepy and suck.) A dot and Google Home are in the bedroom and the big Alexa is in the kitchen.

The article gets it terribly wrong when it comes to the "data investment" these devices require. My investments in Google and Amazon are already there and are nearly 20 years in the making. These devices are leverage for me on that investment, just as getting good apps on my smartphone is leveraging that same data. Either one of the devices could go away and the other could fill in most ways, so far, simply because these devices are only wading into the shallow (but broad) end of my data. Their usefulness is directly tied to their convenience of voice/sound and most of the data they touch or help generate is the ephemeral stuff of day-to-day living, relevant to me until the alarm goes off, the song is over, or my return from the grocery store.

If the author was actually savvy about Google, they'd realize that, based on Google's track record of starting and then killing services, Google is far more likely to fire (retire) Google Assistant than we are. Already, Google downgraded integration with a very useful Google Keep app in order to make it more "competitive" with Alexa and enable purchasing. Google is better at responding succinctly, giving more relevant information when queried, and performing more obscure conversions. These are not enough to distinguish it from Alexa, however, and I'd guess that if the hoped for market share isn't achieved in a year, Google will kill it in spite of its usefulness.

If I'm evaluating your code, I'm paying far more attention to your comments than your code. I'll treat it like I was given this code to fix a bug in it or add a feature, so I want to see if I can figure out what the intent is from comments. Bonus points if the comments explain how the code is intended to be tested. Bonus points if there are notes about oddities in the code, or explanations for cleverness. If the comments are good enough, I won't feel much need to look at the code closely, except for looking for consistent syntactical style (more of a reflection of adherence to coding standards, yes, but let me see that you follow them) and good naming practices.

In short, your comments should inform and excite me. Your code should bore me.

may be summarily dismissed as newsstand magazine click-bait.

The gist article may have been relevant in 1988, or 1978, or 2008, or any particular decade since the 1940s. Only the details need to be changed to reflect the latest cherry-picked failures. One does not predict a Zombie Apocalypse because of a few cases of leprosy.

Functionally sound and working software pervades nearly every aspect of our lives. Practically every aspect of nearly all manufactured product we consume is designed/made/shipped/distributed and delivered utilizing software. That we continue to have occasional failures is simply a sign that we continue to push the boundaries of what we attempt to do with it. No one was promised a utopia. For that, we must wait for the AI Overlord. (And I, for one, look forward to welcoming.)

The author's view is that if you can't look over someone's shoulder and understand what they're working on, then there methods must be broken: "it would have been impossible to tell whether they were trying to calculate artillery trajectories or simulate a game of tic-tac-toe". Let's ignore that the same goes for any hardware development. Likewise, we can't distinguish between a man working a math problem on a plane, and a man carrying a bomb on a plane, so math must be broken, too?

I've wrestled with the term robot as well and as I've previously discovered, there's not a particularly rigid definition of 'robot' that is widely accepted.

But worrying aboutthe term misses the point of this development. This is device is a proof of concept level device and the implications are huge. To use a gross analogy, the leap in capability this represent is as significant as the agricultural revolution.

this dumbfuckery? Get on it people!

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/idgl7i/stand-up-barry-sobel--flaking

factor being reported, it is our experience that Google beats the pants of Alexa for most things. Still, we use Alexa for music (with sometimes hilariously stupid results) and simple timers. The family often will pose questions to Alexa and when she can't answer, Google home is usually able to provide an answer phrased exactly the same way.

do you want to get paid when the project is done?

If you can afford to wait to get paid when the project is done, then become a consultant/contractor and bid your software projects appropriately (sans estimate, if you agree with the article).

But if you like getting paid every two weeks as an employee, then a manager has to be able to at least pretend that the work will eventually get done by a certain time and at a certain cost or the project typically won't get funded to begin with, thus schedules and estimates.

-- Reading the above, you might think I was a manager, but to be clear, I have never worked as a manager. I have worked as a software developer for Fortune 500 companies, tiny startups, and 100+ employees and as a consultant. I hate making development estimates but as long as I don't work for free, I don't expect those that pay me to not request them.

The problem, in general, is detecting the discrimination in the first place. The article keeps the explanation on the simplistic (and legally significant) terms by framing the issue as discrimination against "protected classes".

But the AI problem of 'prejudice by inference' is not limited to the socially negative connotation of prejudice as mentioned in the article. Your AI may be discriminating in unsuspected ways that cost your hypothetical insurance company profit by overcharging a customer category that would be statistically less likely to file a claim. Detecting that sort of discrimination is harder because the demographics won't necessarily fall into the culturally defined categories that humans have created.