6 ms·

This parallels the conversation going on in the ML world right now. "They just so happen to look like gorillas!" This is not okay. I know it's just a pile of

This parallels the conversation going on in the ML world right now. "They just so happen to look like gorillas!" This is not okay. I know it's just a pile of linear algebra and there's no conspiracy to screw a particular country. But once it's brought up that your system is causing harm by increasing inequality in the world, you can't just say "But that's what the algo is spitting out!". At least try to fix it.

privateSFacct 7y ago
If your country is causing harm to the rest of the world by not discouraging (or even encouraging) unethical behavior online, maybe the problem isn't the algo but your system? At least try to fix it.
- 616c 7y ago
  Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it. I see a throwaway account but let us know, what country are you from? Seeing how abusive US behavior is on the internet and in other domains, for me as an American, I'd be afraid to practice what you preach.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it. It's not classifying personal behavior, it's putting an additional barrier based on the country you're from. This is done in pretty much every other form of international interaction as well (visas, extradition, commerce, etc.).
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      Plenty of things in history have been done en masse and now we're left wondering how could the people back then even accept those barriers. Restating the current status quo isn't changing anything.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  My country is very small yet has 6.5 million people. Surely you can't be serious by saying that I'm to be responsible what each of them is doing on the internet?
  - ynx 7y ago
    IMO: If the country is the source of an outsized number of bad actors then – probabilistically and at scale – "you" are responsible, yes. I'm not trying to be blame-y here in that I mean the probabilistic "you" and not you personally. Whether you personally deserve the consequences of that responsibility is more ideological than pragmatic - you probably do not deserve it, but how do others find out which you are? That brings up questions of system design, and avenues available for remediation. If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet as a whole it might not just be defensive measures that are to blame for insufficiently punishing or defeating attackers. In that case, economics and politics might factor in and the question becomes different.
    - extempore 7y ago
      It’s interesting how smoothly this logic can move between “your country”, “your religion”, “your ethnicity”, “your ideology”. I am not making a case for or against any of these. But if pragmatic arguments for group punishment hold currency when there is known collateral damage, arguments from principle lose currency in equal measure.
      - tekknik 7y ago
        aren’t all laws a form of group punishment? the area i live in now charges for plastic bags due to littering. i’ve never littered in my life yet i’m still subject to the same punishment. the same holds true for just about every law, except capital crimes.
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      > If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet... It's small enough that it probably couldn't even bring down a single CloudFlare-protected website IMO. And when we've seen stats here on HN about recent attacks on GitHub, the total bandwidth was what, 1.35Tbps (~169GB/s)? (Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-was-hit-with-the-largest-ddos-attack-ever-seen/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-was-hit-with-the-larges...) I've met sysadmins here in my small country -- guys and girls who administer several thousand gigabit-fiber-to-the-home 1Gbps connections -- who said that for a ~$15,000 tech investment they can build small infrastructure that can withstand 10Tbps DDoS attack, if their upstream ISPs don't cripple bandwidth under pressure. Not saying they might not have overestimated themselves but it's a data point regardless. I don't know for sure either way because I am not a professional sysadmin or a hardware guy. But I feel a lot of hosting providers are just chickening out. Perhaps it's the ingress/egress charges? But 169GB/s definitely doesn't sound that scary. My $140 router can handle sustained 110MB/s for hours. I can't imagine there are no clusters of enterprise-grade tech that cannot sustain 200GB/s constantly?
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.
Aeolun 7y ago
> 1+1=2, but I want it to be 3, why are you not attempting to fix it? How do you fix that which is not broken? I understand the problem you are trying to point out, but the problem is not in the technology, it’s in the application.

privateSFacct 7y ago

If your country is causing harm to the rest of the world by not discouraging (or even encouraging) unethical behavior online, maybe the problem isn't the algo but your system? At least try to fix it.

616c 7y ago
Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it. I see a throwaway account but let us know, what country are you from? Seeing how abusive US behavior is on the internet and in other domains, for me as an American, I'd be afraid to practice what you preach.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >Yeah that's cool. Let's classify your personal behavior by your host or birth country and see how you like it. It's not classifying personal behavior, it's putting an additional barrier based on the country you're from. This is done in pretty much every other form of international interaction as well (visas, extradition, commerce, etc.).
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    Plenty of things in history have been done en masse and now we're left wondering how could the people back then even accept those barriers. Restating the current status quo isn't changing anything.
pdimitar 7y ago
My country is very small yet has 6.5 million people. Surely you can't be serious by saying that I'm to be responsible what each of them is doing on the internet?
- ynx 7y ago
  IMO: If the country is the source of an outsized number of bad actors then – probabilistically and at scale – "you" are responsible, yes. I'm not trying to be blame-y here in that I mean the probabilistic "you" and not you personally. Whether you personally deserve the consequences of that responsibility is more ideological than pragmatic - you probably do not deserve it, but how do others find out which you are? That brings up questions of system design, and avenues available for remediation. If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet as a whole it might not just be defensive measures that are to blame for insufficiently punishing or defeating attackers. In that case, economics and politics might factor in and the question becomes different.
  - extempore 7y ago
    It’s interesting how smoothly this logic can move between “your country”, “your religion”, “your ethnicity”, “your ideology”. I am not making a case for or against any of these. But if pragmatic arguments for group punishment hold currency when there is known collateral damage, arguments from principle lose currency in equal measure.
    - tekknik 7y ago
      aren’t all laws a form of group punishment? the area i live in now charges for plastic bags due to littering. i’ve never littered in my life yet i’m still subject to the same punishment. the same holds true for just about every law, except capital crimes.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    > If your small country creates outsized issues for the internet... It's small enough that it probably couldn't even bring down a single CloudFlare-protected website IMO. And when we've seen stats here on HN about recent attacks on GitHub, the total bandwidth was what, 1.35Tbps (~169GB/s)? (Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-was-hit-with-the-largest-ddos-attack-ever-seen/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/github-was-hit-with-the-larges...) I've met sysadmins here in my small country -- guys and girls who administer several thousand gigabit-fiber-to-the-home 1Gbps connections -- who said that for a ~$15,000 tech investment they can build small infrastructure that can withstand 10Tbps DDoS attack, if their upstream ISPs don't cripple bandwidth under pressure. Not saying they might not have overestimated themselves but it's a data point regardless. I don't know for sure either way because I am not a professional sysadmin or a hardware guy. But I feel a lot of hosting providers are just chickening out. Perhaps it's the ingress/egress charges? But 169GB/s definitely doesn't sound that scary. My $140 router can handle sustained 110MB/s for hours. I can't imagine there are no clusters of enterprise-grade tech that cannot sustain 200GB/s constantly?
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.

Aeolun 7y ago

> 1+1=2, but I want it to be 3, why are you not attempting to fix it? How do you fix that which is not broken? I understand the problem you are trying to point out, but the problem is not in the technology, it’s in the application.