skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: AdSense and the European Cookie Law?
TL;DR: do I really have to postpone showing AdSense until I have explicit user consent for cookie usage?

So Google sent out a mail saying web sites using AdSense should somehow comply with the European Cookie law. Now that I set out to implement it, I find the information given by Google is not actually very helpful, even though they created an extra site for it: https://www.cookiechoices.org/

It seems to me to really be compliant, I shouldn't show AdSense before the user has given me explicit consent. The typical info bar at the top ("this site uses cookies - agree") seems completely useless.

AdSense doesn't seem to have an option to launch it "cookie free" either (or postpone the ads until the consent is given), which would have been a helpful move by Google.

I am leaning towards ignoring the issue completely, as it is only hostile to users. But Google has given a fuzzy ultimatum until September 30 to "become compliant".

I also wonder if it would work over all sites on the internet if a user has agreed to AdSense cookies once. That could also free my site.

(For context, the only thing my site uses cookies for is AdSense).
Yes, but they were utter crap. Their browsers were crippled, side-loading software was strictly for geek hobbyists only and their apps were generally appallingly designed. Mobile internet was restricted by the carriers to a teletext-style menu driven system with menu space sold to the highest bidder. It was awful. They had no idea what they ere doing. Mobile payments were supposed to take over the world in 2001+. The carriers have spent the last 14 years utterly failing to execute on that, and even in 2004 they'd spent the previous 3+ years being utterly incompetent. Steve saw what was going on, and he was completely correct that even 5 years wasn't going to be long enough to sort all that out.
I think I have a mild version of this. I can picture things, but it generally takes a fair bit of effort and concentration to get decent detail if the thing is complex, and it's a fleeting image. Especially picturing people's faces is difficult. I can get like.. an idea of the person's face, so I know I'd recognize it if I saw it, but I rarely see a picture of their face in my head.

I do have normal visual dreams though, which apparently many people with full-on Aphantasia don't. And I can picture and manipulate geometric objects in my head, that kind of thing.

Again, I guess it's mostly that my mental images tend to be vague and indistinct. I really wasn't aware that some (apparently most!) people see perfectly clear mental photographs of things. Now I'm trying to figure out how I haven't noticed the lack of this ability more! It seems pretty significant.
Interesting! I think I have this, though I didn't know there was a name for it. I don't imagine things visually at all -- I just kind of "feel" things. I also have a limited degree of something like touch-synaesthesia... music, mathematics and emotions have some strong haptic associations for me.

And I'm terrible at recognising faces, but pretty good at remembering facts.
Very interesting. A few questions:

- How similar is this to PageRank?

- Is it possible to implement this system anonymously?

- What happens if I don't want to state publicly that I respect X, for fear of backlash or more simply that, while I respect X's opinion, I don't want to be seen to be associated with X?
Yeah, you're right, it does happen and sometimes people can help here.

It just sometimes bugs me though that posts about some new product/lib etc are often sidetracked with bug reports, and oftentimes for some obscure setup ("doesn't work for me on IE6", "I have Chrome Canary and it blows", 'doesn't run in NetBSD", "doesn't work with NoScript" etc).

(Then there's the evergreen: "I cannot see past the first slide of this presentation, clicking does nothing etc." ("have you tried pressing the keyboard arrows?").
Interestingly, I'm pretty good at mental rotations, thinking of complex shapes, etc though I don't actually "see" the objects in my "minds-eye". They still remain abstract concepts.

The only analogy I can draw is this:

Imagine these "concepts" in your head:

Recursion
Monad
Quantitative Easing

They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understanding of the concept, yet I don't see it as a picture (I assume that most people don't actually see it as a picture, but perhaps they do).

Now, when I think of things like:

A Dog
Flower
Sunset

I still think of them as abstract concepts. Like the activations in my mind when thinking of "recursion" are of the same kind as when I think of "flower". If I really focus strongly on thinking of a dog, I get a really fuzzy "flash" of a visualization of a dog, but it's in no way "image-like". When I do this I can feel my brain really really working hard and it's mentally tiring.

Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)
The amount of digitally stored information in the world as of May 2009 [1] is in the order of 2^71. There's no way a single process in a Linux distro will live long enough to read 2^80 bytes for the foreseeable future.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/may/18/digital-cont...
Are you familiar with JMH's perfasm? http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com/2015/07/jmh-perfasm.html

And for profiling apps on production, I've yet to encounter a more thorough, low-overhead profiler than Java Flight Recorder.
Dealing with the ‘Daddy Track’: Men Face Challenges Going Part Time
The original phrase is spooky action at a distance, which has been summarised as spookiness. Actual spookiness notwithstanding, the most important thing really is that there is no action at a distance.
Modern humans have only existed for about 200,000 years [1]. We originated in Africa and didn't migrate outside the continent until about 75,000 years ago [2], which is a relatively short timespan in evolutionary terms. In a sense, then, we are all Africans.

And the concept of "race" as a way of categorising humans is now regarded by most scientists as a social construct [3]. That is, it doesn't tell you anything fundamental about people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations#Exodus_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Raspberry Pi becomes a DIY laptop
I did not say "they've done worse". I said "what constitutes a shame mob?". I should have made clear my implicit question - how is "shame mob" relevant to what happened with Hunt? Which actions constitute a "shame mob" response, vs. 'rational and sensible' ones?

Without clarification, "shame mob" is a meaningless term because anyone will be able to read into it a wide variety of definitions, including ones that you and I think fall solidly under 'free speech'.

As a historical example, when Republicans supporters shouted "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" because presidential candidate Cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock, was that a 'shame mob'? (When Cleveland made it to office despite attempts to use shame to sway public opinion, his supporters responded with "Gone to the White House. Ha, ha, ha.")

If it wasn't, why wasn't it?
ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/
That's not a trend, it's been like that since the dawn of the internet.
> I think we should not incentivize people to have children.

It's not that simple. If your people won't breed, your civilization will die out, along with all its values, culture and legacy. That is, if it doesn't get conquered by another civilization before. Incentivizing "wrong" people to breed may be a danger, but disincentivizing everyone is even more dangerous.
You don't own any land in that sense, all governments can kick you out (see "eminent domain").
Show HN: Answer your life advice questions with random guidance
I'm not particularly skilled at drawing, but otherwise I'm fairly sure I could do that. I can remember all the major visual details of something like a room in my house, for example. But it's still not really like 'seeing' a picture of it in my head, except for little bits at a time, or a somewhat hazy collection of the whole. If I really focus it's a bit better, but some people seem to be able to just "see" memories by default.

Also, most of the time I have a lot of difficulty pulling up a mental image of a face, even one I know well, or holding onto it if I do manage to briefly capture it. (But I don't seem to have any particular difficulty recognizing people by their faces; I'm not picking out features or anything like that -- I definitely remember faces and what they look like; I just can't see an image of a particular face in my mind (clearly, most of the time).
"Tough office policies and the scarcity of good-paying part-time work make it difficult for men to reduce their hours, even if they want to, say management researchers. Additionally, working fathers say they feel rising levels of work-life conflict but many aren’t comfortable questioning the demands of the modern office, or are penalized if they do so."

This is something we're going to help people deal with at http://enlightenedjobs.com (not 100% live yet) - helping connect high performers with life-friendly companies and jobs.

We're looking to do interviews for our blog. Any suggestions of companies or managers we should talk to?
I thought Netflix was supposed to be a replacement for cable. Now they're saying they're an add-on rather than a replacement?
Details are summarized at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Criado-Perez#Harassme... . The details about the conviction are at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/24/two-jailed-tw... :

> Two people were jailed on Friday for subjecting feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez to abuse on Twitter.

> Isabella Sorley was jailed for 12 weeks at Westminster magistrates' court. Co-defendant John Nimmo was jailed for eight weeks.

> Judge Howard Riddle said it was "hard to imagine more extreme threats".

> He said that, despite the defendants' claims, the harm threatened against Criado-Perez "must have been intended to be very high".
Hmm so if race is a social construct then racism doesn't truly exist so there should be no outcry about it? And if it isn't a social construct but a biological one then racism is justified.
I can't really see the logic behind the far-left crowds thinking in this regard.
And as for scientists and the "race is a social construct" by now you should now that opinions that contradict this notion (even whith any amount of proof) could mean the end of their career and a lot of harrasement from society.
That's interesting, because I did! When I read the word "democracy" I started thinking about the concept, and my mind delivered pictures (or really, scenes) to me, The White House, scenes of the UK Parliament, diagrams representing political systems, a game of Civilization, me queuing to vote at the last election etc. etc.

In a conversation that moves quickly, I probably wouldn't begin this process of streaming images, but if I spend more than a few seconds on an idea, they just start arising. To me, it is "thinking" - it is much closer to me and more effortless than the logical articulation of abstract concepts.
The root problem is that cryptography is not usable without some understanding. In the latest days we developed an addiction for "best practices" like "use bcrypt", "use /dev/random" or alike which in the field of cryptography are not enough: understanding is the only possible path. Actually, this is true for most things, it just shows up more obviously in the field of cryptography because of the security concerns. So we should replace "use bcrypt" with "Read Applied Cryptography & other books".
Top Ten Features of Apple Music
A new iOS Malware "KeyRaider" Steal 2,25,000 Apple Account Of Jailbroken Device

http://haktuts.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-new-ios-malware-keyrai...
Just because dictators used it doesn't mean it isn't right. And I think its truth is self-evident, if you just care to look around. Democracy has good sides, like bloodless government transitions, but one thing it does not do is facilitating sane decision making.
This is all well and good, except when you procrastinate over things you want to do. It also throws discipline into the wind in favor of just procrastinating.

It's true, some things you can put off, and nothing bad happens. Other things, you put off, you lose your job or your house. Ideally you can separate the two, but maybe not.

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, or don't feel like doing. And that's life. Rarely do things get better by procrastinating about them, though more often they get worse.
That argument is too hand wavy to be convincing. Can you make it precise? How exactly are the seeds or branches being distributed in 2d/3d space, and how does that minimize shading? Why would sunflower seeds want to minimize shading in the first place?

There's also the trouble that sunflower seeds and branches of trees do not actually approximate phi in any meaningful way. Check out this picture: http://www.wingsdailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/fib... No doubt it was cherry picked and the spiral placed in the best position, yet the match is abysmal (look at how far the center of the spiral is from the center of the flower). The seeds are just packed tightly together and this produces some patterns due to the seeds on the outside being more developed than those on the inside.
The Shapes of CSS
The same happens on a large percentage of open source projects. Dear project maintainers, if I go to your website, one of first things I want to know is when the last version was reased and perhaps what's new in this rease.

Sometimes you have to dig deep into the online docs to find this info.

(I am looking at you, matotlib -.-)
Yes, completely agree. And in fact for my own trading I don't use stops because they introduce downside that isn't there in many other situations. On the quant trading analyses that I have done, adding stops frequently makes performance strictly worse while not helping that much when things get really extremely bad, because of course there is no guarantee of liquidity at your stop level if the market is dropping like a stone.

So I've seen things like having a trigger in an order manager that at a certain price will place an aggressive IOC limit order to unwind something. In normal conditions that will behave exactly like an at-market stop loss order, except that in the case of really extreme disruption you won't get filled before your limit. So the hope is in those cases the market will bounce. You don't want to get unwound at any cost on your stop if the market is going to rapidly recover afterwards. It also means there's no information leakage if you're worried about your broker taking advantage of the information in your stop (paranoid, but yes...).

As you've said, there's no panacea.
I wonder if that means you hae an excess of visual imagination or I have a deficit?
This is all fine and dandy for seeding a CSPRNG, but we still don't actually have a CSPRNG in the C stdlib or glibc. getrandom(2) seems to target exclusively getting entropy for seeding, looking at the man page ("These bytes can be used to seed userspace random number generators or for cryptographic purposes."). And of course, the syscall is very recent, introduced in Linux 3.17, coming after the kernels in Debian stable (jessie), which features 3.16, and CentOS/RHEL7, which features 3.10.

OpenBSD and NetBSD feature a ChaCha-based arc4random; FreeBSD and libbsd still seem stuck with RC4-based arc4random[1]. An equivalent for that is sorely missing on Linux. /dev/urandom requires messing with file descriptors, which you may run out of and may require error handling, plus all kinds of security precautions to make sure you're actually looking at the right /dev/urandom[2].

[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=182610 and https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85827

[2] http://insanecoding.blogspot.ch/2014/05/a-good-idea-with-bad...
Steve’s best prediction for me has always been his bet on JS in ‘The Next Big Language’: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/next-big-language.... . This is pre-V8 but post- open sourcing of Tamarin.
Sorry I was misinterpreting. And maybe my statements are a bit harsh. But especially the last election didn't sit right with me.
That was WAP.

Windows Mobile back then had a fully featured browser. It was all pen driven, but it actually worked really well. The first iPhone seemed like a step back at least as far as the browser is concerned.

Data was just extremely expensive, but it was faster than the dial-up internet most of the country was still stuck with back in 2004.
British politician: “iPads are a gateway to porn in the classroom”
I usually practice the art of visualization to picturize images in my mind. The more visual impact you have in your mind, its better to create things positively.
Why?

I think, delegating one's vote to a known expert would actually be a problem, not a solution. Just delegate it to a friend you trust, that knows more about some stuff than you do. He then may use your vote directly or delegate it further to someone he trusts.

What I fear in liquid democracy system is PR efforts that will be done to market "experts".
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9913774
the betting argument is not the same as what is being discussed.

to a halver, the likelihood of heads and tails are still each 1/2, but the expected winnings of betting tails would of course be larger.

it would be like saying i'll flip a coin, and if you guess correctly that it's tails i'll give you a million dollars. obviously i will guess that it's tails, even though i still believe each outcome is equally likely.
Why Chromiums Core Component Options are hidden under a compile flag
Ask HN: App to manage .ssh/config file?
Does anyone know of a CLI app for managing the config in my .ssh/config file?
Features that would be good:

- Organisation. I have many stanzas in that config file, for home, for work etc.

- Profiles. A simple way to switch the HostName and Port for a host alias. (My NAS has a different IP for me when I'm outside the home LAN).

- Native encryption. Some parts of the config should be kept private (which is why it's not simply committed into my dotfiles repo). Private keys could be managed then too, maybe.

- Preferably written in python/go.

I've thought about making something for this a few times, but never got around to it. I'm sure someone has already scratched this itch.

Thanks HN!
The Guardian front end source code
Give a New Lease of Life to School Library with Library Management Software
Have you ever tried https://github.com/emre/storm?
"Race" doesn't exist in the way that "democracy", "socialism", and "fascism" don't truly exist.

For a large number of Christians, the Hindu gods don't "truly exist". Similarly, to may people the Christian God doesn't "truly exist."

That doesn't mean there's no outcry about those topics. The Walt Disney Company is another social construct which doesn't 'truly exist', but there are real-world consequences should you try to infringe on their copyright ... copyright is another thing that doesn't 'truly exist'.

"if it isn't a social construct but a biological one then racism is justified"

"Biological" has many different meaning.

People have different color eyes, based on biology. Given your logic, that justifies the general discrimination of people based on eye color, yes? (FWIW, I am alluding to the "Blue eyes-Brown eyes" exercise.)

The underlying question you would need to address is why should some biological aspects merit categorical discrimination but not others, which sorts of discrimination are appropriate for each biologically traceable aspect, and when can technology (like my genetic disposition towards myopia) make it no longer reasonable to discriminate?

Research hasn't identified a useful biological justification the racial categories we currently have, any more than separating people into blue/brown eye categories is useful.
Here is a surefire way to win the lottery.

Start by picking numbers. Your chances of winning naturally are very small, so I will make an arrangement with you. You go to sleep before the winning numbers are read. Afterwards, if you have won, I will wake you up N times, administering our trusty forget potion. But if you have not won, I will wake you up only once.

As we have established in this thread, by increasing N, your chances of having guessed the lotto numbers correctly upon awakening approach 100%.

I wake you up, you apply Bayes' Theorem, and then rejoice, for you almost certainly have won the lottery!
Your self-description sounds entirely typical to me. I don’t think most people can imagine detailed photographic images (e.g. of faces), though there do seem to be some who can, like certain autistic savants.

It seems likely that people’s external verbalizations of their internal experience vary widely enough that it’s difficult or even impossible to gain a useful understanding of that experience from survey answers. Sort of like when people claim non-human mammals have no consciousness or sentience because they don’t talk.

For example, just because the picture-book illustrator profiled in this article has a “vivid imagination” doesn’t mean she can literally visualize a full-fidelity photographic mental image of a whole book spread. As a photographer, when I see a scene I can “previsualize” what kind of picture I might get after fully editing/printing the image days later. But that just means I can conceptualize particular visual effects, think about the lighting, texture, contrasts, colors, and put them together in an abstract thought, not that I can precisely “see” the picture exactly as if it were finished in front of me. I would say I have a “vivid imagination” for photographs, but my mental experience of remembered or imagined vision is probably pretty similar to yours.
Microsoft accused of adding spy features to Windows 7, 8
Why big societies need big gods
> People often start multi-tasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect. (Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.)

Omg. This paragraph. Is my life.
Notch posts loads of dumb s* to his twitter like anyone else. Extracting 4 tweets and then coming to the verdict that being a billionaire doesn't make you happy is terrible journalism.
I got 10 trillion problems, but logging ain't one
I don't care what profits my phone-maker makes.

I care that they produce a decent phone, and that they have enough market-share that there's a software ecosystem.
PGStrom: GPU-accelerated PostgreSQL