skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you really asking me for a history of discrimination in the US, including prohibitions against voting or owning land, the Separate Car Act leading to Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow laws, the American Indian boarding schools, redlining, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, and Japanese interment camps?

Perhaps 'universal' isn't the precise term, but I lack a more nuanced term, and it captures the idea that many more people don't like Obama simply because he is black than those who don't like him simply because he is a man.

The examples you gave are also less universal. I agree that single males in the US face discrimination for being at or near a playground or around children in general more than women do. But that is not as universal as non-whites forced to leave so-called 'sundown towns' by sunset, or the "Tacoma Method" used to expel Chinese residents from cities in the west coast.

Going back to the OP, the recent prejudice against unaccompanied males near playgrounds is another example of how humans don't really use a Bayesian analysis.
Ah FFS. It's sad to see that XMPP has come to this. We had the promise of an open Internet and it's being consciously destroyed by the big players, one platform at a time.

(By which I mean Google, Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, etc.; all of those companies who have chosen to put a nail in the coffin of the open Internet).

Oh well, guess I won't be doing online chat any more.

I wonder whether the children even believed the last generation of Roman Britons when they spoke of writing, under floor heating, goods from half a world away...
Top habits for successful weight loss
Banks are extremely slow movers, probably for somewhat valid reasons since every little change must be examined and tested in the extreme for defects, vulnerabilities and regulatory compliance.

Adding that it actually takes a fair amount of work to make browser back/forward buttons work in a web application, it is really no wonder that the situation is what it is.
I'm not sure if this shows he is really serious or exactly the opposite.

In Poland there is a guy, Janusz Palikot, who in 2005 owned a "Christian", anti-(many things including LGBT) newspaper but later sold it and founded a pro-LGBT, anti-religion political party.
Absolutely nothing will change for you. When you share a gallery to google+ from photos, it will generate a unique share link to that gallery and paste it in google+. The shared gallery even displays as a gallery within g+, instead of redirecting you to google photos.
How will Facebook's new search feature impact Google (and Twitter)?
Online ads are here to stay, there is no doubt - in my mind at least - about that. That said, the industry is in trouble, there seems to be a disconnect between the users and the products advertised hitherto unseen and many in the advertising industry are acutely aware of this. Nobody has found a silver bullet on how to fix this and it is only a matter of time before there will be some reaction to this ever decreasing engagement.

Making an ad campaign that has a positive ROI is doable, but if you are that well embedded in the industry then you will quite likely agree with me that it has become quite a bit harder to achieve that today than it was in the past. The solution (performance based advertising) shifts the burden of the effectiveness of a campaign onto the wrong party (the owner of the inventory) which has resulted in a series of start-ups that optimize on behalf of inventory owner.

This is all like watching eb-and-flood erode a beach and just like real life erosion there are turning points at which the situation can go from steady state to dynamic quite rapidly and it is anybody's guess what the new steady configuration will be once all the potential for movement has been exhausted.

The ad industry is imo not exactly in a bubble as much as that they are more than a little bit worried about why the usual bag of tricks no longer works and how they plan on going back to when conversion rates were still something to be proud of. I don't doubt that this will initially be tackled with a wave of even more invasive advertising, or advertising masquerading as content.

The problem is that what was initially an absolute boon for the advertising industry, that you can 'measure' engagement ended up being the exact problem, you can measure engagement, including a steady drop in engagement over time. And so, by making advertising more and more aggressive the industry has made it impossible - or nearly so - to make a non-aggressive campaign because it has to compete with all the aggressive ones for attention (from the users perspective it is a zero sum game, they only have 24 hours in a day and usually something else to do besides watching and engaging with ads, and if they don't then they are not exactly prime material for some demographic to begin with).

So now there is a problem, which is that the ad industry can't suddenly stop reporting all these engagement metrics, nor can they pull more technological rabbits out of the hat that spawned all these new tricks because these too will work for a while and then run out.

It's not a simple problem.
> Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second.

And that may well be what is wrong with the Linux ecosystem today. I keep seeing formerly technical "projects" go social over and over and over, with the inevitable result that it turns political and gets derailed from its technical efforts.

This in large part because going social attracts people that end up using the name and reputation of the project to ride political hobby horses (potentially for social ladder climbing outside the project).
It does!

(let (([x : string] "hello"))
(fmt.Println (+ x "owickstrom")))
Whatsapp is built on XMPP I believe. :)
Well, they closed the terminal after echoing a file under /tmp :) That was a bad idea (to give internet a free terminal to "huck").
There is a filter on HN, but that doesn't sat much about the unfiltered reality. Another commenter, who seems to know, says combining various targeting techniques typically gives 20-100% improvement over untargeted advertising.

I'll trust his numbers. But is 20-100% enough to say "targeting works"?
Kolmogorov complexity of HN comments on X is approaching boilerplate level. Where X is Google's product changes, front-end apps/frameworks, advertising, etc etc.
Cars are kind of like tvs. My philosophy has always been to get the cheapest nav/entertainment system (or dumbest tv) and use the car speakers like a dumb pipe, because nearly every auto maker's attempt at integrating technology are completely subpar. If you expect to keep a car for more than a year or two, your best bet is aftermarket or third party components anyway.

I'd say one of the few that get it is Tesla. The huge touchscreen is pretty cool, even though you lose tactile feedback, a huge nav screen with consistent ota updates is neat.
Bear in mind this is from July 2015.
School for Social Hackers: The European Graduate School and its legacies
There are regulations about what frequencies and at what power different devices may broadcast. Currently, those implementations (and hence regulations) are done/enforced in some combination of hardware and software, but mostly hardware. Implementation is moving to software, so updating the OS allows the user to override those regulations. The FTC is not thrilled about this.
>Yes, your intuition derived from a single anomalous data point (yourself) is definitely more accurate than the companies which have seen demonstrable success from targeted advertising.

"Single anomalous data point"? His description is exactly how targeted advertising works for pretty much everybody. He's not some weirdo outlier -- we're all show the same things we've bought and tangential things to our searches with the stupidest ad AI.

He might be wrong that "it doesn't work" (e.g. doesn't pay since it's crude), and probably he is, since so many businesses follow it, but he's totally right in that it's crude and far less effective than its potential effectiveness.
I think that's too strong of a statement. Victims aren't considered heroes. Rather, social media enables broader transmissions of stories, and people connect with certain stories, so people playing victim card may receive sympathy, possibly empathy, but not made into a hero.

Now the person that DOES something about their shitty situation, now there's a person we call a hero.
In other words the geeks has taken over the domains of the nerds?

Something i get the feeling started with the web going commercial, and people that was more interested in presentation and bullshitting than technical aspects smelled money and potential fame.

And it has been going down hill ever since...
There is no advertising bubble. I used to think there was one but this article convinced me otherwise:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...

What may exist (maybe that's over as well) is an advertising startup bubble.
It could be a coincidence, but I wonder if this piece (published 3 days ago) was inpsired by this 6-day old Reddit thread: "ELI5: Why don't we already know everything that's inside the pyramids?" https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s7ljo/e...
This article seems rather vacuous, and I'm not sure why it has so many points or comments.

Ignoring the way the article is presented, its point could be explained in a single sentence: startups are spending a lot on advertising, which is causing an investor-funded bubble in startups dependent on advertising.

Whether this is really true depends on the relative quantities of the money being spent on advertising by startups. A quick google says over $100 Billion is a reasonable estimate for online advertising annual spend, as a ballpark figure. Startups are raising say $20 billion [1] a year.

Even assuming a large percentage of funding is going to online advertising, we're only talking about say a percentage point increase in the size of the ad market. So I think this article is probably incorrect.

[1] https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/internet-startups-vc-2014/
> The fear is that they'll use it to blackmail you. "Give us $X or we will send your wife all the texts you sent to person Z." or perhaps more realistic, "Give us $X or we will publish that embarrassingly bad love letter you sent to person Z" or even "Give us $x and we will reveal your alternate handle"

As a rule that is information advertising companies do not have or have access to.
Show HN: Rake Standalone – an initiative for a standard Rake distribution
This is really cool. Our bodies are essentially battle fields with different replicating agents struggling for control and a "place" in the future. Any cooperative "agreement" is loose and subject to change at any point (for example cancer), and those offspring stem cells invading a mother's brain: mind-blowing (no pun intended).
This is something that is either simply brilliant or utterly useless -- and I have no idea which is the case. I like the idea, but it needs research to see if it makes a difference. At least the developer should write some of his experiences with using this :)
Microsoft Fails to Deliver Tool for Bringing Android Apps to Windows
The back button exists, banks can not refuse to allow its use. All they can do is warn against its use.

Have a unique hidden input for every form. If a user goes back, regenerate the form.

If a form is somehow resubmitted, print a nice message saying saying that transaction was already submitted.
If that's the argument, the writer needs to put up some numbers.

Here's an attempt at some numerical estimates: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...
Spoiler: ad spending in the US has grown roughly proportional with the growth of the economy, no bubble in sight.
Mafia

Anyway, the parent comment made no sense. Maybe people expect privacy because they're US citizens. But the NSA doesn't specifically surveil people for that reason.
The question then becomes is that 20-100% improvement over untargeted advertising as observed from the advertisers (not the agency or some tech layer in between) point of view also an improvement when compared with the same situation say 5 or 10 years ago. And if it isn't then there still is a problem (but a smaller one, that may or may not be repaired in time).

And yes, targeting works. But non-animated banner ads also used to work, and they worked even better than quite a few targeted campaigns do today (hence the shift to performance based advertising rather than CPM and CPC campaigns, they are also much more resilient against fraud but much harder to properly set up).
Then how can you have "cat" and not "ls"?
MTNL to Scrap National Roaming Charges in India
Let's assume Theory B is correct, and searching for a faucet and then stopping can be treated as having bought a faucet. That tells the advertiser that the user buys faucets, and that's exactly the right person to advertise to. I'd bet that in a large number of cases someone who buys a faucet is likely to buy another faucet in the near future - faucets are something that you buy when you're doing up a house, or you've moved house, etc.

Advertising to someone who you have reason to believe is going to buy your product is much more effective than advertising to an unknown person.
It occurred to me and I work as a web developer. Just think of things in abstract enough terms and possibilities like this pop out. Having the technical sophistication and time to do the work is another matter.
Introducing Negotiator – a GoLang content negotiation library
I also like Tomato on ASUS hardware, but as far as updates go, it seems little-to-no better than using stock manufacturer firmware. There is no central development project, and there is no one who ensures that new updates work on existing hardware. It seems like a few people put together some builds that work on what they have, toss them over the fence, and everyone else is left scrounging for what works on their particular hardware.

And are you really going to experiment with building it yourself when you're talking about your Internet router? What do you do if it bricks?

I've been thinking for some time now that the only sensible way forward is a device that runs plain Debian stable, something Raspberry Pi-like, with a USB dongle or two and a plain Ethernet switch. That way, keeping up-to-date is as simple as `apt-get upgrade`. And with a few SD cards, one can easily keep multiple working system images, clone them, and swap between them for testing and upgrades. This situation in which it's even possible to brick a router seems like primitive savagery and madness.

But, not having a DD-WRT/OpenWRT-compatible router, maybe I'm just missing out...?
Some time ago, when i discovered xv6, I started playing with it and I ended up:
- Refactoring the build system
- Lots of clean of the code
- Adding a real distinction between distribution and kernel
- A clean libc
- Tons of other stuff

You can find it here: https://github.com/NewbiZ/xv6

Considering the original build system, I think having a look at this just for the sake of the cleaner makefiles is worth it.

There is also a mailing list for xv6, to share its understanding:
http://www.freelists.org/list/xv6
It's also instructive to reflect over the other federated internet communications protocol: E-mail.

It pretty much works, and that's great, but barely a week goes by when HN doesn't have an article lamenting the lack of useful spam-control or encryption/sender verification and many other things. E-mail is still a very poor medium to facilitate long threads with many participants. E-mail as notifications (push) is lacking. E-mail as an interface to software systems (e.g. ticket tracking systems) is lacking.

These deficiencies are all easy to fix in a technical sense, but practically impossible to address due to the federated nature of the system. The few changes we do end up getting (HTML bodies, and even MIME before then) are long and painful, and are largely resolved by "might is right". Others unilaterally break fundamental features, such as curbing spam by essentially banning decentralised SMTP. If you rely on being able to send out large quantities of email, you either have to pay a gatekeeper, or hire a specialist in the dark arts of actually have your email go through. This dark art consists of keeping track of the many ways in which the large players in the e-mail world systematically break the protocol to combat spam.

We have essentially abandoned the federated nature of email and handed over one-sided control to a small group of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, perhaps a few other) in order to effectively curb spam. The alternative would have been the end of email.

XMPP fails because it tries to, indeed needs to, boil the ocean. There's an extension, or two or seven, for every conceivable feature and use case, and so you need to choose which set of features in a n-furcated (where n is tragically large) set you want/need, and live with the fact the these aren't perfectly compatible with deployments that has made other choices. And so the federation and standards compatibility is really only theoretical, and then, what's the point? If spam killed truly federated email (and the need for actual working encryption might well finish it off), mobile killed XMPP.

Hopefully, at some point, the IM features of Slack, Twitter, Google Hangouts, iMessage, HipChat, Yammer, Skype, Whatsapp and friends are going to converge enough that an open source application can emerge and define a basic set of features through domination, in much the same way Wordpress ate the blogging world, and that can then lay the foundation for interoperability.
That's about twice the stopping distance for a wet road so plenty of time to stop except that you can't tell until a lot later that someone might be about to cross because you can't see the pedestrian approach. I come from Swindon and drive that road quite often when I go back to visit family and I have never seen a pedestrian cross it. I certainly wouldn't like to do it except on a bright clear and dry day but I dare say that the locals might have a better idea of the risks.
Square Root by Long Division (2014)
You know npm shrinkwrap does exactly this, right?
By reading `cat`, how come that error messages are printend on standard output and the exit code is always 0? stderr and exit codes are not implemented/used in xv6?
But isn't artifical demand generation exactly the problem? We already have growing problems with overconsumption, yet we're still told to keep buying more? The only thing your numbers show is that marketing is great at selling its own services, which should not be surprising.

Then (for me at least) there's the problem that almost all TV advertising is targeted at the more vulnerable groups in society: they invariably equate spending with a superficial emotional quality. I can't even remember the last time I've seen an ad that contained factual information.

And since consumer money can only be spent once, it's a zero sum game to me. I'd rather have people spending money on things they really need, instead of trying to fill an emotional hole created by advertising.
These algorithms do not work on 'specific people' or 'specific products' they work on vast buckets of A/B tested users with equally vast buckets of products. That's why you will get these 'bugs', which can be fixed by much more specific targeting (soon, on a website near you).
Given that the google photos app isn't supported on iOS<8 (whereas the google plus app was), does anyone know what the best way of getting camera photos to upload to Google photos from an older iPhone?

I'm really hoping I don't have to do some sort of Dropbox/iPhotos dance :(
I think I agree with you for most of them. However I'm not sure how to pull off 'turn'. And if you don't know bash extremely well I'm sure there's a readability win here.

Not sure if it's enough to get node installed everywhere I go, though.
npm install --save

In npm v3 updates the shrinkwrap as well as the package.json
If Dr Evil could do that it's not in their interest to because we'd all know how the 25 btc came to exist and the blockchain as a system would be undermined and lose its value. Isn't that the point? The act of defrauding it is what devalues the chain.

*Edit: I misunderstood a bit. But to then go on, the value of operating the bitcoin chain with your compute resources is to control and charge transaction fees isn't it? Profit from mining is the initial gold-rush kick to get the system popular. You're not always supposed to make money minting the coin as it were.
Like you said, the company has been there for a while. So, they had plenty of bad and mediocre coders. You won't fool them easily. They probably know the difficulties you have, yet they did hired you. It's not like they expect you to be the best but they know you have what it needs to be it. Programing is a team effort.
I don not understand this. My only question is why? This seems to be one of these tools the author thinks is really good, but in the end nobody will use a tool like this.
>People pay a "consumption tax" to fund every part of the products they buy.

Yeah, only those other parts:

a) are not relevant to the topic discussed. If I discuss where ad money go, I don't have a reason to show where money for packaging go.

b) are essential to the production of the item (besides the fact that there are millions of products that are sold without ANY advertising at all -- e.g. all no-brand-name items) [edit: fixed "not essential"]

>Some investors lose their shirt. Some companies go bust.
My question is: so what?

So, when it comes to online advertising, it's the basis for tons of tech-related activity (the reason d'etre of most typical web startups for example, most online media, etc.), and if it goes bust there will be a lot of blood.

The impact to HN's crowd and the web as we know it in general is not even comparable to what happens if some market like "PVC supplies" for products goes bust.
You brought this up as an argument against the idea that people discriminate based on (roughly) Bayesian estimation of what other people are likely to be like. Specifically, you heavily imply that if people were discriminating based on rough Bayesian estimation, there would be some level of discrimination against men as potential criminals (since they make up roughly all of the criminals) which does not obtain now.

I disagree; I think men suffer a lot of discrimination as potential criminals. I want to know what you think should be happening to men (if people were using a roughly Bayesian approach), and what you think is happening to men, and why you think it's not compatible with the idea that what people are doing can be modeled as a Bayesian approach.
npm v3 already uses the 'flat by default' design, so the node_modules folders aren't that different.
> I'm sure he's also interested in gaining the support of Christian and Jewish voters

If anything that will loose him Jewish votes.

According to Jewish history Josef stored grain in the year 1532BCE, but the pyramids were mostly finished by 1759BCE, more than 200 years earlier.

If you are going to base a belief in the Bible, maybe actually know what it says first?
In theory yes, but these NN libraries are very difficult to set up. I remember it was a huge pain to get numpy working with lots of frustrations and learning technical things. Torch and theano are not supported on Windows at all.

I've been looking at brain simulator recently. It has it's own installer and a decent GUI: http://www.goodai.com/#!brain-simulator/c81c
That is called 'publisher optimization', google does not offer much in terms of that today but the buyers of advertising do have a whole raft of tools at their disposal to the point where pranksters have used it to target individuals.
npm v3 already does this by default.
Oh wow, rewriting cat.. that's definitely a mapping/affordance issue.

I assumed cat was cat!