skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think intelligence is kind of like a fountain. All the water being sprayed in the air is how smart you are. As the water gets higher, the individual drops are further apart from each other and from the source of the water.

Intelligence is similar, the smarter you are, the later you are in the "stream" and further you are from either people earlier in the "stream" or others who are at the same stage.

I think a lot of what makes existential depression (at least, if you are referring to the Dabrowski theory) [1] is the lonliness of having such a unique way of thinking.

Ignorance is bliss and most people do not worry about the world depleting resources, EMP attacks, meteorites, shifts in political discourse or other threats to humanity from such a "meta-self-aware" level. They just live their lives.

For very smart people, continually worrying about large scale threats to humanity instead of your own small problems is both inevitable and makes you feel powerless.

It is like the Peter Principal for environment threat neutralization. You will keep thinking of higher order threats to protect against until you run out of locus of control.

The theory also suggests that this can be overcome by deliberately accepting our limited locus of control, through love and relationships, and through contribution.

[1]: http://sengifted.org/archives/articles/existential-depressio...
s/better/more profitable/
How to earn $1,000 a month from an Android app
It's interesting that both "thought experiments" take essentially the same form - layer a fully working consciousness (defined either by being able to pass the Turing test or by actually emulating a brain on the physical level) onto a bizarre and improbable substrate that, strictly speaking, is too small to contain it; then gawp at the improbability of the arrangement you've constructed.

Dennett has a good rebuttal to this whole class - he notes that is not at all intuitive that a brain should be conscious. Open up someone's skull and look at the pulsing meat, and try and convince yourself that there's a mental universe in there. You may as well say "it's just stupid atoms bumping around - how could that be conscious?"

You either believe in a) supernatural souls, b) the mystical consciousness-granting power of meat, or c) minds are independent of their substrate.
Actually by some definition Moon orbits both Sun and Earth.
Have done so.
why not freebsd? the freebsd project seem to focus exclusively on post-attack with jails and trustedbsd mac. fbsd has not implemented any of the modern exploit mitigation techniques. i mean, even os x has had full aslr since 2012 lol.

some years ago fbsd was forked to hardenedbsd which has aslr, mprotect restrictions, non-exec pages on cpus w/o NX, randomized lib loading order, etc. i guess the freebsd project is too busy fighting meritocracy cus none of it has been merged as far as i can tell.

as for linux, plenty has been written on linus' stance on what he considers to be a "security circus"; and the mantra on lkml is still that "a bug is a bug". just watch oss-sec and see distro people wading through kernel commit logs (hyperbole) cus sec-related bugs usually aren't reported downstream
This industry is ripe for innovation. I agree that the state of malware being served through Ad Exchanges is grotesque and I fully employ my ad blocker everywhere.

Here is the thing I just dont get. Why doesnt some tech savvy organization create a white label solution that companies can either slap a subdomain on and invite "Customers" to fill ad supply. Self host the curated assets through said white label solution. Moderate with sophisticated computers that are not subject to the vast majority of mal ware (excluding 0-day obviously), and move on. Im sure someone could easily serve the ads off of the main domain anyway to circumvent all of the ad blockers on subdomains.

This is a perspective from the outside looking in, but people seem to just complain about the problem instead of looking for solutions.

EDIT: BAH, so there is a conversation from last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10221859
Just dropped you an email :)
This is basically the monopoly problem.

The problem isn't that FB is slanted, but that FB has a near-monopoly on user attention, which allows its slant to be both covert and disproportionately influential.

If FB was one of a selection of companies competing in the same space, political bias would be less of an issue, because it would be more like the print magazine and blog space.

But then you have the problem that the US gov has an entire network of foundations, think-tanks, blogs, PR companies, astroturfers, bought-and-paid-for journalists, and other "thought leaders" who exist solely to present a specific agenda - usually a pro-corporate one.

In the same way that you can't argue with the Fed, you can't argue with a state-organised propaganda machine - not easily, anyway.

So the problem is much wider than FB.
This.

Hallelujah.

Down with the hierarchical paradigm.

Down with Reductionism.

Long live Systems thinking.

Long live Connectionism.

Not everything has one canonical representation.
Not everything can be clearly represented from one view point.

The view needs to be determined by the viewer. It's just the way the world is.

Trying to smash everything into one and only view point is frustrating and totally pointless. Unless of course you fetishize order, tidiness and control.

But then the joke's on you.
They're not great. About 40% of the recommendations are things I'd never watch, 40% are things I've already watched.

YT has trouble figuring me out because I watch a lot of gamers that also appeal to a younger audience (eg Yogscast). I get recommended a lot of terrible stuff targeted at that audience that I have no interest in (eg PewDiePie and Markiplier).

I have no idea why they recommend stuff I've already watched.
No. Those are useful countermeasures, but kernel exploits for OpenBSD are neither theoretical nor impractical.
Perhaps I am wrong here, but I got a much different message out of the post.

It's not about actually having ZERO bugs as it is about enforcing a strict and logical classification system.

I think this quote resonated with me the most:

> ...but much more so, the bugs were a result of incorrect specification or missing specifications.

The argument being made is that if you hand a developer a specification, the developer implements the specification _as specified_, then you discover the specification was incorrect or that in practice you want a change would you classify that as a _BUG_? No. But a lot of shops _do_, so they end up with _too_ many tasks classified as a "Bug" which makes it impossible to prioritize since being a "Bug" is a binary descriptor.

By enforcing a classification system means you have the ability to then enforce a prioritization system...and really the prioritization system is key for maintaining consistent output and forward progress.

At least that what I felt the argument of the post was...and I see some reasonability to it. Especially since, as the author mentioned, this is not a new idea.
The banks did exactly this before the financial crisis, and most of them came out of it just fine.

The reason this works in practice is because when a company becomes that big, it's impossible to place blame. Any repercussions against the company as a whole will mostly impact the honest and innocent folks.
> Gizmodo reported that it could not determine whether curators took the same steps for stories from liberal news outlets.

Seems like an important detail. There's a difference between "we omitted conservative topics because we don't want to be too political" and "we omitted conservative topics in favor of liberal ones".
I'm probably misunderstanding something but on my system (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) the X server runs as root & not as my user.
Thanks for the video link - the slides are great, but the video is even better, since a bunch of the slides are animated. Actually, 'animated' describes the whole presentation pretty well. :) Clearly a thought-out and well-crafted presentation, and lots of insights.
Read this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659718

Note: I tried Sublime for approximately one year and don't use it anymore.
You cannot down vote links on HN. You can flag them but doing so on otherwise legitimate articles might be frowned upon and could lead to voting penalties.
Does "will be portable" include any notion of a cross-platform UI?
And to elaborate on this, there's a namespace clash: Arc in Rust is _atomic_ reference counting, and Swift is _automatic_ reference counting, which, even more confusingly, is implemented using atomic reference counting in my understanding.

Automatic reference counting inserts all of the refcount bumps. In Rust, you have to write the up count yourself, but not the downcount.

But, reference counting isn't used very often, at least in my experience. It's very useful when you have non-scoped threads, though.
"As you have guessed by now I am some kind of allergic to this... those idealistic over-simplifications... drawing everything in black and white..."

I avoid oversimplifications, too. Yet, most of what the author wrote was proven by precedent. Only grip I have is calling Linux anti-security and anti-privacy given how much good work in those used the platform. Gotta be a kernel by kernel and distro by distro judgment on that. Rest seems accurate.

"Some of the OS X users I know are incredible technology-orientated and privacy concerned people, should I draw the conclusion they are being overly naive by not using OpenBSD for everything?"

The conclusion is that they prefer to use OS X. That simple. Far as its security, it's made by a company that spent a long time lying to its users that they were immune to malware because Mac's were just inherently secure. They added lots of mitigations sometimes 10 years behind Windows and UNIX per one firm. I recall one vulnerability where an administrative service required a username and password for log-in but didn't check it against database. If you entered any password, you got in.

Such a history of absolutely, terrible security plus deception of customers means Apple products shouldn't be trusted for security by default. Any "privacy concerned people" using it are making a foolish mistake or intentionally trading away privacy for some other benefit.

Now, what you just saw me do was the evidence-based approach to these things. Helps cut through the noise nicely.
Ruby is great for so many reasons, keeping it great is a no brainer.
Too many flags, probably.
I gotta disagree with this one. Those operators have always been confusing and unnecessary.
j = i++ being different from j = ++i alone is enough to convince me it's gotta go.
My local drugstore sells both kinds of products too. If it's evil for Nestle, it's arguably even more evil for Walgreens, since that's where the consumer is making their purchasing decision.
I can't stress enough how powerful an argument I think this is.
I offer $Y, the lowest amount I think I can get them to accept.
BSD Now did a rebuttal in Episode 134 http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2016_03_23-marking_up_the_port...

IMHO, I found it unconvincing. It soured me on the rest of the episode and its not really my watch as soon as its out podcast anymore. I guess since every segment is basically a FreeBSD segment no matter what OS they are talking about, it had to go that way.

YMMV
>> I suppose they were able to do the binary-tree benchmark so much better than Java, because

… because it's faster to use a memory pool than GC for that … ditto C Rust Ada Fortran C++ …

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/performance.php...
Hardly. Sugar has been made the scapegoat. Many things contribute to diabetes, sugar is but one among them. Meat has been shown to contribute significantly[0]. If you dig into it further, you'll see study after study blaming "normal" amounts of meat consumption as a factor for an increased risk of diabetes. And yet, few people want to give it any thought.

[0] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2108.full
Again, I responded elsewhere, but I don't think the article was about actually having ZERO bugs. It was about enforcing a strict classification system so you can implement a reasonable prioritization scheme (Critical issues and Bugs are fixed FIRST by distinguishing what are actually bugs and what are Improvements).

So it's an article on the development lifecycle and how to get consistent forward progress with some organizational improvements. It's not actually about writing software with "Zero" bugs.
Just because the evidence isn't there doesn't mean there wasn't downward pressure from management. Look at the art of dodging blame as practiced by VW.
Objective-C has no safe collections for non-object values. If you want an array of ints, for example, you either get to use a C array with lots of manual management and potential for error, or you use an NSArray of NSNumbers and pay for a bunch of overhead.

It has very poor support for custom value types. Objective-C structs basically can't contain object pointers, so they're limited to simple things like CGRect. They also can't contain methods, so you end up writing associated code in global functions.

Protocols are extremely limited. They're basically just collections of method declarations. There's no way to add functionality to every class which conforms to a protocol.

Objective-C is often verbose to the point of painful redundancy. Consider:

NSString *x = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%d", number];

Versus:

let x = String(format: "%d", number)

Other examples include having to write the signature of every public method twice (once in the header and once in the implementation) and the need to do an annoying `self = [super init]` dance in every initializer.

There's almost no functional programming stuff available, like map and reduce. This is not strictly a language complaint, but since the standard libraries are pretty tightly woven in, I think it still counts.

Generics support is really limited. What's there was only added to interoperate better with Swift, anyway!

That's a quick overview of some of the ways Swift improves on ObjC. I'm sure there's more.
> about enforcing a strict and logical classification system.

But that is something so common place that even pretty poorly run software organizations which ship crap do it.

The rhetorical Everyone has a bug database with features, enhancements, low priority bugs and "blockers". That plus version control is the bare minimum requirement for having any kind of process distinguishable from total chaos.

This is an article about water being wet.
FB must avoid the outward perception that its members are a collection of right-wing cranks. That perception would be bad for business.
TOR and Trust
A bit too late for wider adoption, isn't it? Are there examples of similar path to openness?
That demo was very cool. But:

1. do we really want a centralised service for everything that has access to a lot of data within a walled garden?

2. Siri only works well with North American accents afaik (maybe all western accents?). Alexa's voice recognition is the best and I hope Viv does a similar job.

3. This is mostly a personal preference, but for online shopping I prefer using a lot of filters. This UI doesn't really help with that.

Also, HN probably knows better but is the "computed plan" shown in the demo, different from an execution plan created by an RDBMS?
Not if people who can't afford it have their lives ruined simply because they can't afford it
If you're only after sex this is true.
But that's not what the article said. They had a conservative on staff who was in charge of these feeds, and he wasn't cutting out conservative articles, he was cutting out articles that supported candidates he didn't like.

As long as you choose to consume their product, you get the results of their work. Don't like it? Go somewhere else. You should appreciate that as a libertarian.

I see no harm in excluding articles from Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax. Or Alternet for that matter. Those aren't news organizations. They're propaganda tabloids which consume the work of Reuters and the AP and regurgitate it with a ton of spin.
90%+ shared code is a bold claim, Xamarin.com states 60-90%.

In my experience it's closer to 60%.
So what.

The day Bill Clinton got elected, Rush Limbaugh started counting the days of "America Held Hostage".

Today Fox News leads every day with how there is a Nggr in the White House and we all hate Obama and everything he stands for, and it is a tragedy we will get four years of Hillary because the Republicans are so screwed up, and...

Right wing "thinkers" get unlimited funding from the likes of the Koch Brothers and free copies of their books get mailed to all the public libraries in America. Even on "liberal" CNN they regularly have panels of "conservative thinkers", and the Economist features a "conservative thinker" who is a Senator from Nebraska.

When they bring a "liberal" on it is always somebody who works for a campaign or the Democratic party.

Conservatives get all the breaks but they are always bitching they aren't treated fairly. It worked for Nixon but hasn't worked for any Republican candidate ever since.
Tagging can be done with symlinks if you just want to stick to using the filesystem.
The Art of Being Wrong
Show HN: Pathfinder – Routing as a service
I believe both right and left news medias filter out stories to meet own agenda. No question about that imo.

The problem here is Facebook never claimed to be a news site but a connector for people. But here we find out they were acting as a left leaning news site or a powerbroker.
Different feature: trending is a box full of subjects, none of which you may be subscribed to.
Bloggers: 5 Key Tips to Review Your Social Media Strategy
Yall don't be too nice to them. The code quality is shit. My favorite quip of all came from Ted Unagnst noticing they did endian-checks in one code that ran very often during use of protocol. He said something along the lines that they hadn't applied any sense to (important issue) but they had you covered if your CPU's endianness changed in mid-operation. No words. :)
And I appreciate it, I don't doubt that OS X isn't the best choice, and for sure there is some kind of trade-off going on, most likely, yet I assume a lot of it also has to do with how those products are used, meaning an inexperienced users fall into the pitfalls of maybe any system, while an experienced user will use the product rather differently?

Since you are a security researcher, aren't a lot of people of "your breed" using Macs as well?

As for the OS X security track record I don't claim to be incredibly well versed in that regard, thank you for the insight. But the piece doesn't primarily talk about security flaws, rather about systemic risks in using any sort of proprietary software whatsoever, especially by "evil" corporations like Microsoft and Apple (it might not say that directly, but that's how I conceived it) which I think is far over-emphasized.
Is this even in the top fifty of shitty things facebook does? I ask that as someone who has visited the site four or five times in my life. Every time has confirmed how horrible it is. Every item about FB I see in the rest of the media is a complaint of some sort. What is going on?
Hey, there's really no need for attacking each other. That doesn't improve anything.
I don't see why that would be the case. The language has been public for less than two years, and I don't see any reason it wouldn't become widely adopted for situations where it's a good fit.
Semantically, it's probably closest to Rust (from my limited exposure). The syntax is slightly changed, but most things have a direct parallel between the two languages. Although Swift doesn't do ownership/borrow checking like Rust does and is a lot more relaxed in that department.
So facebook is a news site? Or a connector of people?
> controlling the types of news their consumers get

Of course they are. They control the medium. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that "it's just an algorithm" isn't a defense. Just because a process involves calculation doesn't make the entire process free of bias or agenda.

The basic decision to use an algorithm is an opinionated decision that affects the outcome. Personal opinion influences how an algorithm was chosen or designed, how it will be applied, the selection of input data, and every other decision made during implementation.

Yes, some time may not intend to add their own bias and opinion, but it still happens. Jacob Appelbaum recently[1] discussed this problem; "Your politics are in everything that you write". The same is true for software and algorithms in general. Your politics are in everything you design. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it exists, and pretending that an an algorithm is "unbiased" or otherwise free from human influence and manipulation is foolish.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78
Another explanation: EVERY can of beans at a mass supermarket like Safeway has the same ingredients. You have to go to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods to avoid the national brands. Many people don't have that option or choose to use it.
Look up BULLRUN. That's literally what is happening.
I don't think these benchmarks are realistic. Yes, you can use UnsafePointers, but that's not the real world case. ARC, runtime generics and structs have a huge cost in real world programs.

Swift is unfortunatelly usually an order of magnitude slower then Java and C# in real world according to last benchmarks I've made. I'm hoping that will change because I really love Swift.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659676
China bans 'erotic' banana-eating live streams
well with mp3 files the meta data is in the file, it's called an id3 tag. for other files, depends on the file.
Languages don't have UIs - frameworks do. I realise it's a pedantic distinction, but it's an important one.
NSA has partnership with many other nation states. They get much more data than just the data which goes through the US.
> You can't rewind time and go back and taking away all assets gained in such a manner, while doable, would pretty much put the company out of business even if they're willing to comply.

It is a choice being made to prioritize the preservation of the company, though. Imagine a criminal justice system that prioritized the job of the criminal.
Fair enough, but there are valid reasons to object to paywalled content being posted to a news aggregator like HN other than wanting everything free. Content not available for everyone to read leads to low quality conversations dominated by complaints about the paywall. Unfortunately, people still complain even when there is a workaround. Showing partial content then asking for payment to read the rest seems like a dishonest tactic, and it kind of is.

If people don't want to pay for anything on principle, then there's not much sites can do about that either. Paywalls are a better option than advertising but sites are still probably going to lose a lot of revenue either way.