skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, I know that. The point of the new effort is trying to cure diseases. That's a completely different type of effort. Getting people together to travel to different parts of the world to make sure people are vaccinated, for example, requires a different group of people than scientists researching cures for diseases.

Both groups are needed, of course. But you giving the example of "curing" polio as an example of what the Chan Zuckerberg foundation is trying to accomplish is inaccurate.
Feeling so privileged right now; what a great time to be alive and see such visionary leadership. Thank you Mark, Priscilla, Bill, and the thousands of people whose names I don't know who work tirelessly on these problems.
How many people on your Facebook friends list, or more specifically who show up on your feed have you not talked to in over a year? In over 5 years?

For me I would say 90% of people on my feed I have not spoken with in over a year or two. Some not for 5 years, some not for 10 years.

So the question is, is it really worth my time to read updates on their life when neither of us can be bothered nor have reason to actually talk to each other? Be it in person, or over the phone, or a personal e-mail.

I think for many people, they spend way too much time reading about other people's lives. People who they no longer see or interact with in any way outside of Facebook.

The other ill effect is that most people only tend to post positive things on Facebook. If you don't talk with them outside of Facebook you are getting a one sided view of their life. Everything may seem perfect. They love their job. They keep going on interesting vacations. Getting nice things. Going out to eat etc.. And it can make you depressed that your own life isn't as fun or interesting. The truth is they likely have just as many bad days and hardships as you, but don't publicize that information. A one sided view can cause jealousy and resentment. If Facebook is your only window in their life, you probably shouldn't be concerning yourself with what these people are doing.
I'm familar with it from Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and Joyce and Michael Heusemann, who address it specifically and at length in their book Techno-Fix. Also in Marshall McLuhan (of whom Postman was a student).

I think you'll find a philosophical basis in Jaques Ellul among others (Foucalt is also mentioned).

From Postman:

[E]very technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.

French philosopher Jacques Ellul, who...

...cautions that technology brings with it a great number of unforeseen effects [4]. This is because “technology leads a double life, one which conforms to the intentions of designers and interests of power and another which contradicts them—proceeding behind the backs of their architects to yield unintended consequences and unintended possibilities” [5]. It is difficult then for us to control what we cannot always see.

http://www.helwyssocietyforum.com/?p=1360

There's a related concept of Technological Determinism, originating with Thorstein Veblen:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism

More reading:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology-wont...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/four-arguments-for-the-elimina...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/technopoly-the-surrender-of-cu...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/this-is-marshall-mcluhan-the-m...
Well, it depends. Manufacturing might be a profit center if your business is being a manufacturer.
If we're going with the alcoholic analogy, alcoholism very clearly has a genetic component, so some people are predisposed to it. I don't think it's far fetched to hypothesize that technology addiction might be genetic as well, with the key difference being that using technology is basically compulsory while using alcohol is not.

Sounds like you're just saying "deal with it" because you don't personally struggle with it.
Inciting violence is the objectionable bit; it's not about how many people were insulted.
I've found that a lot of people here in HN and Reddit are really passionate about not being tracked, so even if it was as easy as one command, the fact that Homebrew did it at all is enough to make some people not want to use it.

Nothing wrong with that viewpoint, but I just disabled it and moved on to enjoying pretty good software.
False. There was already internal encrypted traffic and the revelations only sped up the migration for the rest.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-en...
I guess telling all women to be sluts and procreate against their own desires is acceptable, but only forced sterilization is bad. We live in interesting TIMES…
This is absolutely inane. Do you think that the FE/PE only focuses on things that you do every day?

It's to give the world hard proof that you actually UNDERSTAND what is happening and allows you to actually accept responsibility to create things that may actually affect peoples lives. Sure its useless if all you do is work on a react/angular app, but not all software is your standard CRUD app.
They aren't duplicate efforts. You keep missing that point.
"The Nordic Theory of Everything" is indeed a very interesting book. A view of American society from the outside looking in.
Why 'there's a chatbot for that' is now a thing
The cheapest McLaren is about 150% of the price of the most expensive expensive Tesla. McLaren competes with companies like Ferrari and Lamborghini not Tesla.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn't trust a low-level support engineer as a source for official company policy.
To be honest, he did not suggest to sterilize them. So his statement might be technically correct (the best kind of correct). E.g. it might actually be true.
> There is literally nothing on that article about how many lives their initiative saved.

Well it's impossible to know exactly, but with statistics we can estimate that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has saved millions of lives. 7 million is the current estimate for just the vaccination program:

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/infographic-...
Google.es doesn't seem to work that well, in certain circumstances. I often write in Portuguese and when I do searches with words in that language, the results come up almost entirely in Spanish (even when placing the phrase in quotes).

Given, they're "similar" languages, but I would think Google would recognize "não" (no), for example, as belonging to the Portuguese language (especially since it's the only language that uses that word).
The Government gives incentives for charity donations via tax benefits.
Privacy violations and user tracking should always be opt-in not opt-out. If nobody opts in, one should rationalize why users may not want to be tracked or have their privacy violated and question whether making it opt-out is a good decision and respectful of their users.
> Please don't take it as an insult, but how do you know this technology is not causing similar issues in your life?

That's something I think a lot about. For me, the evidence that technology is not having that effect on my life:

1. At least once a year, I go on a hike of at least 1 week (without a phone). I'm consistently able to do this without feeling any sort of withdrawal.

2. I try to read a book on my Kindle for an hour every day. [0]

3. Whenever I fly, I never purchase wifi. If I'm able to consistently go 9-12 hours without any internet access, just reading or napping, it hardly seems like I'm addicted.

4. When I'm around other people, focus on them. If I go out to dinner with someone, I sit and talk to them instead of playing on my phone. It honestly boggles my mind that people think it's acceptable to stare at your phone while talking to someone.

[0] The fixation on "printed" books really is ludicrous. Reading on the Kindle is no more or less distracting than reading a printed book. It's essentially an offline experience.
Ex-Highbridge PM talking about Long/Short Market-Neutral strategies
My guess is the commenter's use of the word "unsafe" in reference to the antibacterial compounds. I don't believe they have been proven unsafe, rather that they have not been proven safe. There's a difference, and "unsafe" borders on misinformation which often merits downvotes on HN.

Edit: Think of the difference between "lack of safety" and "lack of proof of safety".
Battle of the Data Science Venn Diagrams
>>
In response to an article that quotes the United States House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, criticizing her Republican counterparts for agreeing to pay for the legal defense of a federal ban on gay marriage:
“This is so much political correctness. The family, men plus women = children is the basis of society. Scientific facts are not altered by political correctness and neither is the law and design of man by God. Two men can create a relationship, but not a child. This is not marriage. This is sodomy. Check out Sodom & Gomorrrah if you would like God’s opinion about it. A lie is not the truth. Stop it Obama.”
<<

You should reject because it shouldn't be about Obama.
Academic spinoffs in biotech, by contrast, are almost universally disappointing.
Wow really? I have the opposite opinion: easy and safe (for reddit's hive mind / what is currently popular / anti-popular) rise to the top, things people disagree with get downvoted.

The effect lessens the further you get from the front page, but the formula is the same.

NB: this is not true for some of their highly moderated subreddits like AskScience / AskHistorians or whatever. The rest of reddit does not operate that way though.
And, here we see the problem with the whole system. None of these comments truly adds to the discussion, they are all aggressive, insulting, and biased. Yet it's difficult to achieve a level of moderation that doesn't seem overzealous without allowing some of this garbage into the conversation.
Also, Polio was near extinction before Gates jumped in and collected the ovations for finishing job.

http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourworl...

That's great what they've done, but saying they've eradicated polio is brutal exaggeration.
I understand the issues with comments but I feel publishers are making a mistake. NPR recently said their comments are non-​representative of their total listeners and are annoying to users and take time to moderate, so… they’ll remove them and let you comment on Twitter, Facebook, etc. But are people talking on Twitter, Facebook, etc always making delightfully erudite comments on shows? Are social media posters representative of all NPR listeners? Hell no. So publishers make this decision to send the user base and activity to other internet platforms, then they complain that all their traffic is being captured by and funneled through social media…

Maybe publishers should start competing head-​to-​head with internet platforms: going for network effects, monthly active users, making recommendation and personalization systems, that kinda thing. Not going “oh, some people don’t like reading our comments, so we deleted our user activity system.” At least the NYT is making an effort keep the comments in place and use tech to help with moderation.
It would be great to be able to have debates over Trump's policy positions, but until that becomes possible, one has to simply guess at motivations of supporters.
You'd really rather have a cheaper MS Office than eradicate polio from the world?
Standard culture of outrage before actually taking more than 5 seconds to think about something and consider other possibilities.
Google something (often results in reading unrelated articles, "link dives", etc.) <=====> Cache miss (?)
And you can do `brew cask install postgres`.
Sex does the opposite for me - it wakes me up.
Most people, myself included, never even heard about this before this point, because it's never mentioned as part of the installation or usage process and is opt-out—if you know it exists and that you might want to opt out in the first place.
Remember if you work in finance you will most likely live in NYC or London which are not cheap.
If the people are explaining politely why Trump is a bigot and why they support Hillary, what's the problem? Just because people having a discussion don't share your viewpoints doesn't make the discussion less valid.
"You can partake in moderation in a limited fashion"

Didn't/Doesn't Slashdot do this?
It really doesn't work though. Maybe it works for the Pokémon Go subreddit or whatever, but the hive mind is out of control on issues where there are multiple sides. Even sports subreddits suffer from it, and those are hardly that serious.

I love reddit, but I don't think a lot of upvotes indicates "truly great".
this is exactly the reason i got rid of fb also. i found myself stalking people online, trying to initiate probably-unwanted communications, something bizarre and creepy that i certainly do not do in real life. it just becomes easy and abstract on social media.
> In your analogy the Supreme Court would be the mother saying they may not.

That assumes that the Supreme Court will judge according to the Constitution, which I think isn't borne out by case history.

It was the Supreme Court which said a black man couldn't be a citizen; that wheat grown in one state and fed to cattle in the same state is involved in interstate commerce; that the death penalty referred to in the Constitution is unconstitutional; that taking property for private gain is a public taking; and on, and on, and on.
No, the NYT is going to use Google Jigsaw in an attempt to improve their comment moderation.
Well, it's not a contest. Whether or not your moderation agrees with theirs, the explanation tells you about their standards for moderation. I think it's a pretty cool demo.

Kind of reminded me of Slashdot's meta-moderation (no idea if that's even still a thing), I wonder if they're analyzing the response to see if their readers' intuitions agree with their policy.
So when is Dropbox going to allow users to encrypt files client-side before getting synced to its servers? It should be relatively trivial from both a technical point of view and a UX one.
As a side note, Ansible users might be interested in the roles I've been putting together for a bunch of the apps I regularly use [1].

You can kinda use homebrew-bundle in place of some of this stuff, but even then there's random installs that need extra configuration or general mucking about with that homebrew-bundle doesn't give a good way to encapsulate (for example, see the duckdns-updater repo and the template it uses [2]).

[1]: http://galaxy.ansible.com/icopp/
[2]: https://github.com/icopp/ansible-duckdns-updater
the "switching on error types" he describes looks like the moral equivalent of exception handling in other languages, but without the ability to rethrow.
I agree with both the parent and this comment; this is why when i read "Software Engineer" i don't consider it to fit in the same bucket as any other "Engineer" in general.

As a "guy who writes code" - call me whatever you want, i could probably give myself a fancy title and get away with it, but I am one of the very successful (When compared to the 99%) people who didn't finish school but managed to get by in the tech industry very comfortably. Life is already great, perhaps I just don't deserve to get everything my way.
FWIW, the comment got 9 upvotes and 2 unconstructive answers: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/world/asia/china-marriage-...
Why should someone not consider the reply from a lenovo rep as legitimate (although absurd)? There was a problem and lenovo said that the problem was because of the signature edition windows. Your comment about requiring more evidence is valid but rebuttal requires some time, and here we have it. I doubt lenovo would have cared about it had it not hit media. Note that the problem is still not solved. You cannot install linux on that machine.
I'd like to second this, while also noting that a side-effect of this noodling-with-languages is that my fully English OS and browser is getting a page with some content (full paragraphs!) in Dutch, while other content is in English. On the same page. An interesting bug, but not one that inspires confidence.
So since my bachelors degree is 'Bachelors of Science in Computer Science: Software Engineering', I shouldn't be able to call myself a software engineer?
> Sounds like you're just saying "deal with it" because you don't personally struggle with it.

Sorry if it came off that way. Like I said, I don't doubt that some people might be addicted to it.

I absolutely think they should pursue the remedies they need for themselves, whether that's quitting social media or pursuing a meditation practice. I have friends who quit Facebook and I don't hold it against them (though I do recognize it makes keeping in touch a lot harder).

My problem is that he can't seem to recognize that this addiction might not be universal, just like alcoholics shouldn't force prohibition on the rest of us. (In fact, he literally calls for "restaurants where smartphones must be surrendered upon entering.")
Remember that d99? Getting a 1-95 are the places he describes. Congrats on making a good roll but this is still very relevant advice.
We used waterwipes as well but ended up switching at the time. I don't remember exactly the cause, but the fruit juice (I think it is grape or rapeseed extract) had some problems and was linked to some health problems. I honestly don't remember what it was (been a while) but give it a google, it may have been overblown at the time, or maybe not.

We still use very basic ones but don't really remember the brand, but if you are interested I can ping my wife tomorrow about it.
Specifically, if you took the top 10k passwords from this blog post as a starting point you would be able to crack "password123" in under a minute.
Not so much, imo:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/53sqkv/protests_e...
MULTI-VIEW STEREO 3D MAPPING CHallENGE
I am familiar with pretty much everything related to Alan Kay (in fact, he was an advisor to OpenAI, where I had a brief contracting stint). :)

I like the form factor of many NUCs but would be willing to go even bigger (maybe up to the size of a tactical suitcase, something like this but with user-friendly design: http://www.governmentvideo.com/Portals/0/IMT%20Suitcase%20Re...).

I am the least qualified person to comment on security, but I'll give my viewpoint for what it is worth:
For me, there are two types of security: passive and reactive. Passive being that secure measures are in place to prevent foul-doing. Reactive being that threats are identified as they are created and appropriately eliminated. In the real world, our law system is passive and reactive. We are allowed to buy guns (but only by going through a passive security process [1]), but (severe) punishment is issued for misusing them (reactive security). In a way, reactive security functions as passive security - i.e. people do not steal because they are afraid of going to jail.

I believe in a little bit of both. I do not like security that obstructs users from doing what they want to do, especially if there are ways to circumnavigate that security anyway. A large problem I see in the software world is that we are too afraid to enforce security reactively, or the laws are simply not in place to be able to effectively do it.

([1] unless via a blackmarket/etc)
Use Mirroring to Connect with Others
Safari 10 for El Capitan was released yesterday as well.
> HN political discussions, which overwhelming praise Hilary Clinton

I'd really like to know how HN has implemented the feature which occasionally allows posts from readers of instances of HN in alternate universes to be shown on the instance of HN in our universe.
>Somehow, the people I meet who can't find a job are those who are looking
This is a pretty clear example of a biased sample. If someone can find a job easily, then you won't spend much time looking for one. "Don't look for a job" is terrible advice for people who don't have jobs. Also, if you can't think of a good reason for a causation link you should really consider that maybe it is due to a confounding variable (there is no direct causation link).
This is great. Great achievements as a startup founder and now philanthropy.

For those comparing this to pharma companies. Pharma companies invest in drugs that they can make money with. It sounds as though this $3 billion is aiming at more general research and making it publicly available.
I would suggest a three part method to success.

First, know what you do know and don't chase after everything you don't know. If you are good at php, use it. If you understand rails, use it. If you are a master of all things RDBMS, use one. When you are looking to tackle a problem, don't look for a new technology, language, or paradigm to solve the problem. Use what you already know, and solve the problem.

Second, solve the problem. Also, don't pick a technology and then try to shoe horn that into the solution. In other words, when you have a new project, or an existing project that needs improvement, don't say, "Well I am going to need a, b, c, and d because every good project needs those!" Instead say, "What is the problem I am trying to solve? How do I define the problem? What value am I bringing?" Then find technologies and solutions to fit into the answers to those questions.

Finally, learn new things incrementally. For example, maybe you are working on a web project and need a good mobile first css framework (due to the answers you received from the questions in the second part above). You always use Bootstrap. You add bootstrap into the project (because you know bootstrap, see the first part above). You've never used Sass but you'd like to add that. This might be the right time to add it to your skill set and this project. Notice how you didn't add a whole new css framework, a whole new application framework, a whole new language, a new server technology, a new javascript framework... you added one new thing incrementally. You can do that as often as it makes sense. But never more often.
The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
True, but that takes a heck of a lot more effort than berating a CEO for 30 minutes straight.
The question is not which messenger is better but how to get users to move away from What's app.
Then they'll just eliminate QA departments. If the guy doesn't produce perfect code, oh well, he's the liable one. Fire him and get someone else. The business takes on literally zero risk by employing the developer in this case.

If you want to treat us like doctors and lawyers, you'd better give us their salary, benefits, and social status after we put in 4-8 years becoming qualified to meet this new threshold. Of course that's not going to happen, so guess who benefits by switching the industry to professional licenses?
> Why do we constantly get blog posts discussing ridiculous semantics like this?

Because many people (especially early in their careers) don't understand that. I didn't. I was hired to program, so I'd program, but I had no idea what the connection was between my work and people sending the company money.
They do have a quite strong record of abuse. It will take them another generation to shake that, at least.

You knew that when you chose that particular ecosystem. (Why else would you defend them here?)
Of course a lot of software is much more complicated than simple CRUD apps. I don't touch them because it would be irresponsible for me to do so.

But there's no clear line where an app stops being CRUD and starts being something more, so there's no clear line where you stop needing a CRUD programmer and start needing a software engineer.

There are some that clearly need certification, and often that is an explicit requirement of the job.

Just don't get too hung up on the job title. Managers want to believe their software is so complicated that they need a software engineer to build it. I'm happy to go along with their delusions if they pay me.