skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always confused by articles bemoaning the AI and tech revolutions, written in magazines that expound new tech revolutions.

I understand Apple and the EFF are staunchly against merging products databases involving the same user's data, but for me this is an essential feature of the google ecosystem. I can ask for traffic and have directions appear on my phone while driving, play movies on the tv that i am looking at instead of my phone, audibly alert me to meetings while at home or work, and turn the lights on and off in the place that I am.

I don't think they are misleading people, the mute button pretty strongly implies the duality that you can't hear and un-hear things post-hoc. In addition they dont hide the fact that you are talking to a computer at a company by obfuscating it with some quasi-futuristically named caricature.
As is often with these article "always listening" is far more misleading, an embedded keyword processor is listening for keywords, and only if they match the phrase "ok google" are they sent to google servers. otherwise it just sits there sharing nothing.
I ended up with a book, back in the late 80s, called (I think) "C, An Advanced Introduction". To me, the K&R book was just too "circular", as the authors were too close to the subject.
Why is everyone so incredibly paranoid?
Score Hero Level 81 – 100 Season 5 Full Review
Because evolution is a local optimizer, not a global optimizer, and you can't account for all the factors an evolutionary process accounts for indirectly.

> Why do pregnant women have sex
> Why do women have sex after menopause
> Why do men stay with women who are no longer fertile

All of these are answered by the following:

A reason evolution would cause these "intentionally" is to help maintain social bonds outside of pregnancy.

A reason evolution would cause these "unintentionally" is because evolution created reward systems to encourage procreation, but never got around to disabling them when already pregnant/can no longer get pregnant.

> Why do 50 % of young people identity as bisexual in some way.

I don't believe this, but if you have a reputable source I'd love to see it.

Anyway, there are plenty of evolutionary explanations for having a population with homosexual tendencies. It could be good for social cohesiveness, or for maintaining a more effective fighting force, etc. etc. Evolution is also imperfect, so it's entirely plausible that sexual desires just get accidentally subverted sometimes. I can't imagine that it's very hard to accidentally trigger the growth of the "wrong" sexual selection hardware during development.

> Why do sperm banks have to advertise for doners

Remember that humans only have a weak desire to reproduce in the abstract sense. It was much easier for evolution to make us want sex (regardless of its outcome) and to raise children.

> Why do people adopt kids, its not their genes

Any time people have an energy-intensive social relationship that doesn't involve their immediate relatives, you have to consider the fact that in the sort of environments anatomically modern humans evolved in, if someone was in your community, they probably had very similar DNA. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to have the instinct to protect members of the community (especially children) even if they are not directly related to you. In fact, evolution went a bit overboard with this; not only do we want to protect young human children, but also anything with child-like features such as a large head or short legs. Honestly, I think puppies and kittens and the like are a lot cuter than human babies, which suggests that the human baby detector mechanism in the brain isn't particularly well-adjusted and is set up to have an extremely low false negative rate at the expense of a very high false positive rate.

So you're right, "everything I do is to carry my genes forward view" is too simplistic; in fact, you also have to take into account the fact that there is (or at least was) some correlation between social closeness and genetic similarity, so you have a huge incentive to protect your children, a big incentive to protect your siblings and their children, a moderate incentive to protect friends and their children, etc. etc. I'm told this principle has a name in evolutionary biology, but I can't remember what it is.
1. I'd be interested if they have instrumented crash dummies inside for this sort of thing. I'd imagine they'd get some whiplash, but that's a lot better than blown up.

3. Not necessarily. Their first flight had the same tower. Presumably for engineering access to it when it's stood up. https://youtu.be/rEdk-XNoZpA?t=17s
Almost all decisions are unconscious decisions. whether or not Google is involved. We usually rationalize our reasoning after the decision is made.
> On my Nexus 4, this is no longer the case as you cannot remove Google's apps and they frequently require updates

While I don't think you can properly "uninstall" Google+ and Hangouts, you can "disable" them, which makes them inaccessible. I don't think you get updates pushed for disabled apps, either.
You should post this as an answer to that question -- summarize the relevant parts, maybe throw in a few quotes, and add a citation at the bottom. It'd be a great contribution. At the very least, you should post a comment on the question with the book's title and author, so interested people can see it.
It'd be easier for them to not obfuscate and use the checker themselves prior to publishing.
That rather depends on the objectives of the AI.

If you replace "AI" with "marketing" would you still make that statement?
I wouldn't mind an artificial assistant.

I don't want a company that employs tens of thousands of people, along with a government in a foreign country, along with all the governments on the data route in between, and their employees, civil servants and assorted snoopers of all shades, to have access to the artificial assistant's communications and thoughts relating to me.

All these organisations are made out of people. People with power are inherently untrustworthy; they need enforcement mechanisms to be kept in line, and enforcement mechanisms need to be activated every now and then to stay in working order. That is, occasional abuses are required to keep abuse in line. The thin blue line wavers like a pendulum: it's how we know it's working.
Exodus: Manage Blockchain Assets
> Those doesn't require more advanced architectural skills than just knowing how to pile bricks

So building aqueducts is impressive than building a complex functional megapolis, in the bronze age, with top-notch sewer system, with millions of people? Not sure what to make of this claim. I would still love to see evidence of the 'impressive stuff' that Romans built that was way ahead of all of the world civilizations.
I'm not sure "driving force" is really accurate. The main impetus for the 1976 Act, which changed the term from 28 years with the possibility of one 28 year renewal to life + 50 was to allow the United States to join the Berne Convention. Berne required a minimum of life + 50.

The extension to life + 70, or 95 years after publication for corporate works, was in the 1998 Act. Disney did lobby for that, but the big argument for it was that was to match EU copyright terms, which went to life + 70 under the "Directive harmonising the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights" in 1993.
Please no. Disney is not the right company to be driving Netflix.
The Nexus 5 was released ‎October 31, 2013, making it almost three years old (at least it's three generations old - after 5 came 6, then 5x and 6p - now the Pixel its de facto successor).
> Money destroy everything.

That's an analogue to saying that 'tools destroy everything'. Money is just a tool, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad.

The 'old' internet is still there, underneath all the ad-driven cruft, but for some reason the majority of the people active on the net prefer those ad driven services. I'm not one of them but It's hard to ignore the fact that you - and I - are not in the majority here.

As for being able to check the source, that hasn't been true in a very very long time except for scientific publications (and even there you have to check to see who funded the study).
Dragon hasn't done an in-flight test with a firing booster, though. They're each ahead and behind the other in different ways. What SpaceX is doing is for the most part more challenging, but I don't mind some competitiveness if it gets everyone pushing for greatness.
> It is completely possible to do what they are doing by keeping everyone's individual privacy intact. And if I go by Google's ToS, that's exactly what they are doing.

Could you give examples of how that can be achieved and how the ToS goes about stating that they are doing this?
I'm not worried what the engineers who built this will know about me. I'm not worried that Google will centralize this data so if someone hacked it and could drill through the data they could find me.

I'm worried about who Google wants to sell this information to and what they want to do with it. I'm worried about Google working with intelligence agencies to try and target me politically, feed me propaganda, or put me on some list of undesirables.

We can have an ultra-smart AI that does everything for me without worrying about these things. I don't want to pay with my personal information, I want to pay with money. I want Google to stay out of my life.
See also: Envoy

https://lyft.github.io/envoy/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12497926
I'm not sure why that's a problem if they still get to be exclusive carriers of them and they enjoy great success along the way.
I tend to type too much ("I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."), so Twitter has been good for me. Twitter has value in teaching brevity.
Lens speed is not the end-all be-all of photography. The 24-105L is significantly longer and has image stabilization. Sometimes the ability to handhold with a shutter speed 2-3 stops slower trumps the ability to increase the shutter speed 1 stop.

IS lenses are generally considered better for all-around photography, particularly for subjects which do not move like landscapes. Faster lenses give you more ability to stop the action of a moving subject and a shallower depth of field (given equivalent focal length).

The 24-105L is probably the most solid general-purpose lens for a full-frame in Canon's lineup, it's silly to disregard it just because they offer a bundle with full-frame bodies.
D? You sure you can get a compiler for that on an "obscure platform"? Do the libraries you want to use work when the GC is off?
It's accurate. This book is being ripped apart by scholars across many different disciplines. It's a lovely piece of trash that makes Wolfe look as bad as this article suggests.
You should add this as a comment on the actual post, so people like me who frequent WB.SE but not HN can benefit.
Why Choose Shopify For Your Online Store
I believe it, I'm just sad that there's no option for those like me who are satisfied with the shitty 5X camera.
> It's important that while we keep in mind the ethical considerations of minorities there is also an ethical consideration of marginalized users of financial capital, who are denied credit because banks are unable to afford them a lower rate due to lacking information.

That's true. If we didn't give credit to more than a few outstanding black folks, then some poor whites could get credit cards at lower rates.

The most important thing to realize here is that DISCRIMINATION CAN WORK. If everyone agrees that redheads are no good, and everyone is extra careful about lending money to redheads and extra reluctant to hire redheads and extra-strict when deciding how to prosecute and sentence redheads, then network effects will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. A redhead will be more likely to get caught up in criminal proceedings, will be more likely to get fired (or not hired in the first place), and therefore will be more likely to default on their loans.

For the most part, society has decided that this is either a moral outrage or a case of tragedy of the commons. From the moral point of view we say it's just not ethical to discriminate against people based on race, sex, family, and such. From a purely utilitarian point of view we can say that discrimination can benefit one party at a cost born by all of society. As is usual with tragedy of the commons situations, we can repair the problem with regulation. Regardless of whether you prefer the moral approach or the utilitarian one, there is a pretty strong case to be made that it is GOOD (on a society-wide basis) to give better deals to some (those marginal whites) than others (those marginal blacks) by prohibiting the use of certain information in granting credit.
> Cathy's use of 'problematic' seems to paper over any need to actually go into an analysis of cost and benefits

Before you choose to make a tradeoff, you should know what it is that you're trading off. If anything, much stronger forces than this book are pulling in the other direction.
When IR remotes hit college campuses, the game was to shut off someone else's TV through an open door. There's even a one button remote from that era that shuts off any TV in sight [0]. Voice control is like IR on steroids.

Guest at house party: "Ok google, show naked pictures of [host's ex-girlfriend]"

[0] https://www.tvbgone.com
> So wean yourself off the arrow keys, by the simple expedient of disabling them entirely...

I thought the opposite was proposed by the community - avoid hjkl and I've felt the same way...
I've been using vim for... 5 years? I initially forced myself to learn it (after being aware of vim and its learning curve) so I could work with a text editor that would be available on pretty much any linux server I might ssh into.

After about a year of mostly forcing myself to learn it, I started using it as my main text editor. At this point, I have a standard vimrc and plugins that I install on every new machine, including windows. Vim is my default text editor of choice.

Some of the benefits:

- Introduced me to the concept of not using your mouse and how much this increases the speed you can work. Introduced me to hjkl as movement keys (which at first glance was not obvious to me).

- Lots of commands to move around quickly. Lots of customization options for the constant tweakers in us. Core focus on changing text in as few keystrokes as possible.

- Lots of plugins to do all that cool "Oh, it would be cool if it did this." The "missing" features, like code completion or file system navigation, are available via plugins.

- The interface is very fast and pleasurable to use once you have familiarity with its incantations (which actually aren't so bad once you learn the basics).

I have no strong opinion of emacs, but it strikes me as similar in experience (if not implementation) to vim. I used sublime text for a while and liked it, although I kind of just ended up sticking with vim. It is funny how much programmers get into text editors, although they're important tools for the profession, so tradesmen obsessing over the tools they use probably isn't so new.
My issue with Twitter is people need to learn how to take things into their own hands - even if it means at their own expense. Realistically, this is impractical for most people, especially the technically illiterate or those too poor to pay for hosting (even if it is only for personal use, instead of being open to a public)

Twitter will never realistically be a utility. But there can be an open and distributed replacement for it that will meet the same goals, with fewer corporate restrictions and a more fractured government intervention.

GNUSocial is a great replacement for Twitter. With multiple hosts, your data is yours, you can move data between hosts and you can even choose to host it for yourself to control your own data.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social
I think this case is slightly more complicated because the demographics of marginalized credit-seekers tend to be minorities. So by catering to minority groups by keeping their ethnic or racial information private, we may hurt minority groups financially. In some of the situations you mention, we force ethical standards on businesses, but ideally they don't hurt other minority groups in the process.

In this situation, the question is between whether ensuring privacy is more ethical than ensuring access to capital - and this is almost entirely focused at minority groups. If we assume that banks can make more efficient and competitive lending transactions given more demographic information, then denying that information raises the ceiling on financial capital for those marginalized groups.

As of now, I don't have a definitive answer. Although I think it would be beneficial to examine how certain data impacts credit-lending and move from there. A lot of these concerns may be moot if the information in question isn't even relevant to credit lending.
Introducing Public Status Pages
That is the whole point of Intelligent Agents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent

Perhaps using Urbit as the network architecture since it already has pki. As Yarvin calls it, true 'personal cloud computation'.

Really it's the only sane way to live in the 21st century.
How do you propose to prevent spam and abuse of this open federated chat network?
$540m Pentagon false propaganda campaign in Iraq
Well after 5 years of using Vim, the muscle memory for more efficient operations never kicked in. I was either holding "h" and "l" to move around, or I was consciously thinking of the more efficient combined operations like "f.ce.com^[". And that conscious thinking was very distracting from the actual code I was editing.
>are keeping secrets from each other

We tried a "lets stop competition and just have the government run everything with everyone sharing everything." It was called Communism and was responsible for the deaths of 100m people, set up some of the worst regimes history has ever seen, had unparalleled human rights disasters, and people today are still paying the price of such mistakes in a variety of ways. If you think approaches like these work, then I suspect you have an overly-idealized view of human nature.

Trade secrets aren't that common. Most of what these companies do are taught at college. Implementation differences, marketing/advertising, finding new and different markets, etc matter. Innovation quickly spreads by its nature. Having different companies with different management styles and no company, ideally, being 'too big to fail' is a social benefit, not a liability. The tedium of reinventing the wheel is a small price to pay here, especially when you consider how quickly/cheaply this tedium is tackled in practice.

>Haven't you heard about open source?

FOSS has failed to take over many important markets. It is full of boneheaded decisions and PHB-type antics as well as teenage-level drama, forks, and angry fanboyism. Heck, a lot of open source 'successes' are only such because a proprietary commercial entity took an open codebase and layered closed and proprietary layers on top of it (OSX, Android, Safari, etc). Its not a fix-all for the human endeavor. Competitive approaches make sense and have been proved to be effective over and over to the point where this isn't even arguable. Imagine if someone told Elon that he should just get a job at NASA instead of trying to start his own company. If you heard that I imagine you'd be singing a different tune. Why the double standard with Boeing then?

I think a lot of young people are fed this kind of far-lefty politics from a young age to be anti-corporate anti-US and anti-competition without ever being exposed to the positive aspects of those things. I think if you grew up reading Chomsky/Zinn/Trotsky/Marx, you're doing yourself a disservice on how well capitalism works and the benefits of the US-led capitalistic experiment we're all part of that has been paying dividends for two hundred plus years and continues to with ex-communist nations doing nothing but copying our system as best they can. Even 'Socialist' nations are little more than capitalist democracies with token social welfare spending via taxation.

I wouldn't bury competition as outdated just yet. Those who have in history have themselves been buried.
l-o-l
This is tailor-made for Reddit's /r/oddlysatisfying.

I've never really had any desire or reason to have anything 3D-printed, but I would absolutely print a collection of these to have on my desk as conversation pieces and fidget-toys. The "lock" pieces could be printed a bit longer than the original designs call for to facilitate removal.
Siri supports a limited version of this today. "Siri, get me a ride" will show which ride apps are available (say, Uber, Lyft and Curb, if you have those installed)

It's interesting you assume that Google will route you to the lowest bidder. When I search for "New toilet paper" on Google right now, the top 6 results are advertisements. Why would they want to anger their customers and allow you ignore them?
The reaction to this seems awkwardly negative when contrasted with the praise that gushed for Amazon's Alexa products. I am having a hard time tracking why folks seem to feel so differently about google and Amazon having similar access to personal information.
Google is an advertising company, but is it also a product company?

Is Apple also an advertising company?

How about the local minor league hockey team? Are they an advertising company?
There's a great anecdote in Victor Klemperer's diary of life as a Jew in Nazi Germany. He was a longtime subscriber to a cat magazine. In 1932 his cat magazine was all about cats. By 1935 it couldn't shut up about the virtues of the "German Cat."

Not that our society is Nazi -- it's pretty much the opposite. Nonetheless, the feeling of everything becoming poisoned by politics is inescapable. If you prefer you can go over to Breitbart and read about how Twitter is a mess because it doesn't respect free speech and banned Milo. Somehow I don't think this will leave you feeling any better.
This location history is really bad though. I added a test gmail account to my device a few weeks ago, but didn't remember location tracking was a per-account setting - now Google has nice big logs to hand whoever wants them and I can only delete them on a day-by-day basis (from the Android app at least).

Extremely annoying. This sort of thing should not be acceptable, an honest mistake results in every place I've been being logged in such a way that anyone with access to my Google account, access to Google servers or with a subpoena can have my full location history in a matter of seconds.

This needs to be a big red option every time you add an account "we're gonna log everywhere you go and hand it over to whoever we feel like, you cool with that?". It'd be different if the log and analysis were done only on my device, but doing this on Google's servers is completely unacceptable by anyone with even the weakest standards of privacy.
The iPhone looks way chunkier and chintzier