skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"an unnamed official said" or "our anonymous source told us."

'Sources' are an important part of journalism, and they are controlled.

If anyone from a respected news entity quotes such a source, then it's almost surely true.

Now - that source may be simply presenting an opinion - and not a fact - nevertheless, it's almost assuredly true.

A journo that 'makes up' sources would be fired and black-balled, and also, there is editorial oversight on that.

CNN, NYT, Fox - they don't go around inventing sources.

Now - applying 'spin' or 'narrative' or 'too much opinion' - yes, this is indeed a problem. And they can do it by selectively quoting Twitter or 'some source'.

But the 'source' itself is not a fabrication.
Here is how you do that:

$PSDefaultParameterValues["Out-File:Encoding"]="utf8"

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]
I think there's a pretty clear class of things that people are referring to as "fake news" currently.
Yes, some people conflate it with more debatable claims about bias, quality or whatever.
And yes, even the obvious or verifiable fake news might still be difficult to catch algorithmically.
But "fake news" isn't a meme. It's an observed problem.
I kind of sympathize with the author's snarky change of title, but I would have used "class prejudice" rather than "racial discrimination". The paper reminds me of Victorian "research" showing that criminals have differently shaped crania from "normal" people.

Perhaps all they're detecting is that the criminal faces are mugshots, and the subjects are stressed and unhappy. They look upset. The noncriminals are all wearing a suit and tie, and look relaxed.

I am certain that the research is spurious.
The primary value proposition of social media is that it utilizes some combination of your social graph and "the crowd" to filter and/or approve content, sending more interesting/important/relevant stuff to the top. Amazing how gushing fantasies about the power of the democratization of media seem to flip into nightmares days after the tech elite's favored candidate loses.

People shouldn't be silenced just because you disagree with them. Many disagreements come down to a different evaluation of "the facts", some element that the one side would say the other side has objectively incorrect. Both sides have the same data, but they have a different interpretation about what's an "objective fact". It is critical that we allow those discussions to play out.

Platform owners becoming the fire companies of Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian horror show. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that users MUST be allowed to choose for themselves and have free range over the marketplace of ideas.
Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire.

The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong.

Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier.

The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.
Nah, it wouldn't be that hard to jam the inbound signal, especially within cities. The sat can't really focus a beam in the way you're imagining.
Honestly, this is mostly an issue of syntax (a problem, but one that is remedied with a quick look-up table/cheat sheet).

Giving a legend explaining those symbols would turn the statement into this:

Given a function (f) that maps integers in the range 1 to n onto the same range (1 to n), for every y in that range (1 to n) there exists an x in that same range (1 to n) where applying the function (f) to an input x results in the value y.

(please correct the parts I got incorrect, it's been a while since my last discrete math class).

These symbols are important tools in discrete mathematics, but are easy to forget or get lost in due to the very high information density they achieve. Adding to the complexity, we explain the range of both inputs and outputs before defining the function. Intuitively, I feel CS folks would prefer to define the input range, the function's mode of operation, and finally the mapped output range.

This is especially complex when these discrete mathematics symbols operate upon one another. Throw in some sigmas and boolean operations, and it quickly become very difficult to parse.

The underlying intuition the author is trying to communicate is likely something that entire audience could understand. They simply weren't fluent in the "language" of mathematics. It's like being very articulate in English, and having to defend a thesis in French. Not only do you have to translate your thoughts, many idioms you may usually rely on are no longer valid in a new language.

Finally, why not define that same statement in Python or matlab? It's just as valid in my opinion.
Nonetheless drug resistant fleas are a problem, so much so that the most effective treatment for your pets varies regionally.
> Warren Buffett lent Goldman Sachs $5 BILLION on a hand-written note.

Is this actually true? I googled it but couldn't find a source.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis is that they weren't lying and they did forget it. As someone who majored in math quite successfully within the last decade, I can honestly tell you I didn't remember what ":" meant and therefore had trouble parsing the expression. I don't think I forgot intentionally or was lying.
> The article contains several real examples of fake news influencing foreign elections.

It has exactly one example that supports its thesis. That example involved several other factors and the end result of the election was not affected. Here is some coverage from the time it was happening:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0529/Indone...

The rest of the NYT article is a hodgepodge of unsubstantiated statements, hand-picked opinions, pictures and social media quotes. Or do you seriously consider a badly Photoshopped picture of someone's T-Shirt to be a "fact" that illustrates the influence of Facebook on world elections?

> Without any specific falsehoods

You seem to have missed the part where I specifically said that high-grade propaganda does not rely on outright lies.

...

Meanwhile, the title of the article in question was changed from "Fake News on Facebook? In Foreign Elections, That’s Not New" to "Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That’s Nothing New". This serves to further illustrate my point about framing.
This is like "Why Don't Mathematicians Learn to Program?"

"I had this talk where I wanted to feel superior so I showed an obtuse way to notate a simple situation"

"You can see my code I showed a room full of people who have more important things to do then to study arcane math symbols that are of no use to them:" https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...

"I mean who in the hell could call themselves a mathematician without learning how to recognize obscure abstraction principles and language features of Java, something they'll probably never need to use?!?!"

"Some of these people where even smart, I tell you! They are big people who are productive but I have no idea how you could be productive or smart without knowing how to recognize this obscure thing"

Seriously, if you pulled in a bunch of CS people and showed them this:

lambda x: x

And they didn't know what it meant, you have a point. If you pull them in and show them something they don't use often, probably will never really use, and use that as a basis of their worth then I don't feel you have a correct set of KPIs for what makes a good scientist or researcher.
I'll keep it in mind; it looks well worth a visit!

I'm also toying with the idea of getting some reenactor-grade pirate clothing: long-wearing like nobody's business, and relatively easy to care for. I've even found places that sell those leather cavalry boots with turned-down tops! For an extravagant price, of course...
Honestly, I'd be more concerned if this was built into Facebook itself. At least, in this case, it's optional. It doesn't straight up censor the content, either. It just slaps some color on the background. And if you think an entry is unfair, you can contest it -- open a ticket on GitHub. Or you can build your own version tailored to your tastes.

I'm open to suggestions for an alternate approach, of course.
So I guess Priceonomics has to prove that their predictive ability is better than their client, who one would assume is already very familiar with their target market. That is a tough sell.
I suspect if you wrote some code to solve differential equations 12 years ago, and went back to that code today, you'd understand it without much hassle. This is the failure of maths as a language IMHO.
It's sort of weird that a mathematician would confuse 'notation' for 'math'.

This is like giving an algorithms class to a mixed group of perl and Haskell programmers, using Haskell for all the examples and wondering why perl programmers don't learn computer science.
this is actually an important field that is today missing when we see the amount of data we need to digest. How to categorize internet data that emerge on internet.
This is a big challenge.
In real world you trust the source then the information that goes from the source.
If you dont have enough information on the source then you look for trusted source advise on this source, or on this info. System being built step by step.
However a source can be compromised. This trusted source can be challenged anytime by the system by adequate collegial vote of trusted sources.
There is no false or true fact without source. Someone has to see it at first stance.
What is the chance that your vote will decide the election?
That's a fair point, but the only reason this kind of thing happened is because they purchased their phone via Google from their Google Account, and the consequence, their account being disabled, is really out of proportion with the act of selling the phone to a reseller. I think it would be more fair for Google to limit the ability to purchase products in the future for people known to have done this, but significantly unfair/burdensome to disable their account as their account potentially has their entire life on it. It would be akin to the power company deciding something you did was "bad" and turning off your power, or your landlord kicking you out because of something "bad" they didn't like, regardless of your "bad" action.
That's a false equivalency. Mathematics, in practice, is more of a domain specific language that encapsulates more and more precise information as you increase the level of abstraction. The levels of abstraction layer upon one another to be able to handle more complex concepts while retaining all of the underlying precision.
Modeling statewide presidential election votes through 2028
My problem with the Execution Policy is that it's useless in practice since it doesn't actually prevent anything (so it annoys me every time). What was the motivation for adding it since it's not a real security feature? If it actually prevented executing stuff full stop it would be cool. The signed script concept is cool... I wish I could do that with Python.

Was it just to prevent accidental script execution?
How dare you. If someone wants to defend themselves they have every opportunity to do so but I (and I think the HN audience) don't appreciate being-

1. patronised about things like:
"this kind of shows you the kind of audience this is written for". How pathetic, as if there are some levels of access beyond which peons like us cannot comprehend.
and

2. Your concern trolling. Where I come from we believe in the scientific method and meritocracy. You are entitled to your opinions if you can defend them and your attempt to stifle discussion is reducing efficiency.
>east ones with a certain kind of systems background, have put a lot of work into designing abstract logical structures for human beings to use. They've learned a lot of rules about how to do this well.

This is very arrogant and wrong. The exact opposite is true. Mathematicians have worked hundreds of years and streamlined notations that can express complect things well.
They admit in the article that they picked up javascript over the weekend. I credit them for open sourcing it rather than waiting until it's perfect code, which would result in it never being released.
Would not better presentations have taken 2 to 3 hours of content and condensed down to an hour?
I did tone down the frequencies some to be more
Manageable. Even a 12 second break every 15 monutes or so does a lot. And it doesn't break the flow much at all
LOL rrrright, why don't poly-sci majors learn math?
laughs I'd never really thought about it that way, but it does seem to be a good analogy.

Google as the brilliant software developer whose only flaw is that they're completely unwilling to ever write a single-use function.
If it was just about kids in Macedonia, it'd be collapsed into Google's ordinary anti-spam techniques and it wouldn't be newsworthy. John Oliver wouldn't have dedicated the half-hour to, ironically and bizarrely, attempting to deflect the blame for Clinton's loss onto social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It is equal parts hilarious and depressing that they would expect anyone to buy that.

The American people resoundingly rejected the MSM/establishment narrative on Nov 8. The establishment responded by shouting "You kids need to get off your computers! I know what's best for you!" (even more astonishing, the world's tech conglomerates appear to agree). The meltdown here is, frankly, dumbfounding.

For the record, I'm all for shutting down plagiarized and spam sites. But the tech companies have already been doing that for years. "Fake news" is fake news.
He is not confusing notation with math.

If you don't speak the language, It indicates that you never learned the stuff that is spoken in that language. At least well enough to be fluent in it.
This feels like naivete and arrogance of the question asker. Why should a group of computer scientists understand a particular equation? What does it mean if they don't?
Data Wrangling Westworld
A year ago, a university that I never even applied to sent me a letter saying that my Social Security Number was among the data that was stolen in a hack. (They offered a year of free "monitoring" and yes, I checked to see that it was a real event and not a phishing attempt.)

Apparently a decade ago when I took the ACT, I gave the testing company my SSN. I listed this university as one to send my scores to for free. Apparently the ACT company not only gave them my scores but my SSN as well. On top of that, the university held on to my SSN for years after it was clear that I was never going to apply there.

Of course now as an adult, I know better not to give out my SSN, but many others do not. Until companies see that holding on to personal information is a liability rather than an asset, nothing is going to change.
Probably because some don't need to and don't want to spend more of their life on it.
Dense and high-level. Like programming languages. You take a group of machine operations and represent those with an operator in a programming language. You take a group of programming statements, expressions, etc and represent them with a procedure. Group some procedures together into a category (or perhaps a 'class' of items.)

Take a few lines of COBOL, compile it, and how much actual machine work does that represent? Lots. Very dense.
Oh come on. The mainstream media make up news all the time. For example, the New York Times manufactured the story of Trump mocking a reporter's disability. Then they sent in their fact checkers to validate the lie. More here: http://newslines.org/blog/lets-talk-about-fake-news/
You can purchase from a NIC for the TLD, but it's pretty difficult and you would likely still be at the whim of their TOS. It's arguably better to switch to a domain name provider as you can more easily get an SLA that makes termination difficult, and in any case switching to a reputable registrar means your domain getting "unjustly" terminated would be much less likely.
I keep seeing DD-WRT/Tomato/OpenWRT coming up in these discussions; how about an option you could actually deploy to home or business customers and be proud of it.

These days that's MikroTik/RouterBoard for me.
My reply is just one example of how long term major changes are happening in the artic, changes that can not be dismissed as short-term variances in weather.
20% of what base? Are you referring to a figure in the article?
Do you think that the people in his room didn't understand the concept of a function mapping over x coordinates whereby the height of each y component equals that of it's position on the x axis?

Or more simply put, do you think these people have never taken a math class in high school that went over

y = f(x)
Account Takeover Links Given to Trackers
I'm not sure how you know that, given that none but the most doctor ozish of climate scientists (Hansen and ilk) will claim the doomsday scenarios are likely. Even then, other climate scientists will quickly repudiate such claims. As they have.

All fields have their attention whores and serial exaggerators. They are better ignored.

Or perhaps you are referring to the opinions of advocates or true believers? Those opinions, unfortunately, saturate the media.

As with any controversial science, a reading of the contrasting opinions of phds would do you far better.
> An almost weekly occurrence is seeing people stick half their car onto the street when leaving a parking garage I drive by often, and only then stopping to watch for incoming traffic. I've parked in that garage before and I know there's plenty of visibility from the exit; it's like people don't realize there's a whole chunk of metal before the driver's seat.

This would never happen in China! Yielding? Ha! Instead the car would just plow out of the parking garage irrespective of any cars or people on the road that weren't right in front of them! Same goes for right turns and anywhere else yield might be required...the concept just doesn't exist in China's driving culture.
"Is an element of the set" "for all" "there exists".

It's automata and computational theory 201, not parody
This! Exactly this! Honestly as a CS person I might be completely biased but, I often hear this quote around the office "The hardest part of software engineering is naming things". We spend a lot of time and effort to name things in a way that a non engineer would understand. I wish people in hard sciences would do the same. I often times understand the underlying concepts described by all these Greek letters and symbols but it gets lost in translation. That is why I love efforts like https://betterexplained.com/ where math is made concrete.
Sal Soghoian says ‘ask Apple’ about future of Mac user automation
> we have youtube stars that make millions each year, and there aren't as few of them as you think

The top 0.1% of the world richest, that 7 million people, that´s a lot of people ...

Seriously you make money on youtube by having an extra-large volume of views, and that by definition is going to be a vast minority of the content on youtube.

> Just like smartphones enabled everyone with even basic programming skills to make a decent income from selling apps

Not everyone. Same thing, the vast majority of app developer don´t make any money.

Anyway, why talk about an hypothetical future, why not look at the current world. Since people are currently employed in traditional job and the competition is lower, artists must make an absolute killing, right ? Photographer, Singer, Actor, Music player, Painter, ... surely we must have noticed a massive increase in wealth in those fields and that´s the reason there are so few people going into STEM ?
> ... the traditional time to announce bad news because everyone is checked out for the weekend?

Not just the weekend. Here, anyways, in another big university town in the midwest, a lot of the students have already taken off and are heading home for Thanksgiving.

The timing truly worked out in their favor.
I must agree! (though we had less knowledge of the dangers it brought in the mid 2000s.)
+1

WebFig, GUI WinBox, and SSH/Telnet feature parity and a config I can export and read as text, fully featured boxes with gigabit for ~$50 USD, need I go on?
How do we know if the solution they chose to achieve that goal is the most efficient one? How did that notation evolve? Has it evolved at all?
What if it's just a design by committee, with decisions made in the 17th century still affecting how modern papers are written?
What if we think of the rulebook on "how to write math" as a codebase? Would it be a 3-4 centuries old codebase without any major refactorings done, ever?
I don't know if this is the classical definition of grassrooting because your HN tag mentiones you are the Co-founder & CPO of Winnie but there's also other new accounts just commenting on this story (tvnut999)
We do
I had a dream where I had the last programming job in the world - writing cobol printer drivers. Then somebody came in and put a box on my desk. "What's that?" "Its a device that can write cobol printer drivers".

I stood up, and went to the door, and opened it, and there was only a grey blankness. Then I woke up.
You're aware that many of us watched it on video, right? EDIT: Context at the time matters, and revising the intention later without regard for behavioral patterns of condescension and shaming is disingenuous.

As for fake news: if your particular vectors don't align with those of fake news readers, Facebook wont show them to you. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
As far as I know, linear algebra and discrete math are
Prerequisites for CS majors.

I didn't formally study math after grade 11. A lot of
Math anxiety is simply being too young to have enough
Knowledge or neuroconnections.

I'm 40, and while I do not understand Roger Penrose's
Books, they don't intimidate me like they would have
At age 20.
I disagree, and I've used Dvorak for 12 years.

Just using Qwerty for a few sentences feels awful. It doesn't hurt, of course, it's just a few sentences, usually on someone else's computer. But it's like using chopsticks to eat oily rice, when you're used to eating potatoes with a fork.

To everyone:

- Print this PDF: http://www.dvzine.org/type/OneSheetDVmap.pdf

- Change your keyboard layout to Dvorak

- Don't look at the keyboard, look at the printout to see where the keys are.

- Relax :)

(Qwerty: so much is one one hand. "st a few se", "lly on", "oily". Common things like "ter" and "sed" and "ard". This is the uncomfortable typing.

In Dvorak, the longest sequences on one hand in the above are "12 yea" and the "ng ch" in "using chopsticks".)
I understood it. They covered this stuff in the discrete math class I took at community college.
It's hard to look at the list of Medal of Freedom awardees and conclude this list is strictly meritocratic (these two individuals are exceptions who absolutely deserve it). There were people nominated, e.g. Jack Bogle, who have made a much more significant impact on Americans' lives than people like Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, and Frank Gehry. Even Lorne Michaels won one!

But the guy who gave up potentially billions of dollars to help the average American investor get a fair shake hasn't had enough of an impact...