skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Media and information systems fundamentally change societies and their power structures and dynamics. They always have. They always will. Often the changes, or at least the immediate periods of change, are highly disruptive, often painful or deadly, sometimes to tens of millions. The dream of uniting humanity through better communications is at best exceedingly incomplete.

That idea occurred to me a few months ago. I've been researching it in some depth, and like most good ideas, I'm hardly the first to stumble accross it. In recent memory, Elizabeth Eisenstein has pursued the idea to a greater extent than nearly anyone else, in particular in her 1980 book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Review here (full text available via https://sci-hub.cc):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779560?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

I'm aware of a number of those transitions, and there's good evidence for nearly all of the corresponding changes.

1. Speach and language itself: increased intra- and inter-tribal communications. Strong evidence of rapidly advancing toolmaking, including stone tools, and weapons.

2. Writing. Co-incident with the start of civilisation itself, cities, and agriculture. Spread like wildfire from regions in which it first developed over a period of a few centuries for the most part.

3. Printing. Moveable type, in Europe, corresponded with thhe Reformation, schism of the Catholic Church, and a continent-wide 30 Years War.

4. Incremental improvements in literacy, papermaking, and printing: the American and French revolutions.

5. Steam-powered, iron-framed prresses, greatly increased literacy, and much cheaper paper: the Revolutions of 1848, in which 50 nations in Europe and Latin America experienced revolutionary uprisings.

6. Mass media, especially radio, public address systems, cinema, audio tape recording, grammaphone, and ever cheaper and faster presses: the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, demagogues in the United States (Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy).

7. In the 1950s - 2010s, mass social movements piggy-backing on radio, mobile PA systems (bullhorns), mass music, television, CB radio, call-in radio, telephones, mimeographs, Xerox machines, Fanzines, dial-up, broadband, and mobile Internet, Web-based apps, social media.

Profiling, targeted messaging, and other elements operate similarly.

The overall dynamics are complex, and I've omitted other elements, but the overall concept seems quite strong. Many authors have commented on elements of this, though few look to the darker side. Le Bon, Mackay, Bernays, McLuhan, Chomsky, Mander, Shirky, and boyd are among those who have.
A list of the human tasks artificial intelligence has mastered
> As a side note, does anyone else thinks that this specific photo in article about manipulation was used to manipulate my emotions and invoke negative view of the other side?

Yes, he's either got a crazy face or "laughing all the way to the bank" face. They used fairly "stock" photos of Mercer and perhaps Banon, but Trump has a look of confusion and Farage looks mental. For the record I'm neither pro Trump or pro Brexit. I wish both sides wouldn't participate in behaviors like this.

I wonder how long until your browser or an addon can get the gist of the article's subjects compare with image recognition the facial expressions and let you know if there might be some editorial bias. Just something to put in your subconscious before the editor/author works on your subconscious
Do you subscribe to the AES journal? This explains why 16-bits isn't enough:

http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20170226/18046.pdf
Steve Bannon (the Breitbart News figurehead) is on Cambridge Analytica's board. Yes, that Steve Bannon, chief strategist for President Trump: a guy who – completely coincidentally – has already started his campaign for 2020.

Big data, microtargeting, and social graph analysis are being used to manipulate the electorate.
Robert Mercer and daughter Rebekah. Excellent WashPo coverage:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-trump-megadonor-...
Show HN: Using Google Face API to “Trumpify” Your Selfies in Realtime
Do you remember when Medium was tanking? I do, in fact it's happening right now.
No they don't have a fiduciary duty to negotiate with everyone. Founders routinely arbitrarily decide certain VCs are not the right fit (basically, they don't like them).
where's the source ? can't find it
Well, inequality is a major theme, because pretty much everything is explained by energy potentials and gradients.

The inequality is partially cultural, e.g. when children don't even learn to read, which counts for some US city as well. Hence, criminal risk assessment seems rather informed by tradition and a myopic outlook (quite literally). So I agree that they "feel" it's worth the risk. On top of that, any local variance in potential will be deceived and abused. The problem then is that informing the deceived and stopping the abuse is hindered by exactly this lack of consciousness. Of course that's an issue of trust.

Error margins are huge either way, when the potential profit seems high and alternatives very low. "Nothing to lose" implies a zero division, resulting in an arbitrary decisions. So at least we can probably assume that for every criminal effort there are as many good intentions on the other side of the equation. Only if you look at people as numbers it's purely economical.

On the other hand, culturally, there are a lot of parallels to developed countries, too, e.g. in business culture. Then the overall difference is rather economic, which the developed countries profit from, thus increasing the differeyial. The US ie. is a more important market than the home countries for the drug cartels, or the weapons being produced in the developed countries).

Education is cultural and economic. It's hindered by poverty and stands counter to crime. Now, the education and the systems devised to control it are a different topic.
Another point is that the election of Trump, Brexit and Breitbart News are linked by common corporate interests.
The big difference that I have seen is after I started trying to work on things that made me happy. I have a list where I keep a track of things/thoughts/feelings that have really moved me, made me feel motivated and inspired and so on. There is also a list of all the things that have the opposite effect. I try and make sure that my short and long term plans are aligned with the positive stuff and at the same time eliminate the negatives. Going back to the list has been a constant source of motivation.
Reading Hacker News while people are dying.

Close this page, you heartless bastard. Go save African children* NOW!

* Or whatever the current trendy humanitarian tragedy is, I can't keep track.
intelligence and mathematial ability can't be taught very well
Friends in London finance said that for them, most business was done over Yahoo Messenger. Crazy world!
Ask HN: Building an MVP with a RAM-only database – a good idea?
I am starting to develop an MVP, and since %99 of MVPs are destined to fail, I have decided NOT to spend a lot of time thinking of the db layer, at least initially.
I already made a few MVPs in the past, and every time I had to spend a lot of energy and time on DB issues, only to have the MVP (and all the work that came with it) fail .

So I am thinking of starting with a RAM only db and only if the MVP reaches more than X users, I will actually start thinking about a real, physically independent, secure and reliable db .

I can 'get away' with a RAM-only db by creating a json txt file db that will be loaded upon runtime and will be backup-up on an interval basis (eg: every 1 min the RAM db will be saved into the json txt file).

To summarize:
pros: Extremely fast development of an MVP
cons: Not sustainable, not scalable at all, only fits for the initial stage of the startup .

Any thoughts ? experiences ? life lessons ?

ANY info will be appreciated .
Computer games, and the stock market, initially look pointless.

Games are, as the article puts it, frivolous toys, and the second-by-second stock market is a zero sum game casino. (Buying stocks is emphatically not investing in a company, except tangentially. It is principally a speculation on the price of an asset, and no money actually goes to the company when you buy stock through a broker).

In fact, they both do have some economic outputs, although their value is quite hard to measure:

Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know. But we're spending all those quants' brains finding it.
a lot of rich people in brazil drive cheap/lower end cars because carjacking and literal highway robberies are a huge problem.
Point of clarification: Bloomberg does not require special hardware to use, though they do offer special hardware that integrates well with the software. At the time I left finance, I used a regular off-the-shelf PC with Dell monitors and a Das Keyboard, and it ran all the software I used on a daily basis (Bloomberg, Office, etc.).
> I wanted a leadership position at my company, but I was hired for a position that has no decision making power at all.

If you were hired then I'd say it isn't your company. A way forward may be to start your own company. Build your own enterprise instead of someone else's.

> Everyone here seems dumb and working on a few useless things.

I don't think that attitude shows leadership potential.
I wonder if it works well with pedestrian crossing the road in unusual locations or bikes in the traffic
You have a strange idea of how law works. In sufficiently high-profile cases you might be right. In general, no way. And that's ignoring that in criminal cases the court cannot even do that, under any circumstances.

And of course, people cheat. Asking the defendant to show this material enables them to cheat. Where do people get this attitude that courts are either capable, or even interested in being the final arbiter of truth in society ? They are not, they have no interest in doing so. They exist to keep the peace, and to keep situations from spiraling out of control. They only enforce the law in a very limited fashion, and this whole absolutist faith in the justice system that so many people have is a fantasy.

People do cheat in court. For two reasons :

1) hubris. Usually, if a case ends up in court it indicates there is more than a bit of ego involved on the defendant's side.

2) the punishments for lying to the court (esp. if it's manipulation along the lines of "we have 5 versions of the requested material, and yes we picked the least bad one), are far less than people think.

> How is this different than any other protected-access evidence material?

The complainant always, always, always, always brings the material and shows it to the court and the defendant.

So it's very different, and very unlikely to work at all otherwise.
Other than being open source and multi platform - how does Cerebro compare to Alfred?

*https://www.alfredapp.com/
What's it like compared to Spotlight on OSX?
> Are you honestly suggesting there is anything other than education preventing them from it?

Yes. The aptitude of higher abstract thinking varies greatly among different people and groups.

If you are really curious, check out the IQ test about pulling info from a sports column.

After that, your question becomes similar to asking why every short person can't be taught/trained to do well on a professional basketball team.
MacOS, and Linux, and Windows? Let me guess: it's some web-electron-app-native-things, right?

Yes it is.

Not gonna replace (native) Alfred for me, no.
Simulation based optimisation
From the HN guidelines:

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
Note also the image used to depict Leave voters: young men waving flags and wearing waistcoats. Despite the fact that Leave gets a big chunk of its support from everywhere that isn't London and Leave was more popular with the old than the young, they chose to illustrate it like that because they know it'll cause Guardian readers to puke a little.

You can see that sort of thing everywhere, subtle manipulation through image choice. Here's another example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/06/brussels-punishin...

That article is supposedly about Brexit and Marine Le Pen, but the image chosen for the top of the article claims to be a picture of a Russian journalist (holding up pictures of Trump, Le Pen and Putin). In fact she's not a journalist at all, her name is Maria Katasonova and she is an obscure candidate for a far-right Russian political party. I can only assume the point of doing this is to try and plant the subconscious message that Russian journalism is unreliable.
Pondering nihilism while people are dying.
Interesting read on Bloomberg vs Symphony (through an EU policy lens, but has a lot of details about BBG business model I hadn't read elsewhere) http://www.politico.eu/article/bloomberg-vs-the-banks/
If you are willing to go that far, why not "mandate" no robots?
Those sites already fail for Firefox users though, right? Just randomly, depending on what other sites they've visited first.
This is the second article I've read on this firm. Neither provides proof their means are effective. The only claims made about effectiveness are made by the firm itself. So of course, as a for profit venture, it's going to say it's worth the money. Of course.

As for the rest of the article and the graph of influence. I wish some SC wiz kid would build a "revenue Big Brother" DB so we can see and track all these often nefarious connections. We have video games out the ass but no way of knowing and seeing a graph of relationshios that for all practical purposes paints a picture of corruption. When will we finally get something that useful?
He is having an existential crisis about finding self worth while working in an entertainment industry. He then blames everyone else for not having the exact same values as him.
The best stuff I ever wrote is here:

https://zmiblog.wordpress.com

Though I haven't gotten the habit of writing regularly there.
Arguably given the context, Obama visiting the UK to tell the British that the USA would ignore them if they voted out (send them to the "back of the queue") would be the best example of this: direct intervention by a foreign leader into a national referendum.
I get the gist of the article, and it is scary.

I don't recall as much scare when people found out Obama's team used machine learning and data collection, as well as Hillary's later efforts, to influence voters or gain support.

I am not a Trump supporter, nor a Hillary or Obama fan; I am pretty disgusted with the US political system, however, I also recall people praising the IT/ML/Big Data teams for Obama and Hillary without even a mention of what data they were slinging or collecting.

I left FB years ago, and I feel much better for it, especially after reading this article.
He was used by a monkey in a business suit, and now he has buyer's remorse. Caveat emptor motherfucker! Thanks for the downvotes friends.
Arguably both Sanders and Trump were effectively independent. Neither had the support of their chosen parties.
It could be worse: https://www.thedodo.com/live-animal-keychains-china-12256846...

https://www.thedodo.com/watch-holds-captive-ants-1057364913....
This is almost right, but still manages to be dangerously wrong.

Frustose and glucose are very different, one never gets converted to the other. All cells can and will take up and metabolize glucose, but only the liver can import and metabolize fructose. Metabolically, fructose does not behave like a carbohydrate, but like alcohol.

Insulin affects mostly fat, muscle and liver cells. They react by storing the excess glucose, which they do harmlessly. Excess glucose does not cause insulin tolerance; fructose seems to do that, thought I don't remember the whole mechanism.

Neither chitin nor lignin are carbohydrates, lignin isn't even chemically related. Even ruminants can't digest lignin, only a few funghi can do that.

At any rate, the bottom line is that frustose is a problem, glucose isn't, and lumping both under "carbs" confuses matters. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM for lots of details. (But don't take Dr. Lustig's words at face value---check other sources. Most of it is uncontroversial.)
The article talks about similarities between common agile practices and John Romero's programming principles. There is a world beyond the gaming industry where you can sign big contracts and ship broken software and no one dares to complain.
Your explanation is very different from the interpretation I made from what you wrote. Yes I agree that clickbait only adds noise but your comment seemed dismissive of engineers writing unless they were exceptional engineers.
So basically... an imitation of Spotlight? I prefer that they copy Alfred's UI. Simple and does all I need. Need Alfred on my Windows machine!
My order of priorities: satisfaction, purpose (both are tightly connected) and finally enough money to make a living (see https://80000hours.org/articles/money-and-happiness/).
Equally, it's free. Alfred wants me to pay for it again to upgrade to the newest version, but I'm feeling like I kind of don't want to sink more money into it ..
I once was a fan of electron until I ran some apps on a low end surface with little disk space. Something like react native for the desktop could become a huge success.
> It's a shame, but if it's something they need to do to survive then fair play.

Depends on how much they value that google traffic, since google doesn't like being tricked into fake search results.
Peopleware.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0321934113/
The RNC was critical to Trump winning.

It resisted him in the primary, but it was critical in the general election, providing the voter information that the campaign used to target their advertising and such (The Trump campaign spent more on digital ads than the Clinton campaign, they targeted those ads a great deal).
He absolutely dominated news coverage, with over twice the airtime devoted him than Clinton, 1144 minutes vs. 506. Andrew Tyndell produces an annual report of major commercial TV news coverage:
http://tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2016/

He gained insane amounts of "earned coverage" -- airtime obtained without paying for it. Over $2 billion.

A conservative media source:
http://conservativeintel.com/2015/09/11/trumps-earned-media-...

The NY Times if you prefer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...
Plus, no matter how else you would store the key, it could be retrieved just as easily if the site is compromised on the frontend.
Oh. I'm European and I always wondered why in practically every American criminal-spy-scifi-investigative-themed TV show or movie there are people sitting at magical, proprietary computers able to find strange pieces of (personal) information in no time (but obviously always complex to use, because other characters don't know how).

I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.
Bloomberg would be very hard to dethrone. It's key selling point is all of the data they have access to, which takes forever to setup integration with all of those providers. They continually expand data sources as well so it's not like they are asleep at the wheel.

Finally, Bloomberg chat has strong network effects so even if you had all of the same data, many traders still wouldn't switch to you because they can't communicate with others still on Bloomberg.
[RANT] Been Banned from Google Plus
It is somewhat astounding that Mercer/CA were able to attain so much political influence -- by following the data collected and providing a candidate that was anti-establishment. Quote from Mercer:

“America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite. Trump is channeling this disgust, and those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on Nov. 8.”

I assume this statement is derived from data.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/no-one-...
You could just use the words "democrat" and "republican". It's funny when you think 5 seconds about what those words mean.

The democrats are about as interested in what the people would decide as the republicans are in letting every state do things for themselves.
UC Berkeley Now Offers Coding Bootcamp
You are right, although at least this article presented it more as a personal agenda thing than corporate interest, but it's getting hard to tell where the difference lies between them.
As opposed to CNN, WaPo, Bremain and Clinton's campaign?!
"Reddit is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies"

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5vxxyh/reddit_i...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...
Books for Startups
Check Hain [1] on Windows. It works very nicely.

[1] https://github.com/appetizermonster/hain
The main part is not purely interface but the aggregation of data - integration with thousands of various systems, licencing agreements with thousands of proprietary data sources, automated and manual data cleanup. This isn't scalable and simply requires thousands of people and lots of work, because obtaining ocean tanker data doesn't really help you get integration for e.g. Nigerian mining industry data.
When I'm streaming, I let my GPU do the video capture and compression for me (Nvidia NVEnc). You can do this with ShadowPlay if you feel like hurting yourself, but Open Broadcaster Studio supports it too.
I've decided that the outcome of that may not be quite so benign as we'd initially hoped.
I am from former Soviet block country and there is no surge of female programmers. Also, poor people don't become programmers - only middle class kids do. Poor don't have computers at home and schools don't teach programming. You have to learn from elsewhere.
How does that guideline apply if someone asks a question that is directly and clearly answered in the article? Is it OK to point out that the article covers that as long as one is polite about it? I'm not sure I understand if the rule is "you're allowed to correct people using information from the article as long as you don't tell them it was in the article" which is obviously silly - or "just don't be a dick about it" which seems covered by the general rule of "don't be a dick".
On the contrary, he is probably quite aware. Immigration's advantages already come with tiny numbers of immigrants, whereas most problems caused by immigration get caused by large sudden influxes of immigrants.

So he's taking a tiny bit of immigration to illustrate that an influx at over 6 times won't generate any problems (I think you underestimate the difference. It's actually about 10x)
I'm not really trying to be abrasive or argumentative but your logic doesn't make sense to me and your comments are dismissive and you resort to ad hominem attacks which don't add any value. Which kind of proves your point if you take yourself as an example.

Please do elaborate and explain how and why I should be ashamed of myself because I really don't know how writing can ever be bad for anyone.