skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Future philosophers are being purged from social media
Social media trends towards, promotes, and rewards exclusive filter bubbles. [1]

Parody and extremism are interchangeable. [2][3]

As a result, content curators and creators gain short-term benefits from banning and removing critics, both real and perceived. [4]

Thus, to preserve the curated (and profitable) filter bubble, those who critique it must be banned because cultural consistency (also known as memetic rent-seeking) is more desirable than cultural innovation.

Therefore, it becomes profitable to purge future philosophers en masse from conventional avenues of social media, forcing them to seek refuge in the unprofitable ether of highly anonymous digital space.

1. https://qz.com/913114/bill-gates-says-filter-bubbles-are-a-serious-problem-with-news/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

3. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_Poe%27s_Law_examples#People (Stephan Colbert reference)

4. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/11/ditch-blog-comment-sections/
I believe that is the reason we have "cookie law" in EU.
The reality of M&A for augmented and virtual reality
Ask HN: How do you define DevOps and is it dead?
I keep reading about AWS killing the DevOps profession and was wondering what were your thoughts on the matter ? Is DevOps dying as a profession ?
Rarely happens here, in my experience. Significantly downvoted content almost always has severe issues, either in form, tone, or quality. We sometimes might happen to agree with some controversial opinion that has been downvoted a good bit, but more often than not the tone was just not conducive to a good discussion. There's probably a few exceptions I guess, but overall the false positive rate is low enough for me.
Of course, the voices produced by Lyrebird sound more "real" than Microsoft Sam, since I would define realness as sounding humanlike. However, I would strongly prefer Microsoft Sam over something generated by this algorithm for general use because this algorithm produces voices that are still in an uncanny valley, because it is almost human but not human enough, whereas Microsoft Sam is obviously not human.
AI security
Don't be easily fooled. Even people in 3rd world countries who work at universities understand what a predatory journal is, and in fact publish there because they get easy publication with no sweat.
The Profound Implications of 5 Increasingly Dominant Tech Companies
In that case the information extraction frameworks Apache UIMA and GATE might be helpful, too.
As far as I can see, if you already know what fmap does and what infix notation is, you'll know what <$> is after looking it up just once. And if you know what a monad is, you'll also know what >>= does. And if you know neither of these things, then I'm fairly sure writing `fmap` and `bind` wouldn't help much anyway.
Industrial scale killing and angry self justification are the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes.

I do eat meat, but the immorality of it is obvious.
> That's some impressive graphics fetishism on display there.

More like compatibility and stability fetishism. nVidia and AMD can't even agree on how to compile the same GLSL shader - I'm much more confident about my ability to ship working D3D9 or D3D11 than OpenGL without a QA team with a wide range of hardware and driver revisions. D3D? Uniform bytecode. Uniform debug layers. Nice. Being indie just makes it easier - simpler rendering pipelines, easier to port.

For Android dev, where I have no choice about using e.g. OpenGL ES 2, the compatability mess is so bad that even for solo dev, I've been eyeing AWS Device Farm and Xamarin Test Cloud. Maybe AAA studios can afford the QA time - but I can't even afford enough phones to test to my satisfaction. And in my heart of hearts, I blame OpenGL, even if it's really the fault of mobile GPU vendors. I have a much weaker urge for a PC device farm, where D3D mostly just works. It'd be a much stronger urge if you threatened me with the prospect of supporting desktop OpenGL.

Biggest company I've worked for had about 50 people, usually on a much smaller team. I don't think that's AAA. Wasting milliseconds left and right, we didn't need much per-platform tuning - still lower hanging fruit around. Still almost agree with euos. Aside from compat - getting OpenGL working on a console or in the WinRT sandbox is probably more work and worse results than just doing a straight up port. Worst of all worlds.

> The idea that somebody who chooses to do this is therefore not "competent" just boggles the mind. No point in deriding engineers who decide not to use the latest bells and whistles in the graphics pipeline. Maybe they just have other priorities.

Agreed - competent engineers and managers may decide that competent 3d support not worth their time. I welcome this restraint when it comes to Excel's pie charts and the good fight against scope creep. If you're targeting the holy trifecta of Windows, Linux, OS X, and little else - OpenGL might be right for your MVP and your launch window.

Yet I'd still be eyeing that OpenGL on Windows as possible technical debt. Hell, I basically look at OpenGL ES on Android as unsolvable technical debt. I'd have a hard time labeling it "competent 3d". And I'd be wondering if it was really better than D3D9 + Wine.

Metal might be a little flavor-of-the minute. I need to give it a shot sometime...
84 Recommended Books – Joel Spolsky – BookAdvice – Medium
In this article it's what he seems to be doing.

If digital leads me to listen more to the notes today's equivalents of the Beatles are playing and less to the studio air conditioning, I can only see that as a good thing.
I've just done the same...wonder if they will publish mine.
The app store did publish it.

Edit: mine has been instantly published and I see another from 2 days ago that also cites concerns. I wonder if it will be removed.
Worth preserving.
I'd like to do a pepsi challenge with a freshly squeezed juicero juice vs one that was pre-squeezed before packaging (i.e. the juicing machine is pointless)
Wrongthink
We followed an Australian fintech startup for 6 months
Wow, this is awful. Would you mind telling me what combination of settings/add-ons you have so that we can reproduce this?

Our "no JS" fallback styles are not done in a very nice way at the moment: they rely on the browser reading noscript tags. We never did any testing with NoScript or similar add-ons, and I remember hearing somewhere that those sort of add-ons don't always evaluate noscript tags.
This would to more harm than good. Using automated methods to evaluate science can only make things worse.

Hiring committees and funding authorities already rely on way too many automatic indicators such as impact factors and citation indices anyway, despite the fact that nobody has ever been called a great scientist because he or she published a lot, and, even worse than that, in the humanities people often get quoted a lot and make a career because they published a really bad article that somehow made it into a good journal. Everybody tries to correct them, they publish a few even more outraging and stubborn follow-ups and pronto - they've got their tenure. I've seen that more than once.

Besides, whether journals show up in search results or not is also not that important. This is important to find readers and followers, but what counts more for many individual researchers nowadays is whether or not publications show up in their CV.

To fix the problem, universities and funding authorities must return to putting a higher emphasis on the scientific evaluation of the actual work of scientists, evaluate their results, their approaches and how promising their line of research is, instead of bean counting. There is no other way to ensure quality other than evaluating on the basis of quality rather than quantity.
https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine suggests we already have a drug that works fairly well for some diseases.
Is Quantum Theory About Reality or What We Know?
There was an article on HN a while ago from someone whom decided to start signing his reviews. To me, that seemed like a decent initiative.

The only real downside I see is that it allows the authors to contact and potentially bias the reviewer to affect a potential review of the written material.
>> Ensure the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished

This might be a good idea for running a military unit but fails miserably in IT. As a leader I hardly ever supervise my engineers, they have to understand the tasks and only come to me if there something that they do not understand. Giving them as much freedom as possible is one reason they like to work with us, feedback we got from 90% of them. Sometimes if the task is impossible to be done we expect them to come back, explain why and also provide an alternative. This happens a lot too.
I really want to try this on small refactoring git commits to reproduce a simple ml-based code optimization engine.
I wonder how accurately this would reproduce dead musicians voices. I've had this idea for about 8 years called the Notorious BIG project. I have about 20 acapellas that I was originally going to manually chop into a song. Neural Nets can pretty much solve this now.
A black hole in a low mass X-ray binary star
Yes, this is the worst one that I've heard of: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm
You should totally do it! Would love to see what happens.
Who is it preying on? The person who got rejected from a journal with standards but still wanted to keep his job?

Yes.
Modular visual interface for GDB in Python
always monitor your TCP connections.
Sadly there doesn't seem any way to short it on an organised stock or spread betting market. The best you could probably do would be a private bet or forward contract if you can find someone who wants to be long.
I said "like this 10 years old vulnerability", which means there could be other 0-day vulnerabilities affecting even the latest PHP versions and that could be exploited without relying on objects declarations within the serialized string.

Using the unserialize() PHP function itself is not security issue, unless you use it with user-supplied input, and that's the reason why this is a SugarCRM problem and not a PHP problem.
Why? Have a page with a QR code seed in the internet banking. Scan it with a phone app, no interaction with customer service (unless you lose the phone).

If a bitcoin exchange can do it, I don't see why a bank couldn't (banking is easier - you can cancel transactions).
Global Perspective of ‘People’ in India
So it equally makes no sense for China to forbid itself from using their own exploits? As long as they can't be sure America isn't benefiting from them, they'd better keep up with the arms race.

Or do you consider America to be special and that it deserves these powers more than other countries? Personally I don't think it's competent to hold them because it has an ongoing history of using its weapons to destroy other countries, property and lives. If I had to choose who wins the arms race, I would prefer a less hostile country like China or Germany to have them instead of America. But really, why not nobody? Exploits are offensive weapons, not defensive ones.
You could quite easily write a script that does this:

#!/bin/sh
cd $1
shift
exec "$@"

It's a shame "in" is a reserved word, because that'd be a good name for it. Maybe "cde" for "cd-exec":

tar c files | ssh dest cde /some/dir tar x
Another hindrance when browsing without JavaScript is that changing to a news sub-region ( e.g. Northern Ireland ) requires three jumps-and-clicks to the bottom of the page. A CSS-based menu would be a wonderful alternative.
That applies to Google more. Amazon folks tend to understand that it is just a job and do not spend most of their life on campus. There is definitely pride attached to working for Amazon but there are very few people sticking to working there over 5 years (not unheard of though).
Smartphones are the new Cigarettes
That is irrelevant. Anyone who is remotely competent to read any scientific article will recognize predatory journal with a quick glance. I doubt that predatory articles have even a couple of reads. The problem is something else: those articles are used to beef up the CV of the "scientists" who are then promoted on their jobs over honest candidates. That may be rare in USA (but I am not sure) but it is rampant in developing countries (of that I am sure).
I can't wait to hear the new cassetteboy songs.
> This article was amended on 29 December 2016 to remove a sentence in which it was asserted that Assange “has long had a close relationship with the Putin regime”. A sentence was also amended which paraphrased the interview, suggesting Assange said “there was no need for Wikileaks to undertake a whistleblowing role in Russia because of the open and competitive debate he claimed exists there”. It has been amended to more directly describe the question Assange was responding to when he spoke of Russia’s “many vibrant publications”.
On your last point — the new breaking news banner doesn't have the infuriating jump-to-top behaviour. At the moment the new banner is only on the new front page but I think we're going to backport it to other pages in the not-so-distant future.
Try Settings > General > Profile > Delete Profile?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT205347
I use chrome extension hangout
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/nc... for this.

I use different chrome user profile for office & Home and suppose I don't have time to read some articles or anything,

I just send it to my home profile user (hangout) and If I found something at home which will be useful for my office work, I send it to my Office profile user.

Even TO DO List, Otherwise for long run I use Chrome Keep Extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep-chrome...
with the labels So I would know Why I saved it.
I imagine Sir David Attenborough would basically just cite the intro of "The Gods Must Be Crazy" movie, casually explaining how humans technological progress is futile in regards of happiness. That text seems to holds up to present day.
The problem isn't the breaking news banner. If aliens make contact with humanity, you better believe I want an intrusive popup. The problem is what the editorial board considers breaking news has been completely diluted and diminished both for the BBC and CNN
> The giddy excitement of being on the verge of unlocking the power of language slowly turned into confusion and then decayed into disappointment as i slowly realized that the task was maybe a bucket of orders of magnitude harder than i thought

This was very wonderfully articulated! Do you have a blog or something?
Depends on the "coffee enthusiast". If you don't need the crema, an AeroPress and an electronic burr grinder are almost certainly the better choice. It's extremely convenient and the coffee tastes "full" without the bitter aftertaste.
Fun Fun Function – Templating languages: The hidden costs
Related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1425/
The combination of human and artificial intelligence will define humanity’s future
So, to stop it iterating through your keys for a single host, you have to specify IdentitiesOnly globally? That would explain why I couldn't make it work last time I tried it.

If I recall correctly, if you specify it for a single host, it tries all your default keys then tries the specified key if nothing else worked. Which seems weird and wrong to me, but what do I know. Anyway, thanks for (possibly) solving a mystery for me.
Nowadays I try to reduce what I infer from someone's having graduated from Harvard (and most major universities). I know people cite it as a signal, but it's like the big-O notation we know and love: you often lose so much relevant detail that the exercise is of limited value. And the whole shebang is pretty much outweighed by the elephant-in-the-room that is the nasty moral environment so widespread in colleges.
One issue with Rust (which I know you weren't actually suggesting for use in the kernel) is that it's difficult to implement recursive mutable data structures in a way that makes the borrow checker happy. Recursive mutable data structures are pretty common in the kernel, I should think.
> Once you had better coffee, you somehow don't want that stuff anymore

Unless you don't have the time to grind, tamp, extract etc every morning for a single cup, compared to the Nespresso which is good enough (or, at least better than instant).

I have a proper Gaggia machine with heated head etc, but I don't care to fire it up every morning - a Nespresso machine can pour while I do something else, so takes less than a minute overall.

> generating that much trash

Other than the grounds, there is just the pod, which is aluminium and recyclable - in fact, you get credit for returning them.
Because with intrusive lists, insertion/removal can't fail due to memory allocation failure - with dynamic arrays, it can.

In the kernel, where you have to handle every single error path, this is a big deal.
... imagine: Socrates alive. Spending his days vehemently explaining himself on Twitter.

shudder
I don't buy this. The same logic suggests that Tesla would not have been able to innovate the automotive market. AirBnB would not have been able to breakthrough the accomodation market. Or petroleum would be dictated by a few Robber Barons.

If anything, what sets the FAMGA apart is their embrace of innovation and their willingness to invest in new technology to maintain their market position. The author's notion that innovation will slow (the core 'profound implication') is not backed up with any data (except that IBM was dominant ... and now not).
The tale of the flying gurney: MRI machines can turn objects into projectiles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14181152
I can confirm this to be the case.
The title is from the perspective of the submitter (being the husband in the original title), it should be "visakanv-RNN — machine-generated husband chatter". Which is a lot less catchy.
i.e. One, weaker, rule for popular apps, one stronger rule for the little people.
In the future: PGP signed speeches.
Junk food is full of salt, sugar etc that is unhealthy, but gives you a temporary high.

The same is not true of a Nespresso pod coffee vs any other, so I can't see why it's "junk" coffee in the same way, other than as an object of derision.
Interesting that companies are trying to get us used to taking to our computers.
It's a great site but internationally the ads ruin the experience. You think you've clicked on a link but the site still hasn't loaded all of its ads and you have clicked on the wrong link.

Also waiting 30 seconds for a video ad to see 10 seconds of content is kinda stupid.
> Similarly, we can't use HSTS as that applies to the whole domain

Is this a problem for e.g. account.bbc.com though? I can't see how that can impact bbc.com/bbc.co.uk if the header is set on the subdomain only.

I remember it used to be that e.g. news was accessed via news.bbc.co.uk but this seems to have been changed more recently to be accessible at /news. As you note, this makes HSTS a no-go because of all the other products on the same domain need to support HTTPS. This makes me wonder why this change was made in the first place. It would also seemingly mean that (without e.g. https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/) an XSS in one product means an XSS everywhere.

I'm sympathetic re. the SSL configurations you need to deal with and it's reassuring that this is being worked on.
Inspired by all this, I removed disqus from my own static blog. Nobody ever wrote me anything either so it's not going to be a big loss.
For getting true value from reproducible builds, the environment should be as free as possible. If a build requires a certain image to be used, you need to trust that image not to be backdoored. Ideally, the only binary dependency in the environmental requirements is the compiler itself. Everything else should be source-code or plain-text.

Getting the compiler out of the chain would be even better, but trusting trust is a hard problem.
When we're here, I have to jump in with my own: https://www.scribd.com/doc/167706815/EVALUATION-OF-TRANSFORM...

The whole sting is later analyzed in a serious scientific journal: https://sci-hub.cc/10.1007/s11948-014-9521-4
a good chunk of the fun in kernel code is maintaining the various layers of self-referential lists and dealing with the cleanup
> memetic rent-seeking

Excellent! Did you come up with this term?
Using multiple devices does not preclude one from using a server and end-to-end encryption.
The greying out of downvoted comments seems to me to be a separate issue to karma - and particularly egregious given that (thanks to pg) there are no standards at all for voting.

It would be nice if HN would allow sorting of threads by various filters, such as time of last reply, and/or decide whether or not low-sorted comments get greyed out.
Does that include starting sentences with "so"? Is anyone else annoyed by this?
Yes. It describes the profit motive of filter bubbles fairly accurately. Upon additional inspection... I've concluded how horrifying such a thing can be.
do they have additional expenses to produce news for foreign readers compared to British paying for this service? they would need to produce those news anyway, so no need to feel guilty about reading something paid by others, anyway these news agencies cooperate and I guess almost anyone in Europe pay for their national TV/radio/news agency which is sharing their news with other countries
GitHub/scientist: A Ruby library for carefully refactoring critical paths
Well, Orbital Designs http://orbides.org certainly qualifies as "something", but i'm not sure how much of a "blog" it really is since all of the content is indexed. :)
A salient difference from astronomy is that computational neuroscience is typically concerned with describing neural systems in terms of information processing. Our principle technological example of an information processing system is the computer. So while there's a distinction between "computational" as (a) a tool used for analysis, (b) a methodology or model employed to describe a system, and (c) an statement about a property of the system under study, computational neuroscience refers to at least both ab and often abc. This isn't the case with astronomy, because we aren't typically using telescopes to study how stars bend and collect light like telescopes (although we of course sometimes do).
"They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."
If I were going to guess (not the parent), it's because human parsing is quite localised, and Markov models tend to optimise well for localised coherence.

Their failure mode is long sentences which don't go anywhere (or mean anything), but that's less grating than a blatant parse failure, especially if you're skim reading.
CASE STUDY: Etsy, Sprouter and Conway’s Law
Better to have feedback to the writer in the editor, so they are given a chance to learn and improve!
I read zero sport news per month, they could be all behind paywall, for long reads you can just check dDigg or Longform, there is anyway so much content I have no chance to read everything I am interested for free why would now I pay for it if there is so much free content I can't ever read?
Top School Bus Companies
> conventional avenues of social media

What's conventional about social media? Someone with the least love of self should seriously stay away from that.
There are situations with IVF where a child may have more two parents, e.g. when the genetic mother is different from the gestational mother.
Are Numbers Real?
There's a really nice article[0] inside about how people share music in west Africa.

[0] http://thepiratebook.net/music-from-cellphones/
That's great to know :-)
A point score normalized according to the total number of points in the thread could at least make it possible to compensate for the 'general popularity' variation of different articles.