skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your comments about web-based e-mail clients, but:

> many organizations don't allow anything but HTTP, so it's easier to just use it.

Remember when we allowed for newer protocols to have their own ports and didn't blacklist everything but HTTP? Why are we doing this again, now? Please don't say security/firewalls or else I'm going to ram an ice pick in my eye.

If your organisation is blocking ports, they're probably filtering HTTP. Companies that care about filtering deny access to most personal e-mail on work machines. So basically you're saying "let's abuse HTTP so people can violate company policy."

You may or may not also being saying, "Let's build a brand new awesome shiny latest and greatest protocol...and permanently tie it to the technical debt wreckage of HTTP/2.

oh and Google could just fix their terrible broken IMAP implementation.
That's the ultimate myth, that somehow "liberal" agenda was pushed too arrogantly, too hard. No, it's exactly the opposite of that, it's the case of the cornered boar.

Millions of people decided they know better than facts. That's it.

- bring back jobs (won't happen, because automation and simply too high cost of living in USA)

- climate change is a Chinese hoax (coal ash is killing folks in the USA, and they have the largest healthcare-financing problem)

- illegal immigrants, Mexico wall (ineffective and immigrants are net payers, since they pay taxes, but don't receive any support)

- sex ed, planned parenthood, contraceptions (again, costs of teen pregnancies are hurting them the most)
These struggles are real. I don't see a way around them other than just learning them (and then they go away, because you know what code won't work, and don't fight it).

It's probably because Rust looks and operates mostly like a high-level language, but still satisfies low-level constraints.

e.g. the confusing difference between `&str` and `String` is equivalent of C's `const char * str = ""` vs `char * String = malloc()`.

In C if you had a code that does:

char *str = foo();
free(str);

you'd know that in `foo()` you can't return `"error"`, since an attempt to free it would crash the program. And the other way, if the caller did not free it, you'd know you can't have a dynamic string, because it would be leaked. In Rust you don't see the `free()`, so the distinction between non-freed `&str` and freed `String` may seem arbitrary.
Plus there is now the potential for a great deal of purely negative disruption to the economy as a result.
There is no understanding of why NN training converges in reasonable time and does not over/underfit. (Unlike for say convex SVMs)
There are (and always have been) different genres of journalism, not just wikipedia-style paragraphs of facts in defending order of importance.
I'm not sure that many right-leaning people would agree that "the right was about maintaining power and the left was about making the world a better place". This is a perspective I see quite often these days, and I'd like to point out that left and right aren't equal to "good and bad". They're merely different perspectives on the best way to structure society - and the left-right spectrum doesn't even make that much sense in the first place, given that (as you've noticed) most left-leaning people hold as much in contention with marxist-leninists as they do with conservatives. So while I think you're right that left and right shift around, I think that's partly because they're fairly nonsense labels in the first place.
Closing the breaking news now at least seems to be fixed (it no longer scrolls back to top). Thanks!
It's pretty hard to find people who know how to apply the tools that they have to new problems.
>Replace 'most' with 'a slender majority' if you want to retain the fig-leaf of objectivity and rationality that you seem to covet

Would the argument still hold water if he did ?

> Politics is littered with examples of groups who were deceived into voting against their own self-interest. This isn't some kind of bizarre conspiracy - it's business as usual. It strikes me as more bizarre to pretend that democracy is some kind of idealized machine that extracts considered, rational decisions from large aggregates of people

Tell that to the leftists in US who go around shouting that Trump lost the popular vote
The human brain is a black-box and no one argues against using it.

Well, nobody's against using the brain, but the current trend in most subject domains is to avoid overrelying on intuition, and checking and supporting the conclusions using structured thinking methods, i.e. logic.

That is, deep learning is an intuition, and you have to have a high-level explanatory/verification mechanism that would support or reject the answer.
Actually they do. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/06/100bn-brexit-bill...
> In fact I noticed the fallback to those fundamental critique comes always up when one's own favorite did lose.

Of course. We have vested interest in complaining when we 'lose' and praising the outcome when we 'win'.

But your original post seemed to be dismissive of the idea that there is anything to be worried about. Even if we agree on the existence of a major cognitive bias here - it's irrelevant to the question of whether there is a real issue that should be addressed.

The problem with a "backdoor in democracy" is similar to the problem with cryptography backdoors. You can't control who'll make use of them so everyone should be scared.
Lessons learned in 25 years of Linux kernel development
I was already on the fence about the article being standard deep learning click bait when I saw that :)
I worked with someone who had worked on the campaign for Public Health England but:

“The 5 A DAY programme was launched in March 2003 as part of the health promotion activity by the Department of Health to encourage people to eat at least 5 portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables a day.”

http://archive.senseaboutscience.org/pages/5-a-day-qa.html
SaaS Is Here to Stay
But what do you expect to hear from the algorithm? As in, how "deep" should the explanation go, and what do you do if you don't like the explanation? How do you verify that the explanation is correct?

Edit: I should add that I worked on a similar problem. I can't reveal all the details, but it was about scoring pairs of objects to say how much one object is like the other. At first we used an off-the-shelf system that only spit out abstract values, so you can say "A is like B with a value of 5, but it's like C with a value of 5.17, so A is more like C than like B". The problem was those scores didn't correspond to any explainable metrics, so we switched to a custom system that could spit out a normalized value (0 to 1) and tell you exactly which qualities were alike and how the score was formed. People were NEVER happy with the values. Never. Everyone "felt" that these two should be more alike, or there should always be at least one object that has at least 0.8 likeness to another, etc. Plus, the values were now non-transitive, i.e. A can be 0.9 like B, but B is 0.2 like A. After about a year of tweaking we switched back to a non-explainable system.

Of course, the "non-explainable" system is perfectly explainable, it's a computer program and it isn't even deep learning, it's just long equations, the explanation is just "this long equation results in this value". The semantics of that equation though are very hard to impossible to understand. Plus, I don't think we can have a semantic explanation of a deep learning system precisely because we use deep learning when we can't semantically specify an algorithmic solution to the problem.
That your grandchild is likely to be a robot spouse? ;)
California has been using a direct democracy model in various formulations for a long time and it's four times the size of Switzerland in both population and economy. The results are at best mixed (eg California has one of the lowest median incomes and weakest education systems in the US, to go with immense debt & infrastructure problems, despite vast wealth in the top 10%).
What Event Sourcing is not
I used to agree; Brexit made me think about it a lot.

I now think a bias in favour of maintaining status quo is just as arbitrary as one against the status quo - if it's so great now and everyone knows it then they'll come out in droves to keep it, right?
> They have a tendency of 541-ing mails for no apparent reason

There is a reason. It makes people switch from own email servers to gmail.
> github is not the answer

I am against centralization and all as well, but I think that is the lowest barrier to entry for them right now, as they already have a repo there.
The article meant elegant in the sense of "nn training provably converges in subexponential time and doesnt overfit the data". E.g., like the theory for convex SVMs.

Mathematically, nn training is an unproven algorithm, it just works empirically surprisingly well. It's analogous to the simplex method which worked well for years without theoretical justification.
There weren't that many traditional news outlets in the past, and those that publish flagrant lies tend to get a reputation for this ( not that that ever stopped some of them ). Nowadays, I barely recognise half of the sources I see material forwarded from, which allows a range of much more extreme opinions / alt facts to be shared with the world without any real requirement for self regulation ( obviously, this is a contentious point, but I do feel things are a lot worse in this regard now ).
I think it was better ten years ago or so, though. I had a visitor recently and I took him there and it was just okay, but I remember when it really used to be one of the best places around.
are there really that many Nazis in Britain? Sure, the BNP are pretty fascist, but they're such a minority party as to be almost completely irrelevant. Being a nationalist, disliking the EU or being anti-immigration are not traits that make someone a Nazi, and overusing the term diminishes quite how horrific the Nazis were and makes room for actual neo-Nazis to think they are more commonplace than they are, bolstering their confidence.

If you want to criticise people for these traits then do so, but using "Nazi" as a snarl word does nothing to back up your point. If you are arguing that there are many actual Nazis in the UK, I'm fairly skeptical but open to believing you if you have the data to back up your position.
This is kind of a missing piece, in a lot of ways. With such a large character set as Unicode's, discovery can be a real pain - when you see a novel character, how do you find out what it's called, so you can find out how to type it?

Unless you're using something like Emacs which lets you point at a character and ask the editor to tell you everything it knows about what's there, this kind of identification becomes a daunting task to contemplate. Shapecatcher does an excellent job of it; as long as you can draw something roughly approximating the glyph you have in mind, it'll very effectively winnow down the search space to a very manageable list of possible matches.
Stephen Fry under police investigation for blasphemy in Ireland [video]
> the vote could be repositioned from "remain/leave" to "be in the EU/not be in the EU" to make it an A/B rather than a yes/no decision, at which point the argument about direct democracy being unfair becomes clearly biased.

Apologies if you're from the UK (or otherwise aware) but there was huge debate about 'the question' ahead of the referendum. Like you (it sounds) I was surprised they decided on one that seems so obviously biased. I think the 'to be or not to be' variant was supposedly going to be 'confusing to voters'.
Tell me more about this!
I find nothing to disagree with you on, here. I was careful to speak in the past tense about my own views.

I still have an innate affinity with the left in an idealized form, but I understand that there is such a thing as an intellectually valid conservative political philosophy based on something more than self-interest.

There are scoundrels and there are the righteous (and many of us are a mix of both). Making the world better for everyone in it is the only political aim I can fully support. If we agree on that we still have a very difficult task converting the aim into concrete policy decisions. Spotting scoundrels is sadly another intractable problem.
But there are shortcuts for things like moving cursor to next indentation block or to closing or opening brace.
This is really great. Works perfectly and solves a very practical problem for me. Unicode really should do something about discoverability though.
Doesn't "marketing" suggest someone was trying to sell something?

This was a public health awareness campaign, and given the huge number of TV (and other) adverts they had, I'm surprised if people didn't see it as such.

I wouldn't call the road or railway safety campaigns 'marketing', but they're also well-run campaigns with lots of visibility and sometimes memorable phrases.
Having once been a recipient of an Open Society Foundation grand on the order of X00,000$, I have to say that both of you are right: His jewishness is definitely used to amplify opposition to him, by people opposing him primarily because he advocates for open democracies.

It's important to clearly state what is meant when people talk about Soros' "liberal" or "progressive" values: the work I have seen is almost exclusively concerned with the mechanisms of politics, not the content. It is motivated by his experience of seeing both fascism and communism devastating his native country and opposes both extremes. The work I was involved in organised debating competitions for students from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everything in between and there's nothing "liberal" about it, unless you count allowing women to participate on equal footing as such.
Deriving the Softmax from First Principles
Your understanding is correct. It's a fact that he funds a large number of such organizations (and has for decades now). I can't imagine anyone disputing that at this point, it's extremely well known at all levels politically. I'm not aware that he even attempts to hide most of it. It'd be like pretending the Koch brothers don't do many of the equivalent things on the right.
Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM into Deep Freeze to Boost Performance
> But neither the NN nor the researcher will be able to give you a rule like: "F=(G m_1 m_2)/(r^2)" to explain the underlying reasons for the object-trajectory dynamics.

Come on, you can just fit the NN numerical outputs with Excel and come up with tentative explanations for both the underlying elegant rule and the science. The point with NN-based science being you are not left guessing much, instead retrofit the NN numerical output and build a coherent narrative with other accepted results.
He does fund those organizations. But when I read comments from Trump supporters about Soros, they're assigning him a superhuman level of control and manipulation that has nothing to do with his actual financial contributions. His name is used as a stand-in for a conspiracy.

Also it's worth noting that factual statements about Jews can be used in antisemite contexts. For example, "there are so many Jews in Hollywood..." is not incorrect, but it's easy to imagine how that phrase is typically used.
I don't see where the disagreement is. I agree that the population is civically engaged, and it's not a surprise that a show that moves around the country with a remit amongst the audience planners to include everyone has 'Leave' voters (Leave voters being as they are predominantly concentrated outside London and large cities).

My argument is that we are potentially no longer able to determine the arguments that are being used to influence people, which is significant when there has been a marked turn away from the EU in public opinion over the last five years.
It was ever thus - the American Cincinnatus famously conducted his "influence campaigns" with barrels of rum and of beer, and made his fortune in real estate by suckering many of his military colleagues out of the land grants that came with their mustering-out pay. Romanticizing the past appeals, but in reality Bismarck's sausage factory has always been this unlovely.

Alas for the chance to get a good drunk out of the whole rigamarole, at least. Such things would be considered shocking, perhaps career-ending, for today's politicians, but in a country that never quite fell out of love with the temperance movement, how could it be otherwise?
"Odours are just organic molecules"

Yeah. Right. This is why Yeah. Right. This is why H2S has no smell. (in fact, some claim is has not and we smell something else).

"that are detected by the cells in our noses, and it's possible to identify them with various techniques."

Well, I think this was not the question. Yes, the mentioned start-up in this thread (owlstonemedical) uses a "Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometer", might work, but I am not too impressed by the approach. Also, would not call this a detection of "scent".

Would be more impressed if they really build an artificial nose that can smell. They eye has not receptors to detect dogs, chairs, cars but detects a spectrum. Same with the ear and actually, the same with the nose. The literature is out there.
Everything you share is visible to all your friends AND their friends, so you are grabbing attention of few hundreds/thousands of people, most of whom are total strangers to you - that's called spamming.
I always wonder about this. Many Navajo people I know view the whole idea of selling traditional native foods to the general population as basically selling out, and just fundamentally won't do it. There are s lot of restaurants and stands on the reservation though (and at events) which target natives. I recently heard my mother in law (who is Navajo and a cook for her job) tell me her work regularly tries to get her to make Navajo food (which is very good) but she absolutely refuses. Nstives have strong views about protecting their culture and view everything from food to religion to music as a part of that...
Can't argue with that :)
When I think of cowboy food, I think of stews and other things that can be easily made in one pot over the fire, honestly. Or fire-cooked meats.

Like, what do they think the word shepherd means in this context?

Nothing. I've always thought it was just a weird name for it, honestly. Shepherd nearly always brings up images of a man with his sheep - or maybe goats, if I'm stretching it. More often, I think folks don't give it a second thought nor consider its origin.
yeah I am from the UK, and this is the exact debate I'm referencing - in fact, one of the questions that I asked a few people that got them to really think about their position was "if this was a vote to join the EU, would your position still be the same?" - this question is also obviously biased in the other direction, but it gets people to think outside of the default position of loss aversion, which has psychological biases to support it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion).
This is the site with the credentials - It's not an intermediary/proxy.

The point is I want to have a different site (eg. myawesomehnsite.com) that will use the firebase api for a reader but allow the user to upvote or comment on my site and proxy that action to news.ycombinator.com. Unless they expose some API to do it, which AFAIK they don't, you don't have a way to do this entirely in the browser. You'll hit cross-site XHR issues or the requests will not be authorized (look at the link for an upvote - it has an auth qs var - this is custom per user per link).
These struggles are indeed real, but at least as far as verbose error handling goes, remember that Rust is forcing you to handle a lot of things that are silently ignored in Python. Truly equivalent Python code would include a bunch of exception handling and checks for nil.
I'm another bantu on Hacker News but living in the US. The migration continues...
For some nostalgic value - here was that ad [0] in Byte and PC Magazine etc. back in the '80s. I seem to remember that $49.95 was USD but the software was AUD$69 over here in Australia?? I could be wrong.

Another point I realised from this ad, was that Turbo Pascal was one of the first compilers to actually include the editor portion as well, as part of the total package, including the ability to compile directly from within the editor. A precursor to the modern day IDE, I guess.

In a lot of way, really innovative work from Anders Heljsberg and Borland - they really broke a lot of new ground with Turbo Pascal and like I said above, they really opened up programming for a lot of people who might have otherwise taken a different path due to cost.

[0] - https://community.embarcadero.com/files/2008/11/turbopascalv...
What's so sordid about Soros - at least from the perspective of the right?

I could understand the left loathing him more - due to his involvement in the financial sector.

I have a tendency to view him positively because of his support of the concept of the Open Society and his espousal of Popper's political project. I don't know a huge amount about him beyond that but this alone makes me lean towards regarding him as a force for good - even if the idea of billionaires spending money advancing political agendas is deeply troubling on the whole.
The legality is irrelevant.

If Britain refuses to pay what the rEU decides is fair, it will have a very poor position for the trade negotiations which follow.

(I'm not paying to read the Telegraph, but "admit" in the headline is loaded language, and intentionally missing the point.)
> Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it.

Lately I've been wondering what the percentage of paid shills on /r/the_donald might actually be. Considering how cheap it probably is, it could be extremely high. The thing is, unless I specifically filter out the subreddit, it regularly shows up in my 'all' feed, so it strikes me as an extremely cheap way have a far and wide reach.
Since we also talk about languages here. I once found a post in African ( Afrikaans), I thought it was strangely written Dutch, then saw the tld and looked it up.

Then learned that Afrikaans is based on Dutch. It's really funny that you can read the main language of a country so far away, since Dutch isn't that spoken by that many people ( 28 million)
Is it necessary to postulate a shadowy cabal of influencers at play here? Perhaps there's nothing there to identify, and the risk is instead of falling into the conspiracy theorist's trap of being so desperate to force legibility upon an illegible world that outright florid psychosis, a true break from reality, becomes preferable to simply accepting that too many things go on too often among too many people to ever be cohesively understood save in retrospect, and rarely enough even then.
This risks getting into semantics, but no. The AMA definition of marketing is:

"the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating,delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large." [1]

Having worked with the people who run such campaigns they would absolutely describe themselves as marketing practitioners, many move between public and private sector during the course of their career and the skillset and techniques for doing both are completely fungible. Worth remembering also that public health campaigns are paid for with public money.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing
Yes, we do that, but not on this product. This product is specific to service the US businesses. If you have some time, please check out our company site which lists all our products, http://ozonetel.com
This minimalist cell phone is designed to be as basic as possible