skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Genius" is like "rich": as actually used, it's implicitly a comparative term. When someone talks about geniuses they usually mean "people much smarter than me" (either in general intelligence, in so far as that's meaningful, or in a particular area like mathematics or music or languages).

I think this sort of usage is so deeply ingrained that there's not much point in trying to counter it by adopting a fixed formal definition (e.g., someone elsewhere in the thread said something like "genius means IQ >= 140, get over it"). Instead, either pick a definition and say what definition you're using or use it informally and live with the fact that sometimes you'll be misunderstood.

In this particular case, it seems reasonably clear that what she means by "geniuses" is "people with the sort of ability the big names in mathematics generally have": her point is that mathematical progress depends not only on the Gausses and Thurstons and Ramanujans but also, just as much, on the ordinary mathematicians who, yes, are generally also extremely bright but are very conscious of the gulf between them and the famously-brilliant ones.

(Is it absurd to say "just as much"? No, because there are a lot more ordinary mathematicians than once-in-a-generation ones.)
The 9/11 attackers discussed their plans through email. Good thing they didn't use encryption, or it would have been a tragedy.

Wikipedia says the United States Capitol/The White House was called "The Faculty of Law". The Pentagon was dubbed "The Faculty of Fine Arts". Atta codenamed the World Trade Center "The Faculty of Town Planning". I remember reading they had also use terms such as "birthday cake" and "candles".

I don't know if ASIO (and the US agencies pushing this agenda) are lazy or if they have some different agenda. Clearly this isn't a make-or-break issue in policing.
I have edited my post so that it includes "Do Not Track" instead of DNT in the first paragraph. Hope that will stop others from having to look it up.
The point is to remind the reader that light doesn't always "travel in straight lines". Obviously refraction and gravity aren't the same thing, but nonetheless you can measure the index of refraction of a material by looking at the deflection of light through it in (sort of) the same way you can measure the gravity well of a star by looking at similar deflections.
> After over two years of use

That's not how short acting benzodiazepines like Xanax are intended to be used (Klonopin is more likely for longer term use). Most psychiatrists would be getting you onto a regular antidepressant regimen within a few weeks of the onset of generalized anxiety.
Your links give a 403 permission denied error.
Flynn's actually great for this kind of stuff. You can deploy a git repo directly and then provision your DBs (Redis, Postgres, MySQL) right from the dashboard.
Actually, there is no 32-bit pop instruction in x86-64 mode. Your code won't work.
> Facebook mines WhatsApp metadata [1].

Thomas addressed this:

If you're worried about Facebook seeing your metadata, which is a sane worry, Wire is approximately as slick and usable as WhatsApp with mostly the same underpinnings.

> I'm not sure I'd elevate WhatsApp over iMessage

I would! Consider the following: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-o...

That sort of attack is not possible against WhatsApp.
Signal has open source clients and server. Matrix has crypto support now (needs more auditing, but you can turn it on and nobody has cracked it yet to my knowledge) and thats fully open source.

No, open source does not guarantee they are using the secure algorithms advertised on their servers. But open source does is let you run your own server, that you can put much more trust in. People spin up their own signal and matrix servers all the time now for just that reason.
> Nanorobots for removal?

Don't hold your breath. What we're getting instead is even more fine particulate matter from nanomaterials.
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Doesn't Flynn require a minimum of 3 servers? What if I'm only running one?
The analogy is flawed, and the final sentence is condescending.

All things in your list have an inherent physical danger. Neither encryption nor cryptography are themselves dangerous, they're a means of encoding some other thing which may or may not be dangerous into something whose danger cannot be determined.

Imperfect analogy, but crypto is more like a safe than anything you list. An ensuing argument is, we need to regulate (crypto) safes not because they are themselves dangerous, but because their contents might be.

The means of encryption-decryption, code, is considered free speech (Bernstein vs U.S. 9th Circuit, and Junger v Daley, 6th Circuit). Thus far crypto is itself protect, but the usage of crypto is an open question.

With a real safe, police with probable cause can get a warrant, and forcibly gain access to the safe and see the contents. This isn't possible with crypto if the key owner refuses to cooperate, and why there's the ensuing problem of sanctioning the person for contempt of court when ordering access and they don't cooperate.

The dispute has nothing to do with analogies though, it has to do with a power transfer. Crypto permits some transfer of power from the sovereign to the individual. And that has altered the social contract. It's done. And now after the fact we're trying to sort out the consequences of that power transfer, and whether or not the sovereign gets to reign it back in, and how. And that's unanswered.
If your primary care physician can only spend ten minutes with you max, find a new doctor. That's not acceptable.
I imagine that electronic records will suffer a similar fate as paper records. Many will survive and many won't. To respond to the grandparent, there are many more records, so you may be able to track some individuals with far greater level of detail, but the noise is also a lot higher. When googling my name, for example, I don't show up at all in the first several pages of results, so it may be a lot harder for a random researcher to sort through the data to learn about me if, for some reason, they wanted to.
Overly-literal response.

A polyfill is a short snippet to implement a missing feature. Notably almost all recent additions to JS and DOM have been designed to be polyfillable where possible. Generally that means under a thousand lines, by the way.

A library in this context means a set of functionality built on top of the platform, like jQuery, with its own API, etc. "Use a library" and "use a polyfill" are not the same advice.

A polyfill is not a library.
This has been discussed before. Read these two threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10713064
Obviously not my own site, but an example I found which I thought handled this well;

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3410

If you click the play icon under the product shot, and you have DNT enabled, you'll get a modal:

"This embedded content is from a site (www.youtube.com) that does not comply with the Do Not Track (DNT) setting now enabled on your browser.

Clicking through to the embedded content will allow you to be tracked by www.youtube.com."

As much as I'm not a fan of modals, I can't think of anywhere else that's even pretended to care about this.
This is a great question. I have to admit that the only effort I've taken thus far is to minimize reliance of external parties. For example, on my utility site, I don't use google/fb auth but have used Persona and recently rolled my own auth ... and I keep very minimal summary analytics only.

Somehow I feel that the burden of starting a website today is kind of crazy - analytics, comments (and the implied spam filtering), social media sharing integration, onsite feedback, social logins, T&C, privacy policies, cookie legalities, DNT, ... all apart from the content we actually want to put there, even if only as individuals.
> I'm not saying that Weil describes exactly the same idea as Kaptchuk, but ideas in the same space were out there knocking around. Is Kaptchuk's idea truly radically different from what came before?

Well, Kaptchuk at least tries to do science. Andrew Weil is a full-blown crank.
The answers are all right there in the article. Want to reduce the influence of sociogenic anxiety? Lay off the Twitter & TV, and specifically ignore Trump. It's what I do and it works like a charm. It won't cure a chronic case, but it'll stop making it worse.

I knew as I clicked the link that Twitter would be mentioned, and it occurred just 40 words into the first paragraph.

I also knew "Russia" would appear, which is especially ironic when you consider that most of what you hear about Russia nowadays is utter bullshit - listen to Putin talk about the US sometime if you want to feel calm. I'm dead serious about that.

You should do your damnedest to limit the scope of your anxiety to things you can actually do something about.
Self-awareness about anxiety certainly seems to have an impact. After it was suggested to me that I might have some 'anxiety issues', my anxiety issues got way worse, probably because of a positive feedback loop the self-awareness created: if I noticed I was exhibiting symptoms of anxiety, the symptoms would start increasing since anxiety symptoms were something I was anxious about.

Edit: I mean to also point out that as our society becomes more conscious of the effects/risks associated with anxiety, it increases the likelihood of creating issues like what I described above.
Wow! This almost reads like a threat, but I'm guessing what they really meant is "we're not going to be intimidated by off-channel pressure".
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My psychiatrist determined it was the former.
> allow a malicious employee / government to write code (...) from that point on in future conversations

This is exactly what Apple fought to protect "recently". Once a government entity forces backdoors on citizen, privacy goes out the window. Apple knows this and I think you can expect them to make a gigantic media mess if they were forced to. It would ruin their business world-wide.
Seems blueberry growers could learn a thing or two about this tactic given their profits have tanked and some ponder exiting the market[1] as more growers entered the market.

[1]http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/fear-losing-bluebe...
I've read his blog for a number of years. He is saying new drugs haven't improved much on those available at the beginning of the 21st century. Scott is not very pessimistic at all about SSRIs being useful. Here's an essay from him (that is much longer and better cited) debunking the "antidepressants are basically placebo" narrative: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-yo...

And another where he explicitly recommends SSRIs: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-h...

I was really shocked that you posted something from his blog, but I guess if you've already decided the answer you can find evidence anywhere you look.
and the way they are presented as "alerts" creates more suffering than it's worth.

Alerts should be for things like tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, not upcoming birthdays.

And even more fundamental than that, most of us are unprepared to deal with such intimate knowledge of one another. The goody-goodies are losing it when they realize how much suffering there is in the world. It makes us all feel so powerless (if we let it).

Humans apparently evolved to have enough memory to deal with about 150 personal relationships... We're now pervaded with human contact and persona from thousands of people at varying distances...

And our mistakes, instead of being dealt with on a personal, intimate level of people nearby to us are projecting outwards to the entire globe! And stored there indefinitely!

I liked playing low-res video games and calling BBSes, but this world-wide persistent network is too intense!
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https://clarity.fm/
That sounds very sarcastic on their part.
I think you underestimate how fundamentally human the actions of the media are.
Mathematicians aren't forced to take IQ tests. This could cause self-selection bias.
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Even if the server code is good, frequently they're hosted on servers that have other vulnerabilities anyway. Because we're not the sysop, we have no idea what they're running on and if it's patched properly and up to date. The only way to be safe is to become an expert in digital security, an expert in systems management, an expert in reading and mitigating security problems in open source code, an expert in securely deploying secure communications systems and host it yourself.

For the rest of us, even those of us reasonably well versed in systems and application security, we kind of have to put our trust in someone and hope they don't fuck it up.
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Maybe they got a better gig :)

Seriously, do you hire programmers personally or does your company ?
I recently got to take a retirement finances course from the local Society for Financial Awareness (SOFA [1]) person. They're totally non-profit, the classes are free, and (as was the case with the guy who taught the classes I took) they can't reveal who they work for, if it's in the financial arena.

The classes were informative, and covered a lot of things I hadn't taken into account for retirement. So I recommend them highly... as is said in the article above, many people are lazy about preparing. It's worth fixing that now, wherever you are with respect to retirement.

[1] http://www.sofausa.org
I have noticed at least two more sites doing the same, as far as YouTube videos are concerned: Medium and DuckDuckGo.

They allow you to specifically override your DNT policy and watch the video embedded, or open the YouTube video in a separate tab (which would make them respect the DNT policy on their own website).

EDIT: I've also just remembered that I've seen some website (EFF, IIRC) embedding youtube-nocookie.com URL (operated by Google itself, judging by the certificate), which is used to embed a YouTube video without storing actual third party cookies from Google (you're still making an external connection, of course, but you're limiting third parties from storing and accessing cookies). Wish I remembered that yesterday.
Yes, a perfect, benevolent, god-like corporation would do something like this. What is the point in pretending something like that could ever exist?
What, and no mention of Anathem?
As funny as your comment seem, it's actually true.

Look at the "recent" FBI case. The insecurities became very apparent because Apple had to cooperate.
> tried to see if I had gotten past the point of needing it by tapering off

A small point, but the "discontinuation effects" for these meds can be severe, and they can make people think they still need to take the meds. This keeps people taking meds for very long amounts of time.

Some people are okay with the side effects, and they've made an informed choice about the risks of taking these meds long term.

The Guardian newspaper has been running a couple of stories about long term use. I think they're a little bit alarmist, but the personal experiences are useful.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/06/long-term-us...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/03/is-brit...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/06/dont-know-wh...
I watched the intro video, and this does look pretty neat. But, after reading the Privacy Policy[1] — I have decided to stick with Pinboard[2] for my bookmarking needs. Suggest maying adding a paid tier that opts-out of all advertising/tracking/marketing.

[1] https://link.fish/privacy-policy/

[2] https://pinboard.in
That is kind of contradicted by the guy in the article, who claims hunter-gatherers kind of had things figured out and were able to get stuff at a steady pace. Although if that's true you have to wonder why most decided to become farmers instead.
"In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It’s an unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the goal of nurturing creativity and discourages valuable contributions to communities, worthy causes and scientific projects"

I don't think "the rest" are in any way "dismissed", but certainly it's much more interesting to read about a Feynman, Saussure or Pascal, than the more mediocre people around them. Reading about a hard working and helpful but relatively average group of helpers seems profoundly boring, and our attention is quite limited, so naturally all coverage focuses on the more interesting luminairies at the apex.

Besides, it's not even true that all these people were heavily dependent on big teams of helpers, especially not before the mid last century or so.

Did Leibniz get much help? Did Newton rely on dozens of graduate students? Did Dostoyevskiy have a team of writers? Hardly. The geniuses of old worked pretty much alone.

But coming back to the main point, isn't it precisely this "hero worship" that makes the teams work so hard for these geniuses? And why would this focus necessarily discourage any creativity? I don't see why it would. It's not like people, when they inevitably discover that they are not Einstein, give up science completely. The situation is the same in sports, most people are not going to set any records, but they don't stop training, despite the total focus on a few individual top level athletes.

If the author feels that things should be different, why not try writing a book about these teams, and see if people are actually interested in hearing about them.
> Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad?

There is also some discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14518985

And more links in these articles:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp
Xanax in particular has been off patent for over 20 years.
I honor it on my websites as best I can, and am in the process of even rolling my own analytics to avoid using any third-party.

Long story short, there's no way to enforce DNT from an end user perspective.

From a web developer perspective, even if you roll everything yourself, its difficult to actually track down everything that you could be accidentally sharing. For example are you using a CDN? Does your host track this data, and share it? Do you use a third part API somewhere in a library you decided to use? So on, and so forth.
If you're a nomad I'd think your waste management strategy does not need to be very complex.
The answer is yes. If everyone went to this site with the intention of paying for good journalism, Google would rank it higher. Now it might penalize the site if the first thing that it displays is something that looks like an interstitial popup rather than content, based on the assumption that this type of experience is a poor-performing feature on other sites.

Google is built to optimize relevance against what people are searching for at a heuristic level (increasing the utility of their search engine based on each immediate choice people make, as opposed to a model like Facebook that tries to increase overall relevance of experience to get more time spent).

Most people who end up on WSJ are searching for quick, accurate, free information. The landing page (a full article) provided that, albeit in an unsustainable business model.

The vast majority of internet users are not looking to subscribe — which has become the main function of the landing page now. That means that the site is, on average, less relevant at a heuristic level.

Cheers!
The existing sandbox iframe attribute is inadequate. I would like a mechanism to ensures private mode for the content in an iframe, even if private mode is not otherwise enabled.
>boiled this technical subject down to "more antibiotics" vs. "less antibiotics"

Because, once again afaik, that's one of the driving factors for the emergence of MRSA bacteria: Too liberal use of antibiotics, which especially applies in the US.

The suggested solution, of using different kinds of antibiotics, feels like the sledgehammer approach that could just as well make the problem worse. By creating MRSA bacteria even faster, giving them a whole load of antibiotics to mutate resistances to at once vs one at a time.

The BBC Article has a whole paragraph about this dynamic:

"The most important part of this is that bacterial resistance is essentially a numbers game: the more humans try to kill bacteria with antibiotics, and the more different antibiotics they use, the more opportunities bacteria have to develop new genes to resist those antibiotics."
Recommended is 3 servers, 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM.

However, single server configurations are perfectly acceptable for personal clusters.

I would strongly recommend taking a cluster backup when you get it up and running though, since single cluster configurations do not deal well with unexpected power failures.
Running a minimum of 3 servers is just a recommendation, you can run Flynn on a single server (many people do), but then you obviously don't benefit from the HA properties.
Delicious irony that this is in one of the main pushers of crisis news.

After my mom retired she started watching a lot more cable news. She became noticably more anxious after a while.

If you're feeling anxious, I'd suggest stop watching/reading popular news media. Turn off push notifications. Reduce or eliminate social media apps.

Our psychology did not evolve with constant input about every crisis happening in the world.

Live your life slowly and locally. You'll be happier.
Here is a decent summation of the effecticeness of anti-depressants as modalities for different conditions:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3398684/

My .02c: Modern anti-depressants are less effective than the MAOi's they replaced and haven't advanced much in the last 50 years. It's not surprising since our knowledge of the brain's function and structure (at the cellular level and below) is roughly where our understanding of genetics was in the 1950's (note, it wont take 60+ years to catch up). The Human Connectome(mapping of the 100 trillion connections our neurons make) and Obama's BRAIN initiative (taking ultra detailed scans of super thin slices of the brain) as well as a mature brain informatics field will push knowledge quantum leaps forward.

Lets hope scientists have learned their lesson from rhe genome and don't label parts of the brain they dont understand as junk neurons or simply take a reductionist approach. The brain is fractal... we have more or. less the same neurons as a fly. Using these same parts and simple instructions, when you scale a brain, you get us. When you Garry Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue who tried to control them by saying you were defeated by quantity not quality period he retorted with enough quantity comes quality
I think Flynn should rename, just saying.
Care to expand? I am not convinced of planetary-scale ecosystem restructuring due to nuclear waste, but certainly leaks of such waste could poison large areas for quite some time.

(I prefer to call it ecosystem "restructuring" rather than "destruction" because clearly under almost every possible scenario some organisms would prosper. The term "destruction" only makes sense if you suppors a selfish view that the ecosystem is designed to be congenial to humans, and anything else is "wrong". It is interesting to speculate if the sentient cockroaches of 100 megayears hence would detect any traces of us).
People don't know, care whether their app uses encryption
Just descriptive links + no js/other dependency for me.
True, yet they also do it because they believe women like it. They can't see the woman's perspective, and because they would love to be catcalled by a woman they think the woman feels the same way about being catcalled.
The New York times? I don't think so. They're not pushing any crises, they're just reporting what's going on in the world. Maybe you're a bit biased.