skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Digital addiction, legal issues?
recently, i was watching 60 minutes and one of the stories was a piece on how app developers use psychological tricks, skinner boxes etc. to keep people using the apps. i was wondering if there are any laws or legal precedent of a company being sued for producing and selling an addictive app.

i could see a case being made for some app, somehow being knowingly and maliciously developed to trigger addictive behaviors, a little bit any way.

any thoughts?

thanks-
A Rust-specific sanitizer has been proposed, though. See my other reply (which I was in the middle of writing when this thread popped up, so I didn't see it):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14553679
Yes, once you've dealt with implementing it, the notation just makes sense as the most compact way of formalizing what you just did.
I mean, you are essentially charging others for access to something that's not yours to provide access for (paywalled news).
A word of warning: launchd has been rewritten more than once.

People claiming systemd is some slapped-together piece of junk with bad architecture are probably wrong.

People who think they can write a better systemd on their first try are probably wrong.

This stuff is really hard.
The kernel is a component that has a straightforward purpose on a system, and interferes as little as possible with the actual usage of the system. You could describe it as "It gets the job done, and stays the hell out of the way"

Even with the kernel there is an element of choice about what parts of it you do / don't use, e.g. you can use ext4, XFS etc. etc. and even have the choice of providing kernel modules so you can bolt on ZFS.

The kernel doesn't start to dictate who or what software does DNS resolution, for example.

systemd keeps taking over more and more control of various aspects of your system and effectively removing choice by making it hard to use alternatives because it starts to make assumptions based on the inbuilt versions.

systemd is presenting you with a "one-size-fits-all" scenario. The problem is one size never fits all.

One of the biggest strengths within the *nix ecosystem has been the fundamental understanding no two use cases are entirely the same, what works well for one purpose doesn't work well for others, and choosing the right software to meet those various purposes is invaluable. It's impossible to make software that is efficient for every single use case.

The freedom and possibility to choose the right tool for the right task is essential to designing and building new, innovative, or even just plain old efficient systems.
I have no idea. Like I said, I was only a casual observer of the rally against systemd. I get the feeling that the opposition was more about ethos than any irrefutable technical argument.
As a high school student, I heard the word "algorithm" for the first time I could recall in the movie "A Beautiful Mind". I had been playing with computers and writing small BASIC programs for years, but had never been formally introduced to the concept.

I wasn't able to infer the meaning of the word from the film, and it wasn't until a couple years through my CS degree that I remembered the use of the word in the movie and the meaning of the scene in which it was used clicked for me.
Introducing Highlights
It can, when the constant portion of the algorithm chosen is high and the number of items being pushed through the algorithm is low.

e.g. bubblesort will beat quicksort for tiny lists or large lists which are already sorted.

Or, put another way, 1000 operations against 1ns latency memory (L1) has the same performance as 10 operations against 100ns latency memory (RAM).
Sandalwood and a few others are protected across India. Growing sandalwood without a permit was recently legalized in India, but cutting it is still illegal. Though it mainly grows in the south of India (not sure if its because of climate or happenstance). Other states occasionally maintain their own smaller lists of protected trees.
You're confusing profit with revenue. By definition Awazon will have small profits if they put most of their revenue into growth.
Guide to working in AI policy and strategy – 80,000 Hours
The crux of the issue I believe is C++ can lead a bewildering mess of coding styles and abstractions, making it difficult for the thousands of people working on the kernel to grasp each other's code. This would be mitigated to a large extent by using the simpler C, hence the rule.

C++ needs a lot more discipline and thought if you don't want unmaintainable code years down the line. Ironic given that abstractions introduced by C++ are partly to make code more efficient to write, extend and maintain.
GOAI: Open GPU-Accelerated Data Analytics
If I had a Bitcoin for every skeptic that posts a blog on why it can't work...

This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things and saw potential where no one else did, I just don't see the love for the potential of smart contracts, DApps, etc. And how this is just the beginning of what is possible and of course it's isn't perfect but it's fascinating to the curious.

I do see a lot of enthusiasm from Eastern Europeans and all across Asia and they seem to be leading the charge on what could be the next major technical revolution.

My working hypothesis right now is Silicon Valley has been getting fat on the virtually unlimited venture capital power structure and sees this as a threat they've missed out on to their power.

Maybe the disrupters are being disrupted?
In which you have to "provide your own accountant"
What Went Wrong with the F-35, Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter?
Word can also save in flat XML format, but it's really verbose (really just a listing of all the document parts).
>"The value of a piece of a corporation stems from a claim to said corporation's future profits. If you have no influence then you may not be able to stake that claim."

No, If buy the stock I have a contractual right to future profits. This is true whether I am a small individual investor or whether I personally know every member of the Board of Directors. The stock represents that claim. Influence is completely orthogonal to the legal contract that the stock represents.
Or you could type "black bar" and find the answer?

I had no idea seeing this black bar meant a death. I thought it meant a rendering error and gave a half second to reload the page, say hunh it's still there, and go on to something else. I came away with the impression somebody got design-y and changed things up for no real reason.

Edit: and for all the talk on this page about the bar, very little is being said about the man. Here's his Wikipedia page for anybody interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_P._Thacker
Microsoft's AI Just Shattered the Ms. Pac-Man High Score
The journal files can get corrupted, but it's a localized corruption that journalctl skips over and continues on without additional data loss. Obviously anything that didn't completely commit is gone, which would be gone anyway with some other format. The main difference is that systemd-journald can a.) become aware of the corruption, b.) warn of it rather than display corrupt info, and c.) recover and continue on.

There have been a pile of bugs I've run into and reported where journald gets really confused; e.g. 'journalctl -b-5' won't actually go back five boots, it'll show some other content, or it'll give an error, but using --since will work fine. I haven't seen this problem recently, so the fix may be trickling out.
>Really? Do you have a mental image of these people locking arms like a search party and marching around the forest deliberately stomping everything they find into a thin green paste or something? It is not actually that difficult for some people to walk into a forest without killing everything they see, plant some trees, and come back. The Evil of Man (TM) does not actually extend to laser beams of death coming out his eyes and striking down all living things within visual range.

You understand that large numbers of people walking over an area necessarily involves trampling over the ground right? This effort requires repeated plantings over a long time. Random people you pick up off the street who you're paying a pittance are not going to be invested in your actual goal, just the proximal goal of getting paid to do the thing.
I would guess it's because Chuck Thacker died.
See https://cacm.acm.org/news/218536-in-memoriam-charles-p-chuck...
I had an opposite (BAD) experience with Amex. I switched my internet provider, called the old one and cancelled the service. They didn't give me any cancellation number, but kept charging me monthly via Amex. They were going out of business (no wonder), so they stopped picking up the phone and had PO Box for the address, but kept charging!

When I asked Amex to cancel or prevent further charges, they refused to do anything without a cancellation number, which I didn't have and couldn't get.

So, your mileage may vary.
1. You should just start getting them at a pharmacy then, they're usually more like $20.

2. This is why flu vaccine is not inexpensive: First, the CDC and WHO need to identify possible strains of flu that will be prevalent during the next flu season. Then flu vaccine has to be created by incubation (in an egg I believe), then killed, then transferred to a sterile container in suspension, this must be done for each strain of flu you are vaccinated against. The container must be transferred within certain temperature and time boundaries. This container must then be moved into a sterile syringe, which is inserted under your skin, preferably by someone who knows what they're doing.

The only reason that the vaccine is so inexpensive is that the CDC and WHO receive outside funding, and the process takes place on a massive scale.
Susan Fowler's Uber Expose Should Win a Pulitzer
You should be using adobe xd or sketch for any app/web work, photoshop is best for photo manipulation and raster images. And yes it is needed for stock heavy websites...
Make the extension generic and give away "rules" separately for specific sites. For instance, if it's just a "referer" header injector, just release it as that. And no, unless it's novel, don't try and charge for it.
SPSC Recruitment 100 Lower Divisional Clerk (LDC) Vacancy
Practically, mining has become relatively confined to a few parties, individual users have fairly little power and the developers hold quite a lot.

Regardless of relative size of this group, governance is opaque, political and chaotic, not either absent or purely mathematical.
“I'm looking forward to going back to Gmail” Marissa Mayer on life post-Yahoo
5 people, including Michigan health chief, charged in Flint
Of course it is! Which is why it's preferable to put things in user space whenever possible. There were even microkernels for a while to try to mitigate the design difficulty of kernels; however at least with Linux what won out was lots of testing and very very picky maintainers.

Even if systemd is at the very high standard of kernel reliability, it would be better design to break out the monolithic parts where possible. The kernel is the way it is because it needs to be, not because it's a preferable way of writing code.
Good point. Just wondering: is there any way I can proactively check for liver health to make sure its healthy? It seems like a ridiculously important organ to not have checked at some regularity.
> I'd agree that a lot of developers still over-index on performance though, probably because it's sexy and easy to measure.

To keep producing responsive compute programs as the complexity of those programs continues to rise while the single-core CPU performance remains steady, program performance must become more and more important.
What "hidden magic"?
I'm not seeing that boolean for some reason. I'm seeing;

browser.tabs.remote.autostart

browser.tabs.remote.desktopbehavior

browser.tabs.remote.separateFileUriProcess

but not the one you mentioned.

I'm on Firefox Developer Edition 54.0b14 (64-bit) if that makes any difference.
From a cynical point of view, that is indeed an astounding achievement. No amount of negative judgment will take away her fortune.
They should focus more on the UX. I never been able to remove seal correctly.
A lot of them work hard, but there is nothing to ensure that they are working on useful things and governments are veeery slow to shift workforces around.
This is a great start! There is a huge demand for more opportunities like this. Entrepreneurs and businesses are so tired of building yet another useless app, out of sheer lack of problems to solve. But, with a site like this, you can find problems that are actually problems. The site just needs more customers and more problems.
This interaction supposedly exists around Kilamanjaro. Seems reasonable to expect the same from the Himilayas.

But Bangalore? Sounds iffy.
Accounting for sample selection in Bayesian analyses
New labels.

Here I was hoping that they had finally made a jar you could actually get all the product out of.
Have you actually spent time in forests that are well-traveled by people? Forests are not constructed out of finely-spun cotton candy or something that melts away at the touch of rain or the slightest touch.

Again, it is not that hard to walk into a forest, plant some trees, and walk back out without killing everything you see. People manage to do this all the time, even at scale.

Perhaps you are thinking of the desert ecosystem, which in many places is sensitive enough to do serious damage to with just a footstep?

I really can't imagine that you've spent very much time in forests if you think they are literally so delicate that they can't handle traffic for the purposes of putting more trees in them. You are aware that animals tend to live in them, too, right? It's not all just The Evil of Man (TM).
The cloud has no rollback

That's the whole point of having certain things in the cloud!

nor should the billions of people not have privacy

You can have a relatively open machine that implements rollback mechanisms using local storage and have privacy just fine. Did you just have a reading comprehension failure?
The authors have made the python code for the examples in the paper available here: https://github.com/samreay/SampleSelection
When she was looking at those line item expenses like employee salaries, did she look at her own?

She was paid an obscene amount of money to turn around Yahoo. She did not. She made the most incredible set of blunders and seems to have fallen afoul some pretty awful nepotism, and yet there are folks here who say it wasn't her fault. Well, ok, she came into a company in chaos but not only did she not resolve the chaos - she made it worse!
You missed a great chance by not putting a newsletter onto it.
Multiple bank accounts robbed by thieves using an innovative service
One aspect of his argument that seems insufficiently explored is an apparent assumption that governance is primarily a binary state, either present or absent.

It's important to recognize that different approaches to governance have different levels of effectiveness and efficiency, and one of the most important aspects of blockchain is how it presents the first real improvement on the present state of the art in governance, or the first real competition to our current forms of government. It can help consensus to be achieved more quickly and efficiently and can make corrupt government more difficult. There are further improvements to blockchains being made to make amendable blockchains where changes to blockchain protocols and contracts can be tested in sandbox environments, essentially systems in which laws and contracts can be tested to see if they produce the desired results before implementing them. The Tezos blockchain is the most notable emerging example of this.

All of these improvements present much more powerful tools for aiding just governance than our forebears had when they created the constitutional democracies that presently govern the world. Governance is not some Platonic binary that is either absent or present, but it is an ideal towards which we're always striving and taking pragmatic steps to implement. Blockchains afford us new tools with which to achieve better governance. They are not an end in themselves or a replacement for traditional governance so much as a means to implement it more efficiently.
Discussed at some length two weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450158

That's not to say that it shouldn't be discussed here as well, it's just that many points will already have been made, so it might be worth reading that before starting a duplicate thread here.

The KickStarter, by the way, now has over 2k5 backers and has reached $235,038 of its $48,000 goal.

I guess it will happen.
Using Microcosm Presenters to Manage Complex Features
I saw that as a post. Can you please explain the symbolism? I took a look at your link, but it didn't jump out me.

Is this how HN honors someone who has passed?
The whole point of this site is to find problems that are worth solving. Not, to build yet another useless yik yak app, that nobody needs, wants or isn't willing to pay for.
And that's just how old tables often worked.
"Nice platitude, but this is simply not true."

You got an example of anything man has made that man has not broken?

"I believe the poster upthread already considered only restricted characters (upper + lower + digits), so the difficulty they stated is what remains after your analysis."

No it's not, because they didn't think of things like password truncation (which my bank annoyingly does) and various other things.

I tested it. It took me almost an hour to crack my chosen mixed-character + symbol 15 character password with a GTX970 implementing the few rules I stated above. Howsecureismypassword.net says it would take a computer 16 BILLION years to crack.

My point very firmly stands.
"FreeBSD's init system works well enough, but there's no question that it could be better."

Problems or features? I haven't run in to any problems.

From a feature perspective I've run into the system policy bug where the name of a package has a minimal relationship with the name of the file read in /etc/rc.conf.d... For example, say you're installing the package named "isc-dhcp43-server", you need to add a file named /etc/rc.conf.d/dhcpd. Why not a file named something "obvious" like /etc/rc.conf.d/isc-dhcp43-server ? Sometimes the names are close enough to be Extremely annoying, like package name "logstash-forwarder" and /etc/rc.conf.d/logstash_forwarder. Obviously thats not a bug in the init system, thats a bug mis-using the init system. Or is that mis_using? Or misusingd-4.2?

Its the kind of issue thats super annoying one time when you write the ansible script and then you forget about it until next time you're writing an ansible script to do something else.

I have not run into any lack of features problems with freebsd init. Although I admit to having run some end user applications (not system stuff) using supervisord because the end users wanted a pretty web interface for restarting and logs and stuff.
I was hoping the algorithm was to design a new shape of a jar rather than the label of the jar. There are tons of variables and constraints to consider for the jar shape. You want something easy for people to scoop out the product and to get all of it without wasting anything (or maybe an acceptable amount of waste so they go buy a new jar sooner but don't feel like they waste money). Also lid shape and size, easy to open and close but as minimal as possible. How efficient can you pack the jars in a box while keeping the box weight under whatever the standard person should carry without needing help. And also how easy it is to actually make the injection molded jar, too complex a design would cause too many jar rejects. And also just overall look, does the jar look like a jar? Human designers usually have a general idea of what a container should look like before adjusting the design to be cost efficient but if you give a computer program just a list of constraints and tell it to go wild, I'm sure you would get some innovative designs that most people wouldn't think of.

Think back to when condiments started coming in the upside down squeeze bottles. No company immediately went from the glass ketchup bottle to the upside down squeeze bottle overnight so it was a long process of interim designs until someone realized what the ideal shape and features the current ketchup bottle should have. Sometimes the most common design practice isn't necessarily the best or cheapest. Bottled water used to be made of very thick plastic with large caps that were sometimes not able to be recycled. The designs have changed to more thinner, ergonomic shapes with better usage of materials both as a cost cutting effort and a green effort. It would be interesting to see genetic algorithms used for things like packaging design in the future.
And when you screw up and stick it in the wrong place?
What about you pay to get hours of work (HoW). Then people put their HoW into the issues that they want to solve. Example: Having different keymaps scheme support in Gimp would take 100 hours. So once people put enough HoW into that issue the team can start to tackle it.
Agreed that asking is largely counterproductive when it comes to security patches (as opposed to feature updates). To satisfy the concerns of folks like @jacquesm, it might be best to implement a soft form of the hidden update: Make them opt-out rather than opt-in.

Keeps everyone happy and dramatically improves compliance.
So the point is to use the stateless currency, but continue to rely on the state to settle disputes and redistribute funds as it sees fit?

That seems counter to the ethos of the BitCoin enthusiasts.

I also doubt it will necessarily work for large sums. Governments may enforce contracts related to foreign money (if they find that the contract itself is in their jurisdiction, which isn't always the case) because they have quid pro quo agreements with other states, and it is mutually beneficial to global trade if global contracts can be enforced. (In a way, it similar to foreign mail being carried by local postal services.) But there is no quid pro quo with any friendly BitCoin government, so there is no incentive to enforce contracts.
The difference is the NYT and other actual journalism outfits strive to report fairly and have standards they hope to achieve. Gawker did not. In fact the standards they held themselves to were deemed illegal by the courts, and when the courts told them that their journalistic standards were illegal, they attacked the court and doubled down. It's no wonder they were sued out of business.

100% tabloid. They had no journalistic integrity beyond "lets get more clicks" and were not afraid to break the law or ignore the truth to do it.
3 Safest Times of Day to Drink Coffee and More
Well, we should just listen to outsiders then, right? Who cares about what's happening internally when the outsiders see it all?

I remember reading Eric Jackson's screeds and he was clueless as hell.
That isn't yet an existing sanitizer. :)

It is definitely an important missing piece to bridge the gap to ASan/TSan, but it's still just a proposal/work in progress, not least because, AIUI, the precise rules it needs to enforce aren't yet entirely clear.
The buttons are on your keyboard. Swipe on touch interface
I don't think that is a simple use case of an init system; using pre-built init scripts is the default use case. A simple use case is writing your own simple startup scripts for your own services. For that case, systemd is very, very easy to use
Just to echo Patrick's default pricing model. If it's too cheap (and you currently are), I would not trust the developer having resources to make the product stable enough for me to trust it with my data. Also, it costs money to go through certification (without which you will not penetrate the market where this pain point is clearest).