skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Owning a computer, getting a college education, having a stable, supportive family are all privileges, and at least a couple of them require a good amount of money to spare. Not trying to play oppression olympics here, but I think we should try and recognize the privileges that many of us enjoy, and many others don't.
Your argument doesn't make sense to me. Nuclear proponents have argued that nuclear power is safe for decades, and the statistics that show they've been right so far are somehow proof that they've been lying this entire time?
> Every fund pitch everywhere comes with the disclaimer "Past performance is not an indicator of future success" because of funds like Ackman's.

No, it's because of the simple fact that you can't predict the future. That sleazeballs can make it even worse by making funds that pretend that they had yields before they even existed (or were active only in a theoretical sense with a few bucks in it as a fig leaf and the other 999 that got axed you'll never hear about) is taken as a given.

That's just the 1024 envelope trick at a higher level.
The answer to that question just muddies the waters further. Anti-inflammatory drugs have been shown to have some anti-depressant effect, while anti-depressant drugs have been shown to have some anti-inflammatory effect. In both cases, the effect size is fairly small.

It would be nice to find a simple cure for a complex and diffuse set of symptoms, but we haven't had any luck so far. In all likelihood there are multiple interacting factors that affect the progression of depressive disorders, with no singular cause.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201616...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194072/
The big issue is that they'd actually have to shoot themselves in the head: they can't exist in China without giving into things like this. And Tim Cook can't keep his job if he decides to leave his 1st (or 2nd, depending on the quarter) largest market for moral reasons.

I'm not really sure if its a rule of law issue (though China definitely has problems there). One problem is that western companies generally must follow the law in China because they are easy to make examples of while their lawyers won't sign off on anything "shady." Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.
> Presumably, the world-famous multimedia behemoth willing to assume the risk of getting sued in order to publish newsworthy truth.

So, therefore, smaller companies that can't afford to pay should decline to publish anything that could offend anyone rich and powerful? Was Susan Fowler, for example, in the wrong for publishing the allegations against Uber earlier this year, because she was not "a world-famous multimedia behemoth"?

> Buzzfeed stands to profit a great deal at the expense of R Kelly by publishing such a salacious story.

Evidently most media outlets disagreed with that calculus. That's why this was a story to begin with.

> Celebrity net worth pegs R Kelly at $150 million. A 2015 investment from NBCUniversal put Buzzfeed's valuation at 1.5 billion.

The cost to R. Kelly: Hundreds of millions of opportunity cost. Millions of dollars in legal fees from victims.

The cost to BuzzFeed (or whoever) of declining to take on a story: A million dollars in opportunity cost, tops?

I'm probably hugely overestimating the benefit for BuzzFeed to try to be as fair to your point as possible, and the numbers still don't add up.

> Is this true, though, or is it just the desired narrative? How do we know that the Hogan decision will have made a difference on whether R Kelly decides to sue?

The media sure thinks it does, and that is the problem.

> Media self-censors all the time. Big media companies are incredibly risk-averse.

You've correctly identified the issue here.

> A sob story about a journalist enduring the intense pain of having to shop a story around to several different publications until finally one picked it up, wouldn't be news except that the media companies all want to frame themselves as poor victims of the Hogan decision, which they hate because it means they must be ever so slightly less reckless when destroying the lives of their subjects.

Hold on. R. Kelly is not the victim in this case. If the story is true, the victims are the people R. Kelly abused. It would have been a huge injustice for the story to be self-censored out of existence and for the victims' voices to go unheard! How would you feel about this story if you knew a victim?

We aren't talking about random media vindictiveness. There is a reason why journalists go to so much effort to do this research, often at a personal cost.
thanks for providing an existing real-world example i can use as a point of comparison when thinking about AI regulation in general!
Stress can show up as chronic cortisol elevation which is not an expensive test. Instead we get the cheapest cure of all: gaslighting.
Why is mandated vacation considered a "right?" It's a right that I don't have to work? That should be an agreement between the employer and employee and not the business of government. I'm an independent contractor and I don't get vacation paid by anyone except me. If I don't work, I don't get paid. I'm not sure why that's controversial. Should a restaurant customer pay for meals they didn't actually order just because they eat at a restaurant regularly? Then why should companies be compelled by the government to pay employees who aren't actually working?

To be clear, I'm not opposed to vacations -- that's a benefit that companies could offer in their bid to compete in the market for labor. It absolutely ought not be any of government's business. This is one of the reasons it's so incredibly unattractive to start a business in France and some other EU countries. The amount of government largesse at the entrepreneur's expense makes it insane to want to hire anyone let alone try and grow a business there. At the end of the day, "paid" vacation is paid for by the employee and the customers in the form of lower salaries and higher prices. Look at pre-tax salaries in Paris versus Silicon Valley. SV pays 3-4 times more AND offers health care and "benefits." In France, it's very risky to hire anyone, so salaries reflect the amount of risk assumed when hiring that employee -- meaning they're paid much less because there's a chance you'll be stuck with that employee indefinitely. Taxes are higher, living costs are higher, yet salaries are lower -- by 300%. All that "paid" vacation and "paid" benefits aren't cheap. If you look at net salaries, the difference is even more dramatic. The disposable income of a European worker is dramatically less than that of an American worker -- at least in software and tech.

The only people that demand "basic rights" such as 4 weeks paid vacation are people that have never run a business. The moment these campaigners for government mandated benefits actually try to start a business of their own is the moment they suddenly realize how destructive government-mandated benefits can be to a company and the economy. Employers should be able to offer whatever benefits they choose to offer. If an employee doesn't like the offered terms, they can walk away. If a company wants to compete for top talent, they'll end up offering good benefits as a response to the market as opposed to government mandate.

Look at the benefits offered by Facebook and Google. No government mandates there -- it's the market. They want to attract the best, so they have to offer the best.
I see. I was wrong to make assumptions about what the limitations are.

Thanks for the link. I wonder how closely doctors follow bayesian inference (and how many know about it). It seems pretty intuitive, so maybe it's already largely applied?
China would probably never go that far. At best, they would just cut off the retail market in China and leave it completely to the 黄牛 yellow cow scalpers like it was 10+ years ago.
Google snaps up 52 Sunnyvale properties worth more than $820M in one fell swoop
I told myself I'd avoid Erlang at all costs. Then I decided I needed to know how leex and yecc work, so I got down and dirty w/ Erlang. It's close enough to Elixir that I can stumble through my way through it.
I mean, back in the 80's we had limited RAM and maximum filename lengths and stuff, so maybe there was a practical benefit.

By "trend", I more mean the trend of continuing to use these sorts of weird numeric contractions of words instead of just saying "localization" or "internationalization" or "accessibility" now that we have computers that can handle big words without breaking a sweat.

I m2n, w2t is t2s, t1e o3n d2s of t2t m5es?
> Where was the "gawker is not journalism and threatens to undermine us all with their stupidity" WaPo opinion piece before the trial?

Here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/free-speech-i...

It doesn't just criticize Gawker, of course, because it's focused on press freedom in general. That's because press freedom is a right, not some kind of privilege that can be taken away from everybody if one actor "abuses" it.
Cold War espionage paid off–until it backfired, East German spy records reveal
Ask HN: Should I become a developer?
Hi all, I have a special snowflake career question: should I quit my management consulting job and try to become a developer?

About me: 31 years old, work for a tier 2 strategy consulting firm doing mostly pure strategy work. I'm an engagement manager. While I like the intellectual challenge of coming up with growth strategies, I've ended up doing mostly private equity due diligences and exit options that look interesting appear limited.

Meanwhile, I've been an amateur coder since 2006 - started with R / SAS / STATA (Econ research) picked up emacs in undergrad (graduated in 2008), got pretty good at elisp and org mode [0], picked up clojure about 6 years ago, spent all of my MBA (top 3) coding web apps instead of networking (mistake!). I was watching a rich hickey lecture (hammock driven development) and was just thinking that if this is something I really like doing, should I try and put together a portfolio and get a job as an entry-level developer at a shop that uses clojure? I'm in NYC if that matters.

I'm pretty sure I could go from where I am now to an entry-level understanding of clojure + clojurescript + Java in 6-12 months. That being said, my one developer friend told me that working for a large company as a developer can also really suck and be a real dead end.

What do you think?

[0] Which has absolutely given me a huge leg up at my current job, btw
Side note... the book's logo is mildly similar to the Drupal icon. Might confuse a few people.

https://www.drupal.org/files/druplicon-small.png
Request for Feedback on API Quickstart Guide
I put this (very work in progress) API quickstart guide together to help developers integrate my company's API into their workflow. It is not designed, just imported from markdown into a Google Doc into a pdf. I was hoping to get some feedback on how it's put together and suggestions for improvements. Many thanks in advance!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/bqvl6h9mskdlqbs/Onfido%20API%20Quickstart.pdf?dl=0
Heroku Buildpacks versus Nanobox Language Engines
> Imagine walking into a hotel room and having the temperature set just right, your favorite sub-genre of progressive-math-rock playing in the background, and the TV urging you to continue binging on your saved guilty-pleasures watchlist.

I really can't help but cringe. Please let that never be my future, where I broadcast out personal information to the entire room everywhere I go.
The scenario is a bit more nuanced though and creeps into Internet freedom.

- Reminds me of CraigsList vs PadMapper[1]. In that scenario I side with CL -- it was right to block PM. PM or others should not be allowed to build a new UI on top of CL because CL was the one that put in years of effort of nurturing its listings, its network, building brand equity and taking associated risks and costs.

- As others have highlighted, the data is publicly accessibly and there is no agreement the scraper/crawler is bound by. The agreement is between the LinkedIn user and LinkedIn. The scraper is connected to the Internet pipe crawling the Internet freely as it wants. It's not reproducing the data anywhere so copyright should not be an issue.

- What if a scraper didn't scrape LinkedIn but just the Google or Archive.org cached versions and read those instead? It would not be pressuring LinkedIn server resources in this case.

- What if all of my employees allow me to scrape their LinkedIn data? Can I scrape all of their info? Can LinkedIn stop me from doing that (In the case of Facebook vs Power Ventures, the answer is that LinkedIn would be able to prevent this behaviour).

- Who owns the data? Medium.com doesn't own the posts. LinkedIn doesn't own the CVs.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4286325
When you are such a big name in finance, your public statements can be judged as attempts to influence the market. And if you furthermore pay lobbyists, do advertising, and give many presentations, it is clearly going to have an impact.
No, it won't prevent being scraped. That's not the point I was making.

The point is, the scraper would have to hide their intentions and identity, which removes any claim they are being 'honest' in their intentions and not trying to circumvent the provider of the services efforts to prevent scraping.
There are literally links to scientific research in the article.

This isn't an opinion piece. The author is a researcher in the field.
103+ points, 50+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883904
And I also upvoted your comment because I thought it was valuable and noteworthy. :) I really wasn't meaning to be critical to you in my response here.

HN seems kind of hesitant to add additional profile tools beyond the usual. I'm not sure if that's part of it's charm or a detriment. I think having a sig line on every comment might be tedious, and FWIW, I don't think it should be obligatory to attach your employer to every comment on every post on HN. There's a lot that's simply not remotely relevant.
This is not my field, but you can measure inflammation a couple of ways. One is by quantifying cytokines present and another one is to count blood cells.
I don't see anything that connects the title (written by LinkedIn) to the motivation of the people that are scraping it (not LinkedIn).

Everyone that scrapes LinkedIn (or anywhere else) either knows that they are doing it against LinkedIn's wishes or doesn't care.
In addition to being limited to max. 256 colour palettes and 1-bit alpha (encoded as a palette entry), they only support run-length encoding (Edit: NOT! it's actually LZW) for compression. The combination of RLE (Edit: NOT! It's actually LZW, same point somewhat valid) and dithering (used to overcome the palette colour limitation) results in typical compression ratios which are worse than nothing.

Personally I think a hybrid between a video codec (h.264, VP10, etc.) and a lossless transparent still codec (PNG) would be a good way to go
I am torn, on one hand Herbalife does smell of one gigantic pyramid scheme. Howerver, they have completely revamped the company and structure havent they? On the other hand, while Ackman is savvy and smart, his activist investor style rubs me the wrong way. He has unlimited capital, and thus that affords him the right to manipulate companies for his own gain? I don't like it. Also, let's not forget... If Herbalife eventually goes out of business, he stands to make a boatload of money. Ackman is not being altruistic.
I'd like to know if there's a correlation between the percentage of devout religious people and the incidence of fraud.

When people are raised to believe fantastical things without evidence, they're probably less able to reason from first principles about offers that are too good to be true.
It's impossible to have an electronically mediated voting system that both protects the secret ballot and ensures the public count. Because there is no digital equivalent to the one-way hash of dropping a ballot into a ballot box.

Chaum, Rivest, Pret a Whatever... Fine. Prove it. With a real world election (simulated). Burden of proof lies with the technophiles, not with the proud defenders of Democracy.
You could also frame this as greed causes people to get conned and religious folks are raised to shun greed more than the general population.
I couldn't agree more. Although, as someone mostly in to C++, I think data types like this should be standardised as concepts rather than added as concrete types. The HeaderMap described in this crate sounds like it is quite complex. I'd rather have a concept with some kind of trait mechanism for determining if e.g. the type preserved insertion order (which defaulted to false)

The Beast HTTP library that just got accepted in to Boost follows this approach. E.g. the following Fields concept specifies the requirements the library has on its any HeaderMap-like type you feed it. Writing an adapter for your own types then becomes straightforward

http://vinniefalco.github.io/beast/beast/concepts/Fields.htm...
This is a strangely toxic response.
It'd be fine to say something like "demonstrated exceptional reliability and proficiency in operating their machinery" could work. I know nothing about factories though
As an illustration, here's a speedrunner stun-locking the first boss of Final Fight [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/_UPVa_ftVWk?t=58

(Explanation: in Final Fight, you can normally only chain 3-4 hits on an enemy before knocking them down, which makes them invulnerable until they stand up. However, if you miss an attack, it resets the counter. Turning around, punching the air, and then landing another hit can be done in less than the length of most enemy stuns.)
The idea of an "office-friendly sintering furnace" would have been comedy a decade ago.
The pushback will come in two forms.

First, a backend that works exactly like git is very different from one that works almost like git. You'll be blamed for other people's problems.

Second, you'll have to have a way to deal with commit history the way git does (arbitrarily, and able to be rewritten at any time)

Otherwise the first push -f or rebase breaks the whole thing.

Reading from and writing to a git backend (that is, making fit a client too) might be the safer option. Sort of like git-p4 in reverse.
I think one of the biggest arguments that plays itself out today is whether the appropriate action is to stop sexism or to actively reverse/invert it. For example, in the case of affirmative action and diversity hiring. I don't think many people would argue for the continuation of sexism (even if they act it out) but the real contention is whether we should call full stop or put the ship in reverse.
On the contrary, I shared this quote having full knowledge of the cost and complexity and political barriers, having both studied the industry academically and being personally close to medical practitioners engaged in the research and implementation of new treatments.

I think all suggestion of "alternative remedies" is dangerous, since it opens the door to those preying on desperation to sell false hope. I have an active dislike of the phrase, because it fails to capture just how harmful they can be, and how rarely they are actual remedies. "Unproven interventions" might be a better name.

More precisely, they also serve to mask those treatments deserving of more research that might actually have some potential, because such signal is lost in the torrential noise of snake oil and quackery.

I join your criticism of the externalities in the US market-led system that incentivise research into drugs of symptomatic relief rather than cures.

Nevertheless I believe that is a short-term systemic malfunction, and in any event is not a severe problem elsewhere where drug pricing is regulated. Large amounts of money and time are routinely allocated around the world for fundamental research into many difficult and poorly understood conditions. Pointing out that medicine can't treat everything is fine, because if it could we wouldn't need more research. But claiming the research doesn't get done, that's simply untrue.
Absurd article. Why is this special to Apple? Why can US govt not take a stance and ban all chinese articles from their country?
The should part of the title is kind of silly at this point.

There's no scenario where AI isn't regulated, across all of the developed world, within ~20 years.

Ignoring the commonly understood, well-discussed threats AI may pose. Just the fact that it's an extreme threat to political power, that alone will be enough to spur politicians to aggressive regulatory action. There's also no scenario where we make it another decade without the political power of AI being flexed in a way that scares the shit out of politicians. AI has the potential to be a direct competitor to traditional political power, including politicians themselves. Think the Russian-US political games have been terrifying/interesting/threatening/messy? What AI is going to be able to do in the political landscape, very soon, is several levels up from that. They'll jump to regulation very quickly accordingly. It's not 30 years out either, the first hints of this will be within five years or so.
One advantage of microwave sintering over older methods (like muffle furnaces) is more even heating because energy is deposited throughout the volume of the part, not just at the surface.

Reduced thermal gradients -> more predictable post-sinter part dimensions and more uniform mechanical properties. Those are yield enhancers that could give significantly better production economics.
That's just false, and pretty insulting to the medical establishment.
Alien Blue is gone, I think. Reddit acquired and replaced with their app. Which currently has 5 stars and 700+ reviews, fwiw.
Ask HN: How to best setup a secure/privacy-centric Linux PC for home/family use?
I'm more curious than anything else. I don't do anything that NEEDS hiding, so I don't need it to be 100% "perfect" (and I also know that's not really possible), I'd just like to try protect my family's data and privacy better for peace of mind.

What distro would you recommend for family use? What programs and config would you do to maximise protection of your data and privacy? How best to monitor it all going forward and detect any attempts (software trying to send data out, browser extensions doing dodgy stuff, etc)? Data encryption? Securely sharing files/folders with family but no one else (both on LAN and externally without hosting stuff on the cloud)?

I'm open to any/all recommendations, and was also just hoping to start a discussion on how best to take back our privacy at home, for the casual users.
It's kind of ironic that a news paper owned by Amazon's CEO is publishing articles about Google violating customers privacy

Not that it's not a valid complaint, just interesting
Race to discover Planet Nine using astronomy and new computational techniques
> Chinese companies, however, have no such limitations, and will bend the rules all the time, often with minimal consequences.

Do you mind point some examples?
"destroying their bodies for dollars per hour"

$31 per hour for a non-skilled assembly line worker.

That's $31 per hour + very good benefits.

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/

Perhaps we should demand government mandate a $100 per hour salary? I don't know, what's "fair" in your mind? Why not $200 per hour?

The truth is that many of these auto workers make more money than many of the shareholders. It isn't like "the shareholders" are ensconced in castles counting doubloons. These shareholders are teachers, fire fighters, normal people who invest in retirement funds or other retail investments. Sure there are a few rich people investing, but acting like shareholders are some kind of privileged class is disingenuous.

Why should the factory worker have more rights than the old lady living off her General Motors dividends?