skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Which shows why China (corrupt/autocratic ruling elite or not) feels a need to control its own internet/web -- and would still would be justified to feel that need even if it was a perfect democracy.

Because when country X runs the most/biggest internet properties, then X country's propaganda ops can run uninterrupted on all of its-owned/run web players and services spanning the globe, but other countries' political propaganda can be stopped at any time.

Now, if you're in the side which owns the most/biggest internet properties, then you'll probably feel there's no problem with this imbalance -- nor would you find any reason to control your own internet.

That's because, since all the big players are yours, the global internet is "your own internet" anyway. Plus it's not like your citizens are ever going to venture that far of your national services for alternative news sources. Heck, it's not even like your domestic alternative news sources are much popular, the vast majority is fed 2 partisan shades of the same BS.

And because facts are facts, it gets worse when one side get to unilaterally control and mark as "political propaganda ops" not just actual political propaganda ops, but facts too for everybody concerned.

Especially since, whether you're in country X or another, if you never venture outside of mainstream media (of whatever political persuasion), you'll also tend to find your country's propaganda ops as just neutral reporting. After all, that's what your own media tells you 24/7, what your "neutral" official history books say, etc.
"Small towns" constitute the vast majority of people living in more spread-out communities outside of New England cities. Some are more built up than others but most of them date to some degree or other to well before highways. FWIW ESRI classifies where I live an an exurb.

New England is an older part of the US and patterns are obviously different with newer cities.
People looking to make money often essentially strip mine the uniqueness of a place and the influx of people fundamentally changes the culture. I don't think it always makes it worse but if you like a place as it is it would seem reasonable to generally dislike change
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domineering and yes, it is in Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays.
America: please do not elect zuck president.
Cool demo... completely hijacks the browser history.
> " especially if you’re innovating in a more regulated industry"

One of the things that needs to be simultaneously innovated upon are all the regulations that exist in various industries:
- why are they there?
- can they be reworded to work better?
- do they still make sense?
- how do they interact with other regulations (possibly even conflicting ones)?
- how can multiple regulations be collapsed into fewer/simpler ones?

And more.

Here's a "Philosophy of Automation" as given to me by someone (https://antipaucity.com/2013/06/07/automation-gp/#.Wd4r1hNSz...) involved in the IBM user groups back in the late 80s. It's as relevant here and now (and in this context) as it was then:

Automation is not a technical problem it is a people problem.

When you initially automate, you convert your process flow documents into executable code that consistently runs on a prearranged schedule, or through a monitor, or an error message. These executable processes enforce your process rules every time.

You cannot automate processes that are all over the place.

When you automate your processes they will be transformed.

Because you automate your processes automation never ends.

Automate as close to the source as possible.

Problems with automated processes occur infrequently but are more difficult to solve than manual processes.

The combining of problem, change, and asset management with automated process management and root cause analysis, improves quality and allows you to consistently meet your service levels.

All automation code is throwaway code.

Automation is very exciting.

Automation is very rewarding.

Everyone is on the automation team.
What are you talking about? Do you have credible links?
Is there any way to identify whether or not our upvotes or downvotes are being ignored? Any way to get feedback on whether hackernews thinks our personal opinions are worthwhile?
In some places, an unwitnessed handwritten will is in fact recognised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_will
I have a rift and rarely use it because of nausea. I can definitely see how viewing a scene like this in 360-degree video from a rift could create a level of empathy just not possible by any other means. Of course, Mark could easily jump on a plane and actually go to Puerto Rico, but most of the planet can't. He's creating a platform that one day could have something like news clip videos in VR of scenes like this. That's a potential game-changer to get more people involved in assistance. Most of us don't search out bad news, we filter through it, so we can move on with our lives. It's a lot harder to ignore something you've seen after viewing in VR 360 degree video. I think its not moving in the wrong direction to attempt to have actual serious use cases besides games and entertainment.
I played that version of Tic Tac Toe growing up in Russia as well, but we just called it "krestiki-noliki" (crosses-and-noughts). My mom taught it to me after the simple 3x3 grid got too boring.
Ask HN: Is there any place on Internet where one can get feedback on essays?
Hello, is there any place where one can submit essay drafts and get feedback? I'm a non-native speaker and like to write occasionally. I was thinking if there is a place on internet where I can submit my writings and get feedback. Any help is appreciated.
Traditional media is chasing social media every day. This was the dream, it just took Trump to bring it into reality. A company that lives and dies by ad analytics couldn't have not known about election influencing purchases.

The adults in the room want more Facebook in your life at any cost, totally rational goal for the organization to live on.

I would bet a day or two of bad press from Mark's VR stunt is probably worth the bump in engagement and publicity.
Very meta.

Look, I just don't want to be treading on eggshells when using social media.
Best Comment is Best
> And they have much more influence than some largely unknown YT channel allegedly backed by Russia.

How about RT? They play in the same conspiracy league though RT reaches far more people since they air the same agenda in different western countries and languages.
I find that in practice, these types of changes tend to happen a lot less if they are forced in separate pull requests.
Looking at the Gartner report posted above[0], it appears that Power BI has problems with data volumes, support, and (IMO the biggest issue) is it's cloud-only. For some businesses, e.g. healthcare, the lack of an on-premise solution may be a showstopper.

[0]: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.p...
I saw this on Rachel Maddow this morning. http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/us-tech-giants-oddl...

Near as she can tell, they live in Nigeria (though I don't think she's actually been able to back that up).

She also digs into a number of the other accounts that did this. The "I love Texas" twitter account was another one that seemed pretty egregious. For example encouraging armed revolt if hillary wins. Switching their account-name and branding to "Secede if Hilary Win" days before the election to make it LOOK like their followers were ALWAYS in favor of extreme political action.

This stuff is pretty dark.
Wow, what a backwards company. This reminds of how IBM used to measure productivity of programmers by the number of lines of code they've written.

Everybody knows that there is much more work involved in programming than just typing characters into an IDE. I've never heard of any programming contract jobs that were as strict on hours as this. Whats stopping you from leaving and explaining exactly what you just wrote to the client? You are getting a very bad deal.
> The NSA is angry that their toys were lost because of their incompetence of using a tool that was just doing its job

That is not true at all. The software was run on an employee’s home computer, who had illegally brought classified content home.
Dig a pit around the perimeter of the house if you have time, otherwise, burn a perimeter around the house in your yard to prevent the fire from reaching it.
I think it's worse because even with a list of directories to look in, you still don't know what _file_ contains the module you're looking for. Literally, you need to open up each file in each directory of the specified search path and possibly even _run it through the preprocessor_ in order to determine if it's the module you're looking for. And assuming you don't want to do all this every time, then you need to maintain a cache somewhere, and all of this logic has to be part of the compiler rather than the build system.

Anyway, Java dealt with a bunch of this by enforcing that the file naming and directory hierarchy would match the class hierarchy.
I mean that was depraved in a different way.
Flickr has 1TB free for photos.
Sure, but only if your definition of "propaganda" is completely useless.
Should have brought a 3d Scanner.. this could have been the next call of looty level.
That's literally[1] the worst argument ever.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
Yes. All antiviruses do this. It's one of the major streams of malware samples, and for the company I use to work for -- the most important source -- because those are authenticated as being on real customers machines!
Are there any serious FLOSS alternatives to these devices?
It's events like this one that make me doubledown on the idea that having a more diverse employee base helps buisnesses out, especially when it comes to "optics".

Maybe just maybe if someone at FB in the decision chain had lived in an impoverished area struck by disaster, or had relatives who were in this situation, they could have made a convincing argument that this was insensitive.

It seems as if every week there are 2-3 companies that have a PR disaster that really seems as if it could've been averted if they had a different perspective "red team" the idea, I guess this week it's Facebook and Dove[0].

0 - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/dove-apologiz...
On the other hands, tons of "NGO"s, foreign journalists, parties, etc sponsored under the table and over the table by various agencies, think tanks, etc, are indeed covert.
Google Glass was a neat 1st-gen (or 2nd-gen, depending on how you look at it) AR-like tool

But it was too expensive by far (and underpowered, and didn't run long enough on a charge, and was too limited, etc)

Sadly, instead of blazing ahead on that starter technology, Google [seems to have] abandoned it

Doing AR on your smartphone - for now - is much smarter: you can pick when you want to use it, you don't need another device, etc
Is it a shift or a correction?

Google's cloud offerings are generally going to have more robust SLA's attached to them, that include various guarantees wrt. service deprecation, that probably compare with other vendors in the same space.

So I do think "moving goalposts" here is probably right. Comparing Reader, Buzz or Google Code to GCP offerings probably is an apples to oranges comparison. In other words, not very useful.
Googles support for normal customers is pretty bad. I have two google homes. One of them refuses to work with my lights and nest. Their response was to “switch what rooms they’re in”. Because you know, that will fix a software issue.
You can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask. But I don't like this phrasing: "our personal opinions are worthwhile". Try "violate the site guidelines". That's still subjective, but it's not as if we're trying to pick market winners. About that we really don't care, except maybe when it comes to APL.
The big thing seems to be population density. If you build massive suburbs with low population density then the only way to move around is by car. To big for a bike. Not enough density for public transportation. And then you get endlessly congested roads.

The problem is that is quite expensive to build attractive apartment buildings that either have enough underground parking space for cars or you have to convince people to give up on having a car.
I will start to integrate an always listening device into my home when I can get one I control.

I do use a phone I don't control, and it is mostly sandboxed into social activities. Yes, it does potentially listen to me, and I am aware of it, but it won't take control of anything that is not a social activity.
Relying on collaborative filtering (using play counts, as Spotify do) can lead to non-diverse and non-serendipitous recommendation. If I like Abbey Road then a typical collaborative filtering scheme might tell me I like Sgt Pepper's and Let it Be. Excellent recommendation, but useless if I'm already familiar with the band and the genre.

There might be an unknown Japanese band that'd suit my tastes perfectly and I'd never know with Collab filtering.
>The most obvious would be the content. You can just turn on the still existing propaganda channels like Russia Today to compare the content.

So, like, anything not agreeing with the mainstream US opinion on things?
> the tone-deafness of the video was pretty pronounced and even though the content of his video pointed to all of the positive work Facebook was doing in Puerto Rico,

People are pretty good at detecting superficial niceness. It's something even babies are good at, it's hard-wired so to speak and it's basically the answer to the important question "does this person really care, or are they just pretending". Sure, some become really good manipulators and can fool others.

Somebody else could have done pretty much the same VR tour and it would have had a different effect. The technology itself here wasn't the main problem.

> Facebook is generally pretty careful to isolate its CEO from opportunities for bad press, Zuckerberg has an extensive team helping him maintain his manicured public image on the social media site.

The manicuring part is the fake niceness. "Someone is making him look like what he is not, what are they really hiding..." kind of idea. That is it is contrasted with his or his company's action, what he did and said in the past (ex. "They trust me — dumb fucks") and then it becomes unsettling and has a negative effect.
How does one play paper tetris? Most of the links I'm turning up use cut-out tretraminos or origami boxes. Is it like Blokus Duo?
The only "responsible encryption" is encryption hard enough to break (yet easy enough to use) that you have to use the XKCD method to get around it (https://www.xkcd.com/538).
This has become an standard PR stunt. I agree with you that journalists should point that out.

Also, why public figures could not apologize for real? Like "I am sorry, this was not a great communication campaign after all. We'll do better next time." Is this really difficult?
Nah, that at least is a fair point. Stray dogs mostly scavenge. They aren't actively hunting for the most part. My cat meanwhile used to catch at least 30% of her diet, something I know because she liked to disembowel small woodland creatures in the bathtub, where they couldn't escape.
It can get more subtle than that too, though. For example, see this recent discussion I had on this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72p472/why_did...
Odd. I looked at the description on the main page, and it lists eDonkey, BitTorrent, and Gnutella, but not any kind of direct file transfer.

Am I missing something?
Gates as a candidate would work as well as McAfee
A really damn good execution.

Which in my mind matters more than all this pedantry.
Irritating click-bait National Enquirer-style title (and content, to some extent) should instead have been something like: Decentralized distribution of Crypto-currencies is still a problem.
What's the distinction? When comparing to a modern smartphone which supports "Hey Siri" or "OK Google," then both devices have dedicated hardware that's always listening for the activation phrase, then send your audio off to the cloud for processing. The only real difference is that your phone does this even when it's unplugged, can still send your audio to the cloud when far beyond the range of your home WiFi, and can listen to you everywhere you go instead of just at home.
...not to mention species of wild dogs on more than one continent!
Would have found a awesome name if i where the chinese president.

Cringekotau M. Zuckerberg
Thanks for letting me know! That was accidental and it should be fixed now.
That typically comes from taxes on low-occupancy vehicles, which works out because mass transit also does a little bit to offset the massive emissions toll of those vehicles, as well as all the associated congestion/parking/etc issues.

I mean, we aren't putting the costs of hurricane relief efforts on people's car tabs yet, but give it a few years.
Now I'm wondering what is a good way to measure my project's top 100 redundantly instantiated templates.
I guess raccoons and vultures also can't live in the wild, then.
This is purely anecdotal, but back when I was doing a lot of Windows sysadmin work (and when viruses were rampant) I wound up tearing through a lot of AV vendors in short order.

Only a handful survived my tests, and now I see them all listed here as European AV vendors. Interesting.

Symantec, by the way, was by far the worst. It got to the point where I would immediately uninstall their products on sight. My favorite was when one of their automatic updates started causing boot failures. That sure kept me busy!
That's a protocol. Not a software.
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Is this a common practice? It seems brilliantly simple and reproduceable.
Content based filtering methods like the NLP and audio analysis approach can be used to diversify the results that you'd get from collaborative filtering (or add 'noise' to recommendations, as someone up the thread wished for).

I'm guessing they evaluate in many ways. E.g. play counts for online evaluations, accuracy compared to some ground truth for offline evaluations
I wonder if C++ is headed for COBOL-ification. This article is very interesting but doesn't really give any hope for success in implementing a modern module system in C++.

I feel like the only way to have truly useful, simple and intuitive modules in C++ would involve breaking a certain amount of backward compatibility and force a few constraints (project layout, file naming scheme, build system, ...) on the user. But clearly that's not really in C++'s DNA and you risk ending up with something that's not quite C++ while at the same time not having the simplicity and elegance of modern languages that have been designed from scratch without all the baggage C++ carries.

C++ won't go away any time soon, that's for sure. But when I read articles like TFA or for instance https://bitbashing.io/std-visit.html my gut reaction is always that maybe if you get frustrated with C++'s extreme complexity, historical baggage and user-unfriendliness you should consider moving to something else instead of trying to bolt on even more exotic features on a language which is already crumbling under the weight of all the features and programing styles it already supports. I know I did.

As an example I stumbled upon this std::visit link by perusing the top posts of reddit's /c/cpp (linked by TFA), here's the discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/703k9k/stdvisit_is_eve...

There's an interesting thread about how:

variant<string, int, bool> mySetting = "Hello!";

Doesn't do what one might thing it should do. The variant ends up holding a `true` boolean instead of a string. Why?

>char const* to bool is a standard conversion, but to std::string is a user-defined conversion. Standard conversion wins.

If you know C++'s history and its C heritage it makes sense but it sure as hell doesn't make me want to use C++ for my next project.
#yyyyy would be the encryption key. The webserver end never sees it.

It can, however, easily be read via javascript, so mozilla needs to be trusted in any case.
Regex validation cannot verify that an email address is functioning any more than it can verify that a phone number is functioning. But if an address or a number passes formatting checks, one can indeed consider that data "validated". That's what that term means in the business software development industry. We're verifying if the data entered COULD be correct, not double-checking that it IS correct.

You are correct to say that those emails may still bounce, and the phone calls may also not go through. We completely understand that. For this reason, in very specific situations (like registering a new user), we do take that extra step to make sure the communication channel actually works. But there are plenty of situations where that makes absolutely no sense, and/or adds very little value for the cost. Knowing the difference between these two very different use cases certainly does not indicate that these people "don't actually care" about the accuracy of their data.
The moment there's a longer blackout, you guys are out in the open. Nice.
>Echo Chambers are nothing new in fact we used to live in much bigger echo chambers than we do today. Your choice of newspaper or tv-channels, i.e. one-way channels are actually the real echo chambers.

Echo chambers have nothing to do with whether the channel is one-way or not. It has to do with how often you are exposed to dissenting opinions. Echo chambers can exist within old media (cable news), but there's no question that the Facebook newsfeed is worse in this regard. It's designed to show you things shared by your friends, who probably think like you do. And it shows you more of the things you "like", and less of what you don't.

>Manipulation, micro-targeting and behavior change Yet Hillary won the popular vote. So in other words, not a very effective tool.

The fact that she won the popular vote, and still lost, is a sign that Facebook's micro-targeting does threaten democracy. The Russians knew they wouldn't have to influence a majority of Americans, thanks to the electoral college. Just those in key states, and then, only those most susceptible to their propaganda. Microtargeting is what allowed them to reach the right people and maximize the effect of their influence campaign.
> So, like, anything not agreeing with the mainstream US opinion on things?

No, however such narrow view of the world as you demonstrate here would cause suspicions.

Edit: Pinochet? What has he to do with the current situation today? Are you so desperate that you have to reach 40 years back? What youtube channels were involved back then?
Yeah - I agree EU software is the safest option: https://medium.com/@zby/the-safest-option-is-eu-software-abc...
>My favorite analogy: Visual programming languages are like a foreigner going to a Korean McDonald's. He can grunt at pictures and get what he points at, but he can only do a limited set of things that were envisioned by the menu planner. You can't get the burger without tomatoes by grunting.

Also a wrong analogy.

You can have 100% power/syntax parity between a visual language and any text language.
Ha! I just manually reloaded HN to write the exact same comment almost word for word...