skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This problem is much bigger than any of these articles seem to imply. I am also convinced that Twitter knew this all along.

Unfortunately, bots don't just inflate user numbers for them, they create ad revenue.

Additionally, the majority of self-proclaimed "influencers" rely almost entirely on automation for publishing (i.e. they are not really "there" on the platform), and bots for amplification.

If you dig deeper, there's a number of "certified" Twitter partners there, that provide social media analytics and management platforms. They pay Twitter for data access, but they employ 3rd parties to provide "amplification" for them, via bot farms - creating the illusion of effectiveness for the subscriber.

The rate of real, authentic human discovery and engagement on Twitter right now is incredibly low.
I think the bigger challenge would be convincing the SEC that including the bots in their user metrics constitutes fraud.
Not to be snarky, but have you considered driving or taking a taxi/Uber/Lyft? If you're going to spend a bunch of time on the main road, why not do it in a car?
PE firms do pretty villainous things. "Oh, burdened by unfunded pension obligations? Those are pretty much unranked next to debt, so sell off all the good assets to a carbon copy firm, default on everything, and pass the pensioners onto the government."

IIRC that was pretty much Bain's MO.
For some reason when I follow you, my feed doesn't load. Maybe there's a bug with offline dats?

edit, a quote from @neauoire:

>>> Good morning, I will fix up the client now. Make sure it catches the timeouts, and also make @ names clickeable by everyone.

nice!
+ 1 I spent a year as a barista.
>This is naive, at best. I have a network of people in my life that I must maintain contact with, and their platforms of choice are these platforms.

Must maintain? With who? Do you use FB to exclusively chat to your wife and boss or something? Will the stasi knock at your door for not checking in with Lord Zuckerberg every 5 minutes?

I find it incredibly difficult to believe that there are people who's ONLY platform of communication in a digital age is Facebook. I don't mean 'primary', I mean 'only'.

If your 'friends' much less family won't keep in contact with you because of choice of platform, can you really say they are your friends/family? If we didn't live in an age of cellphones, if calling is too much effort, would they have ever come to visit me in person?

I deleted all that crap way back and only a few people came out of the wood work, the rest I forgot about and couldn't remember if I tried.

In reality the only effect social media has is lowering barriers to communication, letting in all the shit connections. Much like a dam. Lower it, and the crap water comes in. Same with this, just makes it easier to be connected, which is built on the illusion that these connections are now somehow important.

I have yet to encounter a plausible real life scenario that requires facebook. At best, it might add a tiny bit of convenience to your life wrt events/comm. But it's nothing that can't be easily replaced.
The problem isn't that they lack incentives, it's that by expelling bots they'll inevitably expel some real users. The cure isn't worth the side effects.
Yes, and that would be a quite sensible theory for a number of quite obvious reasons.
Lift and shift (cartoon)
You can report a problem with your order and get a free month of Prime when they miss their dates (up to 12 per Prime renewal). It's somewhere in the shipping guarantee. If you paid for any accelerated shipping they'll refund those fees.

I used to be able to nearly double my Prime length this way. The shippers in my area have gotten much better though recently and I haven't had a late package in almost a year.

Edit: Hm, they may have quietly discontinued it recently. It used to be listed on this page:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=201117450

And I can find articles up to December 16 stating it still works. Doesn't hurt to try though, they're usually pretty accommodating.
Generally the people saying it doesn't work all claim that a person will say anything under duress. While this is true, interrogation is generally not done in a complete vacuum.

The interrogator will know things that can help determine whether the target is lying or not. If he confirms things you know but he doesn't know you know, you're probably on the right track. It's never like in the movies where they just ask, "Who's in charge?" and ratchet up the torture until the guy answers. That would have near zero intel value.

We also talk about torture as a binary. There is really a whole range from mild discomfort to extreme pain, injury and threat of death. There is a whole range of activities to debate whether they are torture. Is threat alone torture? Some have committed suicide while facing legal threats alone. Others shrug off mere threats as just talk -- demonstrative torture could make those threats real to some and thus work.

On the flip side, the consensus (30 years ago anyway) was that if you're captured, you're going to give up everything when faced with torture, so go ahead and do so, just try to hold on for 24 hours before you do.
Turing Test passed!
That was easy.
Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out (2014)
Finish your work... only to have legions of newb "hackers" bitching at you and calling your project dead because "(s)he hasn't posted an update in months"

Death to evergreen software! Let projects be finished!
On Intellectual Honesty
I left because there weren't enough bots to bring the average tweet quality up to marginally awful status.
The problem is that moral indignation is rarely about improving the state of things. Further, attempting to change the behavior of corporations through moral indignation is the least effective option. Getting CEOs to issue apologies or to be driven out of their companies is about power--the feeling that the mob gets when its crusade is victorious. But this is only loosely related to improving the state of the world.

People follow incentives, and this goes even moreso for amoral corporations. The most effective way to change the behavior of corporations is to create the right incentives such that its in their best interests to behave in ways that are in all of our best interests. Insisting on "true belief", which this obsession over genuine apologies seem to indicate is the goal, just isn't needed. The behavior will follow when the incentives are aligned. But this shows its less about behaviors and more about the feeling of righteousness people get from moral indignation.
If twitter doesn't ban bots, at least give them an official designation and require people to be honest about whether the account is bot controlled or not. Advertisers want to reach people not bots. If they got together and demanded more accurate reporting then there would be a financial incentive.
> I don't think you described capitalism as an ideology

I wasn't trying to. I was saying that it works well as a means of organisation, before pointing out its weaknesses. Ideology is when you ignore those weaknesses, and try to shoehorn everything within the framework of capitalism.

> If the movie was priced correctly, the inefficiency would disappear

The problem is that it's hard to price it efficiently, because the value is different for different people. You can try price-separation, i. e. by geography, or the cascade of movie theatre to download to broadcast TV. But there's still a loss of welfare. As another example: I will never pay for a subscription to the WSJ, or to Adobe Creative Cloud, or to NGINX Plus. But my life would be marginally better if I had access to these products. And the only reason I don't is because there's no way to allow people like me access, without also allowing those free access that are currently paying.
That's one reason why a no bot policy wouldn't work.

A bot posting articles from your favourite news site is actually useful. A bot which prints out Trump's tweets, burns them and then tweets out the video [@burnedyourtweet] is mildly amusing (and some pretty smart engineering). A bot which automatically replies to every tweet by $personality with a meme is usually an 'orrible troll, but occasionally amusing and often owned by someone who's very convinced the First Amendment applies to Twitter. A retweet bot which does a plausible impression of an angry Trumper might be indistinguishable from the real thing without investigating its network, and I don't think eliminating the real thing would be a great move for Twitter to make.

The other reason is that Twitter's review process is more or less completely random in its responses (I'm reminded of the girl that reported literally the same abusive tweet directed at her from three troll accounts, and received a different response for each one)
Why do you think Switzerland is very close to outsiders? 25% of people living in Zurich don't have a Swiss passport. It is actually the most international city in Europe (everybody thinks it's London but it's not).

If you have an EU-passport, you can just move here and start looking for a job. If you can code, you can shoot me an email, and I can try to help. (I run coderfit.com, a tech-recruiting agency in Zurich)
The Perils of Over-Abstraction in Java
You should have a look at https://www.cluvio.com/ - we don't plan to go anywhere (disclaimer: I work there).
Right, but if the risk backfires, who pays the cost? The driver has a few scrapes on the bumper and the cyclist is seriously injured or dead.
Depends what it's made of. An asbestos apartment building is kinda toxic.
No, the US stock market is doing pretty well. These are different things.
> I'd argue this is closer to compiler writing in the
> sense that it is a much more rigid problem than say
> having to serve the needs of an organisation whose
> requirements may change often and in seemingly
> arbitrary ways, and usually on a tight deadline.

Ex-game developer. If only this were so.

When making a new game, the requirements are constantly in flux and the driving force changing them is incredibly elusive: "fun". This depends a lot on the experience level of the designers and how original the game is trying to be, but it's very common for features and systems to completely change as designers try things out and discover what does and doesn't feel good.

And, of course, game development is always under very heavy time pressure because the margins are narrow.

Carmack's situation is a little different because he's been making similar games for much of his career and much of the stuff he's building (rendering and low level infrastructure) are relatively decoupled from the gameplay and game features that are more volatile.

Game developers are under a really tight crunch. They need to write software that's nimble and flexible so they can iterate on the game design quickly and figure out what's fun. At the same time, the code needs to be very efficient, even during early phases of development (it's hard to tell if a gameplay idea is fun or not when the game is running at 3 FPS) and certainly by the time it ships.
Fair criticism. It's quite possible that Woz considers this a MVP and not the pinnacle of MOOC platforms.

Its also possible that Woz isn't going to be part of the regular faculty, as great as that would be.

IMHO the course structure and content, is more important than the platform code details.
Tech Giants Protest Looming US Pirate Site Blocking Order
The current US administration and Twitter/Facebook bots are in your standard strange bedfellow relationship. The GOP benefits from divisive [0][1] speech not unlike that employed by bot accounts. As long as rhetorically the bots share the same intentions as the administration, namely: divisiveness and promotion of nationalistic views, there will be minimal effort in chasing down the full extent to this defrauding.

The intentions are clear - what will happen is not. The problem is you cannot prove malicious inaction.

[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/125952/gop-party-fear

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/352768-gop-senator-russia...
The bots count towards ad revenue, so add prior knowledge by Twitter, and boom... fraud.
Right on! I'm merely apathetic.
Facebook has been caught dead to rights a few times, like this one:

"According to a recently published report, Facebook says they reach 1.5 million Swedes between the ages of 15 and 24. The problem here is that Sweden only has 1.2 million of ’em"

"Facebook’s Ads Manager says that the website is capable of reaching 41 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 24. The problem is there are only 31 million Americans of that age." [1]

Nothing ever happens, other than maybe some grumbling from paying advertisers.

[1]https://mumbrella.com.au/will-facebook-ever-stop-bullshittin...
Apple sonunda iOS 11 güncellemesini yayınladı Hemen indirin
Do you have any research to back up that claim? In my experience, selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile. Gotta care about other people and be a team player to succeed
Every time I try to use Twitter, it feels like they actively try to sell all the noise as signal.
Twitter is also crawling with fun and light-hearted bots that are non-manipulative and generate content for others to consume. I would hate to see any of those bots get thrown off the platform.
Samsung boss resigns amid 'unprecedented crisis'
Shameless plug: Have a look at Cluvio (https://www.cluvio.com/) for SQL-based alternative (disclaimer: I work there).
Author here. Unlikely to get unanimity on how to write proper Java, but here's my advice.
I think anything goes really, I am on my way of becoming a lawyer.

Seperating hacking from your real life may be beneficial in terms of work life balance.

Although I must admit it is sad not to be able to work on your talents in your day job.
Lets say you work hard and with some savings you go ahead and buy an iPhone, that iPhone is produced by workers in the third world who make much less than you and costs much more than they will make in a month.

Now lets say we add a few zeros to your income to move you from the top 1% globally to the top .1%. Jobs that pay this kind of money are difficult, so you work really hard as well. Instead of an iPhone made in the third world you buy a yacht or sports car made in the first. The first world workers make much less than you do, but have a pretty good standard of living globally speaking (but not compared to you).

What is fundamentally different about those two cases? Can it really be said with a straight face that one is greedier than the other? In fact, it seems the "wealthy" person actually created better outcomes for the people creating his luxury product as compared to the first example.

This is a glass house sort of situation when you really consider it.
I'm not sure that means he is or isn't selling his name.
Yeah, but they are still real accounts that exist. AFAIK, whether they're operated by humans or machines isn't a consideration when reporting user numbers.
There is a filter at the top and you can click on the tag.

However it seems that the tags are not all there. For example Freeciv is in there ant not tagged as playable. So don't rely on it.
This has especially been an issue at the Times as of late. Their desire to be neutral on the coverage of the Google Memo led to them quoting misogynists word for word without any commentary.
I agree with the last point 100%. It seems that this Coder Camps company has experience running different programs in full stack development and data science, so I imagine they know what they're doing.
I used ProseMirror back in the day (well over a year ago now) on a site I was working on and it ended up being a nightmare to maintain. It would break on every new version, screw up the build process, error constantly in mysterious ways that forced you to dive into the internals... At the time it was not designed with the state-view architecture either, making it harder to reason about.

I ended up scrapping it entirely for Quill and it was a massive relief.

In my opinion as a mostly-uneducated observer to this project, it is exactly the kind of project that would benefit massively from static type-checking. I can't count the number of times things broke on an upgrade because of simple bugs in the code where `undefined` would trickle through function calls or function interfaces were updated and other parts of the codebase were not updated in accordance. These are not hard problems to solve, but if you're dogmatic about using vanilla JS with as little build step as possible, you're going to run into these all the time.
As a sidenote, traffic penalties are not regressive everywhere: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Though, with many LACP hash implementations, you end up de facto restricted to a single link per TCP flow.
I'll second this - Walmart is my go to for online purchases of consumable items.
That's like an extreme anti-tax person saying they haven't thought through the moral implications of (not) preventing an asteroid strike with a tax-funded program, "since an asteroid strike is never going to happen, so why bother?"
Hi, I'm also from Overseer :-) . The site we link to has a summary, but here's a more in-depth explanation for you since you're interested. Basically we pull from wherever you keep your ops dashboards and metrics (right now we've only exposed Wavefront as a source), and then pull down some history for the data on those dashboards. We use machine learning to determine how the metrics on your dashboards normally behave, and then start monitoring those dashboards in real time. We use this info to generate "health scores" for your dashboards which you can view any time. Also, if you hook up PagerDuty, when a PagerDuty alert goes off, we can email you info about which dashboards are unhealthy and what metrics on those dashboards are contributing to that strange state.
What would that even look like?
Feature request: donate button / address for postards.

Will try this out as soon as I have a spare minute! Fantastic! :)
Around 2001 Postgres was more reliable than MySQL and more advanced in many ways, but it did have some odd omissions which made it fair to describe it as immature.

For example if you wanted to drop a column you had to create a new table and rename it over the old one.
Hacking a Power Grid in Three (Not-So-Easy) Steps
Acer to become holding company, says Stan Shih
Udacity Official Declares MOOCs ‘Dead’ (Though the Company Still Offers Them)
I feel like that is a great reason to generate it dynamically from the source configs.
Some bots are not technically bots.

There may be real people behind them, but they are "employed" by various agencies as proxies for RT/likes. Some do it manually, others employ automation.

Also, many of the more prominent accounts are almost fully scripted - these people aren't really "there". Here's an example of a Salesforce exec (Verified account, btw) employing "automation":

https://twitter.com/iTrendTV/status/738375663229505536

We've done some twitter fraud analysis in the past, and it's terrifying.
Most will. My credits on securing large credit reporting companies did not.
While I'm sure Woz would make a fantastic teacher, I don't think experience teaching kids elementary math would really give anyone insight into teaching CS/data science topics.
I am not afraid of squids in specific or cephalopods in general; I fail to see how anything we have learned about them would do anything but increase that fear if I was.
This honestly seems like it's taking their reader's intelligence for granted. When people see content from the NYT's they know the point of view it's coming from. I get that the actions of Time's reporters reflects on the paper as a whole but pretending that reader's don't understand that journalists have opinions takes them for granted.
Well, information on how to migitate the cancer risk is already a step forward.

If it is only harmful if ingested you know not to give it to your toddler. If it gives off toxic fumes while burning, well, stay away if you made a fire mistake. etc. The warning itself is pretty useless as it is.
That seems both super dangerous, and super awesome.

It's not something that we should have to consider. But this is the world we live in, now; legitimate supply lines of life-saving medicine have collapsed for a fair number of people. I understand why people might be troubled by someone actively going out and advocating this as opposed to simply making the information available, but if you're offered medicine with 95% efficacy that you can afford and use vs. a well-regulated 99.99% that only exists theoretically...well, come on.
No, they recognise the danger cars pose to others and the responsibility this places on drivers. What makes cars so special that it's seen as okay when a person is killed with one?
If you are being a team player because that's what's needed for you to succeed personally then isn't being a team player the selfish strategy?
Re TeX: That's actually covered by the author. TeX itself is complete. Knuth isn't adding new features, instead the version number is converging to pi (new digit added) with bug fixes [0]. The other variations are not TeX (they're reimplementations) or they're extension built on top of the completed TeX program.

[0] https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-4/tb30knut.pdf [PDF, in case it wasn't obvious]
So Woz’ strengths are marketing etc.? Always seemed that was precisely the part he didn’t play too well.
So many pages on the internet attempt to explain a concept and then do so with an example that demonstrates a totally inappropriate use of the concept. I'd go so far as to say that the example is so bad that it no longer demonstrates the concept at all.

The taco example is an example of an OOP antipattern. Its classic "naive OOP", i.e. "I can do this, so I should". If the taco where in an order taking system, a "menu item" object might have an associated list of "condiment" objects, and these would probably be associations to shared objects. If this were a video game, there might be separate behavioral and rendering objects, and the "rendering object" would simply be a number of generic models etc etc. I understand its hard to provide good examples when writing a blog, but this is precisely the situation when one should do so. To describe the decorator pattern and then provide examples that are bad to the point of misinformation is just lazy.

The decorator pattern is already on sketchy ground IMHO. The wikipedia entry[1] says its to avoid separation of concerns issue, but it seems to do so by ignoring the IsA constraint. A WindowDecorator IsNotA Window. A DecoratedWindow might be a Window, and it might have a list of Decorators, but I can see all sorts of ways that a specific implementation will have a radically different class hierarchy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern
Isn't Bitcoin capped to 10TPS and Ethereum to 25TPS? How is this technology going to handle real-time large volume of payments without reducing latency in the order of a few magnitudes? If this is not addressed, *coins are just an experimental vaporware.
But you have to ignore them. When I look at my lifestyle and its resource consumption it simply is not possible to bring the whole world population to that level. I am aware of that but I still drive my car, fly on vacations and consume a lot of other stuff. I also buy shirts at Walmart although I know that they were probably produced by 12 year old in a sweatshop in Bangladesh.