skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Help your Slack team reach herd immunity against the flu, with FluBot
www.flubot.io

Hi there, I'm looking for some early feedback on FluBot. If you're interested in trying it out and don't mind that it isn't Slack-approved yet, feel free to install it.

I'm interested in any and all feedback, but am particularly curious what people think about
1) FluBot's pricing, and
2) whether the permissions it requires are acceptable or likely to prevent people from using it?
One is conceivably less false to people so it is the authentic genuine source by default, seems to be the current trend of thinking
Isn't the "having access to USD" part of their dollar-backing credible as long as they can buy or sell dollars in the global market?
The Australian ABC is another example of a state supported news service which would probably be harmful to penalise.
For the motivated amongst us, the SEC "Tips, Complaints, and Referrals" portal is here: https://denebleo.sec.gov/TCRExternal/disclaimer.xhtml

They accept anonymous reports, and pay out whistleblower penalties in some circumstances.

I can't tell if Tether is a US company or not, but regardless, it's still worth reporting if y'all care to - that USD has to get into the country somehow, and it sure is interesting how it isn't being reported properly!
Journalism is earned, not assumed. No matter the stance of RT vice still needs to demonstrate journalistic integrity. Have they? No. They’re on equal footing as i’m concerned. Propaganda is at least interpetable.

Also they do tell blatant falsehoods, intentional or no. Americans care much less than they say.
The Soviets were like a big corporation. People do what the big guy says. If he’s right, he’s a genius. If he’s wrong, you’re fired.
RT is Russia Today, which is funded by the Russian government. Sputnik, the other media outlet mentioned in the article, is similarly funded by the Russian government. Their Wikipedia pages imply that both are use for Russian government propaganda... in case anyone else also needed background context.
Money is many things. Some people are against fiat currency as store of value, but okay as medium of exchange. Tether is fiat currency used as medium of exchange but not as store of value.
I’ve wondered about this sort of thing too, but I figure that their response will be “if we can’t see what domain you’re visiting, we’ll just stop you from visiting it”. Ditto with vpn traffic. They’ll whitelist paying traffic and slow everything else.
Read the rest of my post. If you don't agree, that's fine.
No, there isn't.

Journalism in USA is totalitarian. There may be two points of view, but they differ so little as to be indistinguishable to anyone whose intellect isn't constantly gaslighted by the overwhelming ideological conformity. The journalism to which we are subjected is still propaganda, because after all a journalist has to stay in the club in order to work, and he does that by parroting the bullshit the insiders tell him. Nobody steps outside the lines and stays on the air.

A great place to get reporting without the approved USA right-thinking is foreign state media. I actually prefer Al Jazeera to RT, but I'm under no illusions: after they shut down RT, AJ is next, soon to be followed by BBC.
There were tunnel bank robberies like these in the Black Echo, the first Bosch novel.

Not the first underground break ins. I think there's one in a Sherlock Holmes story. But seems like banks could just monitor vibrations to prevent this attack.
JS web frameworks benchmark – Round 7
So when's Al jezeera getting a lower rank. They are a state media which is also heavily baised.
countries' laws only apply within its borders. An Australian court cannot fine the EFF or force them to modify their website because it does not operate within Australia, they have no ability to "force" the EEF to do anything. Google only had to obey the Canadian Court because it has operates in Canada [0]

[0]: https://www.google.ca/about/locations/?region=north-america
To be fair a lot of us stay away from these Tethers.

I think there is a place for a 1:1 backed currency on the blockchain, but I'd rather see Governments actually print for example USD and AUD onto something like an ERC20 Ethereum token.

This would add real fiat to the blockchain which is important, as in the end all taxes are paid in fiat. (It would be nice to be able to go directly into AUD for all crypto currencies, rather than the mess I have now which is to use an intermediate crypto currency like Ethereum or Bitcoin to move in and out.)

Those extra transactional costs really screw with a lot of us.
Slippery slope, if I’ve ever seen one.
What's going now with Net neutrality is a symptom of a bigger problem. We need to repeal Citizens United[1] and make the government less corrupted to prevent cases like this.

But in narrower scope, the best way is to support the inevitable court case against FCC that will follow their expected decision. That will prompt politicians who are backed by ISP monopolists to propose a "solution", i.e. legislation that will supposedly address Net neutrality.

That's where the real fight will begin. They'll try to push a fake law that won't protect anything but will make it even harder to ever change things for the better. The public will have to put a lot of pressure on their representatives to voice interest in a proper law.

Another part of the solution would be pushing for more municipal networks and for ending of the obnoxious monopolistic grip of Comcast and Co. That also requires repealing a lot of anti-competitive state laws (so again, put pressure on your representatives if you live in one). Real (not fake) competition will naturally prevent many of the issues that Net neutrality tries to address.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
> it seems that the Australian court gets to decide what is under its jurisdiction.

Nope
US customers of Tether should be concerned that transactions repatriating dollars might trigger a SAR. Have your paperwork in order.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report
I don't doubt that RT has a pro-Russian slant, but is there any objective evidence that the traditional sources are any less biased? It was only last decade when American media proved itself to be frighteningly biased in favor of the US government's agenda[1].

By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives. Is it any surprise that foreign countries, including our allies in the EU, are becoming increasingly distrustful of American technology platforms?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_the_Iraq_War...
It actually isn't (off topic) , since it's a key theme of the article.
You're falling into exactly the fallacy I described: Vice is not the best news organisation in the world, therefore it is functionally equivalent to a propaganda outlet. It's absurd logic.

Almost as absurd as the fact that yours is a brand new account created specifically to comment on this story. I'm sure it's just coincidental though...
OMG it's such a racket. Why are our customers going to our competitor? Oh, they're using our name in adwords, and our customers are idiots who use google to navigate to the next block... ok Google here's thousands of dollars every month. Please don't extort any more from us.
Financial red lights are flashing again
Cost of licensing closed source or developing own OS for ME is not prohibitive for Intel. No way GPL could prevented creating of Intel ME.
This is the right thing to be concerned about.

It takes an incredible amount of chauvinism and arrogance to believe that the American people are too stupid to realize that perhaps a news source called "Russia Today" might publish articles that would reflect unflattering aspects of American society and unflattering stories about American politicians. If our domestic news outlets reported on these things there would have been no market share left to be grabbed by RT in the first place.

Schmidt seems to want to suppress such ideas, helping to suppress these unflattering stories so that the Al Frankens, Donald Trumps, and George HW Bushes of the world can stay in power.

As an aside, Schmidt is the ultimate establishment opportunist, so of course he would do this sort of thing. He cares only about making Eric Schmidt powerful.

> Wouldn't a better solution be to identify the claims in the article and automatically alert the reader that one or more claims have been debunked? Then let the user decide?

Of course that would be better. It would also be what a capable tech firm should do to help create an informed populace. But Schmidt doesn't want that, he simply wants to be viewed as one of the "good guys" by the partisans who are promoting the Russia story and trying to make political headway with it.

I have zero respect for Trump, but the Russia story is total bunk and RT has published more important stories about America's disadvantaged citizens and failing infrastructure than all of the major news outlets combined.

This also probably reveals that Google rankings can no longer be trusted simply to reveal pagerank results with corrections for spam and pagerank exploits.

Note to Google: We do not want you to be an information censor or a moderator of the ideas that we are exposed to. Please stop.
If I'm not wrong, the message would disappear after the person deleted their Facebook so for people to see it the parent would have needed to stay on Facebook long enough for people to see it (which is an easy way to get sucked back into staying)
I know he has left the administration, but Bannon has said that Silicon Valley is "the heart of the resistance" and that it has "too many asian CEOs." I am reporting this not to make a political point but to answer this question.

As for the political point: he made similar statements before leaving; as an immigrant (green card), Silicon Valley CEO with a south asian parent even before he left I knew I had hit the "Bannon Trifecta".

https://timesofsandiego.com/politics/2017/10/20/steve-bannon...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/steve-bannon-racist-...
The FCC Chairman assures us that there is a robust and competitive marketplace for internet services.
I did not say they were not the best, I said they need to demonstrate basic journalistic integrity at any point. They fail to do basic story updates to reflect obvious errors. At that point, it’s not news AT ALL, it’s just entertainment. So they aren’t just not the best, they aren’t a news outfit, they are an entertainment outlet.
Could you go into more detail on what happened to Mt. Gox during final months?
App that helps you build up your fitness discipline
AFAIK they are from Hong Kong.
This is a natural development in the evolution of advertising. The moment a company picks ads as a revenue model is the moment it pivots to become Media. I am building a company that aims to eliminate the need for advertising, and actually save time for its users, instead of making users pay with their time. I lived in an ads-free country for 10 years and saw the tremendous impact advertising had on society when it was finally allowed. I interned at the top Ad firm in the country and had management offers right after college to work in ad agencies, but decided to build things worth advertising instead. Proceeded to work in a top Media firm where advertisers wanted to buy space that was disruptive to users. The system is flawed, but it pays well, because instead of a cut of sales that quantify your performance as a seller, you are making a cut of every seller’s budget competing against other sellers - a reflection of their margin for selling a product. To top it off, you are greatly aided by your inability to sell your customers product to your users - it’s the advertisers fault for not knowing how to target properly, right?

That feels like a great gig until you realize that it is corrosive to you as well. Every site that has advertising as a business model, eventually has to de-prioritize user’s needs in favor of those of advertisers to grow bigger. Yahoo became useless; Google results are getting worse, because high placement requires lots of keywords padded with more words, instead of a succinct thorough answer; Facebook is losing the trust of its users who are clicking, not typing to communicate with friends anymore (anecdotal, not empirical);

The human brain needs dopamine from progress when it can be productive. Eventually when its productivity is drained it needs to escape with distraction and stories. In between is the need for empathy from other intelligent beings. Faking either of these leads to unhappiness. That is why there is always a solution better than advertising-funded companies of today and that will be the next wave. We are on it.
It's good to get a wide range of views, but RT, Al Jazeera, and even BBC all provide their own skewed viewpoints. An informed person would be wise to read their stories and compare them to stories from American journalism outfits, but the idea that Al Jazeera or RT is inherently more credible than American journalists is pretty ridiculous. They suffer from overwhelming ideological conformity as well; it's just a different ideology.
Economics of scale in this instance are not applicable. But they do lower the providers cost. They never pass along the savings. Media companies like this do not decrease prices as output increases. If this were true cable boxes would be free in 2017. Looking around my house I pay for 1 Hub, 1 router, 3 boxes and 4 remotes. My provider just did an “upgrade” now all homes use 1 hub and 1 router per house and x number of “child” boxes. This means the provider is benefiting not the consumer. In fact, if my hub goes out, all my child boxes go out by design. I asked for 4 hubs and no “child” boxes and they said this upgrade is to reduce their cost, not mine. I’m not the only one complaining. My monthly fee is higher than before the upgrade. All these companies care about is power, control and profits. While this deal is considered a “vertical acquisition” it is not bc the media landscape is changing and the lines are more blurred than ever.
Why would donald trumps mnssages matter? Is the justice departments case based soLely on the president wanting the merger to not go through? Those are two seperate cases. This lawsuit is going to court motives are a seperate crime.
Of all the people I know, us IT folk seem to be the most adverse to interruptions and/or needless complexity, caring most about the things that matter - this is strange considering that we are most responsible for these problems. People have stared at me blankly enough for me to realize that I shouldn't bring up the social evils of Facebook in general conversation, yet my IT friends are happy to talk about the subject to death.

> I'm thinking of ditching my iPhone for a flip phone.

I still don't think I could do without a smartphone. I have practically all notifications muted, but you need apps for too many things (most notably: Lyft to stay responsible).
I don't know why you're making assumptions about me personally or my preference towards news (Vice isn't one of my usual news sources fwiw) rather than keeping it to the subject.

But I don't believe that Vice has quite the divisive and disruptive agenda that these state sponsored propaganda bullhorns have.
> By abandoning algorithmic rankings, and directly targeting "enemy" news sources, Google is moving away from its engineering roots, and is starting to become a weapon for the US government's foreign policy objectives.

This is precisely Schmidt's goal, and has been for a long time. He wants to weaponize Google and sell it to Government as if it were a defense contractor.

It's totally shameful. Schmidt is one of the enablers of villains like GW Bush. History will judge him harshly.
Failing Subway Threatens New York’s Financial Future, Transport Chief Says
Seems awfully niche. Maybe r/Nootropics would be a better place to ask.

Schedule 1 drugs should be avoided, even where legal. You can probably get better results from something like Modafinil anyway.
It's not so much of a stretch. This is by far the highest-profile race Moore has ever been involved with. The allegations were sniffed out by a national paper that was there to cover it. Moreover, we're in the midst of a moment when women who've been harassed or abused by public figures are more willing to come forward.
So I expect you'd support banning NPR, BBC, ABC Australia, NHK, Al Jazeera, and the numerous other state run or funded news organizations? And what of news organization that could be shown to be willing to get in bed with government? This [1] video is of a hot mic moment between Bill Clinton and Larry King. It's from just before Clinton was elected, but has relevance today for rather self evident reasons.

- Larry King: It's crazy - Ted Turner changed the world. He's a big fan of yours.

- Bill Clinton: Is he?

- Larry King: He would, uh, serve you - you know what I mean?

- Bill Clinton: You're kiddin?

- Larry King: Oh you'd be surprised - he's ready what's he got left in life to gain? I'd call him after you're elected. Think about it.

The reality is that nearly all media today is spiraling towards partisan and biased tabloidism, and so this action seems completely arbitrary. We can try to spin it as being "election interference" but let's imagine we played a similar game as we have with Russia, with the UK. And we qualify anybody who posted on issues even tangentially related to the US election from an England IP, with an England phone number, etc as an "English agent." How many would there be? Or even vice versa how many "American agents" are there that tried to "influence" Brexit?

Unless there's any form of consistency and objectivity in these actions, this looks more like a witch hunt than anything else.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCUIlV-AKY4
Discussion on an antecedent story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15737333
Mt.Gox started having issues withdrawing funds to "real" fiat currencies, people got scared, wanted to pull out their bitcoin, suddenly their account says they have a balance, but there's not bitcoin backing up the balance. (In Mt.Gox case, this was because a significant amount of bitcoins were stolen from their treasury.

Similar thing could happen with people redeeming USDT for USD if they don't have enough to cover the already issued USDT.
I suppose I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304479

The short version: Mt. Gox stopped paying out USD-denominated claims, because (as was correctly perceived by many people) they were insolvent. They continued paying out BTC-denominated claims. The only way to get value out of Mt. Gox was to either go through yen (which the vast majority of customers couldn't do [0]) or buy Bitcoin and withdraw, which caused the price of Bitcoin to gallop upwards in late 2013.

[0] I got a number of interesting business propositions that year: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/423869016776933376
And BBC is funded by British government.

And PBS is funded by US government.
Do you have any citations for all of us to read, or are we to trust your judgement?

Also I'm curious, why was it this story in particular that inspired you to sign up for an account on Hacker News?
I look at it this way. I wouldn't recommend it, because society still discriminates against you based on how you look and dress. I mean, if you show up at a job interview with 98% of your body tattooed you're also going to face bias.

Conformity in a way increases opportunity. On the other hand, she's a transhumanist, so she probably believes all of these rules and customs are pretty primitive and totally changeable. I mean, who says you ever have to wear clothes if you're in a warm climate? Who says our genitals shouldn't be seen? These are all developed customs and specific to each society. She's deliberately breaking the mold and refusing to be shamed.

I'm ok with people portraying themselves however they want to portray themselves. I can make a rational argument for "playing it safe" and being conservative, then again, when you're 70 years old and lived a life of conformity, maybe you'll regret you didn't live life openly and flamboyantly like she does.
Laurier university’s handling of freedom of expression ‘inexcusable’
The first known object to enter our solar system from deep space
New cyber security law prompts Amazon to sell part of its China cloud services
Not doable today, I think they use seismic sensors.

But then Elon Musk musk know something I don't...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/29/16567088/elon-musk-the-b...

(a joke, OK? I know Tesla has enough money--for a few more quarters)
This week's installment of internet funbux drama.
> So I would be curious if Letsencrypt is enabling people who otherwise would not have gotten an SSL cert, as well as the extent Letsencrypt is taking away customers.

For my personal stuff, it is both. I paid for a single cert on my little server, but it hosted a handful of domains. It wasn't practical to secure the rest with only a single IP or to expensive to pile them all on a single cert. Let's Encrypt replaced one paid cert and secured 5 other domains that I otherwise wouldn't have.

This bled into work where we replaced all paid certs(except wildcards, coming soon) and secured hundreds of domains were not before.
I find that mindfulness both reduces my stress in the short term, and causes me to reflect and choose to eliminate stress-causes in my life in the long term. Both effects are positive.
You know it's an issue when apple releases an official guide on cleaning the keyboard for users with unresponsive keys due to dust.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205662
Most of the popular US media is very biased towards the US, but that's not what's spurring this action from Google. It's not just that RT is owned by a foreign state or that RT is biased or even propaganda. It's that it's owned by a foreign state which attempted to interfere in US elections, partially using RT, and partially with the help of Google search results showing RT stories. Google, being an American company, needs to draw a line somewhere, and that seems like a reasonable place.

American state-owned or private outlets deliberately attempting to influence other countries' elections (as they undoubtedly do) are also right to be de-ranked by those countries' search engines and aggregators.
If I had a hot dog cart and sold $500 worth of hot dogs, but the hot dogs cost me $100, to me, that's not making $500.
Aren't Fox News and the Wall Street Journal owned by the same company? :-P
Nature and origins of the lexicon in 6 month olds
I'm sure the people in Eastern Europe who were conquered and enslaved by the Soviets wished that the Allies had kept rolling east. But by 1945 the western armies were tired of fighting and had no desire for another brutal war of attrition.
I don't largely disagree with some of the concerns I question the motives and timeliness of the decision to de-rank a media outlet like RT. It's not something that is done for the reasons presented and the whole Russian influence on the election has so many holes to be a proven credible threat. People are ignorant of media outlets and think stations like Al Jazeera are Al Quaida driven so I am highly skeptical that any party is doing any censoring for legitimate reasons or valid concerns. They aren't looking out for your best interests when it comes to presenting the news.
Could they obtain an injunction forcing Australian ISPs to block the EFF website?
I came across this last weekend, which you may find helpful reading for more context on potential fraud with tether and Bitfinex:
https://twitter.com/bitfinexed
Latency still matters though. A stack that can render things in 50ms likely ends up simpler than one that takes 500ms, where things like caching templates, esi, start being introduced to compensate for latency.