skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm playing a bit coy here, so play along or don't read this:

How is facebook different from the internet as a whole? In a way is it a mirror of the internet? Everyone has a presence, they surf pages, they make comments, they have pages, games, etc. In some countries where internet access is new, they don't even know the difference between facebook and the internet, because they never use anything else.

In a way, facebook is like the dark web. It's a version of the internet with different rules. We think the dark web is bad, and now people are starting to think facebook is bad. If we start to hate facebook, what's separating us from hating the internet as a whole?

Is it the separation? On the main internet, your real world friends won't know what you posted. You can let off steam, express your interest in nerdy topics, etc.

Is it because facebook is like public speaking, but without the emotional signals that scare you into being on your best behavior, so you're very likely to say something that could offend the whole room ( and you won't even know you've offended them! )

Is facebook like a dating site? One where you can play 'under the radar' because it's not exactly a dating site? You can be yourself without being yourself.

Facebook is an aggregator. It's like someone took the internet and boiled it down, reduced it, and increased its strength.

When I used to use the internet, I used to think of what I wanted to look at, then search specifically for that, or go to a website that has a niche interest, like nintendopower. Now, I go to a 'generalist' website, like facebook, and I let it suggest something I'd be interested in seeing. There was discovery in the old method, but I was still at the wheel. The search had an aim before, and is now aimless.

Aimlessness, purposeless, nihilism, these are all related. They are all related to having no responsibilities. On facebook, the question is: are you responsible? Sort of. Sort of not. Sometimes you should like a post, sometimes you shouldn't. It's very unclear. It's very discouraging. The "shoulds" are very poorly defined, because everyone has different rules for what good manners are.

Winning on facebook is what, more friends? Until you have so many friends that it dilutes your real friendships into a sea of acquaintances. Or, until you feel like a slave to faux-fame.

The alternative is: don't use facebook. You ditch everyone who uses it, and they think you're a snob, or worse, they think you specifically unfriended them and only them, because they don't know you quit. It's like the whole world jumped off a bridge. Sure, it's the wrong thing to do, but literally everyone did it.

A better alternative: a bot that auto responds to things and tells people you aren't on facebook anymore, and how to reach you. This may be the best way to quit.
It's an opinion piece, not journalistic reporting -- the thesis isn't "Tesla is going to go bankrupt and here's why," but rather "here's why I don't think it matters whether Tesla goes bankrupt." It'd arguably be nice to have a sentence or two about "of course, they may not be in trouble after all," but it doesn't really affect the author's argument.

I don't think this is really written for folks who are bullish on Tesla, anyway. It's written for critics, and for folks like myself who might describe themselves as "fascinated skeptics."
Pg_hexedit: Rich hex editor annotations for Postgres relfiles
Shell Joins Automakers to Offer Charging Stations Across Europe
The Secrets of Resilience
The value of the bitcoin network lies in being a censorship[1]- and capital-control-resistant store of value. That is a social net positive, like investment in the equity of productive ventures (except for different reasons). As more people use bitcoin, it becomes a more effective store of value and thus represents a further social good (modulo the increase in legitimately criminal stuff it facilitates!). Perhaps not exactly $50 billion worth, but value nonetheless.

>Crypto currencies cannot be valued - they don't have anything underlying them - they do not imply ownership of anything - and especially since they are not used as currencies - their valuation is a total fantasy.

>BTC is worth whatever the next guy thinks it is worth - and what he thinks it is worth is pure speculative fiction. Just a function of emotional dynamics and fad.

Isn't that equally true of any currency? It doesn't pay dividends and doesn't guarantee ownership of anything, and rises and falls based on the whims of the market. At most you can say that legit currencies are "ownership" of "the cancellation of X units of tax debt", but that's somewhat circular: there's no guarantee that "X units of tax debt" will be a large burden in the first place, and will itself fluctuate in value with the market.

[1] It's true that bitcoin has many failings at achieving anonymity but it certainly competes with international bank transfers for many use cases.

Necessary disclaimer: I'm long bitcoin and and author of understandingbitcoin.us.
Show HN: Hack Days Live 11/26
>Here's what I did: I negotiated with my parents before I was born to give me a unique name.

Yeah, this is really helpful for SEO, so if you haven't done this yet for your personal site, go do that!
You might enjoy this old article about Bob Voulgaris on ESPN. He was/is a very successful NBA gambler that over time started to use some machine learning techniques.

http://www.espn.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/2935/mee...
What's your take on Nickel, Cobalt, etc metal market that goes into modern batteries?
This seems hypothetical and click-baity to me. In the parts of the US I've been to, here's what happens: most people do a (more or less) zipper merge "too soon" at a pretty good speed. A few people race past (too fast to merge), then stop (too slow to merge) at the last possible point. Everyone stops, again and again, to let them back in.

I think a perfect zipper merge requires matching speeds. I don't see how zooming ahead and stopping can help, and the article doesn't suggest any ideas.
It’s funny to see everyone praise Amazon’s strategy of “invest everything you possibly can regardless of what the income statement looks like in the short-term. Tesla does the same thing and all anyone can say is “look at the income statement!”

Granted there are some differences, but the strategy is the same.
I'm sure they're worried about their bottom lines, yeah, but clickbait web media is shallower, less informative, and more biased (in a variety of directions) than mainstream media was even at its worst. Everyone loses with the rise of clickbait news.
Why not just ban gratuitous advertising? I believe we do it with cigarette companies.
You might, but others have a several decades head start on you. Baseball odds started behaving quite differently when the first high-dollar computer-reliant betting syndicates started operating way back when. The rule of thumb back then was that if you could identify a systematic way to extract a decent income from gambling, the size of that income would decline rapidly to equal the minimum wage within 2 or three years.
It's between allowing gambling to be run by organized crime and creating a system that enables at least a modicum of accountability.

Organized crime would probably a step up from state lotteries.
Saw this table from Crypto Voices the other day - basically you buy $1 worth of BTC every day: https://twitter.com/crypto_voices/status/926808236950306816
So it appears that nature can actually recover quite well from severe nuclear explosions and contamination (viz research from the Atolls and Chernobyl etc.). At least upon surface level examination. Deformities in new born living creatures seems to revert back to near normal levels within 2 or 3 generations. Trees and vegetation manage to eke out an existence and grow again.

Hollywood producers who rely on the post armageddon 'nuclear winter wasteland' will have to go back to the drawing boards.

Yet, I wonder what other long term genetic corruption will have occurred even in the surviving and supposedly thriving flora and fauna. Are we subtly developing life forms that will be able to better withstand any sort of nuclear holocaust and thrive once we are long gone?

EDIT: I am thinking the downvoters are reading the first paragraph of my post and not really getting to the last bit and getting the gist of what I am saying... ;)
Highly recommend Isaac Arthur's well-researched video on industrializing the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGcvv3683Os

Separately, if nobody knows how to say yes, can't Moon Express just launch first and ask permission later? Or launch from a different country? I doubt the USSR is going to rise from the dead to enforce the treaty…
Real estate. Buy a cheap house with leverage, fix it and either rent it out, or sell it. If you rent, cash out refi, rinse and repeat. Many fortunes built this way. High use of leverage means many shirts lost as well, however many of our laws (assuming US) are skewed to benefit real estate investment and speculation... with the current admin, I don't see that changing anytime soon. I don't think you can find better odds.
This is pretty neat! https://github.com/agraef/pure-lang/wiki/Rewriting#construct...:

> As a bonus, you also get "constructors with equations" for free. E.g., suppose that we want lists to automagically stay sorted and eliminate duplicates. In Pure we can do this by simply adding the following equations for the : constructor:

> x:y:xs = y:x:xs if x>y; x:y:xs = x:xs if x==y;
> [13,7,9,7,1]+[1,9,7,5];
[1,5,7,9,13]

(The point about this global override is addressed later. The rewriting can be lexically scoped.)
You can check it out here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pygtk-posting/files/pygtk_p...

The documentation is sparse at best, but you can always email me.
I think you would be better off using more well known statistics for betting (ie. multivariate regressions, t-tests, etc..). These stats methods are less of a black box than ML (neural networks, etc..) so you'll be able to understand why they have chosen specific bets and you'll be able to tweak them easier.

ML is often just stats under the hood in most cases -- I think I am targeting neural networks specifically with this comment.
Whilst there are obvious downsides to having a few powerful organisations pushing (their version of) "the truth", there are some upsides: those orgs rely on their reputation, and they're great big targets for lawsuits or even just competition (if newspaper A is too blatant with their lies/spin, newspaper B can call them out on it).

The difference with social media is that we still have a few powerful organisations, but they're no longer the source of content: if/when blatant lies are spread by Facebook, their reputation isn't at stake because everyone knows they didn't create those lies. With the amount of data moving through these systems, it also seems hard to blame them for not catching things effectively, since that's such a hard problem. Like people asking for YouTube uploads to be viewed by a human before approval: there's no way to make such a scheme workable, so we kind of let them off.

Another tricky aspect of social media is the ability to target the audience quite narrowly. With a newspaper, everyone gets the same content, so the news being read by the impressionable or vulnerable is the same as the news being read by the skeptical and the expert. The latter can complain when something seems off, and that protects the former.

Yet these days we can specifically target conspiracy theories, propaganda, etc. only to those we think will be vulnerable to it. The well-informed, skeptical experts won't complain, since they never even know it exists.
Very insightful analysis, thank you.
I just mean a manual test of application functionality. Maybe some manual function calls. Nothing automated or saved.

BTW, the code is an ecommerce platform, not just a website but dozens of integrated applications that handle everything from product selection to order fulfillment, and everything inbetween. 11 years of code that dozens of people use daily to process hundreds of thousands of orders per year.
> They don’t know how to dress or behave

Basically every youth culture and music subculture since WW2 has had this kind of article written about it. Sometimes daily.

The outpouring of death and rape threats against female journalists isn't exactly helping the "know how to behave" angle either.
Same thing with my dad, but at university level as he could write engineering programs to help with homework and avoid booking time on the mainframe.

Btw: Would you please ask your father what type of calculations he ran on his calc as a power systems engineer? Fortran would've been around for state-estimation and contingency analysis by that time if he was in transmission. For distribution I could see him doing fault analysis or calculating line parameters. If he was on the generation side I'm not really sure what he'd be calculating (not my area). Of course utilities were fully vertically integrated during that time frame, so he could have done a mixture.
What makes unit tested code maintainable has nothing to do with how application code is structured and is entirely about the ability to know in an automated fashion whether the previous expectations for how the code should function still hold after a refactoring. Business realities change over time and there are lessons learned that get woven into the code. If we're not careful, refactoring code can lead to losing those lessons. Encoding those lessons as executable tests allows us to better preserve that knowledge as a piece of code evolves.

Where unit tests have an advantage and where you might have been criticized is their ability to test permutations. If you write three tests for one function and three tests for a dependency of that function, you've essentially covered nine cases with six tests. In a complex application with a large dependency graph, that ability to multiply the value of each test can be difficult to overcome when testing at a higher level. Integration tests rarely cover edge cases. Additionally, unit tests are often quite simple to read and have limited setup which means that a programmer coming to the code base without prior knowledge of the code (I always pictured that being me six months in the future so that I'd be as kind as possible :-) can easily see exactly what is expected of the code.

But we shouldn't be dogmatic about the kind of testing we do and lose sight of the goal of that testing in the first place. Any test that furthers a future programmer's ability to rip the application code apart, put it back together and quickly know whether all the previous expectations of the code are still met is a good test. There's no hard and fast rule and judgment and experience are still necessary to know what to do in a specific situation. Too many people focus on the details of automated testing and lose sight of the goal.
GCC extensions make my brain hurt :( Should just use C++ at that point:

template<class T>
bool is_space(const T & x) {
return x == ‘ ‘ || x == ‘\n’;
}
Safer Classification by Synthesis [pdf]
Bravo was an interesting fuckup. Yield was far higher than anticipated. The volume of the resulting fallout was also far higher than anticipated, which created an international controversy and eventually led to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
You mean crashes.

https://www.enddd.org/end-distracted-driving/drop-the-a-word...
I don't use FB enough anymore to know how Trump uses it vs Obama/etc., but I'll take you at your work, mostly for the fact that I rarely (in fact, I can't think of a single time right now) have heard journalists making substantive (or even flippant) complaints about how Trump and his campaign uses FB. OTOH, most of the journalists I know, besides complaining about him, follow Trump on Twitter. Many even have his tweets get treated as Twitter Notifications.

To me the problem of Trump using Twitter is not political, but it's that he's using it for important, world-impacting communication when Twitter is inherently too reactionary of a medium for it. Both Trump and Obama have been heavily critical of North Korea. But there's a huge difference about Trump sending his thoughts via Twitter rather than speech/video address, or TV interview.

In other words, I don't believe that Trump (nor any human, president or not) is above the kind of impulsive communication that Twitter is designed for.
The sparsely populated rural western states will lose the ability to call 911, but maybe it won't matter so much - with a big percentage of those small rural hospitals that depend on part on Medicaid money going under, anyone needing emergency medical treatment is probably going to be looking at a minimum time of 2-3 hours anyway so what's an extra hour or two?

But you can count on one thing: "Thanks, Obama!"
For use by the people who will live there? It'd be easier than building a habitat on or in the asteroid, although that will likely happen at some point as well.
Nuclear terrorism is really, really hard, which is why it has been confined (so far!) to fiction.
Can BTC even crash by half once it gets so pricey? Are there enough buyers for the sellers?
The Great Bitcoin Bull Market of 2017
>...but I still won't invest because the fundamentals are all wrong.

Trading bitcoin is speculation. It's not investing (where fundamental analysis can be useful to evaluate assets). But a lot of money can be made (and lost) by speculating. It just depends on your risk profile.
>> restatement of the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Actually not. The smart people described are all executives (experts) at Tesla. Their interests are therefore aligned, not individuals acting in their own self-interest in the marketplace.
Convert Native and Scanned PDFs to Editable Documents
Yea, I can't really understand why all the complaints about Facebook are so maximalizing. I feel like the authors of all these hitpieces are personally unable to engage in healthy, limited usage of it, so they cast it as as some universal evil that every person is powerless to resist.

I got Facebook in 2006, when it was only college kids (and some high school kids), and my usage throughout college was 99% photo sharing and event planning. 10 years later, my usage of Facebook is......99% photo sharing, event planning, and messaging.

At no point did Facebook launch a feature that pointed a gun at your head and forced you to mindlessly scroll through your feed. Blaming the product/platform for people's unhealthy use of it is like blaming dessert or alcohol for existing: I avoid both of those things a lot more than most people do, but I also wouldn't want a world that completely lacked them.
Between organized crime and ruthlessly efficient corporate entities seeking endless growth, though, which ultimately results in more exploitation and human misery?
2017Q4HW: Desktop Monitor Roundup
Disagree. This is probably true among your demographic but it's not true of the biggest whales for casinos: really old people. My grandparents wouldn't break the law to gamble but given the chance would blow hundreds of dollars on slots in a single visit to a casino. And they would go as often as possible because they liked the attention casinos gave them and they had nothing better to do.

Sure maybe legal gambling will let young people move from sketchy books to more legitimate operations, but they aren't really the ones that get abused by legalized gambling.

Casinos will find a way to exploit old folks with this, I guarantee it. Old people often have about as much going between their ears as ~11-13 year olds but have a lot more disposable income.
I don't think I saw a single article about EA that painted them in a favorable light over this one. "You paid like $60 for this game and would have to spend like $90 on average to unlock Darth Vader, or grind for [some large number of hours]" is not a good look.

This isn't the first thing EA's fucked up by being greedy for microtransactions, and it won't be the last time they roll it back after their customers reacting loudly enough that someone who doesn't give a damn about whatever franchise they're running into the ground by doing this hears about it - I mean, I don't give a shit about SW, much less SW:BF2, and I'm aware of this, and my entire mental picture of the story is "EA is a bunch of greedheads as usual".
I feel it’s kind of shady in the first place to use a transit visa to cover tech events.

Do this in the US, it’ll be worst.
These days of online "newsmedia/newspapers" are not the same as the old days of print media. They are after clicks and they tend to write to their core audiences.
This means HuffPo, WaPo and WaEx write to their audience to the detriment of any semblance of evenness. When it comes to policy they all seem to have pet audiences whose agenda they push rather than examine the pros and cons --these days they seem to push agendas blindly or by cherry picking data.
Yes, I get that (in general).

But then there are things like hygiene, performance and some tricky edge-cases.

And I couldn't find any standard (and simple) algorithm to implement macros (preferably written in something other than Scheme itself).

Still trying to wrap my head around.
Here are a few reasons that I hope you find somewhat convincing:

- Single point of failure. It's ran by one person who can be bribed or manipulated. I've never met Troy Hunt, and from what I can tell he looks like a great upstanding guy[1], but $5 wrenches will work on my kneecaps too.

- What's the process for reporting and publishing? Appeals? There's no transparency here, aside from a list of 5 one-sentence steps in the FAQ[2]. How do we decide what data are "sensitive"? My guess is that there's not too much review.

- As hinted above, with a publicly available shame list, there would exist new incentives to get competitors and enemies on the list. How does this play with a loosely documented review + publish process? With a user interface that might oversimplify the issue?

Please don't misunderstand these points as hostility. I really really like Have I Been Pwned and think it's amazing what Troy is doing. It's just that if we're building new web infrastructure, it's important that we get it right. I think where we can agree is that web users deserve more control over their data by default and shouldn't have to learn how to install and use several fringe programs to do so.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/About

[2] https://haveibeenpwned.com/FAQs
What? Did you actually look at their cash flows? They are massively free cash flow negative, and it's only getting more negative every quarter. The only reason cash is up is because they regularly tap the capital markets with debt and equity, which is why Elon is constantly looking for new ways to boost the stock.

The only way Tesla avoids bankruptcy is if the markets keep believing in the Elon magic, because the operations are definitely not financing the investment required.

This is the key thing people miss when people falsely compare Tesla to Amazon. Amazon has always been free cash flow positive. They may never have turned a GAAP profit for many years, but they weren't issuing stock to finance their growth.
> And you can actually bypass them and go straight to the source of news.

This has been possible long before the Internet. PR firms had as much clout and monetary value as journalism, even in the "golden" days of journalism.