skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yah, the only thing I really like on facebook is pictures of friends hiking and backpacking trips. Some of the hiking groups also have great content and relatively recent info on trail conditions that is hard to find elsewhere.
>Powerless

Same, so as a petty man I've made a personal vow to send Ajit Pai a card every Christmas reminding him he sold his soul to Comcast and that I will never forget or forgive him for it.

Totally pointless right now when the whole country is calling for his head and he gets to play the haughty "I don't give a fuck, I'm set for life now, suck it plebes" card.

But in 2040, when he has long since moved on, and the rest of the country has forgotten, and he's an old man that just wants to spend time with his grandkids and ensure a good future for his family or whatever, every Christmas, still, a card from me - "Hey shithead, remember when you sold out the American people for cash? Fuck you."

I will do this until he or I dies.
The argument that seems to be espoused in this comment, and varous others[0], is that Disney only wants to make "dumbed down" traditional US-style children's / "family" movies and therefore will turn any company they buy to that purpose. Several of the hosts on pop culture/entertainment industry podcasts I listen to have said the same thing.

However, it seems to me (and at least Peter Sciretta at SlashFilm Daily has expressed a similar sentiment) that this would not necessarily be Disney's strategy for Fox. As was recently pointed out on the SlashFilm podcast, Disney already has so many subsidiaries making family-friendly movies (Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) that they can hardly find enough sufficiently spaced-out weekends on the calendar to release them all. Movies like Logan, and shows like those on FX and FXX, have been critically acclaimed and financially successful. Would it make more sense for Disney to turn Fox into yet another family-friendly content company to compete with all their other family-friendly content companies that are already potentially cannibalizing each other, or use it to expand into a new adult-oriented niche with existing critically acclaimed and financially successful content?

[0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922177
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922087
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15923597
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922605
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922925
It really won't. See Brazil. The president was elected with less support than that[0], and they are overhauling nothing. Don't think that things would be different in USA, don't fall to American exceptionalism. I recommend that you take a few minutes and honestly ask yourself what is different in the USA that would cause such a poor election to have a different consequence. A 10% will be taken as a sign of apathy, not of opposition, and as an opportunity to do whatever because people clearly don't care.

[0]https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazils-Michel-Temer-...
In that article, a quote...

"We are helping consumers and promoting competition," Mr. Pai said in a speech before the vote. "Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas."

Please, Mr. Pai. Help consumers? That's a lie.
Silicon Valley is in California because of historical reasons related to a) US defense R&D spending following WWII and b) the 60's counterculture, not because of differences in each respective state's employment law.

IANAL, but declining to hire a lawyer out of principle because you think that certain aspects of a given state's employment law "shouldn't be a problem in the first place" is really dumb.
Python library for EnvKey: a password manager for API keys and configuration
Not someway, somehow. I gave a concrete example of how it will correct itself.

If we wish to talk about hand waving, consider all the "the internet is going to blow up!" hysteria[0] going on right now from the pro-NN side.

[0]: https://twitter.com/thereaIbanksy/status/940989790677291010
I think the cable guys just awakened the sleeping giant. By making sure they can tighten the screws on Silicon Valley they have spawned out a multitude of startups that will topple them one day. The cable companies make money by making something scarce. They will milk every penny of their investment and give it back to the investors without much reinvesting it back to create cheaper broadband for the masses. Silicon Valley’s whole business model is based on cheap access to the internet that's why google Facebook etc is investing so much to connect the third world. I believe they were hedging against net neutrality dying someday. I can't imagine after winning the first battle they took a timeout. The investments in the 3rd world internet may ultimately lead to newer cheaper ways to connect the world. Cabel companies clocks started to run out the day they attacked net neutrality. Let's see how they survive in about 10 years’ time.
No, Trump selected him to be the chair, he didn't merely renominate him.

But, in any case, Obama nominated him but did not choose him so much as he choose not to violate long-standing precedent as to how the seats that cannot (because the 3 members of one party limit has been reached) be from the President’s party are selected.

Now, he could have violated that precedent, but that wouldn't have likely gotten someone else into the seat, just given up any chance of Senate confirmation.
> The problem with most voters is that they choose an identity and then vote according to how they think that identity votes.

That's because it's sports to many people, they want their team to win - but instead of a superbowl title it's our nation at stake....

Being a liberal in Idaho kinda feels like being a Raiders fan at this point, now that I think about it.
Funny how things have changed since 1991. Now it’s just “government has a role to play” vs “government is the source of all your problems”
The government exists for and by the people. Funny how fascists seem to forget this.
I do agree with the general point: people need answers, so they usually keep some postulates as true without further discussion, and build reasoning on top of them. This makes a lot of pragmatic sense.

Science, though, does notice its own epistemic instability, so to say. It understands its limits (reproducible phenomena on which statistic methods work), and ultimately agrees that the very base of it, the hypothesis of "objective reality", is but a hypothesis, and could be wrong (e.g. we live in a simulation that can be controlled in interesting ways), and can't be proven subjectively (that is, a correctly formulated solipsism is impenetrable).

So, no, science is not tying to give all the answers. It can provide a lot of practically useful answers, though, that are also supposed not to contradict each other. That's the best we can extract from it.
Facebook is a phishing website.

There's gonna be a point in the future that people are gonna have to click 10 ads to see 1 friend update.

And they'll be okay with it, just like people love The Super Bowl ads. I can see how people will say "What I like Facebook for is the ads!". They don't have to steal your credit card to make you buy stuff you'll do cause you like the ads!
"Argumentum ad Gödel" ... How would you prove it's a fallacy?

(If you take Gödel seriously, then you can't take Gödel seriously, in which case he's correct and you must take Gödel seriously, &c.)
Start with https://www.recode.net/2017/12/14/16777356/full-transcript-a..., and maybe read through the several hundred pages of arguments and citations at http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...
See also: updating vulnerable library packages but not restarting dependent daemons.
I don't think controversial ideas are the problem, or changing cultural standards of what is acceptable to do or discuss. I think at the core, discussion itself is less valued.

To have an useful discussion with someone, there needs to be an assumption of good faith on both sides - that each person will make an effort to see things from the perspective of the other, will set aside semantics and minor errors that don't matter, will directly confront key points that are brought up and will admit errors or spaces where they lack knowledge or clarity.

This assumption of good faith, in my view, has been the major casualty of modern politics and the new means of communication tech has provided to us in the last decades. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with views that match your own, to gorge on straw-men and memes and bad faith arguments that then result in pattern-matching responses when dealing with someone of opposing views.

---

That said, I suspect there might be something else at play here in Sam's case. In the last decade we've seen tech grow up, and much of this has shattered the "tech is the way to a better future" idea. Google has gone from "do no evil" to the biggest marketing and personal information gathering force on the planet, with intentions that now seem ambiguous at best. Facebook has gone from a convenient way to stay in contact with people or make new connections to a machine optimized to capture human attention to such a degree that notable former Facebook folk are coming out of the woodwork to say they don't use it and forbid their kids. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated the capability to have massive impact on politics, seemingly in negative ways, and seem to avoid interest in taking responsibility for the impacts of their platforms.

All of this leads to people being less optimistic about tech and startups. Sure, Uber sounded like a great idea at the start, but now? All those people working below the API seem to be in the same spot as the taxi drivers before - making minimal money, in debt over a car instead of a medallion, etc. And above it, a valuation of billions. It feels like a resource extraction project, where the average people are squeezed for the wealth growth of investors and techies.

Capitalism has a warping effect on tech. The successful startups aren't about saving the world, or making things better - they're about making money. If that coincides with doing good for the world, great - and if it doesn't, oh well, because making things better isn't actually the name of the game. It's a feel-good thing to put SV above finance or resource extraction or energy - and less people are believing it.

China probably just hasn't gotten there yet. They're still in their tech honeymoon phase, where everything is great - easier ways to pay, communicate, etc. Given that they're used to restrictions on communication and what they're allowed to know and think, maybe they'll never leave it.
Attempting to blame Republicans or Democrats for this collectively is silly. The point is that both are responsible (by differing, unquantifiable amounts), as noted by the fact that Pai was appointed by Obama, a democrat and promoted to a point where he could influence Net Neutrality by Trump.

Politics are more nuanced than red or blue.
While technically correct, your comment is misleading because the seat legally belonged to the Republicans and he was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Obama could have rejected the nomination but anyone that the Republicans have a say in will be anti-net neutrality.
that's actually a really good tool. I've been looking for ages for a simple web based tool to do simple editing and couldn't find a decent one. I think this is an option i'll explore
And you believe that Ajit Pai is "one of the good people" doing the "good thing" against public interest?

Funny because I believe Ajit Pai is a corporate shill doing what his Friends at Verizon wanted and I am sure he is hoping the land a nice 6 figure job in the private sector in a couple years....

This move today for the FCC has absolutely nothing to with public interest
As a midwesterner that has ran in -30(F/C doesn't matter at that point), tourist. >.<
I'm sure President Trump's policies were very important for voters, not just "he's not hillary".
Yet another generic linux distro. Nothing interesting.
I'm self taught mostly from books and MOOCs and arguing with friends of mine who are actual economists. Perhaps my lack of formal economics training is another reason not to listen to me.

If you're interested in going deep on this stuff, I highly recommend this MOOC:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking

He doesn't talk about basic income, but this class really helped me understand the nature of money and economic policy.

If you're curious about more about the economics of a deficit-funded basic income, I'm working on a paper about that. Here's the abstract:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9KDLUTAOkduOXdNQWl3REw4eWc...

Feel free to email me if you're interested in reading the full paper. It's over 50 pages long, but it's not very mathy and should (hopefully) be accessible to non-economists.
Los Platillos Voladores de Israel Vendran
>As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else's product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume.

I don't think this is always true, is it? The price of a phone call isn't contingent on the contents of the call. Regarding the internet, though, I'd feel better if there was any guarantee at all that these "negotiations" would be on a level playing field. If you're a startup that wants to complete with some Comcast streaming service, the Comcast ISP side of things can kill you day one. There's no negotiation possible when one party has all the power. Maybe that's the system working as intended, but if that's the case, then the system creeps me out.
Pai says he is "helping consumers and promoting competition".

Unfortunately, half of the states have laws and regulations that hamper efforts of local governments to build out municipal broadband [1] to take their own broadband access into their hands.

Republican politicians are often [2][3] at the forefront of these state bans, despite citizens of all political leanings in favor of localities being allowed to do this [4][5].

[1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/another-state-la... [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/another-state-la... [3] https://www.fischer.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/81c82846-... [4] https://muninetworks.org/content/pew-survey-reveals-overwhel... [5] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/10/americans-ha...
"They're sure they can get done in that amount of time, so they take it easy for the first half. Then they get progressively more panicked as the deadline approaches, and they're late anyway, and/or you ship on time ..."

I found that the more experienced/older I am, the less this happens. We even finished multiple such tasks sooner then was required - of course contributing factor was that deadlines were sane. I somewhat used to have this tendency when I was younger. Experience makes you better at managing time risks. It is actually one issue I have with cookie cutter agile. Everyone is so micromanaged by the system, that they don't get to get experience needed to learn the above.

There are also contributing cultural factors. In many companies, people who stay late last week tend to be praised and rewarded over those who work in predictable speed and kept eye on the deadline from day one (not in my current team). Incentives matter and finishing tasks at the last moment at cost of evenings/weekends makes you a hero.

I personally know people, including leads of agile teams, who believe that last moment desperate effort is somehow necessary. Like you are lazy if you dont. That means there will be last moment effort, whether it was needed or not. So if the team is going to be on time, an additional work is found to be done - or more often possible logical steps to make the deadline are not taken (a feature the customer explicitly said is not necessary is done anyway etc). I wish this would be a joke or exaggeration, but I have seen it multiple times already. While details were each time different, it really did boiled down to techies essentially organizing that desperate effort for themselves.

It does not matter what the process is, how exactly you estimate etc. As long as not doing the responsible thing is rewarded, people will do that.
Godwin's law came fast on this one!

A part of me is uninterested in reading it because I find other topics way more interesting. But a part of me also feels I can't read it. Because if I read it and I agree with it, I will have to balance honesty and integrity with oppression.

All my life I held all my controversial opinions quite openly, but this was the first time I actually fear being controversial.

I'm with Voltaire on this one: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.". A coworker can say something I disagree terribly with, that even could impact my life personally, and would consider it just the way people relate to each other, sometimes its not nice and thats it.

"Moral outrage" on twitter is a ridiculous measure for progress or improvement over people's lifes. It does terrible damage in so many levels. And companies listening to that are just succumbing to their PR and legal department, not striving to an idealistic work environment. Google can be sued for not firing Damore!
> ...and in hunter-gatherer societies, women walk, on average, 5.5 miles per day, often while carrying and feeding infants as well.

Quoting a one-sided statistic like this is something the editor should have caught. The 5.5 miles figure doesn’t support anything if the figure for men is ten; it’s great support if that figure is four; but without either figure what does it mean?
Ahh I misunderstood what you said. I see what you mean now, but sadly I'm still salty that solution (despite being a sound one) boils down to money.
If HBO is hamstrung by lucrative deals, then it stands to think that HBO's own deal making has prevented them from usurping Netflix. To my knowledge, I haven't heard of Netflix having overtly anti-competitive behavior but I'm all ears for examples. It seems as though HBO is capable of competing, but they have to make a risky play and get out from their cable TV bubble to do so, which is no fault of Netflix.

If anything, this shows that the monolithic telecoms that have large stakes in these cable TV brands are facilitating monopolies elsewhere because likely competitors are locked into their current markets.

EDIT: to be clear, HBO's unsuccessful attempt to be level with Netflix in the streaming arena is more "don't want to" and not "can't". I wouldn't call a lack of wanting to be monopolistic. If HBO suddenly turned around and wanted to compete directly with Netflix and got boxed out by Netflix in some way, i.e. Netflix striking deals with Level 3 or similar providers to prevent HBO from getting equal treatment, then there's a strong case for them being labeled a monopoly.
A fair point, but I will just say that Hound is _astonishingly_ low maintenance. I set it up at my current employer like two years ago and have logged into that VM maybe twice in the entire time. It just hums along and answers thousands of requests a week with zero fuss.
That's because most people who take more than a cursory glance sees that there are multiple different ideologies lumped under the same name there, diverse enough that the supporters of some have historically been the most brutal persecutors of supporters of others - Among the millions dead you list are huge numbers of communists that fought against the regimes you complain about, in many cases in open armed conflicts.

Raise more specific ideologies, like Stalinism or Maoism or even Leninism and you will certainly meet a lot more opposition, and rightly so, because many on the left are closest ideologically to victims of the followers of those ideologies. E.g. one thing most people forget about the October "revolution" was that it wasn't a revolution at all, but a coup against the socialist provisional government - it was the Bolsheviks overthrowing the revolutionary socialist/communists and largely Marxist groups that had popular support after the elections to the constituent assembly went against them.

So painting them all with one brush is not just ignorant, but offensive to the many socialists and communists who took up arms, and fought and died to try to stop those regimes.

Your example is pretty much equivalent to complaining about capitalism because various governments allowing some variation of private ownership of capital have committed atrocities.
How do you expect those independent experts to be chosen? Even then, how do expect these experts to "objectively address" the issue? I don't agree with partisan politics, but the solution isn't demanding independent, magical objectivity, because that doesn't exist, regardless, everyone would claim to have it, the liars and the idiots especially.

If we want better representation of the facts and the People's opinion, we need better representation. The current system lacks nuance and seems to be subject to Elite interests over popular ones.
> only real world example

[Citation needed]. Whatsapp has virtually no competition in Brazil because most carriers do not count it toward the data cap.
Nope. Otherwise they'd be getting rid of the regulations that allow Comcast to be a defacto monopoly ISP.
This move decreases the government's regulatory power in this area; it completely follows republican ideaology. The government cant screw over citizens if they aren't touching an issue.
People in SF don't think about the south either besides in political discussions.
After pondering on this quandary I find myself not knowing which is more offensive, the fact that corporate money pours into politics and corrupts everything into a pile of shit, or the fact that revolving doors are legal. Pait was a Verizon executive. So those being regulated are now writing the regulations.

I really can’t tell which horrendous act is worse.
1999 (Dogma), not to mention 1994 (Pulp Fiction), was a long time ago, and things do change. Since then I remember Disney being one of the first big companies to get in the national news for offering same-sex partner benefits; they didn't seem to care how many people that offended.
> You still haven't convinced me why I should move everything to TLS.

I don't need to, you can head off into the world believing what you want. You are however very wrong on this. Wether you decide you are going to continue to be wrong is of course up to you. I don't know you, do what you want.

> Also, I do doubt you have other stuff to do, seeing as you answered my post, point by point...

And I took time out of my day to do so, and yes, I do have other stuff to do.

> Yes there are 'bad actors' but lets not get too paranoid here. We can't wrap everything up in TLS cottonwool....

Taking adequate and proportional steps to secure our data, our identities and our money is not "wrapping everything up in cotton wool".

Risk and security are a sliding scale, we don't need to only talk about the extremes.

> where does it stop? Are we all too afraid to leave our houses without 'security' ? Do we now talk in code in public just. in. case. someone is overhearing what we say?

Another straw man argument, but just for fun:

> Are we all too afraid to leave our houses without 'security' ?

No would be the general answer, but it's going to depend on what your risks are. Who you are, where you live etc.

> Do we now talk in code in public just. in. case. someone is overhearing what we say?

Again, generally no. However if we have something that we want kept private we do either talk in code, or we wait until a more opportune moment.