skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for those links, and your great work. If Twitter refuses to do the kind of investigation and analysis that you performed because they're making too much money from bots, then the free press and open source community needs to take up the slack!
>it depends on time and priorities.

AKA never.
I like co-hackers. Sounds exciting without being to formal.
When this came up yesterday, I thought rspeer's comment was the most insightful, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16241656 .

> "he ran this somewhat anachronistic model and it told him that the text was a good statistical match for being in... Esperanto. He threw this prediction out on the basis that it makes absolutely no sense. You'd think this would be the first sign that the model did not fit the data.

> The #2 prediction was Modern Hebrew ...
I think they're more a force of nature or weapon that got out of control. They're also similar to the Borg in ST or replicators from Stargate.

Maybe you don't consider those to be evil, but they're certainly bad, like cancer is bad to an organism.
It is easy to tune Debian Wheezy such that it boots into your X application from rotating HDD in less than 15 seconds from powerup on typical Atom ITX board. For newer distributions with systemd you don't even need any special tuning for the boot time to be dominated by BIOS POST.
Yikes, that license change bites.

I guess I'm going to have to switch to using KVM at work now if I to do things like USB device passthrough now. Shame too because setting up KVM networking is way more complicated than setting up VirtualBox networking.
In addition to simply being rather pissed off about all of this, I was just wondering (don't worry--I'd rather just block ads than actually be arsed to implement it):

If your browser becomes a node in a crypto-mining network, it'll start number crunching and occasionally send the results to some central server for collection.

What if your browser doesn't play nice? What if it sends bad or misleading data?

I'm not sure how Monero exactly does its thing, but I know that for Bitcoin it goes a little something like this[0]: You start out with a quasi-random "salt", I think it comes from the previous block. Then you append a bunch of random bytes to that salt, and hash it (SHA256? or some popular hash function, anyway). The goal is to find just the right random bytes so that the hashed value has the longest run of ones as its least-significant bits. If the length of that run is equal or longer than the current "difficulty level", then you're the lucky winner and you just mined a block of bitcoin! These correct random bytes are hard to find, you have to bruteforce them, but super easy to check: just one hash and see if it has a long enough run of ones.

Because even on decent hardware, odds of personally mining a block are in the order of once-a-year-maybe, people often join mining pools that share the profit. I'm not sure how they make sure everyone in the pool plays fair and divide up the profit based on the amount of work they put in (or amount of hashes they checked). The crypto-miner obviously joins a pool because with the shitty performance of stolen CPU-time over millions of people visiting an infected site for a few seconds, they kind of have to if they want a payout more often than once-a-decade-perhaps-not-even.

Can you mess this up for whoever owns the pool account that the distributed cryptominers send their data to? I suppose if that miner's account tries to scam the pool and report way more hashes checked than they actually did, or something like that, would it ban the account and lose all profit up till then?

What if your browser just reports any bunch of random bytes as "nope, that's not it", without even bothering to hash it? What if one of those just happens to be the winning bytes and it gets discarded and never tested again? Does it even work like that or do the JS miners just pick a random value to append to the salt, hash and test (with the risk of trying certain values more than once).

Even then, I'm certain that you can bugger up whatever protocol these hostile JS miners use, and cause all sorts of "interesting" and costly misbehaviour in the pool. Though I should read up on how these things actually work, the above is just vague guesses based on what I know about bitcoin's crypto/protocol/algorithm (I actually did read the whitepaper once, but it was maybe a decade ago or so) and even vaguer guesses on how these mining pools work (that I haven't digged in to very much).

[0] I'm probably wrong about some details because it's been a while since I read that whitepaper, so correct me if they're interesting details :)
Book Euron isn't evil? Show Ramsay and Joffrey? GRR Martin claims there are no good guys and bad guys. Doesn't mean he stayed true to that for the entire part of the story he's responsible for.
I haven't done the primary research myself, but my understanding from other readings is that we're less unique there than we think. Before multicultural Western cities there was a fair bit of live-and-let-live multiculturalism in Roman society, depending on where you were, but especially e.g. with Greeks identifying as citizens of Rome and such. But much like today, on the more mono-cultural outskirts, such as Judea, things were much more ethnicity-centered, polarized and prone to violence.

But either way, if we're the second or first, you're right that it doesn't seem to do us much good even if that is true, since they didn't find an answer that worked perfectly either... but, having a collapse of civilization is also hardly unique to diverse civilizations, so maybe the connection is just week overall - in which case what we need to focus on is just the reason for the acceptance of violent messages today. The "easy" left-leaning answer is "it's the economy/income inequality/poverty" but I'm only about 75% convinced, myself, that that's the only or primary thing.
For those interested in Linux-based Virtualization (includes Xen, KVM, QEMU) and IaaS topics:

https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/track/virtualization_and_ia...
The Sound of the Machine (1997)
The title and article read like they were generated by a buzzword generator.
> I think the approach will grow old really quickly, and it will turn people into (perhaps more healthy) skeptics.

This frustrates me so. Why does everyone think technology will always magically change human nature for the better?

People are not skeptics now, and they won't become skeptics once this tech comes out.

Just like a large percentage of people believe whatever is put in their Facebook feed, they will believe things that confirm their world view.

It's like saying "man once the internet becomes widespread there will no longer be things like climate change denial because anyone will have access to accurate information at their fingertips and can look up the data and reports." And yet, look where we are in the US.

Technology will never solve problems of human nature.

Via analogy, let's say you saw it as a problem that people like kinky sex and want it stopped. People have always liked kinky sex always will like it. There is no tech you can invent shy of physical or chemical lobotomy that will change that. But for some reason when we look at other qualities we forget that lesson.
No, you’re imposing modern ideals on the ancient Greeks. Respect for, and obedience to, the gods was a cardinal virtue for them, such that many Ancient Greek tales seem cruel or arbitrary to us because they were about virtues we don’t venerate as much. Odysseus was punished for his lack of proper respect for the divine. You don’t have the slightest inkling of what you’re talking about.
Google’s Angular JavaScript framework gets a component kit
> You could also describe this as "everybody has an evil side" instead of "everybody has a good side."

The Bible is more nuanced about this than people tend to admit. I say "nuanced" because it has a particular frame of reference that establishes clear good and evil behavior. But that frame of reference isn't the "good people do good things and bad people do bad things" that sometimes gets attributed to it.

See: Romans 3:10. Psalm 139:14. Genesis 1:27. John 3:17. Matthew 5:46-48.
Lastpass Down
I am not sure I get the point of making it (fake-)3D. Except for all text to be diagonal and me having to tilt my head to read it, and cute pseudo-3D pictures of variously formed boxes, I don't see any advantage. It's still essentially 2D - there's no third dimension I could usefully explore - it's just presented in a visually cute but informationally cluttering way. Is there any advantage to this form of presentation?
This is why I scroll the comments first!
The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Brandable Name for Your Startup
What if we all agreed that Internet points just don’t mean that much? It is ridiculous that in my lifetime the general public flipped from “Internet is for dweebs” to thinking numbers on a website are actually worth caring about.
I think science and technology are closely intertwined, and for all the debate about scientific progress, I think it's indisputable that a term like "progress" can be meaningfully used to describe the gains in capability and complexity of technology over time. I don't think any analysis of technology would yield to an interpretation that insisted different technological ages were merely a succession of untranslatable frameworks to which no notion of progress could be descriptive. Some things worked better than others, and that was that.

And if it's true of technology, which depends on science, why couldn't it be true of science too? I'm not even sure there's a clear dividing line between them.
That's pretty messed up, though, right? "I'm gonna put my relationship with this devil above my relationship with my devoted follower and ruin this poor guy's life and kill a bunch of other people just to win an argument"? It's blurry, at best.

However, to the point in the original article, a good-vs-evil interpretation of Christianity is something that goes back a while, and I haven't personally read enough pre-Enlightenment church doctrine to know when precisely it developed.
Could you share what preprocessors/templating languages you've used with CloudFormation?
Enjoyed this read, reading the comments section makes me wonder how many people have silently made money over the years arb'ing out-of-whack algorithms such as this.

Also reminds me of local competitor retailers exploiting Amazon's policies + algorithms to incur cost at Amazon: Amazon promises the lowest price for game pre-orders, and retailers would deliberately drop the price for a game hours before launch, forcing Amazon to honour the low price for all pre-orderers.
Are Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers just monsters? What about the monsters and demons on Supernatural that the Winchester brothers kill because they hurt people?

At what point is something a monster that does bad versus a bad guy that does bad?
Dragon likely will be integrated horizontally but some national security payloads need vertical integration.
Location History allows Google to track every move you make with Android phone
No, a monster is just a beast, without any necessary moral qualities.
> Facebook's newsfeed would become so fake, that nobody would believe it anymore.

That didn't happen with text, which is usually trivially easy to fact-check.

People believe any old bollocks so long as it aligns with their value systems.
I'm not suggesting overloading it - just trying to come up with a fitting metaphor.
@akash - good article. Love to see some more in-depth stuff next time !
You're asking 95 USD (and going up) for a DLC to a game that is not even released yet?

The FAQ[0] says:

>Where is the code? Is it open source?

>Yes. All our code is viewable

All I'm seeing at https://github.com/EtherBots is a Solidity contract.

>The price increases after each robot sold, and a further 20% upon launch of the full game. Only 3900 crates will ever be sold.

So this is a collectible game where only 3900 people get the initial supply? What if I wanna play it later, will I have to find someone willing to sell it to me?

[0]: https://etherbots.io/faq
He wants something with power and lots of RAM, so your recommendation is an Apple netbook?
Isaac Asimov's “Three Laws of Robotics”
Same here, regarding StarCraft with friends vs Diablo 2/Ultima Online alone.
How would they know on scale what removed accounts were controlled by a human? Some people may just not want to return after the ban. Bots can probably create new accounts and complain too and a few complaining high profile twitter users that would filter out to media to be verified by journalists don't really make a good study.
> Reviewing the Keras documentation (https://keras.io) and examples (https://github.com/keras-team/keras/tree/master/examples) are honestly much better teachers of AI/ML than any MOOC, in my opinion.

Wholeheartedly agree. It’s simple to setup a Bidirectional LSTM and run it with PyTorch if you are trying to predict time series data.
It would be an interesting test to see how much data gets sent from your average heavy computer user. I use a ton of software, and I always opt out of the request to send telemetry data to "help improve the software".

I was feeling bad the other day for not allowing a nice open source program to do so, but realized that my upstream line might be completely saturated with constant telemetry data if I didn't always opt out.
If you deidentify the data, you're allowed to use it for R&D purposes.
I feel like Google have the power behind them to try to at the very least data mine the free text data for information. Possibly they even have enough sway to convince doctors and other individuals towards a form that is far less random, or at least to provide a platform to share information between patients. Note that NLP seems to have come a long way in five years, who knows where we'll be in a decade or more.

In terms of incorrect records, I'm not sure this would be a major problem over a large dataset. Making this up, but I imagine the range of errors is fairly random across all fields and with enough data you can always identify an approach that appears to save a life more than some other approach, even if the diagnosis is incorrect.

Although I totally agree with you that this is going to be an enormous challenge for Google, I feel like it would be underestimating them to assume this has very little hope of succeeding.
This seems somewhat dishonest. It goes out of its way to introduce a new dense language that is just as far from the original math. The Ackerman function is demonstrative of that. I had to consult the wiki page to see what it actually did.

The argument isn't to be against notation. But the most common hurdle to apl that he saw was complaints on lacking a specific terminal. If that is truly needed, maybe a change to not need the terminal would have been a wiser choice?
This is somewhat covered in the "Industry Growth Rates" section:

> At any given time, there are dozens of industries operating within new and underserved markets that are experiencing rapid growth… This almost always represents a possible entrepreneurial opportunity.

His strategy might benefit from incorporating some of the things you mentioned — shifting demographics, new tech, etc.

Then again, one of the most common entrepreneurial mistakes is to develop a solution and go looking for a problem. That rarely works out, because most new tech doesn't have any business applications. It doesn't fit into the market.

So there's something to be said for a market-based approach, where you look for new things that people are actually paying for by examining high-growth industries, rather than simply looking at new tech.
Sure, but I've read the point of the story was to combat the idea at the time that you only suffered bad things if you deserved it. IOW, it was showing that bad things do happen to good people. The part about Satan & Yahweh was just to provide a theological context for it.
Spectre yes. Meltdown is Intel only IIRC.
The knowledge of good and evil is a far cry from the confrontation between good and evil.
Having standards doesn't mean a good/evil dichotomy. Do hunter-gatherers have fullblown Western moralizing because they like competent hunters & story-tellers better than incompetent ones?

> but don't take my word for it, read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

I have, and I'm sure you can come up with a better source than that...
Sure, but in Goiania (and in the similar accident in Samut Prakan), the people involved didn't disregard any warnings, it just didn't occur to them at all that the source might be dangerous. This also led to a delayed response, because people were getting sick but had no idea what might be causing it it. Putting an extra red sticker on the dangerous goods will not in itself keep spent nuclear reactor fuel safe for 10,000 years, but it's at least a good start. :)
Might be, but the ones I noticed were happily using OS X, iPhones or iPads.

I use quite a few comercial software and spend most of my time on Windows, so maybe I don't have any right to say anything.

It just felt strange seeing some people advocating a FOSS world, while their devices weren't in sync with that message.
Is ameo related in any way to altayanta?
I just wanted to second this - it is def. worth the short time to read.

I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.

This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading.

Either way, my time was well spent.
If that is something you enjoy doing I would call it time well spent. What’s the point of life if you can’t find the time to enjoy it in the moment?
It's fun recasting Star Wars as a fight between a duly-elected government and a bunch of misfits led by a clueless teenager, a smuggler, and a "princess" with daddy issues who becomes an exotic dancer for a crime boss who she later murders.

#empire4life
The Empire Never Ended, in a nutshell, to lift PKD's final gnosis.

His view was that we live in the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and I'm inclined to agree - we live in a gestalt system that receives its symbol-set from the earliest empire builders, and we are mostly oblivious to our inherited reality. We just accept it.

Reality is a fungible concept, as he describes - you can exchange one fixed set of givens for another without changing basic reality one jot, but such can drastically alter perceived reality.

PKD would argue that the President of the United States is not real - that the United States is not real - that there is no quantifiable "UnitedStatesness" about the latter and that the former is only so because we define him as so, and therefore, neither actually exist. We just collectively agree they do.

His prime argument always arced back to that which so appealed to Baudrillard - that we have exchange the real for symbols of the real, that we have exchanged reality for a representation of reality - a map so perfect that it is indistinguishable from that it describes - yet all of our actions are constrained to the map, not to actual reality.

Today, we disappear farther and farther up our own reality-hole, as we entrain and develop systems to further codify and divorce reality from itself - e.g. computers and the internet - the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive.

It's really hard to break out, but not impossible - but you have to see the Black Iron Prison first through gnosis, and it's then purely a mental process.

Reading list: PKD's entire corpus - his non-SF novels ply the same waters - but the novels listed in the article are a good starting point. VALIS is where you go once you're prepared to have your mind melted and reformed.

Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra

Vonnegut's Galapagos

Anyway. Time for me to go stare at the pink laser beam.
Premium-priced despite production having been offshored to Malaysia. Got to widen those margins to buy a country estate ( £17 million ) and a Gulfstream G650 ( £45 million ).
> Agree with you, but I always thought highly of Newton coz he died a virgin.

What? That’s why you think highly of him? Not because of his contribution to Physics and Newtonian mechanics? That’s really strange.
I imagine the cost of the data, in this case, is negligible when compared to the cost of salaries and benefits for employees working on it.

Considering they have the ability to pick from thousands of hospitals and universities (the latter being where they actually got the data) they probably have a fairly large amount of leverage to keep the costs low.
Let me try again with an even more mundane example. Is a tiger an evil monster just because it may eat people? At what point is a tiger just an animal which does something people don't like vs a bad guy that does bad? How about a landslide? What would it take to make a landslide evil with a capital E?
> The bug was fairly large and consisted of state-of-the-art integrated circuits and single-bit core memory. It was completely hidden inside a hollow support bracket at the bottom of the keyboard mechanism, and was invisible to the naked eye, but also to the detection equipment of the era. Only an X-ray scan could reveal the presence of the device, which is shown in the image below. It contains special components to hide its presence even from non-linear junction detectors (NLJD).

Holy cow. I wouldn't have thought this was possible in the mid-1970s.

Also the article says that the NSA didn't trust the CIA or State Department to handle the investigation properly, which was very interesting to read. Had the NSA already been established as a "we do tech better" agency?
On reading that quote, I immediately wondered if Farrell drank his coffee before going out to vote in the American presidential election.

A less snidey thought is that humans always use various psychoactives for all kinds of social and asocial purposes.
What I learned from three months of Content Moderation for Facebook in Berlin
Oh yeah? Man, Russia has been subject to racism so much, they might win billions in a court case...
Because there is no biological law of aging. There is only a collection of biological accidents.
Hmm, so everyone's going to think "hmm, everyone's going to think, 'hmm, Ethereum went up when cryptokitties came out, perhaps this means I should buy some Ethereum now,' so perhaps I should buy some Ethereum now," so perhaps I should buy some Ethereum now.
Just read it.
I just really can't imagine, given the progression we see in AI image recognition on a daily basis these days, that medical fields like dermatology or radiology that revolve around scrutinizing things visually will continue to exist in anything but a dramatically shrunk supervisory form 20-30 years from now.
I'm the lead on the Kaggle Learn project, and the author of the deep learning track.

I'm happy to answer questions here.

I agree with the commenter saying you need to do your own projects to understand these topics.

Our deep learning track is meant to be the fastest path to knowing enough to do your own projects. You can do the entire track, including the hands-on exercises, in a single sitting.

We won't make you an expert in an afternoon, but you'll know enough to start doing your own projects. For most people that's also the point where Deep Learning becomes fun enough that you'll find time to keep learning.

Kaggle Learn is still in a very early stage. We'll add more lessons soon. But we'll stay committed to the goal of getting you up-to-speed quickly, so you can take on your own projects.