skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to disagree. Many people are trying to suppress pseudoscience; not because we fear it is true, but because disinformation is harmful to society as a whole. For example, anti-vaxers degrading herd immunity, or astrologists conning vulnerable people out of their savings, or a climate change denier dismantling the EPA... there are far too many examples to list!

Each facet of nonsense you've mentioned is being battled by one group of skeptics or another. Off the top of my head, there's the work of James Randi, Richard Dawkins, Brian Dunning, and Steven Novella. Those people aren't fighting ideas they're afraid are true, they fear the harmful outcome of misplaced beliefs.

If people weren't battling pseudoscience, you'd see a lot more of it in your day-to-day life, and society as a whole would be much worse off. That's not speculation, it's a solid fact.
Here's a Reddit thread discussing the malware: https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/7yh4zu/fslabs_a3...

I'm shocked that the company admitted to doing this.
CommBank certainly did lead the pack, but they have become arrogant and complacent, IMHO. Two things that have driven us to leave them: rejecting Apple Pay, and cutting off feeds to accounting software from certain credit cards. We're leaving for a combination of a local credit union and an 'online-only' everyday banking account.
FÉRIAS NA PRAIA DE GENIPABU NATAL- RN – Por Bélit Araújo
HN has taught me what great comments and writing look like, introduced me to cool and obscure tech, and shown me that everyone experiences imposter syndrome. I'm especially grateful for getting a push out of my comfort zone when I was job searching. I got an offer to do contract development work from a post on HN which lead to starting a business and being a full-time, remote developer. I've gotten several clients and job offers from blog posts that have received attention on here and people have always been helpful and respectful in the comments section especially in comparison to other sites.
I don’t know about the US, but in Germany it would be very illegal.
Can you get your valuable data out of Evernote? Will you be able to read it in 20 years?
Neoliberalism, at least, had a foundation in the real world and wasn't a term originating as a pejorative.
Part of me would really love to go back to Delphi: I learned it when I was like 10 and it spoiled me for every other GUI development process.
Then why is the keyboard different?
Moving ads in video screens around the city are really annoying. They really 'catch your eye' if you are just letting your eyes to wander.

I have started to look down whenever there are these ads around.
Well, I'm magically passionate about every company I interview for. Not sure that's a very helpful marker. ;)
> You just can't reconcile Python semantics with JavaScript semantics in a reasonable way.

That's actually an interesting claim, and so I would really appreciate if you could provide a (possibly informal) proof that justifies it?
> The payment feature scales up very quickly, allowing you to do everything from book cabs through the app through to splitting restaurant bills with other people.

Weixin Pay's pricing for money handling seems pretty competitive compared to Western systems. 0.1% to transfer out of their system to your bank if you are transferring >$3200 USD, and 0.6% to process a payment [1]. I wonder when Weixin Pay and startups like Payoneer [2] will get tired of the friction imposed by the current banking interchange systems, and set up their own identity and interchange solution to start breaking 1% on all of a transaction life cycle's service fees (from payer removing from their account and paying, to payee accepting and debiting to their account, perhaps including forex conversion, to final settlement).

[1] https://chinachannel.co/take-wechat-payments-small-business/

[2] https://www.payoneer.com/fees/
> That said, most physical assets have no recourse either, aside from legal recourse. Same as Bitcoin.

But bitcoin is electronic. And many asset transactions done electronically (credit card, checks, bank transfers)
do have some form of recourse.

Even with cash, one can record the serial numbers of your bills and give those to the FBI if they're stolen. In fact, it's pretty common for high end bill counters to offer this capability.
> What China manages to do quite well is stop rentiers from stifling innovation

Tell that to the dying startups that have to stand up against Tencent and Alibaba. Beijing is littered with them. Let's not forget the various Chinese state-owned enterprises.
Japanese Researchers Develop Ultra-Thin, Highly Elastic Skin Display
Statement on Visit to the USA by Professor Philip Alston
I just wanted to add to this that it's not as if the Spaniards were appalled by violence itself, just by the cultural difference in how it was applied. As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts. Admittedly Montaigne is writing here about Tupis from Brazil rather than Aztecs, but his point applies in both cases I think:

"After having treated their prisoners well for a long time, giving them all the provisions that they could one, he who is the chief calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner and on the other end, several feet away, out of harm's way, and gives to his best friend the arm to hold; and the two of them, in the presence of the assembled group, slash him to death with their swords. That done, they roast him and eat him together, sending portions to their absent friends. They do this, not as is supposed, for nourishment as did the ancient Scythians; it represents instead an extreme form of vengeance. The proof of this is that when they saw that the Portuguese, who had allied themselves with their adversaries, executed their captives differently, burying them up to the waist and firing numerous arrows into the remainder of the body, hanging them afterward, [the Tupi] viewed these people from another world, who had spread the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors, and who were much more masterly than they in every sort of evil, must have chosen this sort of revenge for a reason. Thinking that it must be more bitter than their own, they abandoned their ancient way to imitate this one.

I am not so concerned that we should remark on the barbaric horror of such a deed, but that, while we quite rightly judge their faults, we are blind to our own."

http://www2.fiu.edu/~harveyb/oncannibal.htm
A month is too long to wait. Break it down into smaller units... ;-)

I think some managers just don’t have enough to do so they make work for themselves (and everyone else). Like a border collie with no sheep to herd, they will start herding ducks, children, etc.
> I agree, but i'm thinking along the lines of - more LEGO, less literature.

That's what I see happening. There's already a huge reliance on just connecting together libraries within the confines of a framework for lots of problems.
It's not about absolute freedom or free market it's about free speech thats a very different thing.

Your logic is opening up for the ability for anyone to discriminate other people alone for their opinions, that's a box I don't think benefit anyone.
Fair point. I mostly get to these because someone I trust has pointed to them. I don't go through my feed (ever, really), but certainly not to find worthwhile tweetstorms. Life is too short.
What tech will the hospital of the future have and why? What some applications?
The article speaks of assumptions obtained from tree rings, ice cores, and permafrost.

It's very straightforward to analyze the trees in the forests that stretch across the North Pole to determine such things. And, as most trees in the Arctic live in excess of 1,500 years, we have a very good record. Likewise, it's trivial to examine the permafrost that covers the North Pole and calculate the temperatures from 1,500 years ago.

But, the simplest source of data are ice cores from the extensive and permanent sheets of ice that perpetually cover the North Pole.
This is why I've always found the "be your own bank" rallying point crazy.

I don't want to be my own bank. There are many reasons why people stopped keeping their liquid wealth under their mattress.
Seems similar to www.algorithmia.com and www.rapidapi.com. However, you are required to run their scripts by writing your own code that calls their API. This service makes it simpler by removing the need of an API.
Don't know why this got downvoted. The archeological record demonstrates that the first agriculturists are worse off than the Hunter-Gatherers who preceded them.
A flat tax makes no sense.

To be clear, there may be additional policies associated with a flat tax that may make a lot of sense. I'm talking purely about the "flat percentage" bit.

The only advantage it provides is a slightly less complicated calculation. But it simplifies a calculation that can be represented in a few lines of code and a single excel formula. As a trade off, it completely ignores the idea that the marginal value of money changes depending on the base. If you earn $50k another $10k has a lot more marginal value than if you're earning $500k.

It sounds good but it's terrible policy.
You hope to become a boss in time to watch the corporate reorg in which the scenario will have you as the boss, and your brainchild AI as the AI researcher.
I don't disagree with you. I personally see this problem as stemming from the Two Cultures problem (sciences vs humanities), with the humanities culture leaking out of academia, into the mainstream where it can do real harm.

But, the current leftist movement, as far as I can tell, is a product of the humanities culture. In the current iteration of this fight, there seems to be, at a minimum, a liberal/science coalition, but I am not sure how fundamental that is.

I actually avoid talking about this, because people tend to get far more offended when I attack the humanities culture relative to the leftist culture (probably because humanities students take an attack on the humanities much more personally; while most non-activists would not have such a personal attachment to "the left").
Whether that's what's being suggested or not it's untrue. They benefits in this case come from using a much lower level and more performant language. Javascript to WASM will always be at a disadvantage to an embedded Javascript VM natively compiled given similar optimization time, since the VM can bypass some security safeguards of WASM that it can ensure aren't needed.
Well... they're rich. So likely they're going to have cash, investments, real estate, etc. It makes the loss of gold painful, but it's not the end of everything.
> * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective

Competent people, not "talent". Talented people are very rare, and the
chances are, you haven't ever seen one in reality.

And there are several things to note about hiring programmers for writing in
less popular languages: (1) it's much more difficult to hire an incompetent
idiot that knows Elm than similar idiot who knows C#, Java, or Python --
signal to noise ratio is much better; (2) there is such thing as Haskell tax,
which pretty much means that writing in Elm can be treated as a job perk; and
(3) you don't need people who know Elm, you only need people who can learn
it in reasonable time.

Especially (3) is important, because learning yet another language of the
same paradigm is not that difficult for a competent programmer.
I've heard of it. It's BS.

It was a Republican, Eisenhower, who sent the army to enforce school integration after the Brown v Board of Education decision. Nixon [often accused of this "Southern Strategy"] was Vice President at the time.

And a much higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/s409

But the Democrats are certainly good at rewriting history in their favor.
"it was a step forward" that is no way to move forward. Setting aside political ideology it was one of the most murderous regiemes the planet has ever seen. For the tens of millions who it intentionally starved to death, worked to death in the gulag, or just summarily murdered it was certainly not better than living in an undeveloped shithole. For them its forward movement was only toward the grave.

Imagine all the good that might have been done by these millions if their human dignity were upheld and they were allowed to live. Perhaps one of them would have developed a great medical breakthrough. Imagine the inumerable works of art and music, theater that might have been made. Imagine the things they could have built and done to make the world a better place. If they had children and grand-children what of their potential contributions? Russia might actually have become the greatest world power.
But that isn't how equality works. A heavily skewed field, tech for example, isn't going to self-correct. Even with the diversity efforts, tech remains hostile to underrepresented populations.

Ask a woman in tech, or a black man in tech what their experience is. Often there's an unstated assumption that they don't belong, or that they're at a lower level. I'm south asian, and when I visit my work's offices on the east coast, I get pegged as an electrical technician rather than an engineer. /And I'm in the in-group generally/.

I'd also argue that 50% is a much better goal for gender diversity in engineering than the ~10% representation women have currently, especially considering that the gender equilibrium point for engineering is currently unknowable due to the massive systemic discrimination/opportunity problems.
IANAL. While the entire scheme looks to be clearly unethical, the only part that strikes me as illegal was the use of credentials to log into the online forums/services.
Look at the NYT front page at some random moment. What ratio of stories plausibly fit this description? Right now I'm having trouble finding one out of >25.
​Bogus Linux vulnerability gets publicity
Gold is much harder to move around, and when you'll try to convert it back into dollars you'll find out that nobody buys bars of gold without extensive origin paper trail.
The article gives a good reason to use open source technologies rather than proprietary "clouds" that do whatever they want with your data. Of course, Chinese government can try to ban Jabber/OTR but they won't be able to read the encrypted messages.
I'm surprised the rate would get that negative. Especially when they have a 1000 Franc note (worth around 1000 dollars). At that level you can fit trillions of dollars in a single vault. A respected bank could build a new vault, staff it with multiple guards, charge 0.2% or 0.1% for storage, and make their investment back in under a year. Even with smaller notes. Obviously I'm missing something here, but what? Is it not safe enough?
Let S/D mean a service that offers a speed S mbit/sec with a data cap of D GB per month.

Let P(S,D) be the resources required to support that service. In general, for positive x, both of the following are true: (1) P(S+x,D) > P(S,D), and P(S,D+x) > P(S,D).

Let's say a particular ISP has everyone on a 40/10 plan, so they need P(40,10) resources.

Now suppose they decide to offer something like Music Freedom. A person streaming a 256 kbit/s stream 24/7 would use about 90 GB/month.

The resources required to support their customers are now approximately P(40,10) + P(1/4,90).

If instead they just raise the cap of everyone by 90, the resources required are P(40,100), which is about the same as P(40,10) + P(40,90) [1].

The general cap increase will use around P(40,90) - P(1/4,90) more resources than the Music Freedom approach.

In general, for a given total amount of data transferred per month, the more smoothly that data is spread throughout the month, the less resources are needed to handle it.

Music streaming is both smooth and does not require much speed, so doesn't require much additional resources. Streaming of video requires more, because it needs more speed, but it is still less than is required to support the same total amount of data as arbitrary files downloads, because arbitrary file downloads don't have a built in rate limit.

[1] Not quite. I don't think it is quite true that P(S,D1) + P(S,D2) = P(S,D1+D2). I think the combined will be little less than the sum of the parts. That's because the resources needed are a function of the average data used, the variation in that, and how often you can have slowdowns due to congestion without getting in trouble with regulators. So I think it is like adding distributions...the variation in the combined will be less than the sum of the variations in the individual distributions (I think...)
It could certainly be ADHD-PI/ADD, as it is very underdiagnosed, especially amongs people with (otherwise) above average cognitive abilities, more so if they are men. It can be very debilitating.

There is a sort of very non-scientific test you can use to gauge the probability of ADD/ADHD, in my experience, quite reliably.

— Would you agree that being really bored is better described as somehow painful, in an almost physical sense, than anything else you can come up with to describe it?

If yes, it's my experience, and that of a few others as me with ADD/ADHD that the only other people that tend to consider it at least -possible- that one can actually experience something closely related to pain when bored, is those that either are already diagnosed, or will be in a few years. Haven't been wrong once, yet.

Apparently it's so hard to understand for most people, that it's very common that even doctors and nurses working with ADD/ADHD have a hard time to undertake the concept, many appear tp outright reject it. As if anything but pain could stop you from applying yourself, even to the things you love, or loved yesterday.

I can elaborate a lot more, leave a comment if you're interested, and I'll TRY to get back to you tomorrow. But as you are probably aware, there is a significant risk I've forgotten all about it tomorrow.

Best of luck!
Indeed. The logs of sea captains sailing across the Arctic ice during the past 1,500 are endless. The entire 1492 hoopla was kind of overrated in light of the fact that endless amounts of ships were zipping across the Arctic Ocean to North America (taking excellent ice-sheet measurement as they went) for a thousand years before Columbus.
us liberals are having to come to terms with our leftist allies not actually being liberals

In fact, it's so hard to reconcile that I sometimes wonder if leftists are a straw man invented by the right, but I'm starting to realize that may not be true.
Do you think that, say, "cultural appropriation", as a term owes anything to critical theory?
This really isn’t correct. The civil war - as well as the failure of agriculture during the great war was the primary mover. Us forces never moved inland from the ports that they were dropping supplies off of. It’s a common meme, but not much more. Other powers the Japanese and the British in particular did more.

The American aid was so effective that it propped up the Lenin regime, and got them through the last set of emergencies at the end of the Russian civil wars. It also made Hoover a household name back in the states.

Ironically the biggest force both for and against the Bolsheviks was the Germans. The bankrolled the communists - in a way that had direct echoes of present day - then supported the whites and then again signed a absurdly lucrative trade deal that saved Lenin’s ass.

Source - Sean mcmeekin- the Russian revolution.
I'm guessing you've considered it, but a wiki is a straightforward, highly flexible solution. Some wiki software supports structured data (alongside unstructured, of course), if you want that.

In my own experiments, I've found that the speed of the interface for input is very important. There's not enough time to input everything I would like; the longer input takes, the less knowledge I capture. Many wikis are weak in this regard; input requires a lot of reloads and scrolling, mainly because of the different modes for reading and editing:

1. Load the page on which you are inputting the data. Read it to decide where the new info belongs.

2. Click edit, wait for page reload.

3. In edit mode, scroll and read the page again to find the place you identified in step 1.

4. Add the new knowledge.

5. Click save, wait for reload.

6. Scroll and read to find the new knowledge on the updated page; verify that it's what you want.

7. If it's not what you want, return to step 2.
That's a particularly strong result given the Chinese smartphone market contracted by 4% in 2017 and has been weak for years.

For China's whole smartphone market, 2015 saw 2% growth, 2016 was 11% growth, 2017 was negative 4%. It's likely their market has reached saturation. 2017 should have seen a big jump in sales due to a replacement cycle, given the near zero growth in 2015. Most of the domestic Chinese brands will die off soon, leaving three or so dominant players to go up against Samsung and Apple.
Blue Whale Songs Reveal Their Behavior
Everybody knows this argument, you don't need to trot it out. The issue at hand is in how it is applied as a lever for power by the people who apply it.

Remember: meta-criticism.
Correct, Windows does not have per-application identities that could be used with a keychain service. Furthermore, every application in your Windows session (unless sandboxed) has access to virtual memory of other applications in the same session.

On macOS, applications address spaces are isolated and code signing certificates are used for identifying application requests to the keychain.
I don’t think framing it in terms of friends is useful. I’d make that loan to be kind. I wouldn’t do it as part of a business arrangement, so a stranger would probably be out of luck.

If I were in the business of making five minute loans, I’d charge an astronomical interest rate to cover the fixed transaction costs.
It sounds like you are arguing for equality of outcomes.
> Don't you want people that care about your product instead of the technology behind it? I do.

I would rather have people who care about their craftsmanship and are
indifferent about the product than people who care about the product and are
indifferent about the craftsmanship. The former ones do a good job regardless
of what the product is about.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, and I think it gets to the heart of why companies have started to embrace the "Social Justice" Harris decries. If Silicon Valley and Hollywood have embraced liberal values it's almost certainly due to a profit motive. Younger people are overwhelmingly liberal, and both tech and cinema are industries which desperately need young people to thrive. Maybe shifting corporate values really do just boil down to market forces over advocacy at the end of the day.
Before smartphones, we didn't use to spend hours a day with our phones on. They're not big phones, they're mini computers.