skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do we keep getting these breathless articles about how secret geniuses used social media to "hack" elections? Do we really need a mass conspiracy to explain why large chunks of the population find populist/nationalistic leaders appealing? Motivating voters with this kind of rhetoric predates the internet, in fact it predates the United States.

As mentioned in the comments on the other hacker news post about facebook profiles being scraped by Cambridge Analytica:

1. Obama's 2008 election absolutely bragged about their use of social media to win. I vividly remember multiple long articles in the NYTimes talking about how they exploited new tech to reach voters.

2. During the 2016 election Clinton raised and spent nearly double trump. On top of that most of the money Trump got was towards the end of the election whereas Clinton had huge coffers from day one.

3. I read the guardian article linked and this is one of the few parts that seem to mention what exactly this "hacker" strategy was at Cambridge Analytica

>“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.”

This is the insight that that apparently is being called a "psychological warfare tool?" You're telling me that Clinton's campaign didn't have sociologists and psychologists who were absolutely obsessed with exactly the same advertising criteria? This kind of psychological profiling is the kind of stuff you learn about in 101 classes at university. For the past 80 years (that I as a lay person know of, probably longer) people have spent their entire careers analyzing and applying propaganda and marketing to political campaigns. Why should anyone believe based on what's being presented in this article that not only was none of this stuff done before but that it somehow handed Trump one of the greatest election upsets in American history? The mental gymnastics people are going through to deny the fact that yes, many voters have conservative values, is getting out of hand.
How Do Squirrels Jump So High?
Do I understand this correctly: to optimise for virtual memory, do the things you'd do to optimise for the CPU cache except on a larger scale?
You think the DNC didn't have something similar given how close Facebook and Google's leadership were with the Clinton campaign?
That's because the glass that shatters is (usually) not the top layer of a touchscreen.

Next time you spot someone you know with a shattered phone screen, ask to give it a try and you'll see.
Which city has the best climate in the world? – BambouClub
The Muse is hiring a Fullstack Engineer: Help 50M people find career alignment
Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?

Can it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major boon.
I was away for a month and took a new pair of Chelsea boots from a bog standard high street shop with me - didn't want to look to scrufy on a v high profile project.

Walking the 1/2 mile up princess street from hotel to the office in them caused so much pain after 2 days I had to go out and buy some trainers.

Never had that with Loakes - I d agree that paying 2k plus for hand fitted shoes like the city boys wear is probably over kill.
I wonder if there is a use-case for a simplified lightweight edition of Electron that uses the system webviews instead of Chromium.

Obviously this would be much less capable, require cross platform testing, and limit node usage. But for a project like this that barely does anything fancy in the front-end, it would solve the size and memory issues.
True, the only issue I see here is that big company will manage to adjust to GPDR rules or cleverly trick users of the service to allow for all they want (I guess the number of users who does not agree for changes in terms and conditions that keeps showing up on Facebook or Google pages is not large).

Small e-commerce sites (someone sells socks, hand made goods, used pianos, etc.) are different story here. Usually such sites were put together on some ready-made PHP + MySql solution hosted on a 100 bucks a year hosting and that was done by some small IT shop specialized in this kind of business.

Owners of such small firms are going to have really hard time with GPDR. I suspect there will be a lot of scummy law firms that will go after them and blackmail them either to use their "service to be GPDR compliant" or be sued under GPDR.

Such people are an easy target, they don't even realize that maybe software that was installed for them by some third party that no longer exists puts to logs customer first and last name, or there is somewhere backup with customer e-mails.

This law will have zero impact on say, Facebook, people would give them their data freely as they do now, average FB user will not risk to "get imperfect Facebook experience" (or some other similar clause that clever FB lawyers will figure out) if they block permission to be tracked and their data cannot be sold to advertisers.
Oh man, I've been trying to find a good explanation of what a convolution matrix does! I'm literally just now working on bitmap code in LibreOffice and was deliving into the convolution matrix functionality. Thanks to the author for this!
I went to vimeo.com with the browser of my phone (Firefox). Started to watch a video, the video plays inside the browser. I checked if I had instant apps enabled in Settings (Apps, Advanced, Default apps, Opening links) and I did. Maybe it's because I'm using Firefox? Would it work with Chrome? Oh well, it really doesn't matter. If I want an app I'm installing it, otherwise it's perfectly fine not to have it. Actually, I prefer not to have too many things going on without me knowing.
i hope they don't overengineer this OS by trying to reinvent the wheel. Just a regular mobile OS, working fast on cheap hardware, with an elegant SDK and the possibility to develop apps using cross-platform tools would look appealing enough to me. IE : take iOS or android, fix the parts that are broken, and remove useless feature ( because you don't care about backward compatibility anymore), use a modern and safe language for the sdk, make it open source enough that people can have experiment with it, and you've got a winner.
Cat Snapchats That Will Leave You with the Biggest Smile Part 2
Do you not use shoe Polish?
Linus Torvalds on open source and diving
It costs more to build native UIs, that’s true.

But a project like this specifically seems to have most of the secret sauce implemented in a cross-platform library. That seems to be to be a great application structure and candidate for native UI implementation. It increases the development effort from n+m to 3n+m, where n is hopefully much smaller than m.
Unless it reigns in Google and other big tech companies, whats the point?
Every advertisement should be ostensive

Using fb to advertise for Obama, Trump, etc, is ok

However that's not what has been done, but the a) use of shills and fake personas to pump up opinion b) creation of fake "grassroots movements" and "news articles" with a divisive purpose

https://thinkprogress.org/russia-facebook-pages-sophisticate...

https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaLago/comments/7y6ola/there_ha...
Learn to build a Convolutional Neural Network on the web with this easy tutorial
How Uber ghost rides are linked to online money laundering
What the GDPR will mean for companies tracking location
The story behind the racist responses to “Black Panther” in China
> Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?

Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is sometimes available for copy-paste.
Tail recursion is unrelated to WHILE and FOR.

Scheme also did not just introduce tail recursion, but full tail call optimization.

Python sure does not need it, it already has a more complex iteration stuff like generators.
A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?
> Because writing, testing and deploying on each of those platforms will increase your effort from X to N*X.

No, it won't. Building any non-trivial UI in HTML takes orders of magnitude more effort and time than building it in a UI toolkit that was actually designed to build user interfaces in.
> using apps outside of the browser for video sites

I would still prefer that than including DRM into web pages, at least it's a bit harder for users to use DRM.
Is there any way to actually read this? I can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs before a subscribe/log in
Python's generators are more magic. It's similar to some kind of COME FROM mechanism.
>I guess the other question is why this hasn't been any news yet. But the answer might be that 10 years ago Tech wasn't much in the news because it was just not interesting for most people.

This 100% untrue:

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-interne...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/exclusi...

These are only two links but let me assure you if you're interested google is full of articles from the 2008 election talking about how vital the internet and data was to the Obama strategy.

I very clearly remember these articles and many others at the time talking about the new "big data" strategies utilized in both 2008 and 2012. To me that is what makes this whole "we scraped data and stole the election for trump" narrative seem extremely suspicious.
If only he'd been in the audience for this talk

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lfyou/alan_ka...
Overrating domestic value creation is how you end up being a third world country. I think you are oversimplifying free market dynamics. Free market doesn't magically create optimal results for consumers (see monopolies and the resulting lack of competition and suboptimal results for consumers as one example). Similarly it doesn't magically create optimal results for maximising the well being of a country.
I have no doubt that native UI development for multiple platforms is tricker than a single cross-platform browser-based implementation. But I do think the level of those barriers to entry can be overstated. Building a simple MacOS GUI is not complex; likewise for Windows and say QT for Linux. It requires a little bit of thought and a little bit of research, and more time than a single
implementation. The output is also better by quite a few metrics, and my general feeling is that an application where most of the complexity is hidden away in a cross platform library with a very simple API is the best possible case for this approach.
It's not a phone number because it doesn't need to resolve back to anything in particular. With carrier grade nat for instance, it could be shared by many people. At best it's shared by a house.

With regards of tracking you with the help of the ISP, if you have someone with those resources, it's not you storing an IP address that's their biggest concern.

Geoinformation can also change daily. Figuring it out afterwards isn't reliable.
What does it cost to own an old car?
NetworkManager icon is not in Notification Area?
Since this article is only a rehash of the original one, wouldn't it be better if this thread pointed to it directly?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-be...
> A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one with a timebox of one hour, and then I’ll post whatever I’ve got. (I may then reformat it later.)

While this is meta it pretty much sums up the situation regarding my feelings regarding Stack Overflow.

I was an early user of Stack Overflow, not quite beta but almost. At one point I even received a snail mail letter from Jeff Atwood, thanking me for my contributions. I read most of the early discussions about policy and, being a veteran of various internet forums at that time, it seemed to me the most sensible, most reasonable approach you could take to running a question-answer site. I went to CodeKen in London in 2011 where I met Jon and a lot of other excellent folks that made Stack Overflow happen as a community back then.

Today, I rarely consult Stack Overflow, and when I sometimes find a useful answer via DuckDuckGo it's almost certainly closed. I even joked that closing is a sign of quality at Stack Overflow. My last contribution is probably years ago.

The strange thing is that there is no point I "left", nothing I could point at and say, that's when Stack Overflow took the wrong turn. I think we just drifted apart. And for the conclusion I guess for me it's mostly: "The way to hell is paved with good intentions".
I recurrently think about these topics and my opinions have adapted from:

No notes -> wiki -> searchable flat wiki(s) (TXT note on a text editor)

Collect most -> collect relevant -> collect relevant and recurrently digest it (manually throw away what became irrelevant)

Some extra thoughts: https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder
Tariffs should also be imposed.
That’s a really interesting approach to take for an editor - I love the idea!
Just curious - who are 'techie decompressionists'? :)
And eventually there will be general acceptance that shoving a lump of metallic mixture containing 50% mercury, another toxic heavy metal, into a location an inch or so from the brain is not such a good idea.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs361/en/

"Exposure to mercury – even small amounts – may cause serious health problems, and is a threat to the development of the child in utero and early in life."
> HTML/CSS/JavaScript is something that the most developers tend to already know

If you know both HTML and a proper UI toolkit, you'll see how insane it is to use HTML for anything else than marking up text. It's like launching a space shuttle to go to the supermarket around the corner instead of just walking. The only thing HTML has got going for it is how easy it is to show 'Hello World' on screen. Anything more complicated than that and it becomes a total horror show, especially compared to how easy to use and simple regular UI toolkits are.
> I have no doubt that native UI development for multiple platforms is tricker than a single cross-platform browser-based implementation.

I would argue the exact opposite is true for anything more complicated than 'hello world'
I hope as you progress through your career you learn to be more respectful of diverse ideas. I'm a software engineer, I have to have discussions with designers and business people who also sometimes ask for things that just aren't reasonably doable given time and budget constraints. It's our job as professionals to explain this using a tone and words that educates others on what the technical constraints are.
Yeah, open some previously-unused (or even not-recently-used) feature of an app and suddenly bam, there goes 100mb of data.
I was actually pondering something related today. I worry about my cats' paws getting glass in them. Because the pavement is full of tiny pieces of glass, even worse if someone breaks a bottle outside, they won't actually vacuum and clean it up, I guess wind can help a bit..but it's just shuffling the glass around. Glass doesn't decay on a human time scale.

Which brought me to the grim fact that there are so many substances that do not decay in a reasonable time..that you are pretty much stuck with them in your body if they somehow get there. With glass, at least if you realize early enough, you can yank it out. And some people say that 10 or 20 years after getting glass stuck in them, that it came to the surface of their skin on a random day.

Which brings me to thinking about if we'll ever be able to truly know what substances are doing to our bodies in full fidelity. Like, some people believe that food colorings are unhealthy - will there eventually be a time where we have a machine, you stand in it and eat the fruit snacks and we get a full picture of where every molecule of titanium dioxide is headed? ..Imagine, we see a HUD of a human body, and a heatmap, overlaying that 99.95% goes to the kidneys but we see that 0.05% gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex of the brain in a peculiar area. We test more people and see that they also get the deposits in the same area...something we thought was totally harmless turns out to be depositing itself in some arcane area by some arcane mechanism... Yes, I eat fruit snacks and I don't think this is the case...it's just a silly hypothetical situation. And I am aware of fluorescent tagging technology which can do something similar but sometimes poorly, because ultimately it is modifying the original molecule. (Incompleteness sucks doesn't it?)

Maybe some day..
Time will tell, but maybe microplastic. WHO just started a review on the topic:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/15/micropla...
long-chain perfluorinated chemicals (C8 , involved in the production of teflon) see https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

Nictonoides in general (pesticides) are poisons, which we don't ingest directly but still spew in the environment.

A poison we monitor and accumulates in the environment but don't regulate to the level it deserve given the damage it causes is of course CO2, as well as the other greenhouse gases (SO2, NOx etc... as produced by ships and planes).
The GDPR does have provisions against this in place. Something along the lines of you first of all being allowed to take more time to respond, if the requests are complex and numerous, to ask for a small fee then as well and in extreme cases, you can also report such abuse to authorities.

And at the end of the day, you'll have to get sued for taking too long to respond, at which point a judge will investigate and can then tell that those requests were not legitimate.
I agree with your argument and have thought about that 'explainatism' as well. In my oppinion it is used by those that are incapable of accepting substantially different worldviews to their own. Trump was prepping up his followea for the loser narrative too with the 'the elections are rigged' argument. Attributing it to some sort of cheating narrative allows the follwers to continue belive that they are doing the right thing and that the other side is just a bunch of manipulated fools that need enlightenment.
Facebook critics want regulation, investigation after data misuse
The 10 Safest Countries to Live If World War III Breaks Out
I've seen people imply that latest generation c compilers (gcc,clang etc) generate quite a lot better code than these previous generation compilers. Partly I guess turbo Pascal didn't to much auto vectorization for example. Unsure about loop unrolling.

I'm sure it helped that Pascal had a IMNHO saner calling convention (more like the current amd64 convention) - so would utilise register for passing arguments rather than always using the stack.
Weird comparison. Come from has no indication on the other side that it will happen. Generators are pretty explicit with yield. On the calling side they can be explicit with a next() call.
Don't all products have the MTBF published as part of it's spec sheet (not to be confused with the marketing specs)?

edit: never mind, I couldn't find the MTBF for my watch after some search.
>Since I may not have time to update my article for a while, here is a link to the script[1].

Thank you. I was hoping you had figured out how to get it going in `pandoc`, tried it myself to no avail but just assumed I had done something wrong.

>I am unclear on your dnt script? What does it do? I don't have any facilities on my site to track users at all as it stands.

No, but I can imagine it useful if you did want to put a relevant YouTube video or Tweet embedded in, but wanted to respect DNT. It's worked pretty well so far.

>I will probably be mooching parts of your CSS though, thanks for posting it here!

No problem! Some parts to make the font size a little better for mobiles too at the top :)

>Edit: you are correct, I seem to have forgotten to include <HTML> tags... I should probably fix that.

Yeah, not a massive deal but who knows, could break something in the future!
> The last thing a woman wants to be worrying about while in the heat of the moment is whether her arousal is an expression of her own distinct eroticism or a symptom of patriarchal oppression.

That statement is literally the definition of overthinking something.
My story, the psychologist who began to write code (Dutch)
Absolutely - just recently on two separate occasions I spent half an hour to an hour searching Google for particular website that I was a fantastic resource on a topic.

Yesterday that was <https://www.homenethowto.com/>, where I eventually gave up on Google & DuckDuckGo and instead went to the home networking subreddit that I thought might just have it because it really is a great website. They did (and its probably where I found it originally).
Well done, Avinash!
I like the Free Libray Box. I don't know much about it other than I give them my books.

I also give to used book stores. (I like to help these guys because they are closing so fast.)

I don't like giving to Goodwill. I think it's a questionable 501c3. Plus--by mid morning all books have usually been scanned by Professional Resellers, and any book that has any value is put right up to Amazon/etc.

I really hate getting rid of reference books, and first editions. I know I will have to thin my collection down though.

I once saw a show on Hording. The usually impeccably dressed Ph.D was using fake empathy to get an older gentleman to get rid of house of his book/advertisement libray. A libray his daughter said was ruining his life.

They nagged the guy down, but he said one thing while the workers were tossing his books into the dumpster, "but--some--are 1st editions." There was no reply. I thought the "Dr" might have burped up, but nothing.

The next few day, the "Dr" didn't understand why the neighbors were dumpster diving for the discarded books. Profesional stooge, "We filled that up yesterday, and the books are gone today?"

I vaguely remember, the "Dr" quipping about, "just more Horders to heal?"

In all honestly, getting rid of books made more sense in 2005. Why--because their wasen't a book I couldn't obtain somewhere on the internet then. Today, I just don't see the free books I saw in the past.

The copyright lawyers did their job, and did it well.
But.... you're the one who's complaining that you missed out of assets booming due to QE. So surely if anyone doesn't have a clue it's you, right? I did quite well over the past decade.