skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cambridge Analytica’s actions had real world political consequences, so yes it’s political for that reason. But another angle of the CA portion of the story is that they were ratfucking in a very effective way—such as publishing fake news about BLM activists were organizing violent rallies, then broadcasting that to likely Trump voters. In some cases they even organized BLM events with incitement to commit violence, then pushed true stories about the events that suited their narrative.

In other words, CA demonstrated a tremendous vulnerability in our political dialogue to pure propaganda and dirty tricks that social media, in its algorithmic purity, was supposed to make less likely, not more. Some of the fallout of this affair will be a tremendous distrust that any provider of social media is an honest broker of what others use their services for. If my news feed is tainted by a group like CA manipulating it at the algorithm level, what hope can I have that anything I’m receiving over the Internet isn’t compromised? Maybe the stories are fake; maybe they’re true but the balance of stories is altered; maybe the facts are true-ish but slanted or selective. These are all legitimate concerns in the normal marketplace of ideas, but now we find the marketplace of ideas is deliberately compromised by malicious entities.
I'm not sure if there was miscommunication or what, but Google has had teams that do this for a while now. I typically hear them referred to as orange teams.
I think it also kinda helps that most of the engineers are probably not "rich kids"; they're probably mostly from middle class backgrounds. They've never seen that kind of wealth before, never seen that insane level of benefits. Its much easier to think of someone (or some org) as benign, to give them a second chance, when they treat you personally so well. Its kinda what immigrants feel when they do well in the US as well.
Opinion: SB 827 will exacerbate California’s housing crisis
If Clinton had won, the propaganda and dirty tricks would have failed, and so would have seemed much lower priority.
Aren't advertisers fundamentally just another form of mingler? One key difference I can think of is that the friend, posting an innocent picture of their new Adidas, is not paid any sort of commission for influencing potentially hundreds of people.
Call the hospital and offer to settle. They will cut the price almost certainly. Almost anything they can get you to pay will be more than they will get selling the debt to a collector.
> As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement

Oh, but you will see, when your manager (who doesn't really understand the implications of various technical decisions, by the way) will order you to do something completely meaningless (in your opinion), because the regulatory documents (made by people who understand and care for the implications of technical decisions far, far less than your manager) say something meaningless, contradictory and hard to interpret in the first place. If you aren't familiar with such situation it's probably because you are not working in a regulated industry, not because these things "solve themselves" in practice. No, in practice they don't.
I have done material design somewhat badly. I would mean a design directly from Google not someone’s reinterpretation of it. You can use it to justify your sloppyness but you could do the same thing in HyperCard.
It’s not that your data might be revealed, it’s that the data of you, your friends, and 50 million other voters might give someone an effective lever over a national election. Regardless of how you feel about Trump or Clinton, that should give you some pause.
It's been almost a week of this. Actually wondering when we'll get back to interesting tech
100 or so books that shaped a century of science
>Depending on the severity of a hack or misuse of the data it should effectively bankrupt or significantly destroy profits of any company.

counterpoint: equifax
It's so refreshing to actually read a truly free thinking and intelligent discussion on the problems of technology and its impacts on society.

Anyway, I just finished reading Kaczynski's first book, "Technological Slavery" (Feral House, 2010) It's an amazing work and it elaborates on this point quite a bit. Recommended.
I find this interesting. I'm curious though, who is the state sponsor?
Hey, I'm thinking about doing something similar with baseball JSON apis of all things. Would you mind sharing your firebase/python implementation details with me? Thanks!
Does/Did Intercom use MySQL, PostreSQL and MongoDB at the same time?!
18k for a small business is typical. My mom pays much less than that because she doesn’t even make anything near 18k. For a small business it limits who you can hire because their take home pay would be 0.

Basically what I’m saying is the loss ratio for a bigger pool will be much lower than a smaller one. For insurance companies who charge premiums if you are in say a Bigcorp sized pool compared to a small business size pool the bigcorp pool will be larger and can have smaller premiums .
This is the tape I used a few times to attach the display back to the case. It's slightly thicker than the original tape but works well nevertheless. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HLY50P8/ref=oh_aui_deta...
While I agree that the professor acted unethically, above and beyond the original problem with the Facebook API. This depiction of the Obama campaign is too rosy:

> 1) asking a user who had signed up for the Obama campaign if the campaign could contact their friends Johnny and Sue (discovered via their Facebook API) [...]

The idea that Alice has any right to consent to the dissemination of other people's (Bob and Charlie) data is just ridiculous. Just because they're called "Facebook friends" doesn't mean they have any more rights to give out my information than any other stranger. The entire concept is busted. To my mind that is still unethical, even though Facebook permitted it, and the Obama campaign was clearly the user of the data (rather than a fourth-party).
Honey badger – Floyd Mayweather of wildlife can attack lion’s “ball” literally
Think before you speak, call before you dig.
> If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.

Lucky you.
Unreal does use GC and it is the stop the world variety, yet unlike unity the GC has never even showed up for us as a problem. I cannot tell you why or how but Unreal just handles GC better than Unity. I am speaking from my experience of shipping a commercial game on console with Unreal. Maybe things are worse on mobile.
An “amazing work,” just to be very very clear, by Ted Kaczynski, the serial bomber. Not that he has nothing of value to say, but keep the source well in mind. He’s a smart guy, with a lot of insight, and he’s also batshit crazy and a remorseless killer.
Walters: California’s doomed plan to solve looming crisis in education
> The ISPs want a shot at making money off you, too

- Do you want your ISP tracking you and selling your private data? Do you think that is the place of an ISP?

- Does it bother you you are PAYING your ISP and they are reselling your data as well?

- Do you trust Comcast and Verizon and like that you are paying them to sell your data when you just want to use them to get online and are ok with this?

I don't think anyone argues Google has power but they aren't your 'gateway' to the internet that you pay for privacy.

Your argument is basically that you think Google has overreach so you want ISPs to take that from them or also do that?

I am against Google Fiber ISP having access that ISPs just won with bribery over innovation/product offerings that people want.

If Facebook had an ISP I wouldn't want them doing it either via the ISP.

> What I'm curious about is, why is the EFF so upset about what ISPs do, but not upset about what Google does, when Google's actions are literally affecting an entire industry and most of the world, and not just its own customers?

Products built on top of the internet are way different than products that are the base of the network. You should not be tracked at the network/gateway level ever.

If ISPs 'want a shot at making money off you' then let them build a service such as a search engine, social network or maybe like Comcast is doing with Hulu. Don't give up your rights at the gateway of the web just because you have a grudge or bias against Google.

> Google has been reshaping the entire internet and web just to maximize the way they can profit off my personal information. I don't see the ISPs doing that.

Also your points about Google are rich considering you have a @gmail account in your HN profile. If they are so overpowering why do you use them and not your ISPs email system?

Since you have no issue with ISPs selling data that you are paying them to keep private, you would be fine with Google Fiber ISP also doing that? Careful what you wish for and freedoms you give up due to bias ...
Yeah that's until your CDN or hosting provider decides to censor your. Turns out those are a for profit centralised service too, way more often than not.
The latency and memory usage is arguably far worse than Atom but that would be expected given its infantile state.
Writing essays or a book should be treated like a project work. That means , you first need to find out your readers expectations and then work towards meeting those expectations. So research is the first step. Then, you can create a structure of what you want to write about.
Russia. IRA = Internet Research Agency = Russian trolls.
I don't find that to be true for the people I know who work at FB though...they all deeply believe in connecting the world.

Deploying code to a billion people is only thrilling the first time anyways
Todays landfills will be tomorrows mines. I've been saying that for many years. One of the first things we will probably recover from them is copper.
Any good tutorials to learn this ? I want to make an outrun like game but no experience in this area
For another example: my broken ankle: tib+fib fracture, 2 severed ligaments, partially torn syndesmotic ligament, gave myself plantar fasciitis during recovery. Two surgeries, a bunch of ortho visits, a bunch more PT, 10 months on crutches.

The net bill was over $110k if I hadn't had insurance and wanted to go to one of two ankle specialists in the city I live in. With insurance, $5k-ish.
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time on data that has ended up on this page, I think the fact that the list hasn't grown says more about the priorities of other companies than of AWS. Amazon doesn't (yet) have time to build and maintain these datasets themselves: they work with others to build and maintain it and then fund the storage and transmission fees.

I helped build the Terrain Tiles dataset as part of Mapzen, which recently shut down. The OpenStreetMap data exists on the AWS Public Datasets page because it's useful to Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. If you're able to convince your company to generate and work with a public dataset, consider reaching out to the AWS and Google public datasets teams to get it hosted and publicized.
Between this and the "no GeForce usage in datacenters" thing, I'm really starting to dislike NVidia.

I was hoping AMD would be able to be more competitive with them on both the gaming and deep learning fronts, but manufacturers already seem to be going along with this which could hurt AMD even more.
Apple Discontinuing iPhone X in September
If enough people didn't have access to insurance, then there would be pressure on hospitals to find ways to reduce prices (so that their volume could go up). As it stands the medical industry is allowed to hold the poor for ransom ("accept our increased costs or they won't get treated") against the US's deep but finite pockets.

Before, we had the (very poor) demand elasticity of people paying everything they had and then maxing out every credit source, and predictably prices rose to around that point. Now, we have no demand elasticity at all, and prices can be expected to rise well above the average person's net worth + credit access.

If you look at any microeconomic equilibrium chart, you'll see that the price is held in a balance between people buying and people holding off due to price. When the good is healthcare, the human cost of "holding off" is very high, and usually involves inability to pay. Unfortunately our economic system tends to fly off the rails if this balance is disrupted, no matter how noble or urgent the cause.
Doesn't work when the high beams are on and tailgating you for going "only" 10 MPH over the speed limit. Also many newer cars are coming out with "auto dimming" mirrors without the switch but that don't quite seem to cut out as much light. The problem isn't just with lights either, it's with a lot of different features including mirrors that can't adequately capture blind spots and bumpers that cause more harm due to mismatched heights. The differences in vehicles sizes overall probably lead to quite a few avoidable traffic fatalities and accidents.
I empathize a lot with this guy. I wanted to share my recent story:

I unfollowed every single person and page I'm connected to on Facebook a month and a half ago.

Every time I look at a Facebook there's just about no value. My feed is empty. Nevertheless, I'll visit it by habit. It's weird to see how that persists.

I am not posting (never really did anyway), and I have no idea what's going on with the people I didn't really interact with that much anyway.

What put me over the edge was answering the question: "Does anyone that I deeply care for post anything (at all)?"

Answer for 90% was no. And there rest I still have phone/text to communicate.

This has all made me consider what relationships in my life are important. And it's made me consider how susceptible I was to a fine-tuned algorithm hungry for outrage and virality, and how that influenced my relationships and myself.

I feel great opting out. I hope to fully delete the whole thing soon. Weird that I can't just do that.

I recommend the unfollow thing.
>Than it stands that Google values money more than they value designing a system with their user's best interests in mind.

No, they value their average user over you specifically. If the average user will gain more from Uber than from the feature you suggest, it is in Google's users' best interest to not implement that feature.

>Yeah, because Google never lies about what they do with data, or how they collect it. /sarcasm

Then you can certainly name all the other times? There are a number of complaints about Google that I've heard, but being secretive about what data they collect is a new one.
> Certainly not for those tinkerer types.

Hence why I said most.

But even then I think you're still massively overstating it. 6-10 years ago nearly everyone in my circle of geeky friends and colleagues had a root-kitted Android (Cyanogenmod or similar) or a jailbroken iPhone. Today that number is exactly zero.
> It would increase the number of companies who could produce their own designs

Their own designs for competing GPUs, or their own designs for graphics cards incorporating NVidia and ATI GPUs? There's never been a shortage of the latter, and there's never been an incentive for NVidia or ATI to help enable the former.

I don't think GPGPU would have happened much earlier, but I do think open hardware specs would have drastically changed the evolution of GPGPU tooling. There would have been upstream backends for GCC and LLVM before closed frameworks like CUDA could have gotten a foothold. But none of that was going to happen until the GPUs were actually capable of running general purpose code.
Resources to Help You Prepare for Google Cloud Architect Certification
Tweet dates to 1851, myriad examples: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/377843

Chaucer came up with twitter: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/ch...

Craig Hockenberry applied the one to the other: http://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/
So much food is thrown away by grocery stores on the expiration date or just the day after. Usually you can eat that for a few more days, but grocery stores do not want to take the risk of selling it.
You might as well connect that whistle to an aircompressor if my experience is anything to go by. Very few companies have their house in order, and healthcare is definitely not an exception to this.
You can only sell your soul once, the second time there is nothing left.
Unwinding the Ulam Spiral
I really like the first painting you linked to. Your work is definitely the kind that I gravitate towards and I'd like to keep up with it when you get around to putting your updated portfolio online.

On your second point: have you dabbled in computational art? Anything from animation to machine learning to a homemade CNC painting bot? This intersection of the two disciplines, at least in my personal work, has always been what I find most exciting.

Apologies for the incessant questions! I just always get excited by code being using to create art and have always loved that prima facie paradoxical dichotomy.
> I think the the headline people are seeing is more like "Group doesn't follow website's terms of service from five years ago, and ends up helping Donald Trump win presidency."

Exactly.

The Obama campaign already acknowledge they did the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebooks-ru...

"In 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every American voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge, known as the social graph API. Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.

“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”"
I worked in 2014-2015 at Google on one of the (many) teams that did exactly that.
So you work at Dropbox huh?? :) sorry couldn’t help myself lol.

Invest your money in a way that secures your financial freedom till the day you die at 4-7% yearly withdrawal rate. Assume you live till 100.

If anything is left build a school in a poor country and bring whoever you can out of abject poverty. Cos only people like you can help them. They can’t solve these large problems when they are focused on just surviving day to day. You can be doing well while doing good.
Facebook hid webpages bragging of ability to influence elections
The Waste Gasification Debate (2013)
The government has tried to do away with filing taxes more than once. The tax lobby in the US, specifically Intuit the makers of Turbotax, has paid a lot of good money to prevent that. Add to that the anti-taxation people want taxes to be painful so that you associate that pain with taxes and now you understand why you can't file electronically directly with the IRS who already knows how much you owe, or just get your return back if owed one.
Please mark this as old (2015) – I thought this was a new revelation (it was new to me). But this is absolutely crazy.
As a daily user of org mode for notes, agenda, todo lists and word-processing (I LOVE IT) I'd recommend against using it for sth. like a blog. I did try. First of all it's a moving target, new syntax is introduced not-infrequently. Then, the API is cumbersome at times, and it's also slow. My org-publish setup with an RSS exporting function bolted on took many tens of seconds to export, even when only a single file was modified. I migrated to Textile for my website. It's implementations are all compatible, and it's way more comprehensive than any version of markdown.
I suppose you directed this to me, so to be honest, I don't know. I'm not British and didn't know about this agency before I posted my comment. I just wanted to raise the point that the government isn't a monolithic entity that can be solely described by its actions that we disapprove of.
Logging the max acceleration in x,y,z would have been better than throwing a bear out of plane. Knowing a bear survives is ridiculous and they knew it. Ethics are orthogonal, cadavers would have ben a better choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat#History

https://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1403/08cubesats/

https://nnsa.energy.gov/blog/nnsa-lab-wins-doe-achievement-a...

I didn't know this before either!

Apparently the Beanie Baby box was the inspiration for the form factor and maybe used for prototyping, but the final standard isn't exactly identical to it.
Equifax is exactly the kind of company that should not exist after a breach of that kind
What's troubling to me (as a non-American and non-Russian) is the mere "As part of our commitment to transparency we will be maintaining this list of usernames that we have determined were engaged in state-sponsored disinformation and propaganda campaigns.".

Where's the relevant information about that? I see a "blacklist" of sorts, that should be taken at face value, because some "state agent" (or, worse, social media site) says so.
The search for the perfect door
>>It's a bit much to expect growth to peak during the era 20-40 years after laissez faire ended

We need to look at Sweden's peak growth relative to other countries in my opinion, because its absolute growth rate was mediated by more than its own policies.

For example the entire developed world saw its peak economic growth rates during the postwar era, suggesting there were certain global economic conditions created by the establishment of the post-war order that could have played a major role in their economic performance.

So a better indicator of policy effectiveness would be to look at its economic growth relative to its contemporaries.

IIRC, Sweden's economic performance relative to its contemporaries, like the US, began to lag soon after it increased its tax rates to above theirs.

>>Without a doubt at least, high taxes and health and wealth clearly coexist in many countries.

But that's not in dispute. The dispute is over whether those countries are rich because of their current high tax policies, or their past low tax ones.

The article tries to demonstrate that in the case of Sweden at least, it acquired most of its wealth during the past eras.
This is a fantastic idea. I use Firefox containers for this purpose, but they do not utilize Firefox Sync, and so the grouping is limited to a single device.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16671214
Or ya'know... there are some other forces playing a role behind the scenes.

- https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/22/cloudflare-locks-down-110m...

- https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-raised-110m-from-fidelity...
If you are talking about the NSA, yes they do have a special channel with Apple... not sure who else does...
How to Burn an ISO File to a DVD Disc
And Google still writes backends in C++ in 2018.
For 3 people, the federal poverty level is $20,160. $18k is less than that, and in California, you would have been on Medical. Even if you are on Obamacare, not Medical (in California: 138% of fpl and up), under 200% fpl the silver plans are close to free.

see eg https://www.healthforcalifornia.com/covered-california/incom...