skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A similar problem exists for weird services like Amazon that allow multiple accounts for the same email address (unless they finally fixed that stupid idea?).
What're the reasons why it should be dead? Development is very active https://github.com/meteor/meteor/releases and roadmap are up-to-date https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/Roadmap.md. What're your requirements? Meteor can solve your problems but can also be too much.
I don't agree with "It's gmail fault" and also I don't think Netflix should validate the e-mails. Why?

Most of the startups I work for don't require a valid e-mail when you enter your payment information. Reasons are multiple - conversion drop, "we took your money, we don't care", the e-mail is anyway entered with the payment provider, etc.

Also what comes to your e-mail and you act on is your responsibility. I don't know about you, but I don't pay for more than a dozen services with my card and I usually am aware when / what is being paid, so a scam like this would be easy to detect.
Telegram is using non encrypted chats by default and does not have e2e encryption for group chats which is just unacceptable in this day and age.
I have this problem a lot as well. There was someone with my name with a Bank of America account that regularly bounced checks, and BoA provided no way to disassociate my email address from the account.

These days I'll flag any email from a service as spam, no matter how well known, if there was no email verification step.
We were still doing "new math" in the 1970s when I was in grade school, though. It is interesting how much of the "common core" seems inspired by it.
Glass Is Humankind’s Most Important Material
> What if all the billionaires in the world decided 'let me just hit delete on all of the zeroes in my bank account' what affect would that have on the rest of the world?

In the long term, nothing.
> It's just propagnda.

No, it isn't.

You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts.

You didn't see people getting shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall into East Germany.

You don't see vast numbers of South Koreans trying to sneak into North Korea (or preferring life as an illegal alien in China to living in their own country).
Yeah, it would totally suck to have strangers attacking your ethics instead of considering the small tap targets on iPad minis.
Analytics/data science degree vs. traditional
hi all,

i'm looking to get into ML/DS/deep learning type work. I'm looking to get a masters because my bachelors is non-quant (though I do have some of the "core" quant classes to help me apply to masters like basic CS/linear algebra/stats/etc)

my question is, in the long-term, do you think analytics/DS degrees will hold their value? i am very skeptical of these programs because im worried if "analytics" is not really a thing anymore, then my degree will not be as respected in 10-20 years.

if i do get an analytics degree, i will get one from a program where i can take more stats/CS courses to help give that foundation (georgia tech OMS in analytics comes to mind)

what are your thoughts on this?
> unreal to me

would it be less unreal if you didn't consider the goal to be actually stopping sex trafficking etc, but to set precedent eroding freedom of speech and online service provider protections, under the guise of "for the children" and "obscenity"?
That's brilliant, using heart attacks to treat strokes
Not confirming the email is insane. And it's even worse if you're going to use that email address to send personal data.

I don't see any excuse to not confirm an email address, honestly.
subdomain aliasing sounds way better than + aliasing. Too many sites block + aliasing.
It's true as long as the function f is sufficiently "shrinking." The domain of the function (where the x's live) must be sufficiently larger than its range (where the f(x)'s live). For example, if the domain is size N, a range of size 0.99N is enough to guarantee that collision resistance implies preimage or second-preimage resistance.

Said another way, if there are many collisions and you still* have a hard time finding them (collision resistance), then you can prove that it's also hard to find preimages or second preimages.

Your example, f(x) = x is not shrinking at all: there are no collisions.

A fundamental property of hash functions is that they're shrinking---so much so that it often goes without mention in informal settings. Hash functions are typically defined in two ways: shrinking arbitrary length inputs to a constant length (e.g., n bits to 256 bits) or shrinking arbitrary length inputs by some constant amount (e.g., n bits to n-1 bits, or n/2 bits). Even shrinking by one bit serves to halve the domain, guaranteeing many collisions and ruling out counter-examples like the one you gave.
"Descending into lava lamps and nonsense." is hardly what I'd call it. Kubrick is all about subtext.
I've read the RFCs for email. The RFCs explicitly state not to make assumptions about another site's use of the local part or how it maps an address to a user/account.
The possibility that the big ball of mud people are right? That hero worshipping is better than team building? That the people who still write software the way it was done 25 years ago know something that the rest of us don’t? That all of the techniques and tools I pressed my face against the glass for 12 years ago that are now considered de rigeur are bad? That hoping for the other half of things I wish for will happen in the next 12 is a pipe dream?

No, I’m not open to that kind of education. I’ve had plenty of volunteers to teach me if I ever change my mind. In the meantime I’ll try to work in the half (quarter?) of the industry that strives for something better.

As someone once told me, I don’t need to be a good fit for every job. I just need to be a good fit for one at a time.
Medicine 200 years from now will be different. Doctors are largely ignorant of nutrition. When you go to the doctor, how often do they ask about the what you eat? Unless you really look unhealthy or you mention some correlation between the symptoms and a specific food, your diet is a lowly weighted factor in your unwell being. I think that will change, and many of the catalysts will be from patients who teased out the effects of nutrition on what ails them.

There is also a significant leakage of nutritional advise from sports science, and all this information is finding adherents/testers in the regular world and will eventually (after the pseudoscience is sorted out) have a corrective influence on medicine.

I think at some point Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) will be a lot more common and maybe even have specific practitioners, (like physical therapists) instead of being a doctor-nutritionist partnership. The practice will evolve and it will get standardised and taught to "specialists".
Backpage did charge for these postings. 90% of its income came from adult ads. I don't know how many of those were consenting adults providing services vs non-consenting adults or children.
except my "real" address has dots, so I know that 0 dots are being cleaned. I just can't tell who did it.
Permitting separate "sarah.jones" and "sarahjones" accounts would be pretty bad, too. Too easy to impersonate people. "Dots matter but are not included in uniqueness checks" is probably the safest approach.
Japanese feudalism traditionally left very little freedom to citizens. Your occupation depended on cast you was born in. Samurai could not just take some other job and leave. Neither could peasant. The expectations on your loyalty and obeisance were super high. I am not sure they lost all that much with capitalism, maybe even gained.
> The big ambitions and dreams are gone so I don't feel that much pressure to achieve anymore. Also at that age the options to change one's life are pretty limited compared to being in your 20s.

I would like to respectfully disagree. While I am not "old", I'm on my way. I am actually super on-board with simply removing a desire to achieve, and it has made me much happier. But I'm achieving all sorts of things anyways.

The second part of this is the assertion that options to change decrease with age. I have found exactly the opposite. As I gain more experience, build a solid chest towards an exceptionally early financial independence, and go out to find more like-minded but different people I tend to feel like options to change and expand my life start exploding in a way that requires picking and choosing more and more carefully between different things.

What do you think about the reduction of "ambition" as a helpful thing being replaced with a calm but strong "passion" as a potentially more positive alternative?
> complaining about a guy's morals

> the value he fairly earned

I see what you did there.
The article didn't mention anything about using heart attacks to treat strokes.
MDG has been focused pretty heavily on Apollo for quite some time. I’m not convinced Meteor has been shown much love. The package ecosystem has dramatically declined in quality over the last year.
That's not the point. Salt is constant, but different for each entry. They can encrypt the salt and when they share it with hospitals, those can't reverse the hash but FB can. Doesn't it solve the problem?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16780676 and marked it off-topic.
I think it's an interpretation of the HN title.
Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit
That's why you send an email to whatever the user typed in with a link they have to click before they can complete the signup process. This is really, really basic stuff.
A small and limited government is a weak government. A weak government is susceptible to corruption.

To avoid corruption you need the state and the collection of the most powerful corporate/private actors be of similar size, and they must be as isolated and independent as possible. This way you get a balance of power, rather than one corrupting the other.

The problem in the US is the isolation/independence part. Money in politics and revolving doors has corrupted the balance.

“Limited government” is an idea sold by people who want government to be weaker so it’s more easily corrupted.

What we should strive for is the middle way. Just the right amount of government.
Net assets is greatly skewed toward later ages, for obvious reasons.

What percentage of HN will be in the international 1% in assets by the time they die? I’d still guess more than half.
It's the world before the World Wide Web actually lived up to its name. At the time, they were entirely correct that getting their software pre-installed on Macs was the only way they could get it in the hands of most school users.
Patent misuse laws have something to say about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_misuse
Ugh, what a trainwreck of a flamewar. All: please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which asks you not to feed egregious comments by replying. All you do, when you do that, is add to the damage and spread the flames.

We've banned this account for using HN for political and national battle, flamewars, and personal attacks. That's a rather striking amount of vandalism, just as it would be if you had the opposite opinions. Indeed, the people who vandalize HN this way have more in common with their extreme enemies than they do with anyone else.
A Short History of the Executioner (2014)
The knee jerk response of 'envy' to any discussion about inequality trivializes economic discussion. Given this is not mere conjecture but backed by hard data by the work of economists like Piketty[1] continued talk about envy betrays a camel in the sand approach.

There is now consensus among leading economists like Stiglitz [2] and even bastions of neoliberalism like the University of Chicago and IMF that something has gone seriously wrong in the last 40 years.

Piketty's data shows a dramatic increase in inequality since the 1980s with labour share of income shrinking with wages stagnant and essentially at the same levels as they were 40 years ago with disproportionate gains going to the top 1 percent.

Grandiose claims about lifting 1 billion people out of poverty are meaningless without any data to back them up. Where, how was it achieved, how long it did take, which specific policies? Why haven't we been able achieve these results in the poorest parts of Asia, Africa and even the USA inspite of trying for the last 70 years?

Contrary to the 'envians' no one cares about the rich in any serious economic discussion, but many do care about the majority in a society getting poorer, unequal outcomes, bad economic policies, lobbying and capture, exploitation, unemployment, underemployment as this can only lead to highly unstable societies.[3]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/stiglit...

[3] http://evonomics.com/joseph-stiglitz-inequality-unearned-inc...
What about emails that were deleted?
Yup. I had some guy's credit card bills appearing. It was actually super weird - somehow Google had metadata about the credit card bill that was not in the body of the email, so I'd get "reminders" on Google Now saying "pay $1200 to Notyourbank by the 1st of Octember", but I couldn't actually see that bill without logging in (which, obviously, I could not and did not try to).
How do you efficiently distribute benefits if you cannot ascertain if the individual is a Citizen, hasn't already taken his/her fair share or isn't scamming the exchequer?

You may disagree with the idea but in a country which has a very small tax base and caters to a huge population efficiently distributing benefits becomes the most important priority. Up until Aadhaar, the benefits meant for illiterate/lower income group were swindled by scamsters who used their identities to procure the benefits.

There was no way to ascertain if the individual was really below poverty line and that s/he hadn't taken more than his/her fair share of the benefits using a stolen identity. We can always debate issues of privacy endlessly but arrive at no conclusion which can actually solve the core issues. The core issue being that for the poorest of the poor, privacy is secondary to survival.

For some added perspective, here is a famous quote by Ex-Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 (on a visit to drought-affected Kalahandi district, Odisha): "Of every rupee spent by the government, only 15 paise reached the intended beneficiary". Have you ever heard a top executive head of any other country publicly accept and go on record that 85% of the intended amount never reached the poor and needy? That 85% of the amount was swindled away by corrupt means?

Even this article admits it rather reluctantly: "Officials estimate that taxpayers have saved at least $9.4 billion from Aadhaar by weeding out “ghosts” and other improper beneficiaries of government services."
So then send the verification email at signup and any time the user changes the stored email on their account. Am I missing something?
> The tag feature is not always available because app developers frequently don’t allow the plus characte

Should we stop using a feature because some buggy apps don’t support it?
React + Meteor + Mongo
There is a middle ground - when you work without taking 3 hour long lunches, but don't work 8AM to 3:30AM just to be back at 8AM.

Good luck.
Show HN: A module that parses markdown into html || Node.js
>... so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.

What about western countries where people under 35 are dealing with high student debt, unaffordable housing, stagnate wages and "gig" economy jobs? Things look pretty glum unless you've got some form of inheritance on the horizon.
I don't think I've ever visited a website that had name of an illness in the domain name. But maybe it's just me.
> How sure are we of the causality here?

Does it matter?

In fact, I am almost certain that these are results of other things, but that they are so closely linked that if you get income inequality as an outcome of those other things, you also get the other negative results. And vice versa.
In history there are exactly three ways in which different people end up doing the different jobs needed for civilisation.

* You can have a caste system, where everyone does what his father did. Which is more fun if your dad was a priest than if he had to shovel shit.

* You can have someone with a gun tell you what to do. This was Stalin's preferred system. It doesn't mix well with democracy, because threatening to shoot yourself doesn't get coal dug out of the mine.

* You can use money, and let people trade their time for the fruits of their labour. This can exist with or without democracy. It can exist with varying levels of redistribution, too, but people still call it capitalism.

What is this alternative system?
the additional requirement to set up the schema is kind of onerous.
I actually have dots in my Netflix account email address because somebody who wasn't me had previously started to register for Netflix using my email address.

I have had to do this with some other services as well. Some services won't allow the + in gmail addresses, which is pretty annoying.

If a service starts recognising the dots don't matter and denying the plus symbol, there's a good chance I won't be able to register without obtaining a new email address.

I wouldn't mind but my name is really not that common -- my surname is uncommon enough for me not to have met another with that surname outside my family.
This article CONSTANTLY refreshes on mobile, even after several minutes, making it next-to-impossible to read
What you say can be applicable for subscription billing. But there are hundreds of other sites and apps where you can "checkout" stuff without needing to register, which is also a welcome/better feature. And yes, they do notify when a transaction failed.

You cannot ask a whole ecosystem to change because of a feature/flaw on a central vendor. Where will you start? Force people to create accounts and verify emails when buying a one-off train ticket or ordering a pizza? What if people/market don't want this registration/activation crap for doing small utility stuff? For a payment, I have to authenticate with my payment provider, not to my email vendor. And payment providers do have delayed reconciliation issues that are sometimes notified back. And where would you stop? Validate each and every piece of info the user provides? Send a SMS verification code to the phone for same utility bill?

The conclusion is correct: Fix the vendor. I asked for a specific email address when I signed up. Similarly I should get emails only for "dots" that I have specifically opted in to. Deny receiving the email, show me a warning, don't allow it until I opt in. Anything else is just asking for trouble.
I was looking for something specific to type systems, but this is a good start.
Well, google.com assigned semantics to the local-part, which they are allowed, even supposed, to do.
Good to hear this. I see many comments on HN where midwesterners or southerners living on the coasts are dumping on their friends and neighbors back home, and I think that behavior isn't helpful.
that is really funny mistype :)) makes one think... :)
I thought it was about Stephan Molyneux.
Most people believe that the political spectrum has one axis only.

Unsurprisingly there's so much disagreement and ignorance around the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
>This is Netflix's issue for not validating the email account.

Eeeh, I just re-read RFC 2822. It explicitly states that the local-part of an address may contain any number of dots as long as they are separated by (if I'm reading this correctly) at least one character, and do not start with a dot.

There's nothing in there that states you should treat dotted and undotted variants of an address as the same address.

So, google isn't violating the specification, but they are extending it in an unexpected way. Google could extend it further by implementing a "giraffes don't matter" policy where any instances of the word "giraffe" are recursively snipped out, so that "test@example.com" is the same as "tegirgiraffeaffest@example.com", but if they did it would be a bit rich for them to expect the rest of the world to adapt code to that decision.

It might be reasonable for google to expect others to handle this "dots dont matter" policy if it was some kind of defacto standard, but AFAIK it's not. I would argue that this form of attack is uniquely enabled by the gmail devs making a decision to add additional behavior to an otherwise well-understood spec, and that it's not netflixes problem to solve that.

To be frank, netflix can't solve it. Asking netflix to change their code will only solve it for netflix, gmail users will still be "at risk" from, you know, potentially literally every other domain on the internet.

So I would say that this is a risk that gmail users need to be aware of and mitigate themselves, perhaps by taking such drastic steps as reading their bills before paying them.
Sure, it's being actively developed, but I haven't really heard of it being used in big production systems, which could indicate the community's interest has moved on.
> A small and limited government is a weak government. A weak government is susceptible to corruption.

Why? Also, is that borne by history? Was the US federal government more corrupt when it was more limited?
I remember researching this topic in a biochem class. Aspartame turned out to be the artificial sweetener with the most potential side effects i studied.

E.g. it seems to affect brain functioning IIRC
Funny I'm the first to comment, as this can be a game-changing announcement : "One RAW format to rule them all" from one of the biggest company in the world can push lots of companies to switch from their proprietary or even open (CinemaDNG for ex) filetype to this big one.
Maybe that will be the necessary push to go from Log on average camera to RAW on average camera ?
Or, whenever you get an unexpected email, go retrieve your credentials from your password manager, log in via the main page, and check you can see the message/problem it's referring to.

(Some of us use the dots to trick some sites into using a nonstandard email, rather like the username+netflix@gmail trick, so you can see who sold your email to the viagra trolls. Some sites reject + in emails, making the dots v handy.)
So you want to buy a domain
I have at least two accounts; same email; I have two passwords and sometimes I screw it up.

I'm trying to think of a simple way to screenshot / show this without leaking person info...
Facebook has suspended Canadian data firm AggregateIQ
> When an industry group sets a standard, everyone must disclose their patents and agree to FRAND terms.

Note this is only some industrial groups. The W3C, for example, requires a royalty free license of all patent claims; the IETF merely requires one to disclose patents "reasonably and personally known" held by the contributor or their employer.
The quality of food is better? That's hardly believable. Do you have a source? All first person accounts I've ever read from people who lived then and now indicate otherwise.
Wouldn't the same thing be happening if they'd entered first.lastname@gmail, or if you used firstlastname@gmail? It seems like the problem is that they entered an email address that wasn't actually theirs. The dots don't seem to make a difference.
I think it's a mixed bag.

Not Orwellian:

* Requiring identification to get welfare benefits. The article mentions fraud is a big issue.

* Use of biometrics. It sounds creepy at first, but without a robust system of record keeping to base the ID card on, this is a good way to ensure each one is unique.

Orwellian:

* Requiring a government ID to enter a middle school art contest.

* Requiring a government ID to buy a prepaid SIM card.