skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again with blaming Facebook and Google. Why not blame ourselves?

We aren't acting as adults: we can't look at something shiny and say, "I want it, but it would be bad for me, so I'll leave it alone." At least some of the dangers of these things are obvious: unnatural levels and kinds of sharing, contrived, manipulative reactions, vast potential for privacy violation and misuse of data, and tons of time lost without compensation of any kind. Why don't we all refuse?

I didn't, and I should have. I've recently dropped Facebook entirely and am paring back my reliance on Google. Looking through my Facebook data download, I'm shocked at my foolishness, especially in the first couple years: I was old enough to know better! I hope I've learned my lesson, and that others do too, before we seriously mess up our society --- if we haven't already.
One interesting book in this context is Neiwart's "Alt America". [1] Neiwart is a journalist who spent decades tracking the armed US fringe, including the "patriot" militias, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracists, and white supremacist groups.

It's his view that the alt right didn't come out of nowhere. Instead, the low-friction communication of the Internet allowed these formerly scattered, always-falling-apart groups to connect and recruit in ways that were previously impossible.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of the alt-right happened when social media companies in some sense took friction negative. In the world of websites and blogs, you at least had to actively seek the next site, the next writer, the next article. It wasn't much work, but it was at least a little.

Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter were eager to give you an endless stream of content, so as to maximize User Active Minutes metrics. So their algorithms would pull up anything that they thought you'd be interested in. The theory being that any engagement must be good, which implies that total obsession would be best.

In retrospect, that theory seems to have some flaws.
Great comment. Minor point: you switched the a and the b
TL;DR: it’s one of those sites that pretends to give you useful information but is actually just an email address harvester.

Don’t bother.
Probably not, but it's an interesting concept.
An FPGA compared to an x86 processor or C program is many orders of magnitude more closely related than either of those to a brain, especially when you start looking at the brain as the result of the decoding of a string of DNA in what once was a single celled organism.

The orders of complexity involved alone dwarf any other comparison you might want to make and that's before we get into the effects of nurture, environment, interaction, education and so on.
"It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes."

The most dramatic change has been to "community" features. Amazon feels it is enough of a monopoly now that it now longer has to attract customers through the ability to discuss things. The discussion boards were shut down, and similarly the ability to leave a comment under someone's product review was restructured so that that feature no longer serves to let people maintain a lively conversation among themselves about the author or musician. Many listings now only show by default reviews from customers who actually brought the product; this was done to tackle the problem of shill reviewers, but it also eviscerated the community that had popped up to share their feelings on even library loans because for nearly two decades Amazon had let anyone review and discuss books and music.

The page to see your review history has been changed so that it is now an infinite scroll. While infinite scroll is a very popular design choice these days, I can’t help but wonder if Amazon also wanted to make it difficult for the reviewers with 1000+ reviews to easily move their content to another site.
Honestly, I don't think I want to join any other free "social network" after what happened and still happens at Facebook. I would be okay to pay for a social network that respect my privacy and that would be limited in features like status, photos and groups.
Git-All-Secrets – A Tool to Capture All the Git Secrets by Leveraging Multi
Same here.

In high school (so, decades ago), we found the word "tight" as a graffiti piece on the school wall one morning. That was the day I learned it stood for "drunk".
> companies using the language with hopes of being acquired by them

This is beyond belief. What companies are using Go with the hopes of being acquired by Google? Does anyone honestly believe that Google's acquisitions teams know or care about programming languages? Any business that acquires companies on that basis is doomed to failure, as is any company that hopes to be acquired on that basis.
I wonder where you are counting those 10 from.

Enterprises also write native code, it is not everything Java, .NET and SAP stuff.
>no account verification required

I keep hearing this but I made an account recently with no email verification. Recently as in one week ago. I put in a no email address actually. YOu can go sign up right now, leave the email field empty and hit next, you can do the whole sign-up process without an email.
I read it long ago and came to the conclusion that he was essentially right with how he framed the problem but the solution he picked out of the two alternatives was the wrong one. Running away from technological progress into the wilderness somewhere might be good for you but the only long term solution that is good for everyone is to alter humanity to be better adapted to its new environment.

Though there are probably a multitude of ways of doing it, the two that stick out as most likely / agreeable to all are Gattaca and AI + Cyborg. Though I could also see strong AI either just replacing humanity[0] or simulating / uploading the minds of the good humans and merging with them.

[0] I'm not convinced that this would be a bad thing, a hypothetical AI that comes with all of the benefits of humanity with none of the rape or war might just be better ethically in a global sense.
What’s your motivation for starting the endeavors in the first place? If you’re willing to give something up because it’s too easy, you are probably thinking about it incorrectly. Becoming the world’s number one pianist is not an easy task, it would takes years, or a lifetime.

Regardless, if you were on track to become the world’s best pianist and then gave it up because guitar is “harder”, why did you even want to be the world’s best pianist in the first place?

It sounds like you are dabbling in a bunch of things trying to see if somehow the learning of a new skill will give you a sense of enrichment. It will, however, that will fade quickly.

After learning a new skill and becoming “good” at it, there’s a lull phase where you think things are easy. That’s because you don’t know what you don’t know. Mastery of almost anything is hard and takes a long time.

All of this returns to motivation though. If you are looking for a short term sense of accomplishment, then dabble in a bunch of stuff and get “good” at it. If you are looking for a pursuit, find some motivation that will drive you to try and master something.
Yes, everyone == every single person employed by GitLab Inc.
> He stole the idea from the twin brothers who hired him and used the leading metric of @university email addresses to create contextual-relational importance for viral growth, so it's not surprising.

While uncharitably stated, in my opinion this demonstrates a lot of technical ability and business savvy.
The fact that people are taking this memo at face value is insane. Facebook is obviously much more interested in making money off of people's data through advertising than to connect people. Further, it's dangerous to even rely on such a centralized system for so much of our communication. Especially when it's an organization with an astounding amount of power and money.
So Precambrian?

I'd argue that Backbone is from an even older generation.
People who use singletons deserve no better...
I have a standalone MP3 player the size of a matchbox. (Anybody remember matchboxes?)

The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.

It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.

Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.
Had this happen the first week of my first internship. Made me work Saturday through Sunday. No sleep. unpaid. Only thing I learned was I needed a new job.
By this definition, Python and JavaScript are systems languages.
Exactly. Or at least teach them to use GitLab, which is a good motivator to make the product easy to use.
I couldn't help but notice that one of the few genuine-seeming smiles that appeared on Zuckerberg's face, appeared immediately before and during the broadband guy's "questioning". I couldn't help but get the feeling that Zuckerberg knew in advance that that particular person was going to be lobbing praise and softballs.
Why did you stop using Ember?
I think he did his job. He passed a hearing in front of the congress, while telling as little as he could.

What he did, of course, for HN / tech people / journalists was fiasco, because we know what actually happens there. For the average people it was another reassurance, because now they say "Facebook is okay, the guy went in congress and no consequences followed, so it's good."

I tend to believe that the questions and the hearing itself was so bad and uneventful, because Facebook probably holds tons of data and collaborates closely with US government. So it will be quite unfortunate for the government and for Facebook if the real questions are being asked.

I really enjoyed reading the commend of @DyslexicAtheist [1] from yesterday's thread.

> it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations.

1 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16811281
Statistically, cafes don't do that.
> From an historical perspective, current U.S. spending as a fraction of GDP is not great

It might be lower than tat some points in the past, but that is great. Just like it's great that a smaller share of our population is engaged in agriculture than in the past: resources are free for other pursuits.

> (this means that other nations are spending far less than they need to).

Or, it means that civilization is advancing , and the needed level as a share of total output is declining.

> You're also begging the question of whether or not providing lunches to schoolchildren is a federal responsibility. Reading the list of enumerated powers of the United States[0], unless you squint really hard and figure that it's necessary & proper to provide school lunches in order to 'raise & support Armies,' since malnourished children won't grow up to be good soldiers.

Actually, there's a much better argument for federal involvement in funding and prescribing anything attached to public education including school lunches in the militia clause, if you insist on seeing it through a military lens rather than a commercial one.
> Fortunately that is not the case in many other parts of the world where incentives are not as perverse.

Incentives absolutely are structurally perverse in other parts of the world.

They're just perverse in different ways, which often mask the effects to patients.
Mark has never had an original idea. He stole Facebook then bought everything else like Instagram, Whatsapp and many many more.

Not exactly an insult but since they're not his ideas he doesn't have the ideology to back it up or an end goal. He never wanted to connect people. Vs someone like Musk who lives and breathes his ideas and has an end goal.
Will it help the businesses if they learned that plain web sites are easier to create (and update), are better for the users and needs less maintenance?
On the other hand, large C code bases are a special kind of hell, lack of namespaces and user-defined types make it difficult to understand, modify and test.
Because hospitals use those prices to negotiate with insurance and other parties. I'm not saying it's right, but it's what happens in a broken system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargemaster
You can't get lucky for so long, for so many things. He got poor public facing skills, which just means he has even stronger other talents that he is using where can't see what's happening.

Don't underestimate a guy who built a billion dollar empire and sits on the biggest potential dictatorship tool in human history.

Now the funny thing is that his presidential ambitions seem to be dead for now. It's interesting...
A new, personalized vaccine is targeting the deadliest cancers in America
I find it odd that McD's went with something as archaic as self-ordering kiosks when you can just order from your phone.

Those kiosks are very slow and a bit cumbersome to use, and they put them smack in the middle of the waiting area in the restaurant. Huge waste of space.
Google play music allows downloading the mp3, but only twice.
They’ve received a few. I’ve been waiting to hear about them being used in actual operations. Haven’t heard anything so far.
Yeah I see what you're talking about, though I would add that there's a whole sub culture in the news about pointing out bad takes from among the fourth estate. It all seems to depend on where you "hang out" so to speak.
Agree Reddit is pretty bad for “technical” information that doesn’t change much over time (or that changes minute-to-minut). It is basically an unfiltered stream of consciousness.

Because of this, I like to think of Reddit as a deeper version of Twitter. It’s a fine source for discovery and can work ok for discussion, but the good content is usually elsewhere and there may be a lot of context you’re missing depending on who you follow (or what subreddits you read).

There is a lot of overlap between subreddits too; and while the sidebar content is often out of date, in many communities it serves as a repository of community knowledge to answer common questions, etc. This works well for communities already structured like this (the LGBTQ community on Reddit is a great example).

But yeah, I worry that the redesign is seriously screwing with the core DNA of the site and turning it into yet another MySpace-like content graveyard.
It’s good that you want to update it and make it better. However, it it works fine for the clients and they are happy, you should be too.

We all look back on our previous work and see room for improvement, that’s a good thing. However, spending too many cycles trying to achieve perfection where it’s not desired will prevent you from moving on with your life to bigger and better pursuits.

Be really happy that you have a software project which survived for 7 years. Many fail in far shorter time and provide no value.
No. I put my complete +(country) and then the rest of my usual number and got a text. However, the text that I received was from a US number.
An Eye in the Sky Could Detect Planet-Warming Plumes on the Ground
"Why can't it be both?"

In fairness to the OP, the notion of someone being next is coming from the headline, not the comment.
Why do you think it is a good idea to use analytical methods of one field for another field when you mention the fatal flaw in your next sentence?

I have really issues even accepting that anyone would even try something like this and get it published. Also the conclusion of this paper is broken.
In my former job, I talked to a lot of doctors about this stuff.

What I found was that a lot of doctors look at the decision from a clinical lens only. Why not prescribe the latest branded product, even if it's only marginally better than the generic? Patients deserve the best, right?

Making a cost vs. benefit trade off wasn't a universal process for many physicians.
I really feel for Ember - we picked it for a project we started a few years ago because react was still very new and angular was in the middle of the 2.0 transition. The Ember folks really made sure that transitioning to new Ember versions is straightforward. I don't even enjoy writing javascript, but I have really nothing but good things to say about it overall.

What it suffers from is a small community: we depended on a table component someone wrote which used some weird internal APIs and never got properly upgraded to ember 2.0 so we got stuck with ember 1.x until now because the overhead cost of switching to another library was too high to be worth it. Even then, the maturity of the project has been great and things don't break all the time. The API has been improving and the ember developers are proactive about pulling in the best ideas from newer projects. If you read the Ember RFCs they're always introspective and future-conscious and great. I really hope the project survives, not that I had much doubt. I think there is still quite a dedicated crowd.
> State and federal grants cover most of the research.

That's straight up not true. Most of the money spent on research is obtained directly through pharmaceutical sales in the US, and a large chunk of the rest is obtained indirectly in the same manner.
There need not be a physical cause for excess sleep. Emotional disturbances or drug use can also lead to mini escapades to the bedroom. This can cause your body to adapt to a longer sleeping pattern; bypassing the pain of sleep fatigue healthy people have.
It's a great article, but I do have one quibble.

> A hilariously stupid piece of real world foundational debt is the measurement system referred to as United States Customary Units. Having grown up in the US, my brain is filled with useless conversions, like that 5,280 feet are in a mile, and 2 pints are in a quart, while 4 quarts are in a gallon. The US government has considered switching to metric multiple times, but we remain one of seven countries that haven’t adopted Système International as the official measurement system. This debt is baked into road signs, recipes, elementary schools, and human minds.

A not-so-hilariously stupid mistake is to think that the traditional measurement system is stupid. His picture illustrates one of its virtues: the entire liquid-measurement system is based on doubling & halving, which are easy to perform with liquids. The French Revolutionary system, OTOH, requires multiplying & dividing by 10, which is easy to do on paper or with graduated containers, but extremely difficult to do with concrete quantities (proof: with one full litre container and two empty containers, none graduates, attempt to divide the litre into decilitres).

The real foundational debt is that we use a base-10 system for counting, due to the number of fingers & thumbs on our hands, rather than something better-suited to the task. If we fixed that problem, then suddenly all sorts of numeric troubles would vanish. There's actually a lot to be said about the Babylonian base-60 system, to be honest.
Show HN: Allege – create short links to paragraphs and content for sharing
It would always decompress the same way, so for artistic purposes, if you preview it and it looks good, it is good.

But if you're using photography to look at things in the world, that's a whole different story.
Yup. The way I see this is more like adding intertia in control systems - it makes a system a bit more sluggish, but can prevent it from oscillating out of control.
Pretty darn cool! One limitation I wish I could think of a workaround for is that "cutting out" parts of some letters (C, G, J, Q) requires laying a rotated white square over it, with white as the hardcoded background color. So this will only work with other background colors if you know the background color ahead of time or can configure it in JS or something.
> We want friction in communicating. Not only do we want it, we have to have it.

I am uncomfortable with this, but I find myself agreeing. All the "problems" with Twitter stem from liking low-friction communication in theory, but hating it in practice.

I think that in some way it is workable, but people approach it in a way that sets everyone up for failure. People want their phone to ding, then make them feel good because their friends are nice to them. Twitter is not that. Twitter can never be that. Twitter is the internet. If you apply the last 3 decades of common knowledge about interacting on the internet, it's fine. But it reduces the utility (and therefore engagement) of Twitter, so the marketed idea has to be that twitter is something more.
In think it could work, that lane can be the same as is used for autonomous lorries (that potentially benefit everyone if they deliver cheaper goods).
The problem is how easily the workforce will be able to adapt to these new jobs. It's one thing to have new repetitive manufacturing jobs invented (as with the industrial revolution), and quite another for a growing market of engineers (electrical, mechanical, software, etc).
Totally agree this is content marketing. However, this topic is the wrong content for a contract firm. It would be great coming from a large tech organization who actually had metrics on monoliths vs microservices at different stages of growth. From someone who appears to never have worked on a project of massive scale, it comes off as sub par content clickbait.
Oh I know you can still do this; but the UX is deceptive about it. And one day they may just force the field to be “required”.

Anonymous posting is the core feature of Reddit, so if they kill that the site is dead. It’s also Reddit’s biggest problem with advertisers on two fronts: it prevents them from linking out to external DMPs for most users and it makes it easy to post content that is offensive to advertisers.
The NIH spends 32[1] billion per year

That's true, but a fraction of that is spent on actual drug discovery. The NIH funds a lot of non-pharmaceutical research.
> Not available for India.

It is.
> The majority of money spent in R&D is public money.

No, most of the money spent on R&D in the entire world is funded though pharmaceutical sales in the US. The amount that comes from truly exogenous sources is vanishingly small.

> My wife was treated for MS using a cancer drug developed in the 50s. If you have cancer, the drug costs about $20. If you have MS, the drug costs $450,000+ (that was my bill). The only difference is FDA approval.

You're proving the point. It's more expensive because they have to go through the research and approval process all over again for the new usage of the drug. The marginal cost of producing the medicine isn't the issue.
To be fair to the parent commenter's point, I don't think your restatement of the article's characterization is any more accurate with respect to the hearing itself. There were basic questions he failed to answer, complex questions he did answer, and various questions were not well-founded enough for him to give a coherent answer.
> It would help a lot if there was a well-formed, unambiguous specification for both sides to hold to.

It does sound like you're describing the schema language part of GraphQL. I think that GraphQL is a great tool for making sure that the right stuff goes in and out. Although it's far from solving all input validation problems. Hmm, perhaps you're describing a different problem.

After having worked with GraphQL user input validation at least seems like a manageable problem. There still seems there should be even better methods for handling contagion problems in the data of historical mistakes though.