skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have hope for (but low expectations) that this sort of realization that the 'free' media is being bought and paid for by people who want to manipulate your opinions and actions, will encourage more people to subscribe to media sources with better transparency.
> Bloomberg states that they pocketed over $470M in fees

They invested $1.3 billion. The interest payments were deductible to Toys 'R' Us, which would have been useful if it survived long enough to pay dividends to its equity holders. KKR et al lost money on this.
I also read that somewhere
We do know actually:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/bain-kkr-...
Comment installer Facebook Messenger sur Ubuntu 18.04 et 16.04 LTS
So you'd need a licensed anesthesiologist monitoring every passenger? Sounds expensive.
> where'd that 5 billion in loans go?

As in where did the proceeds go? To the previous investors. From whom KKR et al bought Toys 'R' Us. There's a "B" in LBO.
> the startup side is long hours for a lottery ticket.

It certainly can be, but doesn't have to be. The "long hours" part varies greatly depending on your role, responsibilities, and expertise. The "lottery ticket" part varies based on whether you're optimizing for salary or equity.

I have always excluded stock options from my decision-making process. Sure, it's possible they could make me rich some day... but it strikes me as highly unlikely, and I'm planning on them being worth $0. Equity I consider a potential negative if the company hasn't had their IPO, due to the tax implications.

There are startups out there that offer great salaries and quality of life out there, but you've got to look for that in particular. It also helps if you live or are living to live somewhere with a low cost of living and are willing to work remotely.

I live in a small town and there are effectively zero jobs here that I'd want because the market is so small that they can pay much less than I want to accept. Working remotely allows me to compete on the global labor market, where the compensation is substantially higher. I'm not making the same salary I would if I lived in LA or SF, but it's a whole lot closer to that than if I worked for a local employer. The difference in housing costs alone more than makes up for that, much less the total cost of living.

Here's a comparison between my employer's location (Santa Monica, CA), and the nearest city to me (Springfield, MO). Note that I live about an hour from Springfield, and the costs here are even lower: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Yeah, but they were saying in math related contexts, in which orthogonal is almost equivalent to perpendicular.
> I'm surprised this made it by the WSJ editors.

Why does that surprise you? Obviously the misleading and clickbaity headline will be chosen over the honest headline.
Nothing.

He's living amongst the forests, homeschooling his children, after indulging and destroying himself with consumerism, alcohol and drugs.
I think it is a nice way to look at it. I always thought all people in all professions are trying to figure out some "code", just in different abstraction layers.

I mean, a lawyer learns the "code" of law. A psychologist learns the "code" of human, which has a lot of black boxes but one can still make partial sense of it.
both trump and brexit votes required swaying (or discouraging to vote) less than 2% of the electorate. that's certainly within capabilities of foreign psyops no matter the vote in question.
From personal experience, from a social circle that spans a wide variety of types of people, the venn diagram of "people who are Into Guns" and "people who can effectively hunt their own food" has no overlap.

My friends who are Into Guns are into feeling tough and powerful, like they've always got an upper hand in any situation. When they go into the great outdoors, it's to drink beer and shoot their guns into the woods. (Yeah, it's stupid and dangerous and shitty. I stopped camping with them some time ago.)

My family members who hunt never talk about their guns, they just hunt with them a couple times a year and fill their chest freezers with deer.
People that want to move this discussion forward need to stop using analogies for things in the physical world, because the interactions between a website and a browser aren't similar enough to anything physical. Every single time someone resorts to analogy in one of these threads, it immediately and permanently devolves into an argument over the details of the analogy.

Browsers run code delivered by websites. It's generally considered impolite, at least, to provide code that mines cryptocurrency on visitors' machines. Most people wouldn't defend serving up malware, either. So there is well-established precedent for arguing that there are things a website shouldn't do to its visitors.

Extensive tracking scripts are now falling into the same category as crypto miners and malware.

The explosion of ad blockers on users' browsers is a direct result of websites pushing advertising tactics way too far and not putting enough effort into the safety of their visitors. Tracking scripts will be next. Firefox has a lot to gain from pushing browser features intended to make it look like a more privacy-conscious browser than Chrome; there are already extensions like Ghostery and Disconnect, and uBlock Origin blocks a number of other tracking scripts too.

If website developers don't accept some kind of middle ground in this discussion, they'll be relying on their access logs for all of their data before long.
I like "Person.PersonID" because then "alias.PersonID" will produce an error if "alias" does not have a "PersonID" column. If every table has an "ID" column then "alias.ID" pretty much never fails, even if you typed the wrong alias - you just end up joining on the wrong thing and getting the wrong result set.
I heartily agree with your core point.

> encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence

To offer up some compassion to those people, you have to remember that we're daily barraged with p=0.05 experiments getting breathless coverage in the media. "Scientists say peanut butter cures cancer." "Scientists say peanut butter causes cancer."

Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?"

The media's coverage of science does not portray research in the proper light, does not give context, etc.

So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are skeptical of trusting "science."
I have heard of ORNL but couldn't tell you were it was located without looking it up. That said, I'm really glad you posted this as I always thought that national labs were on GS pay scale and tried to avoid them. I've been teetering with applying to Argonne or FermiLab but was afraid of taking a big pay cut. I'll have to look in to that more.
We've managed so far! Try to follow the war in Syria for a little bit and you will find that people can fake video just fine even in a warzone. They don't need "Deepfake". Even presidents of nation-states want to believe those fakes. Nothing new under the sun.

We had verification problems since video existed:

- When was that video taken?

- Where was that video taken?

- Are the objects in the video what they seem to be?

- Is the people in the video the people we think they are?

- Is the video grainy because it's a shit camera?

- Which of the possibly conflicting interpretations is right?

- Why is only this angle published when we know the event was filmed from another?
Computer vision and robotics (with Agricultural Science applications), RF communications, and one person who works in games development because it affords him his work on a C++ committee sub-group. Outside of technology, an economist for the DoJ and a lawyer who works in non-profits (not sure where she is right now / what sort of work).
At this point I think Apple feels like there are enough apps in the app store so they don't have an incentive to drive more participation. If anything, the fixed cost of vetting an app should be the same for the big guy and the little guy and the big guy can spread that over more revenue so Apple could afford to give a break to the big guys, not the little guys.
Retirement plans at the time of your grandfathers started in a good state: low unfunded liabilities, high population growth and lower life expectancy after retirement than today. Thus such plans were generous.

In fact, they now seem way too generous: paying such obligations accumulated large unfunded financial liabilities (6 trillion is an estimate I saw a few times), which shows them as unsustainable. This means that the pensions of your grandfathers paid a lot of money of your children, so their parents (us) struggle to fix this.

The solution is not more of the same defined benefit schemes to stick our children with still bigger bills. We must do something else (defined contribution? variable benefit?)
Venturing is also age capped 14-21 which would potentially block people in their senior year or anyone who’s going to college later in life. Maybe better to be unaffiliated and more inclusive.
This is a fallacious argument. It doesn't matter if some people predicted a company would fail even though it went on to succeed beyond what most people predicted, this is a rare outlier and usually the naysayers are correct, even if only because there are naysayers for literally everything.
If you could afford flying on a rocket, I bet you can also afford flying first-class. Would that alter your preference?
That's the up side.

On the flipside, if the person who has a 401k finishes it, and has no more money they will then have to depend on their descendants for their livelihood.

Which can make the living standards of the descendant lower, because now they are taking care of their parent for the rest of their life. Which only gets more expensive the further they go (IE: Illnesses)
Different people:

• Low-level infrastructural/optimisation stuff, such as large-scale data analysis systems, language runtimes, and operating systems. Work is hard but even small wins have high impact.

• Developer tools, including using machine learning to help tools help developers better. Improving the state of programming is always welcome.

• Online advertising—such are the times.

• Avoiding the tech industry for a while to relieve burnout and work on personal projects—this person inspired me to do the same.
Perhaps one day the quality will rise to the level of 'barely adequate for human consumption'
This. The repeated prompts almost seem intent on ensuring that one will click yes inadvertently at some point.
You append a correction, it's the same process as an edit.
This line of thinking really highlights how building models that predict phenotype from genotype assuming linear and independent genetic contributions, though useful for predicting something like height [0] [1], is not going to generalize sufficiently to solve the lofty goal of personalized precision medicine even with an explosion in data.

Biologically, we know tons and tons about the interconnected biochemical pathways that cause a lot of activity in the cell. It's impressive that statistical modeling approaches that ignore this knowledge earned by thousands of humanyears worth of work can work so well in some domains, but I'm wary of the possibility of academic communities isolating themselves from empiricism and continuing to make mathematically-convenient assumptions, which in the long-run helps no one but themselves.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16392877
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/19/190124
You overestimate interest and fees, paid by Toys 'R' Us to the PE firms, by over 100%. We know the actual numbers from SEC and bankruptcy filings [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/bain-kkr-...
It means we shouldn't tie retirements to the company you are working for.
Well average life expectancy in 1978 was 69.6 years, average life expectancy in 2018 is 78.7 years. So the problem with pension obligations is people in general tend to live longer, and the people who live far longer are living longer and there's more of them. Not enough people die young to offset that cost methinks.

And if people are consistently drawing more than they're paying in it's not sustainable. Every solution to that problem has drawbacks. You increase the premiums and fewer people pay in. You lower the benefits and maybe fewer people pay in too. It becomes a hard sell either way.

Compared to a 401k, where the company contributes 3% of an employee's salary (or somesuch) a year as an incentive to participate and if the employee screws themselves, that's their problem. It sounds a bit more attractive I imagine than all the other burdens a company has maintaining a pension program. And being responsible for it and to the recipients in perpetuity...

And you couple that with, not every sort of job operated a pension program even at their heyday. Not having access to a 401k program in 2018 doesn't mean your job would have had a pension program in 1978 either...
Or even the engineering design process. Every ABET accredited engineering program teaches it, and while there are minor variations in the specifics it's always broadly the same. It's worked well in the engineering disciplines for decades & produces reliable products. There's no reason it can't work well for software, only an unfortunate case of "not invented here syndrome".
I think it's not actually about becoming more powerful, but about being obscure. Long before Cambridge Analytica, presidents were still winning handily by hacking the electorate with expert use of mass media. Kennedy dominated television and won. Before him, it was Roosevelt on the radio.

The trouble is that like any other virus, people build up an immunity to the tricks on established platforms. You're not going to see another Kennedy or Roosevelt using the techniques they used, and it'll even be difficult to pull what Cambridge Analytica did now that that cat's out of the bag.

If you want to remain as effective as them you need to keep pushing and capitalize on the next mass media platform before people realize what you're doing.
Turns out, positioning yourself this way pays huge dividends when looking for full-time employment as well!
I remember my boss telling me that Flash would replace html.
it's that middle bit that seems to cause all the consternation: "Save enough that work is optional". It also could be (and I don't mean to sound like an old grump or condescend so apologies in advance) that people in their early 20s haven't been soured on employment sufficiently yet. I was much more idealistic and had a greater tolerance for work-related BS when I was in my early 20s.

I'm nearly 50 now and after being burned several times I made a vow to myself never to be dependent on anyone else again. Even if you work for an incredibly well-funded company, that doesn't mean some dweeb with an MBA in some office in another city / state / country won't wake up one day and decide to wipe our your entire division just because she needs to make a bigger bonus.

I've seen pensions disappear overnight, industries collapse quicker than anyone ever thought, and vibrant cities crumble when big employers shut their doors. Painful and stressful in the extreme.

I've also blown $10k on something stupid instead of buying another bunch of Apple stock, reasoning that I'd make it up later in life easily enough. That was 1997. The $10k would be well over $1 million now.

The biggest thing to learn is that money doesn't equal happiness. That, for me, is the repeated lesson of MMM and related authors. Freedom to make decisions without reference to finances is a massive, amazing thing.
Hate watermarks? Remove them with this service and no one will know you got your image from 9gag...
These Ants Explode, but Their Nests Live to See Another Day
I read 'Notes from a Big Country' by Bill Bryson during my second visit and first road trip in America as a child.

I could entirely believe what he wrote on this topic, which fortunately is extracted here [1]. We covered a huge distance, so understandably my dad didn't really want to drive any further once we had arrived at each day's motel. However, there was rarely any alternative.

There were a couple of occasions where American tourists were part-impressed, part-worried to see children walking. (There's a well-known metamorphosis stage in American teenagers; at 15 they grow legs ready for learning to drive.)

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/brysons-ame...
Knowing a bit of abstract algebra, semantics and type theory doesn't hurt. But I'd suggest to start by reading http://www.concrete-semantics.org/, which is a great overview. Once done, you can go for an approach well-grounded on the theories I mentioned above.

I agree formal methods are great for smart contracts. Back in '08 when I was doing graduate work on the topic, some researchers were already talking about it, but the enabling technology (blockchain) was missing.

They are also great for real-time critical systems, especially if you go with a formal methodology, where you start with some axioms (e.g. two trains can't be in the same track partition) and progressively derive your system from these by applying formally verified transformations till you end up with the code to deploy.
Apple’s Deal for Shazam Delayed in Europe Over Data Concerns
Probably not.

Wish they would be, but probably not.
This is in the article...
Scientists Have Confirmed a New DNA Structure Inside Human Cells
And even if they were a monopoly, what is the market? There aren't that many people trying to figure out what song is playing in a public place.

If we are going to define a market this narrowly, then is it considered a monopoly if only one company offers self lacing shoes? Gotta break up that self lacing shoe cabal.
Here is some prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
The point is that you have a given supply and demand. As long as they are in the right positions in the grid that transmission capacity is not the limiting factor, then you can fix that by reducing supply, or by increasing demand - apart from the issue of transmission those options are equivalent from the point of view of bringing the supply under control. They may not be equivalent in terms of cost, but that is a separate issue.

The original point was that you do not need to have a reservoir to pump from to take advantage of the fast start/stop capability of a hydro plant: Closing the sluice gates and/or bypassing the turbines is sufficient to reduce supply by the generating capacity of the plant.

Having a reservoir as the potential to significantly increase the reduction in excess supply you can handle, that is true, but the lack of that option does not change the benefit of shutting off generating capacity.

Hydro plants have been used to adjust grid supply for as long as they have existed in this way. Not least because with grid prices adjusting dynamically, as long as the reservoir is not full, most hydro plants yield better economic result if they respond to falling prices by letting the reservoir water levels build back up.
This is as old as mass-media. The formula has been `money -> propaganda -> control` for at least two centuries now. Social media just put it on steroids.

Limiting paid propaganda would help, but that's sacrilege in our ad/media driven economy, so the ultimate lesson is probably just "don't be poor".
If there are no more trucks in the United States, the only thing you'll have left to hunt after a few weeks would be people. [1]

[1] http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/rooney.html
A few thoughts here.

First, the difference between the two surveys is probably because they asked very different questions.

YouGov's question doesn't actually ask if Comet Pizza was a front for a sex ring, or if Clinton was involved in same. It only asks whether leaked email from Clinton staffers contained code words on the topic. It's still not something I think is true, but it appears that "yes" means "yes the memo with those code words existed" and "probably" means "the email probably existed and probably its wording was code for this stuff". Public Policy Polling asked about Clinton and the pizzeria being connected to a real ring, and consequently saw more 'no's.

Second, this looks like a Lizardman Constant thing. For those unfamiliar, PPP polls find that ~10% of Americans say lizardmen might be running the planet. Which means that any weird opinion showing up in polls may well get 10% just from indifference, trolling, or lunacy.

On the same poll, 5% of Obama supporters answered that yes, Obama was the anti-Christ. And here, 5% of Clinton supporters said that yes, she was involved in a child sex ring. If those people were sincere with both answers, I have some serious questions for them.

All of which is to say that this sort of polling produces nutty results no matter what you aim it at. The most interesting part to me is honestly the uncertainty numbers, which seem high enough to be 'real' answers. I could buy that we've reached a point where large swaths of electorate are willing to say "shit, anything's possible these days".

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-...
The standard for plain text output in the terminal is and has always been TSV.
You don't fill all the lower levels of details. You're likely not caring about generated machine code, you're likely not caring about details of memory deallocation, you're likely not caring about Unicode quirks when you're comparing strings, you're likely not even aware which algorithm is used when you're multiplying two BigDecimals, you're likely not care which characters are allowed in HTTP header names, and so on and so on. A lot of implementation details are already implemented. There's no reason that programs won't be abstracted further away. Sure, it still is programming, but with less unnecessary details (so more people can do it).
It might be that the author likes the fact that GitLab offers free private projects, which might be useful for his other work.

Or likes the interface over GitHub.

Or simply likes going against mainstream.

Full disclosure: I use GitLab since 2015.
Found: a new form of DNA in our cells
I wasn't actually enjoying that experience, I just thought I was?

I don't see the big deal with a few impulse purchases as long as it's not hurting the family budget.
Just because its on your property does give you carte blanche to do anything you want to me. I dont see how this is a reasonable argument.

You cant tracke in your bathroom or changing stalls. You cant listen to my phone calls or ask me intimate personal details about where I have been without explicitly asking me.
Are there any PDF's available of this last manual typeset edition of the NYT for viewing online?
Human existence has always involved a lot of fighting and killing, but a single technology qualitatively changes the outcomes as a result: nuclear weapons. Even though it’s judt a more powerful bomb, it changes everything. Something can change our lives in unforeseen and devastating ways without being fundamentally new, and just a matter of degree.
Gmail spam mystery: Why have secure accounts started spamming themselves?
>But then it’s 200 years old and was in serious maintenance debt when I bought it.

That's a pretty big disclaimer that you probably should have mentioned up front. Your choice of house is far from typical, and they make the costs some standard deviations from typical.
That kind of thing isn't covered by most insurance unless it is caused by a covered kind of event, and the additional cost of insurance to cover it would, of necessity, exceed the expected cost without insurance because insurance companies need to meet all covered costs, plus administration costs, plus turn a profit.

Insurance makes certain costs more predictable at the cost of making them more expensive.
From what I have been able to gather they are using data centers that have fewer qualms with certain activities and installing Asterix PBX's server which they use for the calls.