skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't stand the fact that organizations hide behind "algorithms" as an excuse for every unintended side-effect.

It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it.

Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the music I loved.

Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved.

We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when recommending you something.

I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years, because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be content-driven, like YouTube.

Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I could ever hope to:

https://xkcd.com/1831/
Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance)

I think we all have to answer these questions first:

1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly true, but that which is distasteful to you personally?

2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?
This sounds awful. I have had so much trouble getting packages deceived by Amazon Logistics. Sometimes they are marked as delivered but not really delivered. UPS on the other hand does a great job with my packages. If Amazon has issues with a company they directly control(Amazon Logistics), it is going to be a nightmare with a bunch of small independent contractors. See also people’s issues with OnTrac.
Interstellar communication
Can we communicate with Extra Terrestrials via neutrino travelling through the dark matter?
I recently wrote a comment in response to a post here with the title, "Why Women Don't Code?". The post itself was, I think, on the front page and received 104 upvotes. My comment was along the lines of, "we don't know why women don't code (preference vs culture) but [anecdote] and I personally lean towards the preference angle." My comment was down voted twice but afterwards appeared to gain traction with more than a dozen upvotes.

That topic in particular (gender in STEM, feminist topics, etc.) I find is usually a no-go zone anywhere else on the net unless you have a specific opinion abut it, but on HN it wasn't censored and I felt comfortable expressing an opinion.

It's sometimes hit and miss. I think sometimes posts on certain hot-topic political issues are downvoted because many people come here for tech related stuff and don't want to see anything else-- especially that which leads to an unwinable argument.
Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and would have commented on.
Amazon launches a last-mile delivery program powered by entrepreneurs
Making an animated series
'My homeland is the Portuguese language.' -- Fernando Pessoa
There are a bunch of options out there:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire-mo...

And more all the time; it's a hot area for startups: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fintech-startups-seek-to-shake-...

So it's entirely plausible there's a solution that works well for him already.
I wish I heard this view on taxes more often. Have a nice smooth tax curve up to like 95% at some income level (5 or 10 M). The rich are not taxed anywhere close to enough.
>> POST to views loses POST data

>The middlewares shouldn't be redirecting POSTs then! They could have returned a client error instead.

It does raise RuntimeError during development

>> Integer & NULLS

>If the admin interface knows the field is required, why does it even attempt to insert a null value? It could return a validation error.

Maintaining integrity is databases' job primarily, also I could have triggers and functions inside my database to fallback to some default value when there isn't one incoming. This isn't an uncommon setup.

>> Appending to a list in session doesn't work

>Django's behavior with ORM relationships has always disappointed me. There's no way to work with them in memory like in SQLAlchemy because they always attempt to sync out changes to the database immediately. As a result you often have to write some very strange code. They could change this.

Where did ORM come from? Session backends are not exclusively written to be stored in databases.

>> Errors about undefined attributes with one-char names

>They could have done a type check to see if you passed a string instead of an iterable of strings.

...etc.

This way they'd have to type check at thousands of other places where types are assumed. If one isn't comfortable with python's syntactical sugar coatings - inevitably leading to some syntax gotchas, then they should move to more statically typed language.
The staging area is not necessary for your particular workflows. I found Mercurial horrible to work with precisely due to the lack of a staging step.
I used to work in a laptop repair place.

I found that isopropyl rubbing alcohol can sometimes damage or wear some exterior rubbers or plastics on laptops.(works great on interior and metal though!)

The best method I have found to clean exterior of a laptop is the following:

- Turn off the computer.

Standard:

- Wipe down exterior, screen and keyboard area with Windex sprayed on a cloth or use Lysol wipes.

If Heavily soiled:

- Take a vacuum with small brush attachment and gently suck up stuff under and around keyboard, in vents and other nooks and crannies.

- Then use canned air to blow out keyboard and other places.
(If it's really bad, you may need to (if possible) remove the keyboard to really get everything.)

- Repeat standard procedure until cloth or cleaning implement does not pick up any more dirt or grime.

Finally, let the laptop sit for an adequate amount of time to dry off.
A friend of mine who lives there told me rents cannot be increased by more than the current inflation rate for years. It’s only every x years that landlords are allowed to adjust to market rates or something.

Can someone from Berlin confirm that this is accurate?
This is obviously true.
Some napkin math about SpaceX's passenger ICBM
I certainly agree. System76 [1] is probably your best option there. They're attempting to do just that.

1. https://system76.com/laptops
Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom-tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's algorithm THINKS they agree with).

If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat.

Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.
HTTPS traffic is immune to this, but a lot of ad/cancer is still served over HTTP, which they can inject the cookies into.
Same and that ends up being in the operations wheelhouse.

< Dev who does Operations full time but is not "DevOps"
Pitch Recommendation: a look into the data science process
This looks great! I've been keeping my eye on APIStar but that still seems like it's undergoing a lot of breaking changes. This delivers a lot of the same benefits but it looks like it's actually production ready!
The tricky thing with a lanyard or tether is then keeping the phone in my pocket while climbing and not having a trip hazard. If there was a way to attach the tether to the inside of the pocket then that would work.
Thanks! That's a good example. Very niche, so it's probably not enough to sustain a robust financial network. But I agree they could happily piggyback on a more general "light crime" cryptocurrency.
Sure, they have elections. And the probability of Xi losing is exactly 0% - and not because the people love him so much. "Democracy without a choice" isn't democracy. It's a favorite trick of dictators to make themselves look like they are democratically elected.

Now, if I understand correctly, local elections in China are much more real elections. But for the national leadership? No.
If you can afford to exclude windows and linux, Swift.

If you like windows but also want cross platform, C#/F# and Xamarin.Forms or UI or whatever its called. I've heard very positive things about dotnet gui work these days.

I'm spending time with rust to try my hand at game development. As an older developer, it's all a bit foreign to me so I don't really know what's good and what's not.

That having been said, desktop development is something the rust community at large is dedicated to ant interested in. There's already a fee libraries, like Conrod for Piston, gtk.rs, etc but I don't know how these options stack up against industry standards.

C# 7 is a lot more functional and pleasant than the C# 4/5 everybody dismissed years ago.

F# can compile to wherever you need it and you can write functional first and just include it in your nuget built just like you normally would.

If you're adamant about functional, consider dotnet. Of course C# is still very much OOP, that's just what it is. But I find the primary benefits to FP in my own code to be more related to correctness, testability (and therefore more correct) and a convenience in modelling data structures quicker than subclassing. Even with generics, having unions and record types makes it just that much more satisfying.

F# actually has a little micro-discipline called domain-driven programming. Search for that term and you can see how different researchers have used F#'s incredibly flexible type modelling to adapt to their domain and make their code easier for people in that domain easier to understand.

Hope this helps!
That’s your opinion. I disagree. With the glasses they probably needed lots of filtering by hand. Costed them a lot of money. They were afraid of costly lawsuits. But they don’t have the capacity to do that with every product they sell.
> (the now defunct) Steve Jobs

That's one way to refer to a dead guy.
If only the Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images proposal had been accepted! https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105-unicode-image-hash.pd... http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18203-coded-hashes.pdf
I don’t like Facebook and I rarely use it anymore but this set of examples seems a bit contrived I think.

Would it not be the same the other way around because of the subset rule? Black women would be protected whereas male drivers and white children would not?
Using Apache Spark for Data Processing: Lessons Learned
I never went to college and so a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about in this thread goes right over my head...I think it's very elitist to judge people for not knowing everything you do, even if you think it's important.

Fair enough. However, if someone did go to college, they should at least know what they know, and know what they don't know. If someone is applying to a job with a 3.75 GPA where they might be doing some C++ and they go into an interview and try to tell you that a null pointer takes up no data, they haven't been well served by their education. They should at least know what they don't know, and not waste everybody's time.

However, you should know that these things are important. There are levels of knowledge deeper than being just a user of something.

I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.

So a generalist Comp Sci degree just needs to shrink into Web Development because of your feelings? Look, Web Development is a fine job, but it's not the same as a generalist field of knowledge like Comp Sci. Should mechanics expect that a Physics degree only be limited to their knowledge because of their feelings? They're applying Physics, after all. (Warning: don't you go and denigrate mechanics! That would be elitist.)

The very fact that you can have a job in tech without a Comp Sci degree isn't a justification for the dumbing down of Comp Sci. It shows that it happened needlessly!

Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.

Let's say you discovered an interviewee thought that a 404 meant the request never made it to the server. Let's say they also got a 4.0 GPA at some Web Development coding academy with a great reputation. Wouldn't you at least be scratching your head?

These are things that used to be taught in a Computer Science degree. Now they aren't taught, and companies are going to have to teach new graduate hires this stuff that people used to take multiple semesters to learn? It also used to be that Freshmen in college were expected to know how to conjugate verbs and compose grammatically correct sentences. Now TAs (I used to be one) are expected to teach these things to Freshmen. How is this not a decline in standards?
> Nobody speaks ancient Egyptian but we can still translate their hieroglyphs

Bad example. We know how to decipher hieroglyphs because we discovered that there were actually equivalent to another language that was well known at the time. There's tons of other languages we have no idea idea how to decipher, such as Linear A.
Again, I understand what they are doing very well. They noticed that colorization tends to track things in video.

Of course colorization tracks to objects, it wouldn't work if it didn't.

This is essentially automatic video image segmentation, which itself is heavily derived from and related to natural image matting.

Natural image matting could even be seen to be a combination of clustering and somehow solving (or minimizing) the error in the matting equation described by porter duffman compositing algebra.

So, automatic video segmentation can be seen as clustering over 3 dimensions of pixels - x, y and time, with some loose expectations of coherency over time.

There are many ways to achieve this, which should be obvious if you watch some of the videos or glance at some of the papers I've linked.

One simple way is with a bilateral filter to iterate over the volume of pixels, which gradually clusters them together. One of the papers shows this technique.

Everything I linked gives much better results. They don't require 'deep learning' and the idea that colorization follows objects is so trivial it's nonsense to make a paper out of it. This is more a case of visibility and most people not knowing the research that has already been done. That's understandable for people here, but the authors of this paper should have known better.
Can't you skip the Node server and have him just use index.html and refresh? That way he won't rely on you to set it up. Alternatively, there are many services like Glitch that probably give you auto-reloading.
Is that directional effect used on the Sydney harbor available as a Photoshop plugin? I like the affect it produces.
Isn't OCAML garbage collected, which should be too slow and memory hungry for system drivers.
Is there any evidence a #CrookedTrump hashtag/emoji would've been approved?
There is also a report on discuss.ocaml.org thanks to gasche: https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ocaml-multicore-report-on-a-june...
Same here! https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-snippets/blob/master/rpn_... I found it fun, and it was actually super easy to implement a stack-based language interpreter in an immutable pattern-matching language like Erlang/Elixir.

It's incomplete because I haven't yet figured out how to define the defining character ":"...
The rejection sticks in your mind.

"If it feels bad it's censorship" is not a particularly useful definition of 'censorship'. It should give you pause that most messageboard complaints about 'censorship' revolve around it - you never see someone passionately argue how their top comment (with page-consuming thread hanging off it) is 'censoring' other viewpoints.
You seem to be completely ignoring my point. It's not the term limits or the absence of term limits. It's the removal of term limits that is concerning, because it is an expansion of the leader's power. Worse, it's done to extend the power of the person currently holding power. It is therefore a bad sign about the person holding power who makes the extension happen.
In Wales Cymraeg users demand it being pushed to the fore - this leads to hugely disproportionate spending relative to its economic worth, and a focus on it in schools in preference to use of languages that would foster Xenophilia (languages of other cultures, other countries).

I've no problem with Cymraeg, it's interesting, part of my ancestry, part of British history, half of its fluent speakers prefer it. But if the government stopped putting it up, and supported more learning of major World languages in its place, then I think Wales as a whole would be better off.

Just because something is old, arose in one's own country, etc., doesn't mean it's automatically more valuable (not even culturally) than other things. [And vice-versa of course.]
Ah, that famous empathy that only left-wing people seem to have :)
I do wish I had more fixed, casement, awning, & hopper windows in the US. But supposedly the popularity of sliding windows has a lot to do with the popularity of really, really big windows, especially with large contiguous panes of glass. Horizontal sliders can accommodate the huge weight of large panes. Good luck making a sturdy casement with 1.5m x 1.5m panes of glass, double glazed.
Brutalism is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and any talk of Brutalism on the web is an exercise in analogy given that the core mantra of architectural Brutalism was to stay "true to the materials" and for pixels it's hard to be "false" with them.

The variation of the theme that just uses HTML2/3-esque TABLEs and table borders is definitely more directly evocative of that spirit, stripping away CSS for just the brutal truth of classic HTML design. I tried to find a direct link to that version of Brutaldon's theme, but am not sure where to find one, and searching one's Mastodon feeds from weeks seems to be tougher than I expected.
There's two angles to this: general crowd psychology, and how social media tailors the news feed in response to it.

In the old Internet (forums and Usenet), sure, there was crowd psychology too. There always is.

However, these social media designs were far less prone to hiding unpopular opinions. As a general rule, unless you had an overtly strict moderator or something, you could read posts with unpopular opinions, even if the "crowd" disagreed.

Big social media sites (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) in contrast use algorithmic reordering, shuffling, and tweaking of your feeds / timelines / etc. Likes / retweets / etc. are one component to what gets displayed on your feed. The net result here is that unpopular opinions are often effectively "silenced". IMHO this leads to a negative and polarizing effect.

I can't call it 100% censorship though. It's different. On most social networks, you are free to, say, start your own little space (a subreddit or your own Twitter space and whatnot) where, say, the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives are discussed. Unless the subject strays into TOS violation territory, you can probably say what you want. However, there's a good chance in said subreddit (in this polarized environment and considering crowd psychology) that it is the positive side of diversity initiatives that are downvoted to oblivion. And the reverse is true as well. Basically, crowd psychology and the binary like/retweet system ensures that no one hears what the "other side" has to say. Maybe it's a "dark pattern" of sort? Tweak the emotions of the user in the right way, not the wrong way, and they might spend a bit longer looking at that advertisement...

Hacker News doesn't feel as "bad" to me as the bigger social networks for some reason -- I'm not a big fan of upvote/downvote systems, obviously, but at least HN includes tools like the showdead option that's pretty easy to enable. There was a large discussion about diversity initiatives during relevant stories (the James Damore memo for instance), but for others, I know that some of the "crowd" here is wary of overtly political articles period, favoring only pure tech articles. So you are going to get some front page selection bias against articles of a "political" nature.
At a previous employer, I attended a briefing for our health insurance switching to a mail order pharmacy. Granted this was years ago but the amount of confusion and frustration around the signup process, scheduling, skepticism about delivery times/reliability, etc were numerous. To me, it couldn't have been an easier process. For some people (especially retirees), going to the local pharmacy is part of a regular routine that is not seen as a inconvenience at all.

Basically, the largest potential market for you is not tech savvy at all and makes it hard to convert.
FB has been very obviously investing in crypto currency stuff. David Marcus has been put in charge of this as it says in the article, and I take it he is an important person. Their recruiters were bugging the hell out of me for a while, which indicates they're more interested in using ledger tech in advertising (something I'm working on) than in exchanges, which in fact is along the lines of their core business needs.

I mean, when was the last time the Economist or Independent broke a Silicon Valley merger story? Pretty much never, AFAIK. The substance of the story is Marcus has coinbase connections, and that's about it.

I suppose there is the eternal Winkelvoss/Zuck rivalry, but if that's really at play here, well, lol.
Never heard of Vero. It’s a mistake to think that sites/apps find success by having better features. Especially in social media, the network effect is the only thing that determines who lives and dies.
Aside from enriching lawyers, was there any benefit to this extended dispute? While this drained company's coffers ( and whatever they would have funded instead) was there direct harm from the dispute? I'm trying to find a reasonable perspective despite my unreasonably low (re: forming an opinion ) specific knowledge.