skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a more nuanced topic than you're giving it credit for. While free speech does not classically apply to corporate enterprises like Facebook, as society shifts into the digital world the nature of communication itself shifts as well.

The 1700s and 1800s version of Twitter was standing in the street square, handing out pamphlets, and screaming your message. You were protected to say what you wanted to say via free speech. The 2018 version of that is online through tools like Twitter. By refusing to acknowledge this, we're actually experiencing a dramatic practical reduction in free speech rights without ever technically violating the Constitution.

It's really the ultimate loophole to the ultimate problem. Want to limit free speech? Simply remold society so that communication patterns across the entire nation change and become controlled by private corporations. Done.

A particularly dystopian and extreme imagining of this would involve the CEO of a company like Facebook running for President and controlling speech and news to an unprecedented extent in favor of his/her candidacy.
The volume fake journal spam I’m getting lately is shocking. It seems they just trawl for emails form high impact journals.
I agree with him. Half the time you'll enter an HN discussion and the most upvoted comment will an unrelated bikeshedding discussion.

Usually one of these:

- "I love the idea but can we talk about how the website doesn't look good when CSS is disabled?"

- "25MB of JavaScript? Really? You know, websites used to..."

- "This website is impossible to read because the contrast ratio is too low and I am personally offended."

- "Did anyone else get an ad from this news website? Why does advertising exist?"

- "An obscure open source project uses the same name as this unrelated business. Have you no shame?"

- "The website looks weird on mobile, by which I mean my rooted Android phone running Opera."

- "The text is too big."

- "The text is too small."
Transaction Costs and Tethers: Why I’m a Crypto Skeptic
> pyramid schemes.

What? Did Herbalife and Amway went out of business and nobody told me so I could celebrate?
In your paradigm ”nature” is what ”god” ”programmed” with his ”quantum language”.
Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He can afford to hire people to look through the reviews.
I wonder if that's the reason that Corel acquired Xara back in the nineties?

I discovered the program around 1995, after Corel acquired them. I figured it would be a 'cheap' version of Corel Draw. Instead, it was quite a bit better! Particularly for the time, there was nothing faster that I was aware of. (In 1995 memory was prohibitively expensive, and Xara was very efficient.)

I still use it to this day, though the software reverted back to it's original owner long ago.
Alibaba not only competes with non-Chinese companies but also domestic companies/banks which have a closer relationship to government than Alibaba. For example, imagine how hard to start Alipay business when banks don't support you.
That’d be like criticizing the development of calculus because it could be applied to the development of atomic bombs. This is first and foremost a mathematical result. When people come up with a new algorithm for the orienteering problem it’s not primarily because they want to be better at orienteering; the same applies here. Your comment is well-written and almost totally irrelevant.
> Shouldn't they come out and say propaganda campaigns.

Because the denotation of propaganda is broad and includes virtually all effort at persuasion, plus it has vague but strong negative connotation, so it's often used for “persuasion effort that I don't like”.

“Coordinated inauthentic behavior” has a much clearer and more specific meaning and less emotive loading, so the information-to-emotional-manipulation ratio is better.
Ask HN: Any Colleges that don't use WebAssign?
Hello,

I'm considering going back to college, however every course seems to use a proprietary textbook with an overprised online 'key' I must purchase to submit online homework. The price gouging is atrocious.

Are there any colleges/universites that use open-source textbooks and don't use a WebAssign-like program?
You're correct of course, but I don't really see how this isn't a vacuous observation. Yes clearly our perceptions are at odds, but that has nothing to do with the reality of whether or not they need to be doing that tracking. Obviously they think they need to, or they wouldn't do it. But I think I've laid out a pretty strong argument that they actually don't need to, which leads me to believe that they actually haven't considered it seriously enough to give it a shot.

Would they be as profitable? Maybe, maybe not. Would they become unprofitable? No, strictly speaking. I'm confident in that because the NYT weathered the decline of traditional news media before the rise or hyper-targeted ads, and because I've maintained a free website in the Alexa top 100,000 on my own, with well over 500,000 unique visitors per day. That doesn't come close to the online audience of a major newspaper, but it's illustrative. There is a phenomenal amount of advertising optimization you can do using basic analytics based on page requests and basic demographic data that still respects privacy and doesn't track individual users. I outlined a few methods, such as Daring Fireball's.

Maybe instead of this being a philosophical issue of perspective between a user and an organization, it's an issue of an organization that hasn't examined how else it can exist. Does the NYT need over 10,000 employees? Is there a long tail of unpopular and generally underperforming content that nevertheless sticks around, sucking up money and forcing ever more privacy-invasive targeting? If the NYT doesn't know its audience well enough to present demographic-targeted ads on particular articles and sections, what the hell is it doing tracking users individually? It's just taking the easy way out and giving advertising partners the enhanced tracking they want. But they don't need to do that, and whether or not they think they need to do it is orthogonal to the problem itself.
Static Linking Considered Harmful
I think you're downplaying the actual costs they have quite a lot, which is a shame, because even without that the share of profits they extract is still disproportionate and unjustifiable.
All good communities practice some level of moderation, or else they just get worse and worse.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180514-00/?p=...

One of the problems with running 16-bit programs directly in Win9x was the Win16Mutex, BTW.
Buy one on ebay and have them ship it, use a forwarding service, ask a state side friend to buy one and ship it to you, or take a quick vacation and pick one up.

EDIT. It would be 3% PayPal fee + Cost of shipping ($50 or so) is you asked a friend to do it.
Yeah, Russia was also pumping up the Bernie Bros and the Jill Stein campaign.

Not that there weren't plenty of people who legitimately wanted to see Bernie win but the goal of the Russians was to do whatever made Hillary lose - hurting her campaign directly with hacking, as well as pumping up both her Republican and Democratic competitors. In the US system, spoiler candidates hurt their competitor more than their opponent, so pumping up Bernie is another way to hurt Clinton.

The whole "they just want to cause chaos" trope is true in a sense, but they were very obviously going about it by sandbagging Clinton and pumping up her competition wherever they could. Clinton was very obviously the major-party candidate that would have produced the strongest, most stable US out of that election, and that's really what Russia was trying to avoid, that's the whole "chaos" trope. It's not truly random in the sense of uncontrollable monkeys, it's whatever they think will cause the most damage, and keeping Clinton out of the White House was a specific and key objective. It was quite obvious that Trump was a moron (and very possibly in the early stages of Alzheimer's) and that he'd be the candidate that caused the most chaos.

(Sorry Bernie Bros, but if Bernie had won the primary, he would have been an easy target for Trump and the Russians as well, and even if he won the general the country would have been highly polarized, even if his actions would have been a lot better than Trump's. People in that timeline wouldn't have gotten to see the mess Trump caused in this one. His continued campaign sandbagged Clinton into the general and was a major contributor to Trump winning. The primary was obviously over and Bernie dragging it out was doing nothing but weakening Clinton. And I say this as someone whose personal politics most closely align with Bernie's, out of the three, and who voted for him in the primary.)
I’m an atheist and even I get what his meaning and am I unperturbed by his choice of terminology.
Starbucks is doing very well in China (as well as KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonalds, and their compatriots), and also Apple, Nike, Tesla, Coach, Carrefour, Tesco, and more. (Latter 2 are from Europe.)

Prior to the rise of Taobao, most of my family members didn't really use eBay in China. Most of them prefer using mobile (like the bulk of consumers in China), but if you prioritize the browser experience and 'consistency across the global platform' over what your local users want, well, shrug, let's pretend there's nothing to learn here from a UX perspective...

In contrast, Starbucks has a different user experience when you walk into one in Shanghai or Hangzhou. You place your order and pay for it via phone and pick it up at the register and you don't have to stand in a line. I wish they'd replicate that in the US.
I'm no financial expert, but AFAIU the mechanics of securitization mean that we can assume some multiplier greater than 1x.

You can borrow against your shares at the same time Apple can borrow against its cash holdings and, ceteris paribus, the end result will be more debt than Apple's cash reserves even after considering a reduction in Apple's stock value. And this debt can be used to buy more assets. (Basically, fractional reserve isn't just a banking thing. It's inherent to the mechanics of capitalist finance.)

In addition, the ability to do this enhances capital allocation efficiency, which adds independent value to the entire system.

So there's not a simple function mapping corporate wealth to personal wealth, though you certainly can't simply sum corporate-held assets to personal wealth. I'm happy to be corrected for the implication.
I am not sure which part of my comment you are addressing. As far as I know the official story from Google was that gmail users were being targeted by the Chinese government. Google deliberately stopped complying with Chinese law by no longer censoring search result and therefor became blocked. Yahoo and Microsoft didn't and are still in China.
I subscribe to the following thought:

Pilots are like dentists: When they are about to do some work, and they tell you "it is going to hurt a little" you can be sure it is going to feel like hell. So when a pilot tells you you will get some light turbulence, you can be sure it is going to shake like crazy.
Presumably self-driving buses would be cheaper still!
I mean, Wikipedia doesn't seem to know what a Brownian computer is.

Processes inside our cells partially work due to Brownian motion. How about a Turing machine implemented with nuclear DNA?
Market dynamics demonstrated in other commodity businesses say otherwise.

In a commodity market you win with combination of price and brand.

When it comes to price, a player with a fleet of a million cars can wage a pricing war for longer than a player with a fleet of 10 thousand cars because economies of scale mean that it costs them less, per car, to provide the service.

If this is a new entrant, the incumbents also have an accumulated war chest from past revenues they can use to outprice the competition.

And they also have more money to out-advertise the new guy. GM spends $3 billion a year on advertising which is why, not counting Tesla, the youngest surviving car company was founded in 1925.

It's also why Kellog dominates in cornflake space, coca-cola in soda business etc.

Which is why there will be a mad rush to grab the market share early on. Once someone reaches significant scale, it'll be virtually impossible to catch up with them.
Try these sites without javascript. It's AMAZING.

The chrome extension I'm using ("Quick Javascript Switcher") disables JS on a domain-by-domain basis, so it doesn't break the whole web. Every news site I've tried is massively more usable with Javascript disabled - loads in a snap, scrolls without jerky motion, zero popups or autoplay videos.

Usually you get all the text and most of the images. Some news websites have javascript-driven photo collages, but it's just one buttonclick to enable JS for that session, and I can decide to do so after reading the text and judging the wait worthwhile.

I feel like I've stumbled on a secret life hack. Try it.
The journal usually takes copyright but any IP should be protected before publishing. Generally all the IP owned by the author’s employer.
I didn't start arguing that. The Mercatus Center at GMU did. Mercatus has an ideological bias (and not one I share), but they're serious people with real reputations. It's also a little weird to suggest that the fiscal outlooks of different states aren't comparable. Some states have pension obligations that consume an outsized fraction of their projected income, and others don't. What's complicated about that?
This is the actual incentive, from a researcher's point of view. Even when there are plenty of outlets that provide quality control, archival, etc., researchers still submit to the same traditional journals because those journals' brand names are the stamp they need on their CV to advance an academic career that is already incredibly unlikely (due to their being far more applicants than positions).
Yes, I suppose saying Einstein was wrong is too strong. It's more correct to say there's no evidence (so far) that he was right. Quantum collapse certainly appears random, but if we eventually find a deterministic cause, Einstein will be vindicated. It's impossible to prove that a process is random.

> there is no source of randomness available

I think that's going beyond what we can be sure of. We have no evidence that there is randomness, be we also have no evidence that there isn't.

QM may be fully deterministic if we disregard collapse, but as far as I'm aware, we can't do that. Collapse is still something we have to contend with given the current state of our knowledge.
I made it one month closer to death and survived another month without dying.
> I assure you they don't earn more in retirement than when they were working. If you have heard differently, I assure you that's propaganda.

They earn more than the average worker overall. In California the average government pensioner earns 26% more than the average non retired, currently working worker.

Source:

https://californiapolicycenter.org/what-is-the-average-pensi...

That's too much. As a socialist, I would find it clearly exploitative that a non worker is making more than an active worker. That's completely unjustifiable under socialism.

The point of a pension is to provide an income so a retiree doesn't live in poverty. Paying a pension that exceeds that of a younger worker who is actively working full time completely goes against that.
Video gaming's toxic men, explained
And Samsung.
Yeah this doesn’t solve my problem. Thanks tho.
I'll go a different way here. I've been flying planes since 2002 and am comfortable in the air in pretty much any circumstance.

That said, I think it's actually rational to have a fear of flying. It's unnatural and we've only been doing it a hundred years, so our bodies naturally say "this is weird and dangerous."

I think the best thing to do is to use the time flying as an exercise in letting go of the desire to control. Barring you doing something to force a landing, you literally cannot control anything about the outcome of your flight as a passenger.

So, the moment the door closes on your flight, you should focus on how everything following is out of your control. I find it liberating.
I was referring to the VMS Software port, sorry. nickp posted the link bellow.
I've followed a similar progression, and am in the process of adjusting to an XPS 9570 (i7, 4K screen, big battery) running Kubuntu 18.04, from a mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro. Still on the fence - I really want to like the new machine, but it's not being easy. The only improvements really, are the CPU, the screen, and the weight. I would've gladly paid a couple grand to keep the old machine, with a few MacOS bugs fixed and a more modern CPU.

The 4K screen does look pretty, but I still haven't managed to get a workable dual-monitor setup with it alongside a not-4K monitor. I wish there had been an option to buy the not-4K screen, and the bigger CPU and battery, but at least in the NZ Dell store that wasn't available.

The touchpad in particular is driving me nuts - the heel of my typing hand will often cause the touchpad to jump the cursor off to the side mid-line. The surprise of seeing some chunk of code disappear has resulted in too much spilled martini. It often mistakenly detects middle-clicks. Apparently, there are two drivers that can work with this touchpad, and the other one has some settings that may help...

Lots of crashiness and sleep problems I was having turned out to be the nouveau driver being loaded by a systemd service called "nvidia-fallback" - disabling that helped a lot.

A lot of the peripheral experience isn't great coming from Apple-land; in particular the TB16 dock is way overpriced and awkward, especially including the '90s throwback power brick. I'd love to not spend hours getting audio to come out the right port between the computer's headphone jack, the dock's, or the computer's speakers (which, BTW, aren't great).
Sadly a low-quality pay-for-play journal trying to extract money from people who want the prestige of publishing in a journal isn't all that different from the multitude of conferences that seek speakers--often in areas where they have zero expertise (ask me how I know)--as an excuse to chase them for sponsorship dollars or to otherwise extract money from them.

(In the US, it's mostly just about pay-for-play--i.e. you won't get a speaking slot unless you sponsor--but I've heard about much sleazier operations elsewhere.)
This is great, and ironically it’s sitting next to another HN article where, in the comments, someone is actually defending a NYT news article that weighs in at 6MB.

In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.
There's a YouTube channel, "My Little Homestead" where a family builds various house-additions and structures out of stucco-covered dirt-filled sandbags.

Dunno how that sort of construction technique pans out long-term or large-scale but you could get the sort of floorplans the GA generated out of it.
Macbook Pro sales down to 2010 levels. Worrying for the HN crowd, no? Bloomberg tech reporter saying that the Macbook is going the way of the iPod. :/
> I also hate that every standard linux tool has been slightly altered to make it almost unusable if you are used to the Linux version. (netstat, lsof, ... are a couple examples)

It's not that they have been altered by Apple, but that you're using the BSD toolset, not the GNU one. You would have the same issues if you were running FreeBSD.
It's not strictly true, but generally, authors are allowed to send the published article, and I've never heard of someone getting in trouble for doing so even in cases where it wasn't allowed.
Was this among them: https://youtu.be/DQ5Elbvvr1M
No, it's not a joke. The thermodynamics of information is a pretty active area of research (not too distant from the area that I work in). The basic question in this area is related to the Landauer principle, which asserts that irreversible computation requires energy and gives a precise bound for it.
Send them an invoiced pre-estimate at your hourly rate.
Stop trying to censor speech you don't agree with. We see through it
There is something to the saying "less is more".
That's hard to get started! It does sound powerful, but it also seems like a daunting task for your average chord strummer, like me.
who the hell doesn't??
Did you read the article I posted? I definitely put forward both an acknowledgment that media firms won't change and ideas towards reducing usage where possible.
I find it runs faster and is more stable in the desktop client, but I switched a couple of years ago so that may no longer matter (also ymmv etc).
Well, if you're in the Apple ecosystem, App Store is where you're going to get your apps, iTunes is where you're going to buy, versus stream music, and who else to trust to fix your iDevices than Apple themselves? So where's the competition?
I highly recommend watching this video from flight chops. This is his second attempt to help his friend with her fear of flying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLv609ABHBA

Basically doing some instruction in a flight simulator with a real instructor seemed to help her out quite a bit when nothing else seemed to work.
Buttonless touch pads can be configured to support different actions for two/three finger click [1]. I use Gnome where the default is right click on a two finger tap and middle click on a three finger tap. [2]

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Butt...

[2] https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/mouse-touchpa...
there have been about a dozen new hires at my work, each of them getting a new mac book and accessories to develop on.

multiply that by all of the new hires across the country and some of the lowest unemployment numbers in years and you've got a good set up for apple's hardware division to make a ton of sales last quarter.

...

but unfortunately, looking at their data, it looks like I was wrong: unit sales for macs fell by 13% compared to last year, and 9% compared to last quarter.

interesting.

Edit: downvotes because I made a prediction before looking at the reports then acknowledged I was wrong and didn't delete my post. Cool.
Not from what I've read. There are literally places in the developing world where FB fake news has caused the death of people. This example was from Asia. I don't remember the country, but it was news a few months ago.
Fair enough. I'd love to chat a bit about this -- any chance you'd be willing to move to e-mail? (in my profile)
It wouldn't surprise me if the iPad is actually cannibalizing MacBook Pro sales. (the meme has come true!)
That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.

At this rate I imagine Apple could lock the doors of all of its stores and pull the plug on its website, and it would have enough cash to pay its employees for decades.
How we redesigned Dropbox mobile for rapid work
Not exactly water, hydrated minerals. So stuff (mostly olivine) with OH groups stuck to them.

But yeah the factoid is 7x the water of the oceans.
Sometimes people ask their librarian for an article, and they pay for it without the requester knowing (or caring).
I don't think it's as much about compatibility as it is about trying to focus effort on easiest cases first.
Plutio – everything you need to run your business
I think the whole "public" library theory is a bit off. Just because it was a public building does not mean it was anything resembling what we would call a public library. More likely, it was a government library, like a registrar, or for tax documents, census data, or something similar.
And even if they don't, Master's theses and Ph.D. dissertations are often published in a searchable repository, hosted by the university. Look for recent graduates of the group you're interested in -- group websites ususally have lists of alumni. Their dissertations often contain versions of the papers you're interested in.