skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are the best arguments against using mass surveillance to collect data?
Nonsense, if someone on your IP is in a single bittorrent swarm for some content these firms are tracking that's enough for them to complain to your ISP and demand your details.

TFA is warning that what they're pushing for now is for ISPs to be required to deny service to people based on these complaints. No trial involved.
On a similar vein, I'd also recommend the book Factfulness by the fantastic Hans Rosling (who, sadly, died last year). It is full of exciting anecdotes from the real world and much-needed reminders with lots of informative and fun statistics (one of the amusing ones: "guitars per capita"), and it's a fun read. Rosling isn't all theory; he actually worked as a doctor in Africa (at one point he was the only doctor for 300,000 people!) and many adventures across the world, educating people about Global Health and helping create sensible policies.

I like the term: "possibilistic", which Rosling uses as a less-naive alternative to "optimistic".

The book is college-level reading, though, and not as rigorous as Steven Pinker's book. (Bill Gates was giving away a free digital copy of Factfulness to all graduates in the U.S.)
Not really, Reagan, and the Bushes may have paid lip service to the “moral majority” but they never governed that way. Every modern Republican president supported sensible immigration for instance.

I know it seems like I’m giving Democrats a pass, but living in a southern state, I don’t see Democrats veer to far to the left on the state level. They can’t and still have any chance.
Las Vegas vertical farm aims to produce over a million pounds of produce a year
What do you mean by "on temporal data"?. For example, no feature extraction was performed? This sounds pretty amateurish, and completely below the understanding levels of the many machine learning papers that I've read - which is admittedly a small percentage of what has been published.
If you're locked away for an extended period for a serious crime then, presently in the UK, my conjecture is that you're probably close to the crime -- I mean you're an associate of the criminals without necessarily being an accomplice; or an already convicted criminal; or guilty of minor crimes if you're being held on remand (https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/remand) in most cases?

In the UK IIUC there's a 85% arrest-to-conviction rate across all crimes.

[I realise I'm pushing my luck somewhat.]
Wheat noodles and a rich broth were new.

Interesting how many of the types listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_noodles are at least partially wheat based (62.5%). It perhaps follows that prewar Japanese cuisine was substantially less varied and more regionally defined.
I don’t disagree with you at all, however we (in IT) also bear responsibility primarily in the following areas:
1. IT don’t really understand business. Often we think we do - more so than the business does - and that hubris often blinds us to the real issues that the business neeeds to address. This can be resolved through use of boring old enterprise architecture (real E, not just tech E), and business analysis. Actually making the effort to understand. Sadly most EA’s and BA’s aren’t. These are specific skills and they relate primarily to people and process rather than technology.
2. Technology is largely overrated. I know that is likely to be an unpopular opinion. Sorry, not sorry. I am an Enterprise Architect by training and by trade. I’ve worked on several multi-hundred million dollar programs. I can promise you that in my experience, had every single tech decision been flipped or changed, the difference in outcome would have been +/- 10% at most. Projects are not won and lost on technology. Completely missing or misunderstanding requirements, miscommunication, poor program financial management, overestimating the business’ capacity for change - these (and more) are the things that are more often than not likely to make the difference between success and failure.
3. You are not Google. Or Apple. Or Spotify. Or Amazon. Unless you are one of those companies. But if you’re an energy company or a financial services company - then no. Just no. Your business is largely conservative, managed (ideally) by risk averse managers, invested in by people who want a certain return. Your industry is highly regulated and there are things you have to do, that you don’t control and you do them whether the timing is good or not, at the expense of things that you do want to do. So stop fucking kidding yourselves and realise what you actually ARE, and cherry-pick & adapt those things that are likely to work for you.

It’s not like we collectively don’t know this stuff. Let’s stop drinking our own kool -aid. And for those of you that do work for cool companies or startup disrupters I’m really happy for you. For the rest of us, technology is not the centre of the universe. Appreciating that difference is important.

And yes, I know I’ve missed valid arguments swung the pendulum a bit far the other way. It’s deliberate. We are in danger of disappearing into our own navels.
Red Hat is wrong example, both RHEL and Openstack has no secret sauce, it's all opensourced.
I sometimes wonder if there is something genetic involved here. From an evolutionary perspective, a society full of 'leaders' is one that's going to collapse. You need a large proportion of followers to maintain social order.

There was an interesting article a while back indicating that entrepreneurs were much more likely than average to have tried to sell things at an earlier age, taken on a job at an earlier age, and generally engage in a variety of atypical behavior from a very early age -- independent of class. Bezos, as an example, worked at McDonald's during one summer, hated it, and the next summer started a week long summer camp for kids -- with a whopping 6 signups for the first batch, but still probably earning more in that week than he did in the summer months at McDonalds -- certainly having more fun. Jack Ma is perhaps the most pure example of this phenomena. [1]

But of course not everybody can do this. I mean they technically can, but neither the market nor society would be able to sustain itself if everybody decided to try to lead and create instead of follow and consume. Perhaps it sounds extreme, yet people regularly attribute vastly more esoteric notions, such as mastery of everything from board games to music, to genetic factors.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma
Elm is much more stable than every option in the market. Lots of companies with 100k+ loc web apps, and 2 companies with 250k+, with no runtime exceptions in production, due to it's type system.
Removing native modules was needed to keep the language guarantee to not crash in runtime for every program that compiles.
And wide...
Ask HN: How do I learn information security?
I want to do information security since I'm little.

Years have passed and I graduated in engineering and computer science. I did CS research and am starting a new programme in CS.

I have done a few online challenges on websites like root-me.org, but I feel like I still lack knowledge to solve advanced problems.

How did you progress in information security? Did some classes / books / websites help you practically? Or should I directly go for an internship?
>>>It shouldn't be controversial that we need an educated population

Its not, what should be controversial is the manner in which we are educating children. University based schooling is not the only way to obtain education, nor IMO is it is the best

Personal we should be bringing back more vocational studies, more apprenticeships, and utilizing the ever increasing technology with things likes MOOC to bring the costs of education way down.

I also not believe it should take 16+ years of a persons life to educate them.

There are massive amounts of waste, inefficiencies, tradition in education that need to be eliminated.

All of these are made worse not better by the modern belief that every single student should get a degree, and that is the right of every student to have someone else pay for that degree.

We need to fix the fundamental issues in education first, most people however just want to throw more tax payer money at the problem and hope that by making the people in the work force poorer everything will get better.
I would also submit Judea Pearl to the list.
I can recommend his s3stat software. We used it to analyze thousands of devices that were uploading daily backups. It made it easy to see devices that had incorrect backup configs, for example, were uploading active .pst files from outlook etc, that changed daily (causing large continuous uploads) and other similar files. Also more active clients that allowed us to understand/handle pricing differently.
Does this concern come from experience? Or is it just your expectation of how the world works?

I find it hard to believe that there are currently any hotshot VC-backed startups executing hard to crush a little $10k MRR market and push out the incumbent mom & pop SaaS currently occupying it.

Every once in a while you'll see one of those shops get stepped on accidentally by a feature of a giant company. But I can't think of any examples of a "Show HN: My little bootstrapped thing that pays the rent" that was subsequently targeted for extermination.
Employees hate you because
I feel like sites like hackernews get a higher than average amount of complete sociopaths who think of their relationship with the world only in how much it inconveniences or benefits them. Developers are smart, but that doesn't make up for a lack of care about anything outside their narrow view of self-interest.
Yes, I broke up and got rich and life is much better than it used to be.
I think every dev should have a go at Conway's life, I made one a while ago too http://www.markysoft.com/es6life/
It doesn't work like this. Not sure how many bootstrapped and small companies you know, but most of them have that kind of competition and are doing fine years later(mine included). Not having investors and very few employees works in your favor in this case.
Elm doesn't seem to use semver (which requires that "A normal version number MUST take the form X.Y.Z")
Seems like "Data Scientist" as a job title is too generic.

It's like saying "Web Designer" nowadays, when in reality we have a variety of job specializations like UX strategist (ux only), graphics designer (photoshop), UI developer (html/css only), front-end developer (html/css/js), etc.
What didn't help was that the backups were stored on the same LUN as the production database.
So sad, heart goes out.
Eating out as a vegetarian in Japan is actually very difficult. In Singapore as well, the option besides Indian food, is very limited for vegetarians - this might go against conventional gastronomic reputation, but this is my personal experience in both places. (I am not a vegetarian, most of my family is).
I liked the pragmatic response in NZ to robo lawsuits. Requesting an ISP lookup of someone’s details cost $20 (some years ago, not sure of current price).

In practice although rights holders might claim that damages were $lots, except in the most egregious cases no-one found it worth $20/user to initiate “legal action”.
Forbes doesn't say that (as noted by the popup, opinions of contributors are their own), someone who blogs for Forbes says that. Forbes is just Medium with a financial slant, these days, there are no qualifications required to be a contributor and there is no editorial oversight.
> Lampord

Lamport, in case anyone's googling :)
Richard Feynman – chess analogy [video]
So Sad heart goes out to the family.
As a happens, I noticed a scientist at Microsoft answering another similar question: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-argument-against-mass...

Note however that I want to focus on general arguments, not ones specific to any vendor.
And how well has any of that worked out for Perl 6?
> think about what the data means

of course they do that, that is literally their job.

But to reverse-engineer the biases that may or may not exist in an original data set -- please explain how this should be accomplished, because I don't see how someone could accurately quantify the amount or degree of race/sex/age/religion/nationality-ism without introducing additional "bias" based on that person's own opinion.

> Data does not appear magically in a dataset.

Right, so why isn't the boss, or exec, or department head, or 3rd-party, who sourced the data responsible for de-biasing the data before even handing it off to the the data scientist, so s/he can just do the job of data science-ing, and not political science-ing? You're putting a whole lot of "ethical responsibility" on just one person -- ironically, the one least likely to be good at interpreting human emotional tendencies -- within a much larger ecosystem.
Louisiana
Your premise has something to do with your success preventing you from being able to give advice to people? Something again about your success, and how you've been successful? And how your success facilitated your success?

"Maybe what you're really seeing is Confirmation Bias and, again, everything you have to say is worthless."

"Which is annoying."

"Because it misses the point."
From someone who blogs on Forbes' platform, you mean.
the reason it is compelling to blame tiny third parties for losing elections is because it can happen. if there a very liberal third party like the greens and their vote percentage is higher than the liberal (democratic) candidate lost by, then they probably kept the dem from winning. usually you don't see third party conservative alternatives. and the small third parties don't get any political power in the us system.
Agner Fog
Show HN: Cyber Forensic Investigative Reports
True. Last year, I resigned and then started looking for a job and got several offers. This was only possible because all of my co-workers were able to find better opportunities. If it weren't for the good job scene around me, I probably wouldn't have resigned.
This, and your other responses in this thread, come off as rather disappointing to me, as someone who considers the work they do as "data science". Machine learning as a method clearly has quite a bit to contribute to the business world based on revenue alone. My argument could rest here.

But it's also disappointing the way that you belittle all machine learning practitioners, even those with academic credentials, for their work not being worthy of serious consideration. This also sounds a little defensive and projective, and I can't imagine it's easy seeing the forest for the trees with your head in the clouds.
Is it just me, or does it seem like there is big business to be had in climate change and climate denial?

A lot of money appears to be flowing into these two camps.
I don't think Github has DMs.
I am in no way trying to be offensive here but wtf is a grain elevator? Second question. Why elevate grain?

This?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_elevator
Hmm. I disagree with this overall assessment that that's what's going on. I think people some people (especially hn people) are rightly suspicious of advice that is related to that one specific time success happens. Though of course some individuals apply this in a kneejerk way which must be infuriating if you're trying to make a more subtle point.

But I think in general it's a trend against the idea that successful people or projects are successful because of a particular sequence of steps that could, if replicated, make an observer successful also. Whereas, as you point out, it's more about this meta thing of how we do our best to recognize good conditions for success, and then keep showing up. If the chances of success (especially really big success) are small- trying more times increases your odds.

I think people, broadly speaking, understand this idea, and all the yelling about confirmation bias has roots in real instances of people bragging/advising/publishing books/whatever based on anecdotes about things that happened during their specific successful project, with less recognition of how much coincidence matters.

And yes, you can't benefit from coincidence if you don't show up. If you aren't trying in the first place. If that is your actual premise, it's not very obvious to me from your post. Honestly the tone of your post felt more like complaining/whining that people won't listen to your advice when you want to give it and how frustrated that makes you, than a sincere attempt to talk about the pros and cons of repeatedly taking risks on new projects when you could be doing other things.
99% of the time that’s true. The one time I had to quit a job without having one lined up was when I was doing contract to perm.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place, but I had just been laid off.

I knew they weren’t going to make me full time and as a contractor who was already being watched closely I couldn’t have multiple “doctors appointments”, take advantage of flex time, etc. I needed to focus on getting a job full time.

It was 2012, the economy was looking up and I figured I could get s job relatively quickly through my network of recruiters. I walked out noon on Monday and called a recruiter. I had a phone interview with a division of what was then a Fortune 10 company on Wednesday, in person Thursday morning and an offer Thursday evening making $10K more than the job I was laid off from three months earlier.

Yes that was partially dumb luck and not something I would try again.
I think if you provide the money they’d be happy to raise the bounties!
One way of thinking about a data cap is just a bandwidth limitation measured over a long period.

Bandwidth cannot be measured instantaneously, it has to be measured over some period of time. I'm not sure what the normal period ISPs use is, but maybe it's 0.1 seconds. Then if someone has a 100 Mbps download connection and a 1 TB monthly download data cap, that person effectively has 2 bandwidth limits: a limit of 100Mbps when measured over 0.1 seconds, and a limit of 3.086Mbps when measured over 1 month.

Or you could say it's a 3.086Mbps connection that allows bursting up to 100Mbps as long as the bursts are paid back with downtime.
That's just stupid. The Nazis, and Dracula, in case you haven't noticed, are the villains of their respective pieces.

Deciding that people who cut up women are in fact pretty fascinating and charismatic dudes "who had their reasons" is not exactly a new, intriguing setting to explore, unless you're a sophomoric ghoul.

In the media we are drowning in handsome genius-level IQ serial killers, as opposed to the sordid idiots that they are in real life. Thanks, no. There are a lot of thought experiments we could do; strangely, we seem to constantly come back to this one.
Author fell into a common fallacy - mistook lust for love.
Maybe, but I think that illustrates an important point: He was no expert in how algorithms operate - but neither are the majority of people who are affected by algorithms.

I think the warning the article wants to convey is that the current trends could - eventually - lead to a society in which personal freedom and even laws are undercut by completely intransparent algorithms. Intransparent both because companies are allowed to keep them under wraps (and will absolutely do so) and because even if they were made accessible, only a small group of experts would be able to understand them. Sometimes, not even then as the article shows. I think that is a valid concern.

The last point - that understandability is such a low priority in development that even frequently the designers themselves don't understand what exactly is happening - is a different problem, but maybe less important than the first one.
Yeah, 72 waste baskets in the entiretu of Bulgaria seems... unlikely.
You're wiping too hard.
If you want to store grain in a really big bucket (like a grain silo), how are you going to fill that bucket?
> In a free market setting, nuclear is not going to be cheap.

Costs haven't stopped Germany trying to jump ship to solar, and that hasn't turned out half as well as France from an economic or environmental perspective. Australia is one close election away from the Greens pushing something similar on to us.

Australia is composed of unusually large, flat, desolate geotechnically stable areas. We produce large amounts of raw materials, including steel, and have some of the most extensive uranium deposits currently known about. We have a highly educated population.

The next time we have one of those big once-in-a-generation crashes and the government is looking for a great big expensive infrastructure project to soak up some excess capacity, it would be absolutely fantastic if a nuclear plant was at least on the cards.

Currently, it is banned. It is banned for no good reason. And banning something because the peanut gallery thinks it might be expensive is not a good move. And, and this is my central point in this thread, none of this is because the far right has an irrational love of coal.
Patterns for authentication in the CDN
A few years ago I watched a street performance in Ochanomizu: a post-war Japanese spiv, wearing a wide pin-stripe was selling bananas.

Apparently in Japan now, banana-selling is one of the strongest stereotypes of post-war capitalism - for all its good and ill.
The book he wants has been written. It's called The mythical man-month, by Fred Brooks. It does a post-mortem about what went wrong (an what went well) on the development of an IBM OS.

I think it contains today mostly stuff everybody knows, so it had a lot of impact on our profession. Not on the coding part, but very deeply on the management part.
That's like saying Go will never get generics because it doesn't have it right now. Evan doesn't believe type classes are a right fit for Elm, but he has never to my knowledge ruled out that ad-hoc polymorphism will be added to the language.
How do you want to store the grain if you don't elevate it?

It won't go to the top of the pile itself, and if you insert new grain at the bottom of the pile, you have to elevate the existing pile anyway.
Quaternions are the subject of the next video going up on the channel. I'd be shocked if he didn't explain the connections to Maxwell's work, since he touched on it in his latest Q&A video.
There are some red flags that you can tell pretty early on in a relationship if you pay attention.

- How do you argue? Is your partner denigrating? That’s a personality trait and an immediate no.

- Do they have an addiction? If you are married, you can try to work through it if they want to get better, but statistically it’s a long shot. But if you are just dating, why bother?

- Are they materialistic? Are they just in the relationship for what you can do for them?

- Are they honest?

Etc.
I think the real problem with Thorium from a practical point of view is cost effectiveness. Having to develop a bunch of new technology and reprocess red hot fuel is probably going to work out considerably more expensive just building a conventional reactor which itself is looking like being more expensive than renewables.
Really surprise with all comments here.

Quitting your job if you have kids a wife and a mortgage is a much more complicated topic than just saying "F* this I'm going to raise cows in the Montana"

It's complicated to move internally in a corporation , so thinking as to moving to another company to another position when you have responsibilities it's pretty much like playing the Russian roulette with your finance and your situation.