skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.

It's not on a whim.

Payment processors -- including Visa, Amex, Discover, Mastercard -- have clear rules about hate sites and promoting violence. This is a rule clearly spelled out that all merchants must follow.

Infowars violates rules they agreed to follow when they became a merchant. That's breach of contract.

Edit: and here's Paypals AUP:
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: ... relate to transactions involving ... the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory

Seriously... that's breach of contract. Does infowars need to follow the contracts they agree to? Do those that promote hate get to disregard contracts?

Peddling hate speech does not earn you the ability to disregard contracts you have agreed to.
I think it's important to stress the fact that DMT does not feel like being thrown in a meat-grinder, or being impaled in a car accident, or any other grisly way to die. Really, it might be more correct to say "Death might feel like a DMT trip" because many have experienced a DMT trip, but it's not every day you get to experience death. Of course, it makes for a less interesting title.
I have a question for the commenters who are disappointed by this event: how do you feel about PayPal's actions here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017635 (PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators)? If you have a different reaction to that, then please explain the difference between the two kinds of events for me as plainly as you can for my understanding.
> We undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion

Stop trying to come up with far fetching conclusions that don't even make sense. Why can't Paypal ban someone (especially someone like Alex Jones) for this reason? Would I want to earn transaction fees from Alex Jones' sales? If I were the owner of Paypal, I wouldn't want to do business with him, either.
Which the supreme court overturned, ruling it unconstitutional.
Deep+Learning+Cuts+Error+Rate+for+Breast+Cancer+Diagnosis+|+Nvidia+Blog
Some of the sounds coming from the tank sounded to me like a vacuum cleaner. I guess a Vulcan would be overkill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfddlcebSo
>apprenticeship

Y'know, that's actually an interesting thought. Maybe most programming's best understood as a craft or trade, like being a plumber or electrician[1]. It's a fundamentally blue-collar job that you happen to do while sitting at a keyboard. It's like if we insisted that all electrician work, including things like house wiring and utility pole maintenance, required a full four-year electrical engineering degree.

[1]This is not an insult. "X is basically just plumbing" is said with a sneer by fools who drastically underestimate how difficult and complicated plumbing actually is. There's a reason they're so expensive.
When are we going to acknowledge that commuting to a city center in this day and age is a ridiculous thing to do. I would wager most of LAs output is in the form of info services that can be done from home or the burbs. I remember when gas prices were at an all time high at one point and nobody was dissuaded from driving less. People would simply complain more but suck it up and go about their routine anyway. And who can blame them?! SoCal is not traversable by any means other than an automobile. There are nutjobs who will fight tooth and nail about public transportation, specifically buses, but any resident will tell you what kind of people use those services and they can’t be convinced to. I reckon fires and geography have a lot to do with everything but unless there is a dramatic shift in public policy, ain’t nothing going to change.
Not going to edit the above but people clearly hate it (many downvotes without minutes of posting).

At the moment I think most Go programmers who also program tiny microcontrollers with a few hundred KB or up to a couple of MB of RAM, do so in languages like C or Rust, not in Go. Why not? It's a fair question.

For those of you reading this on a laptop or desktop, how many desktop applications are you all running at the moment or have as an installed application? How many are written in Go? Why so few or none?

I mean desktop applications like Audacity for audio, or VLC, or Open Office, or your web browser, and so forth.

The downvotes came pretty fast so you clearly have some ideas. I'd like to hear them.
Annoyingly that 40% figure is almost impossible to find, it's from a survey done by a Guide Dogs charity in the UK but their own page on it [0] now just refers to it and doesn't link to the original report.

[0]: https://www.guidedogs.org.uk/how-you-can-help/campaigning/sa...
Personally, I'd rather be bold and let people associate me with the title they don't like. At least then they may have an opportunity to question their assumptions.
Dam breach at former N.C. coal plant, raising fears coal ash may pollute river
I don't think there's any issue with wishing racism- and the racists who push it- shouldn't exist.
I’m going to guess this is in response to many community supported dev tools breaking in v1.11 when modules are turned on. Specifically tools like gocode, godef, and gogetdoc.
> If you don't like the law, lobby for it to be changed.

So on this particular point, I was clicking through a bunch of Youtube videos last week while bored and saw one in particular that stuck out. The particular point was about refugees, not illegal immigrants, but it seems that at least some people are absolutely convinced that there's already an authority above the US government that makes enforceable laws, and that Trump/etc is just ignoring those laws. No amount of arguments or explanation during the video could convince the person that there is no such law.
The article says the administered dose is well short of toxic and merely simulates a near death experience. People can and frequently do experience actual actual death while engaging in alchoholic revelry.

I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1)

(1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
That is genuinely funny!! Might be an accurate estimate too!
> Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequence.

This is double speak. If the government throws you in jail for saying something, you could say the same thing. You had freedom of speech but not freedom from consequence. You're distorting the meaning of freedom of speech.
Google also reports software and hardware security vulnerabilities and infrastructure security issues to external companies, organizations, and stakeholders responsible for the the design, operation, and maintenance of external systems. Google isn't the only company that does this - other organizations do too - but at this level expertise is a scarce resource, and we're all in the same boat so it behooves everyone when those capable can and do cooperate and participate in keeping a vigilant watch. This ethos is one if the reason the West dominates.
4:05, from the video you linked

"Why are other countries dumping their crap in China? Because they can't handle garbage sorting. Oh please. They can build nuclear weapons but they can't handle garbage? All their stuff is disposable."

This really resonated with me.
I've worked on a system that loaded data into Kudu in near real time and simultaneously ran queries on the data. Kudu has no transactions, consistency is eventual which was sufficient due to our near-real time constraint, however you do need a stable NTP source. We have lost data when the cluster could not get a reliable NTP connection, decided to shut down and tablet servers' data files became corrupted.
Good. Great even. If the implementation is top notch, mantained and from the 1st party, why the hell not, but most of the times, language server implementations are half assed, slow, "kinda" working messes that are all but useless in the long run. The PHP language server implementations are a great example of this. A buch of broken, incomplete, underperforming projects maintained by a single person (or straight up abandoned). Compare that with Phpstorm and you have just compared a rusty tricycle with a spaceship.
Doesn’t PayPal has a banking license in the US and the EU?

IIRC they merged with x.com specifically because x had a banking license and they had gotten an EU license in the mid 2000’s.

Also banks can pick and choose in fact they do it all the time try asking for a loan form a bank as a porn production company or even opening a business account with one, most of them won’t touch you same goes for many other businesses.

Banks in some cases may not be allowed to deny services to individuals for non financial reasons they same does not hold true for businesses and organizations.
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
Do you live in the area? It doesn’t sound like it. If you live anywhere near San Fernando valley then you’d be quick to acknowledge the impact fires have on the area.
It's a bit strange that we are remembering the "hero" but not the 500 or so innocent vietnamese men, women, children and infants who were raped, tortured and/or killed. Strange how we always have to make ourselves the good guys. The "heroes".

If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vietnam war, when we dropped napalm on people ( chemically burning them to death ) and more than 4 million people were killed in that terrible war. God knows how many vietnamese women and children were raped. My Lai was one of thousands of my lai incidents in vietnam.
>If the government throws you in jail for saying something, you could say the same thing.

Which is why we have the first amendment, and why it covers government only.
Won't someone please think of the violent far-right conspiracy theorists!!
If you're willing to go back a generation on CPU (and merely 192 cores), you can get 24TB.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...
> If we have totally different digestive reactions / problems, then can you really tell much of anything from the microbiome data?

Congratulations. You now understand why the folks trying to monetize microbiome are regarded as snake oil salesmen right now.

I'm sure there are broad strokes that are valid. You have a lot of bacterium X--that isn't good. You completely lack bacterium Y--that isn't good. Your overall diversity is low--you probably should try to correct that.

However, once you start getting into "you need specific bacterium X to solve specific problem Y", that's likely snake oil.

Biological systems are annoying like that. For any treatment X, there will be some, generally tiny, fraction of the population that responds to it.

The problem is finding a treatment that works in either 1) the vast majority of the population or 2) a readily identifiable minority of the population.

Microbiome work is probably going to produce some cool results, but it will take time to get there. Running experiments on people is time consuming and expensive.
I struggle to think of a single person with the faintest understanding of what machine learning algorithms are being surprised by this. Who are these "technologists" you're speaking of?
I wouldn't call him forgotten - while I'm bad with remembering names, when I saw "My Lai", the first thing that came to mind was "that badass helicopter pilot who landed his helicopter between civilians and US soldiers, and threatened to open fire to protect the civilians".

What I didn't know was that he took so much flak for that - from statements that he should be the one punished to death threats and dead animals on his porch. Unsurprising, yet sad.

His name was Hugh Thompson, and today, let's remember that name[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.
> Its how many companies still make low-displacement turboed
> engines sound good enough to back up their performance

Turbo'd engines inherently produce fun sounds and (most) manufactures silence them with overly restrictive intakes and exhausts. Why fake it when they can actually make it?
Does any one else find the site design frustrating? Constant top/bottom bars and a full window height of low-quality content before the article begins.
Odd to see the most popular distributed operational database system in the world left out here.
And you get 4 extra cores and 24 gigs of ram "for free" vs i3.16xl (which is what we use). I think we looked into switching but it wasn't clear if the reservations could be switched over.
How they make the sausage doesn't really seem appropriate for job descriptions to me... but as far as filling roles goes I find that more often than not the people writing the job descriptions simply have a poor understanding of the role and the requirements needed to ensure success in that role.
It unfortunately doesn’t adequately solve “tweak and update the database software in the middle of the day without requiring downtime” situation very well

We do rolling releases of software all the time but it’s pretty hard for us to do much optimisation of our DB setup without doing it in the middle of the night because of how all this stuff works.
Setting aside blatant shock behaviors... If the other side, the audience, were less sensitive and not looking for the next micro-outrage, wouldn't ML chatbots evolve more pro-social values by positive reinforcement?

It takes two to Tango .. the average audience behavior isn't blameless for the impact of its response. Also, how an AI decides interprets an ambiguous response as being desirable or not is really interesting.
That is the definition of censorship - the government is the only entity that can legally hold a gun to your head to stop you from doing something.
My knowledge may be out of date now - is that with Postgres? Hopefully so.

My gripes with the performance issues still stand though. I have queries that take 30-40 seconds on RDS that complete in milliseconds on an EC2 instance which is much smaller.
A conspiracy implies all of these companies .. conspired, rather than independently reaching a conclusion that supporting this fellow with their services was bad for their own business.
Hate speech is protected free speech. Not because anyone loves hate speech, but defining your opponents views and journalism as “hate” is very easy to do depending on your worldview.
I fear Mr. Jones will go from being a fringe loon to being a major talking point in 2020, spoon feeding people what they want to hear about their fears (similar to what we saw in 2016).
How do you implement progress reporting and cancellation in this model?
The barrier to being categorized as “hate speech” seems to becoming increasingly easier to apply.
"what percentage of people would actually do something when they see their peers, friends,"

The history of genocides, war crimes and dictatorships clearly shows that most people will go along.
That has no relevance in this discussion since the Government wasn’t involved.
New search-by-image method on Bing.com
Heck, it's so important that it needs people with detail-orientation and solid judgement, because crowdsourcing (ie populism) may not be the best source of Godwin's law ethical mooring.
While the purpose of this screencast is to explain a principle, not to focus on the particular piece of software that was implemented, I am left wondering about a couple of things;

The timeline as he explains it, is updated by creating a new timeline instance which consists of previous timeline + new tweets. It seems to me then, that his client does not remove from the timeline tweets that were deleted by its author subsequently to having been downloaded.

To some it might be a feature to capture as many tweets as possible, but at the same time, if your view of the timeline includes deleted tweets then you might find yourself trying to reply to a deleted tweet, and then you would get an error response from Twitter when you try to post your reply. (Though I don’t know if his client also does posting, or if it’s a read-only client.)

Furthermore, what about tweets that are edited by their author subsequently to having been downloaded? Seems that you would not see those edits.
> ...this is now dangerous precedence. Payment processors choosing not to do business at their whim.

Hasn't this been going on since the beginning of payment processors? I'm pretty confident in thinking that almost every payment processor does this frequently for all kinds of reasons.
He violated the Acceptable Use Policy he agreed to abide by, so naturally they chose to stop doing business with him. I don't think PayPal was accusing him of breaking any law.
Probably a dumb question but if you need all servers to talk to each other to achieve consensus, how do you deal with network latency? Do people just keep data in separate zones so they aren't globally replicated?
Are you claiming that free speech means merchants should be forced to do business with customers they don't approve of?

Or that no one who disagrees with a particular point of view should be able to express that disagreement?

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence when that consequence is also an expression of free speech.
while this is one of the worse political commentaries i've read, you have a point in that the education system in the US has been so mishandled for so long a significant number of people can't critically analyse language
Yep, like Wikileaks and I guess the Jews in WW2
> peddling lies and inciting vile hatred

I’m not sure this is a good argument. You could say the same thing about pretty much any mainstream media, e.g. in relation to Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” (and they probably resulted in more deaths than anything reported by Infowars).

Censorship is mostly arbitrary, really.
Yeah, it's not going to affect me.
I'm an engineer and not a lawyer, but from what I remember, the license lets them do some banking functions, but doesn't make them count as a full bank subject to all the banking regulations.
The Web would have been dead no matter what Google did. Its death was as inevitable as any human's - just a matter of which organs fail, in what order, and when.

If there's one thing we can learn from all this, it's that decentralization of a network is best understood as a temporary process for electing the monopoly node(s).
The entire architecture of our iOS app is built around this principle. We have tried to give it a name but keep coming back to “Functional Core, Imperative Shell”. You can find some of the ideas that were implemented here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7AGQ9dhWCX0
You got me curious, can you explain why you needed to implement HFS+? Was it read only?
That's a previous-gen CPU system. Current is:

https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7089/SYS-7089P...

Server itself is might only be $25k but those 224 cores could add another $90k, so the total would be close to $400k.

The previous-gen version, SYS-7088B-TR4FT (link in my comment upthread), has 192 DIMM slots, so if you don't need CPU horsepower, you cn get the lower-density modules and still have 12TB (or the max of 24TB for the price premium!).
Crowd Hiring
Hash tag british humour.

But wait. Is it even humour at all?! :O - well now, isn't that always the question.
Is Wikileaks a problem, or a solutition?
I guess what I'm getting at is that in any non-trivial program with many external dependencies and cross-cutting concerns, almost all of your code is the "shell", so either I'm missing something, or this is stating the obvious (write pure functions where you can) in a very roundabout way. I've never seen a program written explicitly in this style that wasn't a trivial example.
It would be interesting to use the Uber/Lyft dataset of driver and passenger ratings to do an analysis like this.

For any such analysis there are a great many confounds, both blatant and subtle. Finding racism everywhere could be because overt racism is everywhere, or it could be confirmation bias. It could even be both! That's the tricky thing about confirmation bias—one never knows when one is experiencing it, at least not at the time.
I truly wish the predictable conversation to follow could be something other than the inevitable bike shedding over what constitutes free speech, slippery slopes, and conspiracy theories. In a dozen submissions of similar topics the comments could be largely interchanged with only a few proper nouns being changed. All too often it seems like people firing mortars from deep within ideological trenches, and worse, some people making weak fallacious arguments of doom instead of openly supporting the speech in question.

It’s all very twisty, predictable, and pointless and I’ve never seen anyone budge. It’s just “over the top boys” and at the end of the day no man’s land gets a few more craters.
Tweets aren't editable so no need to handle that. Deleted tweets can be honored by updating the timeline to be `old_timeline - deleted_tweets + new_tweets`.
It does probably make sense for heap to manage it themselves given it is a core competency of theirs, based on their indexing talks
A statement like this has no backing at all. And it's exactly what the parent comment was talking about when they said: "a bias toward thinking society is biased."

We can't just conclude that x is true because it seems more fair that it would be true. The universe isn't necessarily fair and equal.

We can lie to ourselves and our machine learning models about things like: "there must be an equal number of bad restaurants within each genre of restaurant." But that won't make it true. It will just make our models work less well.
About extroverts: good question. I'll have to think about it. Thanks
When we first launched the i3 instances, i3.metals weren't available. We've been wanting to do experiments with i3.metals, but we've been unable to get confirmation that our reservations will transfer over. Until we know that we'll be able to transfer the reservations, there isn't any reason for us to do experiments.

Since you work at Amazon, do you have a sense of big of a difference there is in performance between i3 and i3.metal for database workloads like Postgres?
Make it an explicit part of the data model.
The government intervenes and is involved all of the time in private companies regarding constitutional rights (e.g., a bakery making cakes for non-traditional marriages).

I don't like Alex Jones or his view, but we have strong protections for speech in this country for good reasons and I don't want to see us sacrifice them because someone we hate comes along.
The old Wise and Benevolent Philosopher King model of governance applied to machine learning?
The Difference Between Lock Wait Timeout and Deadlock
I don’t live in the US so I don’t have the opportunity to meet up with you guys, but I just wanted to say that your mention of “a HN friend” piqued my interest. Is that to say you guys met through HN? Does that happen often, that people meet through HN?
Almost everyone I know with at least a faint understanding of ML is surprised by models picking up racism etc when there was zero intent to do so, because of systemic racism etc in available data. Or at least surprised by how much can be picked up. You're bubbled if no one you know is surprised.