skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Praise for a totalitarian system is not acceptable, neither debatable. That's all. End of story.

We kind of learned about that in Europe, the hard way, several times in XXth century (Italy, Germany, Russia, Soviet era invaded countries, Spain); some of us still having forgotten sadly.

A social credit system that is used to expedite what is normally the responsibility of law, debate, judgement - and can then be used to impose arbitrarial rules from the state (don't be fooled about that) _is_ totalitarian per nature. It is even more that because it relies on automation.

Don't use exceptionalism or pride to defend or justify such a system.
If they haden't been so determined to wipe out (their words) the only working democracy in the region and the only country in the region that doesn't from time to time persecute Jews, maybe? (This is not a defense for everything Israel does, but an observation of the fact that it is considered a working democracy and it is the only country in the region that can be said to be safe for Jews to live in.)
To be fair, there's often a significant contrast between the way someone behaves and the societal values they espouse. In some cases they almost seem to be anti-correlated.
Physically having room for the chip and having enough space that you can actually run it without running into thermal issues are different things. Laptops have a bigger surface area to get rid of the heat but thermals are still a challenge for laptop design. I don't know for sure that Apple couldn't have pulled it off but the issue is not just physically having space to cram the chip in, it's being able to run it cool enough.
It's remarkable that Sandberg is being thrown under the bus for not doing enough to stop Donald Trump from being elected.

What she is (in hindsight) expected to have done is to have insisted that Facebook's news feed algorithm be used as a content filter to suppress stories promoted by politically marginalized groups.

This is much the same way China's government uses its Great Firewall to control which information reaches the people.

During the civil rights era, the Soviets supported the work of Martin Luther King. In the modern world, Russia supports certain third party views and anti-establishment perspectives, for obvious reasons, just as the US supports pro-Ukraine groups and other fringe political groups that are in close orbit to Russia.

So we are being told that Sandberg failed to utilize the firewall capabilities of Facebook to suppress anti-establishment content. We are told this is a big deal because Russia-linked entities spent money to promote some of the ads. Keep in mind the total spend by Russian-linked entities (could be NGOs, private citizens, oligarch-funded research institutes, etc.) was a miniscule $150K in an election with total funding approaching $2B.

Yet Sandberg may be relieved of her position because she failed to anticipate how such a small spend could dramatically influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

News flash: It didn't. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned about some aspects of Facebook -- my #1 concern is the extensive use of dark patterns designed to make people over-share -- but the "not doing enough" critique is
complete bunk.

It is 100% motivated by political partisans in the US who unfortunately have a great deal of influence in possible regulation of Facebook and have made it very clear that they plan to use all of their power to force Facebook to act like the well behaved Great Firewall they want.

To be very clear, politicians want Facebook to be used at their bidding as a Great Firewall and they very much want to see certain views suppressed and others amplified. They also want to (and already do) use the massive amounts of metadata held by Facebook, Google, etc., to supplement whatever data they have when investigating Americans, who may or may not have committed a crime. It is, essentially, a transparent social credit system for US officials to use at their whim.

So the only difference between Facebook as politicians want it to be used and China's Great Firewall is that Facebook exists a bit higher up the protocol stack and its censorship/suppression is much more laser-focused and harder to detect.
I agree, trains are not enough to replace cars, you need much more variety. Buses are typical, but still problematic if you're pushing for small streets and pedestrian areas. Bicycles are an obvious addendum, but still not enough to cover all needs. But the evolution of personal, small-scale, lower-pollution vehicles is happening at a good pace, and I'm confident we'll have good alternatives.

Your point stands, though; a city can't think of replacing cars with a train and calling it done. Cars pack a tremendous combination of flexibility, speed, weatherproofing, isolation, etc that no other method of transport can rival by itself.
They "only" need to topple the current teocracy and put secular government in place while not turning into failed state. With Iran military being the second largest military in Iran after the revolutionary guard that is next to impossible. It will lead to situation which will make Syria look enviable.

Otherwise you are right - Iran is the natueal ally in the region. And it was such until 1979.
FWIW, I have a HP Microserver Gen8 with the dual-core Celeron and 16 GB of RAM, including 4 3 TB HDDs I paid about 800 bucks. I have had this machine for three years now, and it has given me no trouble whatsoever. It is quiet, reliable and for my use case, it performs well (I use it as a file server, DHCP and DNS server, plus I run a few low-end VMs on it).

The one thing that was a little annoying is that it does not have UEFI firmware, and the BIOS cannot deal with GPT, so I cannot boot off the HDDs and need an additional USB flash drive for that. Other than that I cannot say a bad thing about it.
Indeed.

But of course, how many UK and American citizens know the history of Iran, our role in overthrowing the democratically elected Mossadegh, who rightfully wanted to nationalize their oil (the obvious source of the Occidents umbrage too...) and our installation of the repressive Shah Pahlavi regime that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 that initially featured students and workers and such, but later turned into a purge, as most revolutions do, in which the powerful theocrats basically seized the nation, and thus bringing us into the modern era and the detente with Iran that still makes no sense.

Contrast this with the constant support of the various Hashemite kings directly since Trans-Jordan and Syria-Palestina were handed over... basically we set up satrapies in the wake of seizing the Ottoman empire and not being able to manage it ourselves...
Except credit rating isn’t about hierarchy. It is two things (1) pay bills on time — service debt reliably (2) negotiate with creditors when you can’t. People get bad credit because they acquire debt and then fail to service it and think ignoring creditors is the way to go. You can still smoke cigarettes and buy all the video games you want. Just pay your bills.
The ICU project does that: http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/messages
That said what really counts is ad spend compared with stuff sold as a result, and anecdotally I gather Facebook is quite effective. I mean my friend sold some luxury holidays with quite modest facebook spend and it's rumoured others got a presidency cheap with similar techniques.
The Economic Crisis is over. Populism is forever
>I can't believe people keep equating these two systems.

You want to work here? We are going to have to check your credit! Which system is it?

You’re born poor and apply for your first job, a nice government job with nice government benefits, but can’t get it because you don’t have any credit established. Hell youre poor, forget credit you can’t even open a bank account, go apply for a minimum wage job, then head to the check cashing/cash advance store. Look at social mobility in this country, pretty sure it’s the lowest of all first world economies, it’s pretty dystopian.
Not by itself, but putting the pictures up in your restaurant might.
Sure. In a thread absolutely full of baseless rants my comment, which does provide an explanation and a link, was the one that jumped out you.

Though it is aways interesting to see people like you can rationalize your censorious actions. It's too bad HN doesn't require a text explanation for downvoting. It wouldn't decrease the hypocrisy but it would provide some further insight into the hypocrisy.
I can't imagine that Windows Safari usage rates were very good. According to the last 90 days of federal website analytics [0], Safari was used by 28.9% of users (Chrome and IE are 46.6% and 10.5%, respectively). But only 14% of Safari visits were from MacOS -- i.e. 4% of all browsers.

0: https://analytics.usa.gov/
Peter Bright is Ars’s Microsoft guy and is known for his Apple antipathy. Not sure why he’s doing this review.
> I had always interpreted the meaning of the phrase to be "visible by the naked eye from someone in close orbit in space."

These termite mounds are certainly not visible by the naked eye, even from a plane.

I'd say that "visible from space" means visible by a current earth observation satellite, which is very far from the naked eye. The worldview satellites that take these images are huge telescopes pointing downwards.
The profiles and graphs are really for advertisers, aren’t they? It seems like this discussion is centering on the utility that Facebook’s consumer products provide for it members. As we are often reminded, due to their business model, interests of users are indirect, secondary. Facebook’s main service is of course for advertisers.
The science of self-care: How climate researchers are coping with the UN report
This is the ICU solution to it: http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/messages
It's going to cause breadlines, but I disagree with the OP's sentiments expressed here. This money IN is smaller than our war expenses OUT, and it was always so.

Arms dealers rip off the nations populations whose governments they sell arms to.
How Windows Vista Turned into a Huge Mess for Microsoft
That is a good point. I was thinking from a national security context. I know we have done it a few times, but I would like to believe those examples are isolated and extreme. Death penalty is another thing. It has so many problems with it and is a stain on our society in my opinion.
Ask HN: What are your favorite programming videos?
Hey all!

I'm a big fan of Destroy All Software, but have watched almost all of them and the rate for new videos is very slow right now.

I really enjoy DAS for a few reasons:
- good variety in subjects
- explains often complex things in a simple way
- live coding
- ruby, which is a language I know, so that makes things appear more approachable

Railscast from Ryan Bates is another series that comes to mind.

Do you have any other similar people doing such videos?
I’ve heard small claims court is quite effective for redress as well for some of these things.

I agree that disputes are not easy, but you are not being denied rights by the state if your credit is bad which is the key difference here vs China.

If you think we need more reform of credit reporting (I would not disagree) then please contact your representative - that’s going to be the way to better regulate the dispute process and provide more recourse for citizens.
It's just a shortener.
But then you have to deal with that winter.
I'd hope they're capable of that.

Lol, imagine as the farmers are in the fields, and merchants in the shops grinding away to make a few dollars a day. This remote dev is making a 10x multiple of their pay. Sweatshop? Ha.
The comments attached to this video sure are... interesting. Chemtrails, laser attacks, and more.
Not really, donation clothing is skyrocketing (because people consume more and more clothing from cheap brands like H&M) and stores like Value Village or Good Will can't actually accept every piece of clothing donated to them. Lots of it end up on cargos back to Africa or Asia. Buy from thrift stores, this is a good thing and good for environment.
Here Are 13 Ways to Use the Cable Car, the Emoji No One Likes
But please don't be too proud either.

China is a great country, you're a great people. As we all are. All humans. Qualities. Defaults. History.

You're not _that_ exceptional either.

We don't criticize China. Neither you.

We criticize the very idea of automation of social credit (thus of social relations, and individual freedom, and life), because our parents and grandparents had to experiment with it, and its consequences.
5 Times the World Came Close to a Nuclear War
It wouldn't cover situations where the mods took action or retaliated without publicly commenting. But to your question about a queryable database, such a thing exists on BigQuery: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17471117

edit: apparently it's updated daily, with 18,507,035 comments as of now: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/bigquery-public-data...
Do you have a link to where you bought the RAM? Having trouble finding a 64GB kit.
to be fair could this not be any app on his phone that is listening?

I assume that the big ad aggregators like google etc. would be up for integrating with anyone who provided testably good data, and also it may be that the system is being gamed from the other end.. where hints are passed to the ad bidding bot (of the dog toy company) to pay more for your attention.

its a pretty crappy state of affairs we have.. its a shame that our media (and so much of everything) is owned by so few - it makes it very hard to fight against any of this :( no one has any interest in actually fixing this or making big changes as they are all using it to power their growth and so their delusional valuations.

There was nothing more depressing than working as a BA for a big company and realising that every metric was openly being gamed, objectives were stupid and impossible to meet - but it didn't matter as so long as they kept a constant suite of major structural change projects on the go (buying companies, moving profits and ownership over boarders etc.) they could meet all of their targets and just keep the lies going.

The lower level staff had to play along as their managers would fire them if they didn't play the game. the managers had to keep to the line to maintain their promoted state and keep moving up.. the most senior management could just believe the numbers and fire a middle manager if they didn't like what they got. and the shareholders didn't care as if the targets are hit the share-price just keeps rising and rising.

There was no case i could make to do anything about this, I think i proved the issue to several people but there was no way of people doing anything about it without damaging their own lot :(

Since then I have had much more understanding with the broken nature of the world, how long it will take to fix and how sometimes (often) you really do just need to let the wheels come off before there will be any action - as by that point people are less worried about being blamed and are more likely to act.
> I'd rather have my data safe with the Chinese government, a country that is on the other side of the globe and has practically zero influence on my life, that sharing it with the US or my own governments, which are there, and can make my life hell for any or no reason at all, and have the means to actually hurt me.

That's an interesting take, but you are assuming china's influence won't keep growing.

Or more worrisome, what if china, EU, Russia and the US decide to share data in the future.

The only way to be "safe and free" is legislation curbing intelligence agencies snooping on people. Unfortunately, these intelligence agencies appear to be operating above or beyond the law.
Bitcoin's Growth and Professionalization Time
> Why do we keep selling weapons to such a repressive regime?

I'm happy that the country I'm living in stopped selling to them earlier this year.

That said, if one should steelman (as we are kind of expected to do to each other here) the goverments that hasn't done it yet, -here is some rebar IMO:

boycotting them as hard as we should have done might drive them straight into the arms of Russia and China which would probably love to sell some weapons and get a new ally.

I'd love to see that argument torn down as well though.
The sweatshop aspect likely has more to do with the monitoring and technological browbeating than the wages. Sweatshops are characterized by overbearing micromanagement of all workshop activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweatshop
This is a fascinating comic, thank you for sharing.

The mental load sounds like it could be largely resolved by GTD, since eliminating mental load is the reason GTD was invented.

And if it's a shared system (eg whiteboard in kitchen) then the man/breadwinner can see at a glance what needs done and pick up tasks without having to ask.

Of course, there's a much more elegant solution, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader :)
What's in a GitHub Star?
dmghn
DigitalGlobe publicly sells 30cm imagery. That's limited by statute. Military and intelligence users probably have access to ~7cm imagery.
If you need it just for testing, just pick something used from ebay. I use a 2009 Macbook at home and it works fine.
Categorization and catalogs go back centuries so I don’t think I’d call it an OCD trait. Early search engines (90s) were very bad, the change that caught Yahoo was the quality of search. I remember doing searches on altavista, getting a million hits, and at least the first dozen were nothing but log files. The game changer for search was its ability to prioritize relevant content over accidental matches. That started training us to search, which was a new way to interact with information. You couldn’t search an printed encyclopedia. In the 90s Yahoo was much more useful than Webcrawler.
Not surprisingly for an OS running on laptops, OS X supports hibernate. It's not the default on desktop macs, but you can turn it on.
Relations of Power, Relations of Grace
"His workers must agree to install spyware on their computers so Crossover’s productivity team can track the number of times they click their mouse or stroke their keyboard. The tracking software takes screenshots every ten minutes and, in some cases, snaps photos from PC webcams."

If they really believe they can measure programming ability by the number of times their workers are clicking things, I'd give a wide berth to their software products.
It not a painting, it's a photo.

And it's a GREAT photo, it tells a story, it tells of another time and another place, of a behavior that today it would be considered unacceptable, but probably at the time was considered normal.

It's sad that today we feel compelled to judge everything based on how "offensive" something is according to modern standards, without for a moment stopping thinking about context.
Fresh Look at These Stone Tools Reveals a New Chapter of Ancient Chinese History
The ones with fathers.
I’m amused by the Fairfax bit. I used to live within walking distance of that station. Almost all of the green space in the article’s image is now designated for commercial use (the remainder has housing), has plans ready to go, and is just waiting for the developer to start putting shovels into the ground. But the developer apparently doesn’t think it would be worth the cost of construction, so it just sits there.

I’m not sure what else you could do there, unless you want to have the government heavily subsidize commercial development, which seems like a recipe for empty, decaying buildings in a decade or two.
Wat. 1 day of work for a SV dev is at least 1000 dollars, that's far too expensive.
This rhetorical maneuver, where you simply declare a system you don't understand to be totalitarian is no different from shouting Nazi at anything you don't agree with. Even a cursory analysis would show that the defining characteristic of totalitarianism, "absolute control over public and private life," doesn't apply to a system where people are completely free to travel anywhere whenever they want and the government invests hundreds of billions to encourage this free travel both within the country and abroad for its citizens.
Agreed. The link between credit agencies and the state here comes when government uses this data for clearances - typically to determine whether you might be amenable to a bribe.

All that said: typically if you’re asking for money it doesn’t come for free. You are submitting to a control. The fact that these scores are used in other arenas that are not related to finance is odd, but using your financial history as an indicator of future payment seems rational whether scores existed or not.
Repowering the UK’s oldest wind farms could boost energy generation by 171%
When I was only 15 years old, I'd received an inheritance from the passing of a relative to the tune of $2000 USD.

I was living with my Father at the time, who worked for Microsoft in networking (he now works at Azure), and he had nurtured my interest in programming from the age of 8 or 9.

He agreed we could put half aside for my college fund, and I could use half to buy or build a new computer, among some other niceties.

So I basically had an $800 USD budget for a computer, including any RAM or HDD upgrades I wanted to do, or any extra peripherals I wanted.

I had a vast interest in moving away from Windows, and a continued interest in audio production/recording already - I fell in love with the original iMac G4, and, while it was definitely out of my price range, being an all-in-one starting at, I think, $1,199 - but all I wanted was to make music with GarageBand, movies with iMovie, and try to explore MacOS and learn about xCode and Objective-C.

So, at $499, the original 1.42ghz G4 Mac Mini was, for me, as a high school student - who literally would've had to save months for it had they not been so lucky - well, it might has well have been a Lamborghini to a 15-year-old.

But, I was fortunate, and, given my desire to explore in the Apple ecosystem, I was willing to invest in what my Father thought was a very underpowered machine for the money.

What makes me sad is that today, that same 15-year-old kid could not have walk into that store and have the same experience.

Today, I'm a professional iOS developer at a major bank, when I'm not running an independent music label with artists that exclusively run on Logic Pro X systems that I configure for them, so collaboration is seamless. Everyone loves them.

But I exclusively use 2010-2013 MacBook Pro hardware for my artists that I purchase, upgrade, shove an SSD and the most RAM I can in them and often experience better performance, or at the very least certainly a more enjoyable experience, than the 2017 15" Touch Bar Macbook Pro I'm 'typing' on right now.
(While I was writing this post, I accidentally brushed the lock screen button and was temporarily locked out.)

The Mac Mini was a very important and crucial product in their product line. Something at least reasonably affordable. Something you could basically justify with, well, hey, it's got a $100-200 Apple Tax on it, but at the end of the day, it's still something affordable for education and low-income markets who may otherwise simply need to turn to other hardware.

The $999 MacBook/Air was also a crucial piece of hardware in this position.

tl;dr: an increase of price of this magnitude would've probably have robbed me of my future career of an iOS developer if it'd happened to me when I was younger.
I remember when that first came out, and was based on how many friends you had. It would have cost me $90 to promote my vacation photos to a group of people semi-randomly selected by Facebook and chance from my friends list, and for people with more ‘friends’, they wanted up to $500, if I recall.

Socially, it is extremely out of touch to even offer such a service to individuals.
Maybe AWS's web console was ugly.
Their CLI app, APIs, SDKs definitely aren't.
Argh, yeah. Phone typing. Try: In a post Enlightenment society, with everyone having certain unalienable rights, they deserve due process, but....