skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is social media?
I am curious, how do you understand the phrase "social media", of which we talk constantly. What, for you, are defining characteristics of a social medium? How recent of a phenomenon are they? Obviously, Facebook or Twitter will likely jump to the front of your mind, but would you call a blogging platform (such as wordpress.org or medium.com) social media? Would you call an old-school forum (a bulletin board powered by phpBB) social media? Would you call reddit social media? What about GitHub? What about Slack or Discord (and eventually, irc channels)? Finally, what about Hacker News itself?

(Asking because I usually hear the phrase "social media" used as a synonym for "Facebook or Twitter".)
We use ethereum address namespace for standardized cryptographic key pairs, and standardized signing.

Through our API we also let people build hosted solutions that let people make familiar usernames and passwords, for people that would find too much friction getting into the ethereum ecosystem.

But its not like you need cryptocurrency to sign.

Any wallet will do, We’ll also release our own eventually which will just be a code fork with our own branding And people wont even know about any of that web3 cryptocurrency stuff.
Termite mound network the size of Great Britain discovered in Brazil
It's actually a good question to get to know people sometimes. You don't phrase it that way, but people do like talking about themselves unless they're robots
Out of Africa (2007)
pretty impressive structures
I'm not saying the ADA and CDA are right or that your advice on diet and exercise is wrong, I'm saying the issue is more complicated than you are making it out to be. Your average diabetic knows what causes the disease and what is making it worse, yet they have a very difficult time making the lifestyle changes required to improve their outcome. If you're familiar with Jason Fung's work, you'll know that he himself raises this point, and this is why he is such an advocate of intermittent fasting - this lifestyle change seems to be easier to make for someone who is diabetic than improving diet and exercising more.
I've been a fan of Terry Gross for years and have spent many hours enjoying her interviews, but I would not call what she does conversation. For me, conversation is a mutual thing in which two parties gradually share more of themselves. Terry's interviews are strictly one-way, and she always bristles when someone tries to make the conversation mutual. If you've listened much, you know how uncomfortable she gets when a guest asks her a question. That's just fine on the show, that's how it works, but one gets the sense that the interviewer role is her way of avoiding real connection. She's brilliant at it, and presumably it's secure for her, but there's no real relating going on, only a simulacrum. I feel like that is the secret tragedy behind the show and part of what makes it fascinating.
Interesting to see that it was artistic instead of something more mundane, because my hypothesis would be a casting batch/date code --- something like this:

http://mmcdetroit.com/Date_Codes/date_codes_17_l.html
>Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.

That's a difference of 25%, and not the machine scale difference implied at first with the US vs France comparison.

Second, that's off too. Trains continue way past Estonia, (Sweden and Finland go even further north, part of Russia is in Europe etc). Furthermore train connections continue all the way to China (e.g. with the trans-siberian-express) and even Korea and across the sea from Japan.

>Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.

Besides the fact that the rest of the US is still 150 million strong (and thus could very well have some good lines connecting it), this just makes it even easier to have a great train system in those populous cities in the opposite sides -- one in East and one in the West coast for example.

Heck, the US doesn't have a good train and subway system anywhere (e.g. not even within a single state), so the logistics to have one throughout the continent is a red herring.
Horrible article, more horrible title!!!

They found a bottleneck in many species 200000ya, I guess at some point they analyzed the most recent common ancestor in the male and female form, [1] [2] and it was completely misunderstood.

Some sane coverage of the paper: https://biologos.org/blogs/archive/did-90-of-animal-species-... https://phys.org/news/2018-05-special-humanity-tiny-dna-diff...

Also, remember the results of each study is provisional until a few ears later when enough independent groups have review and replicated the results. Peer review is only the first filter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
Given what I've read on the article, I'm fairly confident that what's happening here is a conjunction of Chrome autocomplete suggestions causing the crawl of every URL permutation and the website returning the same content to every permutation, instead of using 403 redirects or including a `rel=canonical tag`.
One of the side effects of the weight loss surgery I got is a very high "cure" rate for T2 diabetes.

A couple of the 10+ year veterans are back to active management, but usually, you're done with insulin injections.
Ask HN: Why are video courses and MOOCs so famous
I see that most of the well known courses/MOOCs (Udacity, Coursera, Skillshare, Pluralsight) online are all video based. Why is this so? Why have text based tutorials and courses fallen out of favour? With video, you cannot go back and forth as easily, you cannot concentrate on what you want and is generally slower than using text bases tutorials/classes.

Why have they increased in popularity inspite of above reasons?
Works great in Termux on the Gemini. Plus there's a decent man page
> "GET's"
I think it's well explained in the article.
The Pixel 3/3 XL (and several other Android smartphones) can run both a hotspot and Wi-Fi simultaneously. [1]

I could be wrong, but I am fairly sure these phones only have a single Wi-Fi module.

[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/11/03/pixel-3-3-xl-suppor...
Because it adds complexity to the build process, for very little benefit. And I don't like complexity.

To illustrate the point, let's take the current Hacker News front page:

+=================+========+
| Description | Bytes |
+=================+========+
| Original | 43,595 |
+-----------------+--------+
| Minified | 41,368 |
+-----------------+--------+
| Original (GZIP) | 7,350 |
+-----------------+--------+
| Minified (GZIP) | 7,247 |
+-----------------+--------+

You've saved 103 bytes, or ~1.4%.
>Doing the minification before the application starts saves time from a pipeline minifying on the fly.

That would only affect a cold-start (app pool recycle) or a view recompile before that'd be an performance concern, unless I don't understand how/when views are cached and then evicted from cache.

If you have a lot of views with a lot of partial views inside them, then yeah, you'd only want to run minification once on the final view, instead of for every partial view. I'm not sure if you'd have (or want) that much control over the view rendering process.

Btw it's a cool post if you're the author.
we faced the very real threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment. It's terrifying how close we came

nuclear holocaust was a threat

I don't understand why these days people talk and act as if there's no risk of nuclear catastrophe. The effect of that seems to me incomparably worse than global warming. Yet no-one seems to talk about it anymore. I read on HN sometimes people saying they won't have kids because global warming etc, but never similar reference to nuclear war.

I just looked up the famous Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doomsday clock[0], which I hadn't heard about in years. Frighteningly, it is currently at 2 minutes to midnight, as close as it's ever been. Closer than it was at any time in the 60s, 70s, 80s. This is from the 2018 report[1]:

In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively
to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate
change, making the world security situation
more dangerous than it was a year ago—and as
dangerous as it has been since World War II.

The greatest risks last year arose in the nuclear
realm. ... To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger—and its immediacy.

On the climate change front, the danger may
seem less immediate, but avoiding catastrophic
temperature increases in the long run requires
urgent attention now. ...

But there has also been a breakdown in the
international order that has been dangerously
exacerbated by recent US actions. In 2017,
the United States backed away from its long-
standing leadership role in the world, reducing
its commitment to seek common ground and
undermining the overall effort toward solving
pressing global governance challenges. Neither
allies nor adversaries have been able to reliably
predict US actions—or understand when US
pronouncements are real, and when they are
mere rhetoric. International diplomacy has been
reduced to name-calling, giving it a surrealistic
sense of unreality that makes the world security
situation ever more threatening.

Because of the extraordinary danger of the current
moment, the Science and Security Board today
moves the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock 30
seconds closer to catastrophe.
It is now two minutes to
midnight—the closest the
Clock has ever been to
Doomsday, and as close as it
was in 1953, at the height of the
Cold War.

[0] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-statements/

[1] https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%...
I had a 5W CB radio a few years ago and bought one of those 'through the windshield' antennas. It basically operates by sticking two panels of tuned copper plates on each side of the glass and they just pass the RF energy between them.

I made the mistake of trying to see if I could feel the 5 watts of RF energy coming from the radio side of the plate. I stuck the panel to my palm, keyed the mic, and instantly felt a searing, stabbing pain in my hand. It felt like a hot nail was jammed into the meat of my palm and was very surprisingly painful.

As blattimwind said above, the distribution of RF energy in the body is going to be very unpredictable at that distance and you could have hot spots deep in the tissue that are not innervated. If you got a hot spot anywhere near what I experienced with that CB antenna I'm absolutely confident there would be tissue damage.
13:51 "Physicists don't know their history well..."
You may have missed the first sentence I wrote. HN has two modes.

There is a thin line between critical and contrarian, and HN has good days and bad days.
Did I say it was? Could you point out where I did? I merely said that it it is wrong to _dismiss_ it for that reason. Whether it is the consensus or not has no bearing on how correct it is. The person I was replying to obviously felt differently.
Really? Because stuff like silverlight, linq_to_sql, razor/mvc and others might want a word. I know technology moves forward, by typically it does so in a much less costly manner, because in the real world, moving people from asp.net classic to .net core costs money.

I mean, even .net standard came and went before we even started using it, considering it won't be part of .net core 3.0.
Yes, that's indeed the case.

A bit of background: Every object has a "group of symmetries". The smallest and easiest groups are those groups which contain only a single element, in case of symmetry groups the trivial identity symmetry. All those one-element groups are also referred to as "the trivial group". By abuse of language, we sometimes say that a object has "no" symmetries if it only has the trivial one.
I haven't, but it looks really interesting!

I've only dabbled with F#, but I always enjoyed it when I do - I just wish I could find the time to spend on it :(
I can't help but notice that it's written by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is essentially the mouthpiece of large-corporate capitalism. Brooks writes a lot of these articles, if you look at his collection on his website. You take some problem that has in its nature the alienation of people from their meaningful purpose in the world, probably because of the needs of corporate capitalism. Unfortunately, large-scale solutions, such as industrial policy, are not in the allowable repertoire of the AEI, so his proposed solution is for people to ... do something about it. Try harder? Not sure.

Edit - fixed grammar in first sentence.
Didn't that storyboard work out to something like twenty hours of screen time?
Of course I'm not complaining about a once-in-a-lifetime 4 hours - I mean, I do this all the time!
When I say productive, I'm talking about time to market. I don't really care about the efficiency because iron is cheap and development time is not.
Thanks for the advice @mindcrime. Will keep that in mind.

And will surely give that book a read.
Depending on the size of the company you worked for, and their legal budget, they may decide to go after you for things you produce even without a non-compete. Or rather they go after ownership of what you produce, claiming it is based on knowledge you gained while performing your job duties for them.

It is far from guaranteed to happen, but it's a risk with a chilling effect.
You probably want to encrypt it with a public key for which the raspi has the private key. You could validate the public key with a qr-code on the raspi, or some other pre-arranged scheme.

This is a very similar situation to being able to access the device on the LAN over tcp/ip and needing to pass it a secret.
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
I'm on a diet (fine tuned for me by a professional), and I'm decreasing 1.2 kg _per week_. 1 per month is not that much of you want to lose a lot of weight.

I do eat carbs within my diet, but it's selected on purpose:

- 80 calories worth of cereals (I use cereals for diabetics, so I can eat 30g of those)
- Up to 800g of fruit (some of it is excluded, like grapefruit)

The fruit is the real trick: it makes you feel satisfied, when you eat it with right timing, even if you are on 700 calories/day (which is basically starvation.

First 3 days are terrible, then the body feels resigned and you feel like you can deal with it.

After 6 weeks that's roughly 10kg lost...
Thanks for the appreciation! I myself have the habit of using `nnn` on Termux.
Thanks for sharing, this looks neat and useful! The pagemarks are an interesting concept. It would be cool if the top progress bar above the document showed, not cumulative progress, but the progress as it maps to the areas marked on the document, which aren't necessarily contiguous. Kinda like the progress bar you have for a torrent as non-contiguous chunks are downloaded. This provides spatial information about what parts of the document have been read.
Yeah, this is pretty much the most matter-of-fact (and accurate) headline I've seen on hacker news all week.

What's funny (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) is that there even need to be headlines about this. In my mid twenties I struggled with some of the various addictions that were quite fashionable among the SV tech elite (work, Facebook, Burning Man, psychedelics, in that order). Thankfully I survived that period and was able to reflect on it, at which point a boatload of repressed childhood trauma began surfacing. After a number of years of working through that, the connection between trauma and addictive tendencies is so painfully obvious. Feeling bad + never learned healthy self-soothing rituals ==> take a hit of something to feel better ==> rinse and repeat.

I've known enough other people who struggled with similar issues to understand that my experience is hardly unique. I would go so far as to say that anyone who ever experienced addiction will understand at some intuitive level that their dysfunctional behaviors are connected to past trauma. The question is, why is mainstream psychiatry still so obsessed with "curing" addiction via chemical means, as opposed to through psychology/trauma recovery?
I really like Gabor Mate. I recently watched a video in which he discusses the connection between addiction, ADD, and trauma. Extremely eye-opening for me, as someone who's witnessed and experienced a bit of the three. I'm not going to attempt to paraphrase, but here's the video:

https://youtu.be/x2YdpvnwtGc
>YAGNI - the time invariably never does come.

If you are not dealing with a sufficiently complex app to the point where you don't need to use JS in a web application, then why are you using ASP.NET in the first place? Kind of renders this whole discussion moot when the entire platform isn't a fit for the application.
You can fallback to the subshell in `nnn` with `!` or `^]`.
2018 Doomsday Clock Statement: It is 2 minutes to midnight [pdf]
Yes, Googlebot (and everyone else, really) is smart enough to figure out if a form action is disallowed in robots.txt.
Report finds that climate change could cause ‘substantial damages’ to US
That video was discussed a bit on HN two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985
Have you tried reaching out to hn@ycombinator.com with some guidance?

May be worth a try.
> but strongly conservative when it comes to issues of regulation, taxation and so forth.

That doesn't match what the study claimed. At the very least, they found SV "elites" and students to be for liberal taxation policies.
I often find GUIs restrictive because they don't lend themselves well to ad-hoc scripting. I also don't use GUI editors, so that may be a part of it.

I can see how a TUI/GUI for being able to quickly stage things from the UI is useful, but it doesn't make the concept of the index useless on the command line either.

Using git from the command line is second nature to me at this point, and the index is a large part of my workflow. When I use git for revision control (as opposed to eg. Subversion. Or anything that doesn't have lightweight branching, something akin to an index, and rebases), it feels like the tool is helping me organize my commits instead of just being a place to shove things after I'm done coding.
Show HN: Bitcoin Lightning Network brick-and-mortar ready transaction demo
I'd bet if you surveyed Europeans they wouldn't be more aware of how data is being used pre vs. post GDPR.

When I watch my non-technical friends use websites, they dismiss the prompts without reading or understanding them.
I should note in response to several good replies here, that since cell phone usage varies by country and demographic, it seems that if it caused a (significant) increase in brain cancer (the organ most exposed to cell phone related radiation), it would show up in a distinctive pattern. Japan had widespread cell phone usage before the U.S.A., and in the US the upper class had widespread cell phone usage before the working class. If it were a significant factor that ought to stand out from the background noise of other possible carcinogens.
Page with past statements here:

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-statements/
apologies if the non-software related comment is unwelcome.

I know some people who were afflicted by macular degeneration at a younger ago. They speak positively about supplements that contain all three of lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin[1]; which have shown some solid results[2] in slowing down progress of dry MD & preventing its progress to wet MD.

Wising you the very best of luck managing this!

1. Macushield or Macushield Gold (AREDS formula) https://www.macushield.com/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4963902/
International Campaign to Ban Landmines Publishes Landmine Monitor 2018 [pdf]
Terra-grammes? Giga-tonnes? Did these two numbers come from different sources? This is not how the metric system is meant to be used.
What is the survivable level of atmospheric carbon?

I don't mean civilization as we know it. I mean mammals, specifically humans.

--

The tundra is thawing with no way to halt, much less reverse. Not an expert, but IIRC it holds 3x the carbon of total anthropogenic
sources. That's bad, right?

Ocean acidification will remove that source of food. I don't know if it stops being a carbon sink at some point. What happens when the microscopic critters (plankton), which consumed carbon, can no longer survive?

Deforestation and desertification is transferring terrestrial carbon to the air. How much of that burns? Most of it?

Those three processes are now in a positive feedback loop. With no apparent inhibitors.

And humans keep consuming fossil fuels. Juicing the feedback loop.

What's projected atmospheric carbon of all those combined? 1200ppm? 2000ppm? Higher?

Ok, that's pretty bleak, right?

Is that a mass extinction event level of bleakness?

--

Now what happens if even a fraction of the frozen methane gets released?

Which critters are capable of surviving that?

--

Edit: I couldn't remember the values for the hottest period.

Eocene Epoch had 4000ppm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Atmospheric_greenhouse_...

And not everything died. So maybe there's some hope.
I don't use github, so it would put me at a disadvantage.
For security:

- MISRA-C, https://www.misra.org.uk/Activities/MISRAAutocode/tabid/72/D...

- AUTOSAR, https://www.autosar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/standards/adap...

- OWASP, https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

- CERT, https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/seccode
I’m not trying to make it a black and white issue, and there is definitely tons of variance in terms of what people respond to, my only claim is that when you have an absolutely massive portion of the population with diabetes, there is something seriously and fundamentally broken, it’s not just about coming up with some better ways to help patients make small behavioral changes (even if that is also important).
Astronomers detect water in the atmosphere of a planet 179 light-years away
Submitting a sitemap might cause Google to crawl those pages, but it certainly won't stop google from crawling additional pages like the ones mentioned in the blog post. Lots of sitemaps are incomplete or outdated or completely invalid or whatever.
Sometimes it's mere proximity. If your family or friends find you have condition X or treatment Y then they may look it up to find more.

If you share the same public IP, as most homes do then that adds to it.

I started getting invitations to add a Google review to a restaurant I've never been too. But some of my family had.

I can figure out other stuff too - music tastes, social media trends, etc. Just by seeing ads and stories I'm offered on Google News and other places.

There's that famous story about a guy who discovered his daughter pregnant (or feared she was pregnant) a few years back because he started getting ads for baby clothes.
> ...in "hippie" circles ca 1970 this was much the norm...

I've read that justification for him and hearing that, I can't shake the sense that just makes him an art fossil that never paid attention to the evolving cultural norms around him. So he just plows ahead and makes art for a world that passed into history; that's uncharitable for someone who is hailed by art cognoscenti. I jokingly maintain he must possess an RDF that rivals or even outshines Jobs', he has access to awesome drugs, and has an unique ability to remember his trips in great detail.
For Decades, Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Northern Aggression
It’s almost like the reason iPhones are so expensive is that they Apple makes money from selling hardware rather than ads...
BLE has support for encrypted communication so should be ok, at least in theory.