skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It may turn out that e-cigarettes are, on the balance, safer than cigarettes, however it's way too early to make that claim with any level of certainty

Public Health England, which informs NHS policy estimates vaping is 95% less bad for your health than smoking cigarettes.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

I acknowledge that this is an appeal to authority, and that there's valuable research still to be done. But, cigarettes are one of the worst possible things that people habitually do to their bodies. It's reasonable that it wouldn't be hard to do a lot better.

I think it's fair to describe the NHS's public health arm as a decently conservative organization. Public health is a conservative practice after all, and they're decent at it. I read these numbers in that light.

> 'Some flavourings and constituents in e-cigarettes may pose risks over the long term. We consider the 5% residual risk to be a cautious estimate allowing for this
uncertainty.'

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
As what I've heard from my friends, you can deactivate your Facebook profile and still have Messenger on. Though you can't use Messenger without creating a Facebook account.
Because centralized ones can go out of business and thus break your URLs? Google URL Shortener/goo.gl, from what I quickly read, seems to do their best to keep existing short URLs working, but I'm sure some people got scared when their discontinuation was announced.
> fix the abuse problem

This has been a problem for about 30 years online, so good luck with all that.

> add an edit button

User tweets out something nice. 10k retweets. Then changes it to something political.
We had a Treventus ScanRobot at my previous job. Not exactly "prosumer" but more "pro". It vacuums two pages and does linear scanning.
Also, while this may not be usually a problem with Netflix, in general streaming also requires enough servers on the other end, and uncongested pipe between them and you. I think most of us experienced the cases where, despite being on a reliable high-speed Internet connection, the movie still keeps pausing every minute or three, because it's not streaming fast enough to keep up with wall clock.
There is actually another option - subsidize growing fresh fruit and vegetables the way we do corn & soy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/farm-bill-why-...
It's not contradictory at all. I'm saying historically past racist policies created a racially correlated class system, and I'll even say that in a great deal of regressive areas the past was very recent, say up to the 70's, but within the most recent generation, many of the issues people are concerned about are genuinely class issues, and they only appear to be race issues to the extent that race is still correlated with class.

But there is a difference between saying people are primarily motivated by race vs. primarily motivated by class but using race as a proxy vs. primarily motivated by class only. Given that these are distinct things, it's not helpful to insist on identifying everything as being secretly racist, not because it conveniently absolves anyone of responsibility but because it muddies the discussion and denies possible solutions.
Yeah the reddit redesign is horrific. Thankfully, they keep old.reddit.com up and will maintain it indefinitely, which I'll use... also indefinitely.
I loved your service when it was released. It does need a little modernization and I'm looking forward to when you get there!

The feature I miss most from pinboard is tag suggestions in the extension/bookmarklet, and perhaps a little popup that gives you a chance to change the title/description.
The dangers of mutability in the context of concurrency are well known and people would do well to read "Java Concurrency in Practice", a book that recommends for all classes to be defined as immutable (with final fields to get the JMM benefits), unless you have really good reasons for not doing it.

Not sure what threading primitives you're talking of, but it depends. In general Scala has very sane abstractions for dealing with concurrency.
DJ Substance – Phase 2
A catchall email in practice receives mails for the specific usernames that are in the specific mails it gets, but saying "it serves * minus the accounts that exist" is much simpler. After it was already made that simple, why make it complicated again?

> Let's say the incumbents cut out virulent racists

So what are you driving at? Just some racists, now and from here on out, so no loss? And what's a "virulent racist", a racist that makes other people racist by mere contact? If that word means nothing, why was it added? Why was that example chosen over Naomi Wu, for example?

By definition, services that play these games cut out anyone who does not want to empower such arbitrarily acting and unaccountable gatekeepers. That's what the law is for, for actual society.

Silicon Valley is clearly not up to the task, these virtual kingdoms are demented, that stuff should be for video games and private forums, not platforms that speak of community or society. They want to receive from society, but not fulfill their duties to society. Free speech is not an optional luxury, and mobs out to destroy livelihoods and doing their virtual lynch justice stuff are not benign. People who on average can't deal with people that well, even on a small scale and face to face, cannot be in charge of large systems that affect the social lives and livelihoods of massive amounts of people. It's not just a trainwreck, it was kinda predictable.
Leet trance mp3s – http://tranceattic.com
How about a grid of equal-height items, but intersperse something between each row- can this library do that?

For example, consider a bookshelf design where the books are the items and each row has an element underneath it (the element would itself be composed of say 3 images for left and right ends plus the middle)

afaik that's not possible with CSS grid either since grid doesn't have an `nth-row` selector
What matters is the complexity of the systems built out of these things. Threading primitives are simpler to understand in isolation, but lead to non-deterministic behavior.

I've only used optics in a couple small situations, but even if I find some big downside, I'll still be open to "exotic immutable approaches".
The problem with centralised URL shorteners is that the site can shut down for any reason.

It doesn’t make money, it isn’t important to the maintainer, there’s a db failure etc.

With a decentralised system it’s a lot more resilient to failure.
Ask HN: Bot to increase documentation usage and reduce support effort. Useful?
Hi HN,
We've built a prototype question answering bot in our team which can use your documentation as a knowledge base to answer questions asked by website visitors with 40% hard corrects and 20-30% soft corrects.

You simply put a Javascript chat plugin on your site, dump your documentation and it answers queries not unlike a domain expert even without keywords.

Here are a few (cherrypicked?) exchanges using Amazon Reviews as answers. It doesn't generate answers, but picks the best it can (out of 1000 total answers)

[Headphone]

Q: Does this work with OSX?

A: It works really well on my Mac [Learn More]

[Foundation Cream]

Q: Is this a sunscreen?

A: I don't think it has SPF [Learn More]

[Mobiles]

Q: Isn't it expensive?

A: I found it definitely worth the price [Learn More]

Would you pay 10 cents per response from this bot?
Becoming an intermediate Rust programmer in one day
Ah of course, I'm a US citizen! I went to UCSD for undergrad, and am attending Harvard and Georgia Tech for my master's
Not on mobile. I don't want to install the app, and the mobile site is basically a bunch of dark patterns piled on deliberately broken functionality. It's amazingly, and consciously terrible.
>> "Takes a long time to parse because it the text has a lot of typos."

Your comment has typos too :-)
Sunflower Security System Protects Homes with AI and Autonomous Drone
I still don't know as the article doesn't address why...
Was the title on the news site edited?
Simplest explanation is that they are involved in some kind of fraud.

Given that Chinese companies and their financial data are notoriously difficult to obtain, it is no surprise either.
The first line of this article links to a source that appears to show this... is it wrong? It looks like it may fully source their claims.
There's a location in the town where I grew up with two Jewel (Albertson's) locations less than a mile apart on the same road. One is a much older store (early 80s), the other is much newer and was acquired when Dominick's (Safeway) shut down in the Chicago area.

By keeping both stores they have all the good grocery locations at that end of town tied up. There's a Mariano's (Kroger) on the opposite side of town and a Walmart with some groceries a couple miles in another direction, but most people go to what's right there.
I left Facebook as soon as I realized they weren't reputable (some time around 2010 or 2011). By the time I left FB had already repeatedly betrayed user trust via "opt-out" security settings.

having a good social life was (and remains) vastly
important to the quality of my life, and that
Facebook is a tool to help achieve that goal.

From 2017: "A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel"

Standing up for your principles and "voting with
your wallet" is good and all, but ... I'm not so
sure it's all that effective.

From July of this year: "Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report."
> The fact that it's a crime is a deterrent.

That was the goal, yes. In practice, it doesn’t work, and bogus claims are widespread. Being a crime doesn’t deter in itself, when it’s never prosecuted.

Heck, some assholes openly brag about willfully abusing DMCA for politics: https://mobile.twitter.com/vanaman/status/906983575337107456... - there’s no fear of committing a crime when it comes to DMCA, it’s a perfectly safe perjury to commit.
If you want to see where the USA will be politically in 10 years look no further than China and India with these draconian policies. We are in competition with them.
I agree with you that people will impute motives, like it or not. I also agree that his tone and style are doing him no favors. I’m less sure about whose priors for his tweets you are talking about, since that depends on how much you know about him and what you think of it.

But I am still curious what you think the motivations of the people he offended actually are? What do you think they are trying to do?
I spent some time trying to build a simple grid layout with dynamic width and height items in order for the layout to naturally flow responsively. Most libraries—like this one—require fixed width items or fixed width containers with fluid items.

Fully responsive turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be due to lots of rabbit holes, but the algorithm was fairly straightforward. My first approach was to try CSS Flex and Grid, but they didn't cut the mustard since they're not really designed for this sort of thing. I then found CSS Columns and had that working, but it proved too unstable for production use with issues with the sort order of items, wrapping across columns, and cross-browser support.

I ended up building our own library: https://github.com/heydovetail/react-masonry-responsive

There's a nice brief writeup about using CSS for masonry layout here: https://regisphilibert.com/blog/2017/12/pure-css-masonry-lay...
What you write in your tests, how you test, how you design the software and so on are altered by the language you work in. This is as it should be.

If I have a type system that prevents certain classes of defects, I gleefully accept that bounty.

If I have a type system that simplifies certain classes of tests, I gleefully accept that bounty.

I will happily rant and complain about all of them, but I will also try to program to the strengths of what I'm using. Wishing one language was a different language is a waste of everyone's time.
Yes, I did. Actually I stopped using since 2016 but deleted in 2018 after massive data scandal. I'm nowhere missing it, and that helped me in many ways in saving my own time and doing real stuff.

Stopped using even Instagram, I installed the app again today itself after almost 1 year, and just added one picture. Then I might forget to use it and have to uninstall the app till next time.

I use WhatsApp but only when I need it most. All notifications are turned off so it can't disturb me and I can open only when I need to.

Though I use Twitter often. Maybe 30-60 minute a day.
None of those tests will silently fail. That’s their point for existing. They complain when the code stops operating as the developer designed it to work.

Integration testing is valuable. It just isn’t scalable to the whole code base (because, as you said, it’s slow), that’s why macro tests should be targeted to the parts that can’t be micro tested (10-15%), leaving the bulk of the code to be tested with blazing fast micro tests. Agile Thoughts podcast goes over this during a series on the Testing Pramid, episodes 1 through 8. https://agilenoir.biz/series/agile-thoughts/
These articles definitely make me think the average leftist/Democrat in the United States has no idea what it's like to be poor and reliant on many public services. They'd understand not only why Dollar Stores exist, but why they are primary choices for many impoverished Americans.

Source: Been destitute and on public assistance with a child and limited access to a car.
Of course it's fundamentally unsound. It's not even a reasonable abstraction for reality.
Interested in more examples
I don't agree to that
Interesting! May I ask what tipped you off? I admit to wondering about the difference in ingredients, whether the chalk (do they still use that?) supplier is different, etc.
You may also wish to compare the funding situation for the various advisors. Each country and university has access to different grants and other sources of funding. You have to keep in mind that doing a PhD is a full-time job. You won't be able to have a part-time job and do quality research, so unless you are able to self-fund, the money aspect is critical.

I believe that, in general, PhDs take longer to complete in the USA, especially with the top universities. And of course, the cost of living varies with different cities.

When you write "potential advisors", have you actually engaged in communication with them? Typically principal researchers have a clearly defined programme, often tied to specific grants, funding contracts. They will only take on advisees whose proposed work dovetails into their group's work. In my experience it is very difficult to be accepted when you propose specific research and it is outside any existing scope.

To better understand the "potential advisors'" situation, I recommend that you locate recent papers by them, read those papers and compare their current and recent work with your intended work. When you contact them, you could frame your proposal to align with their research programme.

I am not a ML expert, so I can only comment generally. I would expect that post PhD opportunities in industry would be better in the USA. However, academic opportunities might be more comparable.
Very impressive. Not to be a cynic, but how long before someone starts turning people inappropriately into frog marching saluting Nazis?! Or giving them an unfortunate Fortnite "bounce".

I haven't read the paper, but am curious how they get the face profile right (given the information is absent in the 2D source). Perhaps they set that manually or some kind of average face, but if it's off it would be quite noticeable.
Sure they have those images, but so what, it’s all unlabeled data.

I think the labeled datasets we create for them with e.g. reCAPTCHA is infinitely more useful for training.
It took me a ridiculously long time to even parse this question. "What fraction of women assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school..." I got to this bit and thought, "How many women are assaulted by a nominee for Supreme Court in high school? It can't be that many. Is it even reasonable to ask for a fraction? Is it meaningful?" I mean it's ludicrous to put up a "<1%" option as it implies that there were more than 100 women assaulted by a nominee for the Supreme Court in high school. Is that option justifiable? I find it really interesting that 65% of the respondents selected it, because it implies to me that they didn't understand the question.

And then "would wait to publicly accuse him not just [after?] 30 yrs" So I thought, "How many nominees for Supreme Court are in high school? If I'm going to publicly accuse a nominee for Supreme Court for assaulting me in high school (assuming we were both in high school at the time), don't I have to wait 30 years? Otherwise I'll never know they were a nominee for the Supreme Court." -- which is a weird way of thinking about it. This word "wait" is particularly problematic. You can't know a priori that the attacker will be a nominee for the Supreme Court, so you can't really wait to accuse them on that basis. The best you can really say is "After not accusing their attacker for 30 years, would they accuse them after they were nominated to the supreme court?" (which might be an interesting question to ask)

The last part "but after Congress hearings & just before Congress vote" didn't make grammatical sense to me. Granted I know nothing about the original context of the question, but presumably the hearing and vote are related to the appointment of the nominee. So I suppose the question the author wanted to ask is, would the accuser wait until after the hearings, but before the vote? However, this is really compressing the options. There are really 5 potential times to accuse the attacker: some time after the attack but before the nomination, between the nomination and the vote, after the vote, and never. Surely a much better question to ask would be "Which of these potential timings seems more likely to occur to you".

This question is so badly written that I have a really hard time believing that it was written by someone who makes their living doing statistical analysis about people's perceptions. I've read the author's comment on it, but if they are defending this question (and I'm not 100% sure that they are), then I don't really think I need to look at their larger corpus. I think I can happily conclude that if they are not just trying to be a shit disturber then they are incredibly incompetent. I'm not sure which of the two labels they would rather be stuck with.
Will this shit matter in a year? [SLIDES]
Fruit and vegetables are ludicrously cheap where I live at Farmer's Markets and such that are open normal hours, year-round. People still love buying boxed and processed food for many, many reasons. If the fruit and veggies got 20% cheaper I am positive it would only help the people already buying the very cheap produce and attract basically no new business.
We need to lower the noise floor or raise our attenuation level to valuable ideas, but yes this is a valid point. On a larger scale with population levels rising and our rate of dicovery/creation happening at idk... really fast, it behooves us crate diggers of good ideas is to step up our game. My only helpful suggestion to aid in this is read The War of Art[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1...
Varkala: A testimony to how mass tourism can ruin a place's history and culture
The Link Between Inflammation and Depression?
I have a trust-but-verify relationship with my feelings.
Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?
And on top of that: what practical applications does a URL shortener have nowadays? There was a time when they were pretty popular for posting links on Twitter, but Twitter made t.co an automatic part of their service in 2010.
Same to me. I never had a Facebook account and do not use Facebook. However, it did not offend me, but I still think I do not need it.

So, no, I did not (and cannot) delete my Facebook account in 2018, because there isn't any to delete.
You posted this clarification while I was writing my response.

Based on the additional information, I would suggest that a USA PhD research op would present more advantages.

Notwithstanding that, if you are attracted to the adventure of studying at Oxford and are able to secure a well-funded research position then it could be a fantastic experience.
Oh yes. I've seen this plenty of times not with just ML, but even basic statistics (and by seeing I mean working next to people doing it). You don't need to understand statistics at all, as long as your customers don't understand it either, and you sound confident enough. If it's hard to verify whether a model works, you can keep the customer happy and yourself paid while not providing much, if any, value to them.

I currently believe this is how most ad tech runs internally. Scammers scamming scammers.
Yes. It was my New Year’s resolution on 31 December 2017 and I deleted my account on 1 January 2018. I’ve been able to focus on growing our startup and getting back to reading; I subscribed to the New Yorker and the Atlantic. That’s primarily how I get my news now. Being off Facebook means I don’t get invited to many events, but I’ve been surprised at how people have adjusted to emailing me or texting me instead. You certainly learn who your real friends are.

I also deleted my Twitter account which has been much more cathartic and healthier for me. I was a long time Twitter user, and followed a lot of very liberal people in tech. Unfortunately, after the 2016 election, most of their tweets became political, and my feed was all ranting, whinging, and hate. What’s even worse is that I’m in Australia, so even though I agreed with them, it wasn’t relevant to me.
This is indeed very interesting to see and made me want to share my stories. I've also scanned over thousands of books (mostly Japanese manga, in a way to digitalize them and make them persist) myself and ever wondered where tech could bring this digitalization to. I've spent more than 10,000 hours on this for more than a decade and will probably do it until I couldn't.

Due to the requirement for maximum restoration of manga contents, especially for those cross-spine scenes, the high speed camera-based solution like above or other places which focus on formal prints won't work quite well and that leads to two major ways in the trade for decades since some Japanese started this self-scanning thing around 80s:

1) Destructively break the book into unglued pages (which also invovle cutting the glue with heavy-duty paper cutter) and send them to scanner with auto feeder, (then try to glue it back if keeping the book is vital, at best effort).
2) Manually press each page on flatbed scanner (thus A3 scanner works better as it allows vertically scanning spine area usually with the greatest shadow) and scan each page using predefined rough area which would therefore include non-content area as shown in : https://imgur.com/a/2ITBlJg (left/right edge and spine).

Solution 1) works great in terms of efficiency but could be a pain for those who love to keep book still in the collection (though malformed anyway, and I myself might consider this when I get old and couldn't bear the effort). 2) would cost a lot more time (on average, #1 takes less than 30 mins per book and #2 takes at least an hour) especially for manually removing noises as shown above. I've tried some basic CV tools/scripts to auto cut at least the edges (middle spine could be troublesome and I'm fine with manually working on that), which work really poorly since content itself could also be largely variant if we try to determine "edge" by checking pixel distribution.

Hopefully before 2nd decade finishes, I either give in to destruction or find a perfect way to automate the noise-clearing process.