skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to find optimal type of user to target?
We are about ready to launch a service that has a broad appeal (think YouTube, Google, Office - something "everybody" uses).

We want to target different types of users, e.g. millennials, veterans, seniors, in our marketing, and obviously want to target the group that is most positive towards our service first.

What service would you use to run a survey among all types of users, to find out which type of user / demographic responds best to the service?
> we're doing irreversible damage to major ecosystems.

A potential rebuttal is to think of ecosystems as dynamics systems made up of species always adapting to changes, instead of something pristinely in balance that we've wrecked.

Then the question becomes whether current changes to ecosystems can continue supporting us as their balance shifts, instead of thinking solely in apocalyptic terms. Life as a whole is more resilient than we give it credit for.
Yet you fail to mention the thousands of deaths every month from Al Shabab and the genocides and famines that have happened repeatedly throught the continent. Putting lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig.

China and India can pour all the money they want into various countries' infrastructure, it can all come tumbling down with the next disputed election or sectarian genocide.
turning 51 this year, still rocking with angular2+, redux, core, azure, firebase, mongodb cloud, nativescript....etc!

should depend on the the developer, the company, the environment! today's youngsters still need to prove they "own" the technology & from what i see this side - they don't know squat, but they want the big-bucks....
> Knowing assembly doesn't make you an expert in CSS, Webpack nor configuring IIS servers.

That isn't what the poster stated.
"Neoliberalism has brought more people out of poverty"

How about just Economic Liberalism, and good governance, and not 'Neoliberalism'?

Because the neoliberals want government out of almost everything, so they can sell all those Africans Nike shoes for 50x the cost to be made.

In between the two arguments there's a fair point: China's growth can't be characterized as 'neoliberal' or else they would be a total open market! But there are strong capital controls, a politicized currency etc. etc. so it can't be called 'neoliberal'.

I think 'basic economic freedom' with 'intelligent governance' and possibly 'national strategies' in key areas like natural resources where it makes sense (i.e. Statoil in Norway) or education and healthcare where there is a dramatic need. And yes - even economic protectionism in certain areas.
I fail to see how this is any resource-lighter than Electron. It still uses a browser. It might or it might not be Chrome, but it's still a browser, so it will certainly use, give or take, the same amount of resources the average browser takes.

The only thing I do see as an advantage is the reduced size in the distributable. But, imho, size really doesn't matter these days.
Russia plans to temporarily disconnect the entire country from the internet
> The current western take...

... is worthless if they allow the PRC to penalise countries, companies and individuals for just recognising Taiwan as a state. Or allowing PRC to takes military control of water and air space all around Taiwan.

We can recognise Taiwan all day long, as we have recognised Palestine for some 52 years. But until you get the local power to also recognise it, you're just whistling in the wind.
Young people who play video games have higher moral reasoning skills
Like the idea, but the only snag is that placement of the HomePod in the house would become compromised because it'd have to be a balance between where makes most sense for music/voice vs. where makes most sense for WiFi coverage.

Selling multiple at $350 each just for WiFi range extension is probably beyond even Apple's marketing.
Canada's forests emit more carbon than they absorb
Australian libel laws are incredibly severe; truth is not an absolute defense (as it is in UK law, and in law in pretty much all other democratic countries).
Thought experiment: imagine that during the communist revolution in old Russia, the non-communist elites fled to Kosovo. Subsequently, USSR claims that Kosovo is part of it, while Kosovo’s claim is, fundamentally, to the entire territory of Russia.

That, from my understanding, has been the historic position of Taiwan vs. China, and why this conflict, while not causing a lot of violence now, could be less straightforward to resolve than a claim of an ethnicity to a geographic area.

In the above alternative reality, could Kosovo be recognized as a separate entity counter to USSR’s desires? Maybe but the question doesn’t make much sense in the first place, since that (being a separate territory) would be almost the opposite of what Kosovo wanted.
> Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks?

Yes (but only begrudgingly). Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation. That means within their borders they can do as they please, even if we don't like what they do.

We fought one of the most devastating wars in history (the 30 years war [1]) trying to control what other people think, and at the end everyone agreed that sovereignty is a great concept [2][3].

Using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms is in stark contrast to the idea of sovereignty and signals to everyone else that that kind of behaviour is ok. That's how you get cold and hot wars.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
1) “The equipment is never the same. You have to make sure the data is anonymized. Even if you get permission, it is a massive amount of work." This is literally true, but also, not something I would want to change. Our PHI should be anonymized, and we should have the right to grant or deny permission for how our most delicate personal data is used.

2) "When tested on unlabeled data, the software could rival the performance of experienced physicians. It was more than 90 percent accurate at diagnosing asthma; the accuracy of physicians in the study ranged from 80 to 94 percent."

And this is where "physician support tools" have always fallen down, and was the give-away I was expecting in the article. There are two type of ways of assisting diagnosis: (a) given this mass of data, what does the patient have? and (b) given this mass of data, does this patient likely have asthma?

(B) is relatively easy. This is not something physicians need help with. It's also what people keep building physician support tools to do. Because it's easy. Note the article gives away that they seem to be working on (b), although the hype machine - as always - implicitly suggests they're working on (a).

I want (a). I was involved with a couple of patients recently that had their amyloid cardiomyopathy missed. I decided to refresh myself on the topic. The first sentence in the relevant text was "The key to diagnosing amyloid cardiomyopathy is remembering that it exists." (a) could have helped those patients. (b) could not - if their original physicians - any of them - had "remember[ed] it exists" he would not have needed AI to help diagnose it. It would have been trivial. Those docs didn't even make a mistake, per se - it's such a stupidly rare condition and, in those patients, manifested so subtly, that connecting the dots was reasonably unreasonable. That's where AI would be helpful. Not "does this kid have (obvious and common and extremely easily identified condition)?"
Not my own, it actually came from a forum for Kerbal space program players who've installed a mod that changes things to a 1:1 scale model of the real solar system.
I am happy as long as I can plug-in old versions of the interpreter in a system 10 years from now as easily as I could plug-in my VHS recorder into the TV. Might be able to do that if I install a windows version of python on Wine, there is a good chance (~100%) that the dependencies of python on Linux will not remain compatible that long.
BILLIONS of people watch the World Cup and Olympics, the super bowl attracts about 115M

The Super Bowl is one event. World Cup is dozens of events. The Olympics are hundreds of events.
Why data, not privacy, is the real danger
Stage fright didn’t involve having an app in the Play store. The review process is non existent, and static analysis tools wouldn’t catch it anyway.
Well that's half his argument on the stats: the other half suggests that even assuming modern figures are accurate it's tendentious to claim that people are no longer in poverty simply because their estimated incomes have reached the heady heights of ~$2 in US purchasing power per day, and implies the low level of poverty line has been deliberately selected to paint a rosy picture. There's little doubt that many other indicators are moving in positive directions but it's rather less clear that education and healthcare improvements are the product of the benefits of increased local market competition and global capital mobility (the author attributes them to state spending and [slow] adoption of technological advances the developed world saw a long time ago). That becomes important when one notes that the proportion of the world earning less than $10 per day is actually rising (due in part to population growth being boosted by increased survival rates) despite developing and middle income countries being better educated and more productive than ever before. Again, there are tenable arguments that due to the weaknesses of PPP calculations, many living on $10 per day live lifestyles that certainly don't resemble poverty, but others do and the unavoidable shortcoming of methods comparing people with vastly different living conditions, expectations and means of earning them is part of the problem with pure Pinker optimism.

I'm also suspicious of apocalypse narratives and suspect I'd disagree with the blog author on many things, but I'm also suspicious of unqualified feelgood narratives in order to promote support for a particular world order
Build a Neuron
Typically, personal spyware apps are removed from both apple store and play store. That includes apps for abusive or jealous western partners that were meant to limit freedom of their partners.

You will be surprised I guess, but I would take issue with app that facilitates genocide in Yemen. As people did. People do take issue with IBM facilitating Nazi project during wwii. I would take issue with app that notifies Islamic State or whatever militia in Syria when high target leaves.

Putting pressure on stores to take away apps that do any of the above is fine by me. Because again, there is big difference between taking Saudi money and doing business with them on one hand and distributing spyware designed to limit freedom of victim and facilitate violence against her.
A plant grown from a cutting is indeed a clone. It is the actual tissue of the original plant, just grown out. Same DNA as the original plant. Only, you use clever techniques to stimulate undifferentiated cells to produce roots.

One of the linked articles, however, shows plants growing in little plastic jars. This looks like "tissue culture", which takes a plant cell sample and causes it to grow in a culture medium. But, still, it's cells from the parent plant grown out.
Is this what you were referring to?

~$250 billion USD worth of wash trading leading to arrests at Upbit (https://thenews.asia/en/2018/12/21/upbit-accused-of-fraud-wi...)
What would concern me is if they did managed to get people to Mars, then went bankrupt, leaving no new supplies being sent across.
I am wondering who is providing the information? Vultr list their "Dedicated" as 8 CPU, when it is not dedicated by Cloud VM, which I presume it is shared. And its CPU are not CPU Core but CPU Threads.

These differences make the comparison a harder. Because in Dedicated you talk Core count, in Cloud VM you talk Thread Count ( vCPU ).
49? That's the same as Normandy, France.

I've lived for 10+ years at 59 degrees (Stockholm, Sweden) and never seen one clearly, even though I'm a night owl and watch the aurora reports, and none of the people I knew had ever seen one in that area. Where I am now at 50 degrees noone would even consider looking for them, it's so far south.
The long-term solution is to move away from binary blobs. The PostmarketOS project is trying to achieve this for at least a few hardware models, including most notably the LG Nexus 5.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen more climate related disasters in the past year than in the previous 5 before that.
Except technology is amoral, it's up to the engineer and others to use it ethically and morally. The internet can organize hate groups and it can organize voters. smh.
I agree. For me it isn’t even that - if an app can save me 5 minutes of time per week it is easily worth $5. Or if it is an app I use every day, if the experience is that much better it is worth the subscription to me.
>You provide a certain input and you get a certain output. When you provide the same input again and again, you get the same output. This is very different in the brain. In the brain, even if you choose the exact same stimulus, the response varies from trial to trial.

>Where does this variable response in the brain come from?

>There are various hypotheses. There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission.

Maybe I am looking too much into a very simple example, but I disagree with it. The brain has recurrence and memory. The first time you show me something I react differently than the second time you show me it. Time has passed, my brain has acquired tons of feedback information, I have an idea of what it is before you show me again. If you have even the most simple models that incorporate memory (such as higher order Markov chains), they will react differently too.
I mean I've been on the job market for a long time now. I'd actually prefer some kind of full time commitment over doing boring CRUD apps. But it's just not a good deal. Interview process is either too painful, compensation is too low, or the job is too meaningless.
That's what I don't get. This seems to be true in a more general sense as well. Amazon just keeps pushing things out at an insane rate. Be it through acquisitions or native dev.

Google Assistant for example is mostly superior to Alexa. Yes, Alexa technically has more connected device options. But not really that much any more. They are just really good at somehow capturing markets.

AWS is more extreme still. In many ways GCP is technically superior. I suppose a lot of it is first mover advantage on Amazons part. But some of it the perception people have of Google not supporting stuff. Which might be true for beta software and consumer products. But is not at all worse than other clouds for commercial (paid) offerings.

Off topic: Amazon also seems to dodge the brunt of the press onslaught tech firms have been receiving for the last two or three years (mostly deserved, yes). But Amazon is arguable worse in regards to monopolistic behavior and probably equal with regards to privacy.

I get the feeling Google is held to a higher standard because of perceived political stance. While they often publicly take a stance for one issue or another while Amazon simply ignores everything acts more like a a business of old: completely devoid of any politics.

A similar thing is seen in investor relations. Amazon generally seems to get more leeway in regards to capital expenditure. They invest like crazy in all sorts of ventures. As does Alphabet. But analysts only seem to reprimand Alphabet for that. It seems obvious that with Amazons entrance into advertising, and if Google doesn't somehow catch up in the cloud space or looses it's arguable lead in AI then Amazon (and Microsoft I guess) will eventually take over all of IT within the next 10 or 20 years.

My possible personal biases: I like what Alphabet is doing with it's other bets. The crazy stuff. Stuff that doesn't make immediate business sense. Also, and this is unpopular, I like that their taking a political stance in some cases. I like to believe that the founders are actually in it for more than money.
There’s a similar distinction between most C++ development and dropping to low-level placement new, mallocs/frees, handwritten assembly or heavy use of intrinsics. You rarely need the latter, and, once wrapped, when used by the former is quite safe. The difference is that Rust was designed with this in mind.

I like Rust; I’ve done some coding challenges in it. It won’t replace C++ for me for quite some time, but it’s about time there was a safe, powerful language that’s truly a worthy contender.
So daydream. Such a company doesn't exist.
Daycare just costs money, and not everyone needs daycare. So why not "money for all"?
> Do you think the word "rational" in rational actor, rational investor and rational market, has exactly the same meaning?

Rational actor and rational investor, the same. Rational market, different. But I only know the term "rational market" through its use in the fixed expression "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

> Do you think as people commonly understand these terms (I don't mean economists) the answer would be the same?

I guess I can't really speak to this.
> Something about the look of those engines in the wing roots with not a nacelle in sight.

Quite a few early jetliners lacked normal nacelles.
Mildly? It got sold for GBP10M in 1999 but I had been out of it for about a year by that point (and I didn't have any equity anyway.)
We also have been wrong in the past about the end of poverty and the gap between countries. These predictions usually focus just in technology improvements, ignoring politics, both internal as international.
For all intents and purposes, a byte should be 8 bits. Standardization is good. All those ancient systems should just die, at this point.
$0.00. Fortnite bypasses Apple IAP.
You can make an unguided, explosive-filled rocket that can harm people for cheap from scrap. Insurgents throughout the world have done so for the past 40 years. That may not be as simple as Add To Cart, but it is well within the economic means of almost everyone.
Google and Facebook should be regulated for news content, UK government report
> 3. I need clarification. Are you saying that a major version >= 1 of a dependency you rely upon in production returns a sorted list, but then a new bugfix version now outputs an unsorted list?

Not OP, but I believe they are saying that the API happens to return a sorted list (either for their particular inputs, or in general), but this was never a guarantee of the API (and was presumably not covered by tests), and so the package maintainers changed the implementation to no longer return a sorted list (maybe they found a faster algorithm).

I have to say that I think this is a good case for having tests that are tied to particular versions, like in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138853

Or perhaps in this specific case the user of the library will add the test (to their own codebase) that checks the output is always sorted, and it will fail to upgrade to a version where this isn't true. In general I'd be pretty happy to see people write tests for the subset of behavior they require from a library, although I appreciate that's potentially a whole lot of work, particularly in ecosystems without property-based testing.
And there are even more people (myself included) who lived through part of the Cold War and realise that we just got through that period by sheer luck and the good judgement of a handful of people on both sides.
As I understand it, the flashing breaks a chain of trust. Once a device has booted from software written by others, your own software can never again be truly confident that it is in full control.

It was written to flash by untrusted software, it may have been modified on the way such that it thinks it's unmodified, such that the signatures match when it checks itself, but actual execution uses a modification by that untrusted code.

It's a bit like that paper about modifying the compiler. https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

From the owner's point of view, being able to update the ROM is the manufacturer's statement that nothing done by a user with physical access survives.
> - While some measures have improved, the picture is no where near as good as it is represented.

Name a measure of human suffering that has not improved. Healthy lifespan, deaths in childbirth, infant mortality, they’ve all gotten better.

> - Using $1.90 as the baseline to beat is too low for what we would consider as being out of poverty.

The trend is the same regardless of which poverty line you pick. Poverty is decreasing, education, literacy and health are rising.

> - Most economic successes have not been due to neoliberal markets but rather state-led industrial policy, protectionism and regulation.

Indeed, in every state where they’ve followed an industrial policy of “Let’s do capitalism.” poverty has decreased, whether with heavy handed government economic intervention like Japan or Korea or just leaving business alone like Hong Kong. If protectionism worked Argentina would have a car industry. They tried for 30 years. It doesn’t.

> - Most quality of life improvements have not been due to neoliberal globalization but simple public interventions including free healthcare and education.

The UN’s human development index is 70% explained by GDP per capita. Poor countries can’t afford good policy and capitalism is the proven way to escape poverty.

> - Progress is slowing relative to the resources available to tackle the problem.

As far as absolute poverty goes, maybe, kind of. The countries that have shown no real improvement are the ones with no real government or state capacity. Everywhere else is in the process of escaping absolute poverty or has done so. These are the countries that do not work, mostly in Africa. We just have to work towards integrating them into the global economy so they can grow. One hopes the nearby example of Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa or Nigeria will help, as they grow their way out of poverty.
Many of those images were also published in O'Neill's book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colon...
According to media coverage, Apple put the UPI integration on hold due to "regulatory issues". That's mainly RBI data localization requirements ([1] on your list).
Android system updates are monolithic OS images. So what are you going to do exactly, replace the user's custom ROM with a stock system?
Namecheap Special Offer: $5.88 “.COM” Domain Name, Valentine’s Day Sale 2019
That’s literally one of the jobs of government, to step in when the private sector does not regulate itself well enough to protect consumer interests. It’s not about wanting the government to step in, its about having no other recourse.
This is the oddest argument in the article, I think. No one claims the data are perfect or identical before 1981, but it’s what we have and it’s used. I think it’s acceptable to provide an alternate proxy. Or to critique the methods rigorously. But it is frustrating when a rhetorical trick is used to point out how the pre-1981 data are different than 1981, that is known by anyone reading Pinker, and then throw out all pre-1981 data and claim it is meaningless. And even more strangely, that poverty during this period is just unknowable.

I would think that the best way to critique this is to develop some other method of proxying poverty rate that doesn’t show drops. Later in the article, the author shows this with the $7.90 poverty rate, but only from 1981.
> It's pretty obvious that the Chinese government is "wrong" on this one.

I don't think it is that obvious. Particularly if you take into account China's long history
Looks like I misread the post, thinking it said Taiwan was not a country. Not quite as terrible but still not ideal, freshly-created accounts for such.