skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I try to abide by a simple principle:

Manipulate computers, don't manipulate people.

To a programmer, a computer is a dutiful servant and nothing more. As much as programming colors my thoughts and provides intellectual delight, it would be troubling to find myself treating other people the way I regularly treat computers.

Tools work on the behalf of users. If you write software that uses people, it has ceased to be a tool. You've written a trap.
It's fine to be upset at my point of view and implied experience within this area. I understand 100%. There are some coding mistakes that cannot be tested or caught during development and deployment. These can be exploited. There are however some that appear to be mistakes and are allowed or missed during the process.

This is a great website for freely expressing opinions, truth, lies and such!

Peace be with you.
Sure. But did you look at the website he linked? When your ad copy focuses on "maximizing user engagement", I know you're not on the side of the angels.
The only folks I ever here say "the right tool for the job" are Java devs. /s

In all seriousness, people using non-mainstream languages are very attached to them. At least in my sample size of one.
Nassem Taleb is an arrogant asshole who can't write. I tried reading "The Black Swan" and gave up in a flurry of swearing after less than 100 pages because he utterly failed to justify any of his breathless assertions with anything resembling an argument. Assertion after assertion with no reasoning linking them. Game to Silver on points. At least he can back up his arguments with explanations.
From a business perspective, the volatility of Silver's models seem like a feature - they enhance the drama / sensationalism of election coverage. One week, he's telling me candidate X will likely win, the next week it's candidate Y, and I'm on the edge of my seat.

If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted.
Agreed. If you're allergic to paywalls the last thing you want to do is drive traffic towards them
Considering Germany is the one that first proposed it, I'd say the chances of that happening are quite slim. You're better off convincing several other countries to vote against it.
Unwelcome Gaze – Vladimir Mitrović
It only passed in the parliament, hasn't passed the council yet (bicameral legislature like in the US and many other countries).
It's fun to check out http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Home.htm and http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Ahl/DHA.htm every once in a while.
Money just have value because society (be it government or just a group of people) need to accept it so it has value.

Either government makes it mandatory ("everybody must accept dollar bills as payment"), or people accept them at free will ("I will give you this horse if you give me 3 sheeps").
Wow. That will come as quite a surprise to the dozens of Fortune 50 companies out there using it as part of their core systems, let alone all the smaller companies and startups.

Source: Worked as a consultant almost exclusively in Clojure for the past 10 years.
But there is a difference between an opinion, like the earnest word of mouth bit concerning personal experience, and people paid entirely too much to convince strangers how incomplete they are. There was a lot of history before Bernays taught the western world to underestimate the universe. A return to landscapes free of billboards could be as therapeutic as aesthetic, but we'll never know that again.
For hosting a Firebase app, with the hosting rewrites (like: https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/cloud-run), what regions is this available in?

Is it just us-central?
A Local LRU Cache
I like the idea of leveraging our already powerful sense of vision and pattern matching to communicate the weather but I feel like this does more to hinder understanding than it does to facilitate it.

If you're going to use a visual language, why not use one that people already know and recognize instead of introducing new patterns/symbols that you have to learn?
I think overall 538 did a pretty good job of communicating a difficult subject to a lay audience, but agree this point could perhaps be communicated better.

I don't know of a good way to try and capture these sort of events meaningfully, do you?
Light pollution in modern cities is truly a shame, and I wonder if we can even do anything about it.

If self-driving cars become universal, will this mean we can do away with headlights and most streetlights? We'd need to actually ban human drivers before that point. Seems quite far fetched.
> Both elections saw the US electing someone against whom the actual majority of voters voted.

And with the proposal here we would still end up with the US electing someone against whom the actual majority of voters voted. This proposal fixes nothing. In fact, it makes things even worse, since - again - the state might very well be actively going against its own voters.

> The only other options would be far heavier overhauls of the voting system

There are plenty of other options that are just as possible:

- Allocating electors by congressional district (this is what Maine and Nebraska already do)

- Allocation electors by electoral district

- Allocating electors proportionally (e.g. if - state-wide - 60% of voters vote for A and 40% vote for B, then 60% of EC electors will vote for A and 40% of EC electors will vote for B)

Proportional allocation of EC votes would be gerrymandering-resistant (since there'd be no creatively-drawn districts involved) and would be a more accurate representation of the will of the people of that state. It would allow, for example, Democrats in otherwise-Republican-dominated states (e.g. Houston v. the rest of Texas) to be represented electorally (and likewise allow the same for Republicans in otherwise-Democrat-dominated states like California). If an actual "fix" for our electoral system is what you seek, then that'd be the best option by pretty much every metric.
Thanks, however, it seems limited to 12 months only, which is usually the initial prototyping phase of a product prior to launching. Also, feels strange to have to be in some type of program and beg for mercy with a contact person in order to alleviate the extremely strange behavior of permanent cancellation by algorithms. What if the contact person we have gotten to know have moved on to a different business etc? Feels unreliable.
Google's entire privacy policy is laid out in (by the standards of other documents I've seen) very digestible language. https://policies.google.com/privacy#intro

Beyond that, it's a trust and a penalties-for-violating-policy exercise.

And I agree with you: you can probably tell volumes about how much a company cares about the risk factors based on who they trust. But I don't generally think companies are being ignorant placing their chips on Google---it's a big org with a lot to lose if something goes wrong. That gives it advantages over either smaller competitors or rolling one's own (factoring in that to match the security of a dedicated service's cloud offering while approaching the convenience of such an offering, you basically have to hire your own full-attack-surface-spectrum infosec team, and that's one more line item in a small company's budget).
According to the review the software has been confirmed vulnerable to publicly known issues via old public software. From here we could compare the number of the severity of the issues... but we already know they don't care about fixing those, so there will be more. What can be worse than this without being malicious?
React native firebase 5.3.0 released
My open office does not. I would love to be able to book one of those for an afternoon on a regular basis.
As a side note: it has gotten to a point where I don’t want to read blog post hosted on Medium, like this one. When I open the page, there are 2 banners on top (Download app, privacy notice) and a huge one below (sign-up!), which leaves 50% of the viewport for the article. So annoying...
That's not apples-to-apples.

To make that fair, they would have to lobby against E-File.
"Works in China" as an unqualified statement is useless, equally "ExpressVPN does not work in China."

Are you in Beijing or Shanghai? Are you on China Telecom or China Mobile? Are you using the Sweden 2 or the Hongkong 3 server? Every permutation of those variables can have a different answer, and that answer can change from day-to-day.

My experience is that in southern provinces and bigger cities it is _more likely_ to work at any given time. But things change.

> However, self-hosted is much faster still. Unfortunately, it's less reliable.

Using a CN2 VPS is definitely a :racecar: in my experience. I primarily use shadowsocks instead of a proper VPN because moving to a different port when the interference starts is usually sufficient.
Ask HN: Documentation to QA Bot?
Just add your Documentation Text and you ask questions from it (example: How do i do this, Can you support this? etc). You don't have to give any question-answer pairs, the system learns from the text and gives the best answer for a question, so basically no training required. Does it sound useful as a product?
if the public owns the legal text under a copyright then some 3rd party cant use that text to make money, and eventually claim it as thier own works, due to formatting, and secretarial time requireing offsetting revenue.
I thought that bit was very well-expressed. Let’s see if I can explain what I think I understood by it...

If you’re buying and selling bets on a range of events, you can only be immune from arbitrage if all your bets are mutually consistent. For example, if you’re offering 3:1 odds on event X, you can’t offer more than 1:3 on the complementary event ~X (where exactly one of X and ~X must happen). That’s pretty obvious, but there a lot of much trickier variations.

“Nate Silver has a probability model” just means his forecasts are derived from a self-consistent model about the probabilities of all the micro-events that make up the election. That fits with the information FiveThirtyEight have published about their methods, so it seems correct to me.

One way Silver’s model could be invalid is if there’s just a bug, and a single event is tracked in multiple inconsistent ways. For example, if the model unknowingly projected odds for the same politician in both the presidential election and a senate seat, without accounting for the fact that you can’t win both at once. But if that’s the criticism Taleb is making, he should be able to put his finger on a specific bug, which he doesn’t seem to have done.

Another way Silver could be wrong is if his models are far too volatile, so you know if the probabilities shoot up or down a long way they’ll almost certainly revert to the mean again. I imagine you could run arbitrage against that.

It’s far from clear that that’s the case, though. It could be that his models are volatile but still pretty close to reality, in which case just betting against every big swing in Silver’s model would be like trying to make money by predicting day-today movement on the stock market.
That seems like a pretty big difference to gloss over. Why are they publishing probabilities for if the event were to happen today? The event isn't happening today!
Piketty's extensive data on global wages raises serious questions about Pinker's narrative. And if there is still doubt Pinker's data sources [1] and interpretation are questionable to say the least.

Here is Pinker himself admitting his selective use of data [2] Watch his answer at 4.30. This is extremely poor use of stats, and makes him look a side character apologist in Hunger Games.

And here is an even more substantial criticism of Pinker's approach by Leon Wieseltier in the newrepublic [3].

[1] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAQ0BfcftBA

[3] https://newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-respo...
In a situation like this the best action is to install a puppet who you can blackmail. Then use them to push policies you find favorable to you.
All the rising anti-Chinese sentiment I've seen seems mostly geopolitical and not ethnic.
This really is great news. I had the feeling that nanobox lost a bit of momentum. So I hope this means new updates and features.
GCP is half the costs of AWS. Azure is more expensive than both but I don't have enough experience with it to judge exactly by how much.

Any report comparing the 3 purely based on revenues should be taken as a joke.
I, too, have used Clojure as my primary language across three startups and 10 years, and despite my great affection for the language and community, I have told no lies here.
Seems a market that is ripe for Tesla's entry into it with the Model 3. That might be why they're getting so much Chinese government sponsorship.
Yeah, "extremely possible" is perhaps a poor choice of words, and could be interpreted uncharitably as a hedge against any outcome, but I think there's an obvious charitable interpretation too: that things that have a 20% chance of occurring turn out to occur around 20% of the time. No one would be blown away by surprise if I proclaimed "SIX!" then rolled a six-sided die and got a six, but that's even less likely than 20%.

So it's reasonable to say that, if 538 claims that an event has a 20% probability of happening, and that event happens, no one should be astonished. Of course, such events ought to happen about 20% of the time, if 538's models are good. And that evaluation is precisely what 538 published a few days ago: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/
Hah! Now I learned about this product from you! Thank you!! (Can't drink boza right now, keeping the carbs down, but surely friends would appreciate it!)
Maybe they'll tell me I'm wrong, but Netlify strikes me as not targeting people who need a "whole cloud infrastructure" (since they don't offer many services), but a static site with a few simple backend functions.
Article 11 is a protection against massive content theft by large companies against smaller ones. A great example is what happened here: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet...

Additionally, "legacy news" are losing money because tech companies are shifting profits from ads on those news sites to their own platforms. Here's a chart showing how Google has shifted the ad revenue balance since 2004: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1055606344559063040

Essentially, it used to be that Google provided a real service to these news companies, by providing an ad network where both news organizations and Google could profit. But over time, they've shifted their ad revenue away from the model that requires they share it to ads that they alone profit from. This has slowly but surely bled journalism dry.
Influential Nodes in Worldwide Terror Networks
There are always engineering solutions to such things, but I don't think most of the decisions are made in terms of "it's possible". There is always a risk/reward conversation, and a lot of conservatism in systems currently processing a large number of transaction and/or $ successfully. Perceived risk may or may not be analyzed correctly, mind.
Porting old posts, part 1
You can definitely do deliveries by bike. They do it in my city currently.
"Humor" is extremely dependent on culture, which is heavily influenced by TV. Why does every laugh-track sitcom try to model itself on Friends? Because it has the sort of characters and humor that's relatable and funny to Americans.

Because Friends is also a global hit, and popular among a generation of teens and 20s, people who weren't born when the show first aired, you can actually learn a lot about the small things about social interactions and conversational arcs watching sitcoms, than you would sitting in a social etiquette class.

I've noticed this effect is especially strong among non-native English speakers who watched English sitcoms. Their vocabulary, cadence of speech etc
are much more natural sounding compared to others who weren't familiar with any TV shows here beyond news programs.
Microsoft will not let me go past 16 on my O365 email.

Msft employees: change this!
As someone who has spent years trading in forecasting tournaments, I worry this characterization might be misinterpreted as saying know nothingism is correct and we should give up on predicting the future. (Not that you meant it that way, of course.)

It's true that "amateurs" can consistently beat "experts". But not all amateurs - only some. This suggests to me there is true prediction expertise, but our system that attaches labels of "expert" does not select for it.

Prediction is very much a skill and some people are very much better than others. We just don't regularly measure or select for it explicitly.
If that's a reference to typescript, it can also be used as a backend language with node. That may contribute to the growth, too.
This is really addictive! I made 52 rooms! what are the best scores? How far can I go?
Could Transcranial Brain Stimulation Help Sharpen Memory?
That would suggest that there is such a thing as a "good" analytics company.

From my perspective as and end user, why would it be desirable for me to facilitate the "analytics companies" business model?

Sure, far-reaching blacklists are probably bad for analytics companies across the board, regardless of their intent. But as an end user, why should I care?
Germany is busy building Putin pipeline to bypass all other EU countries, and will vote whatever France tells them to vote in exchange for the support.
It was “GOSUB” if I remember correctly!! Ah good old times!!
A lot of people are very happy to pay for generic junk.

If anything, this is an underestimated problem in art, music, and engineering. Digital tools make it much easier to crank out generic junk, which adds a lot of noise to the output space, which makes it harder for truly original work to be noticed or valued.

AI feels like it will be the natural limit of that process. The SNR will drift towards zero. Everything will become noise.
yes, but how? I researched this idea before, didn’t find any good QA model.
I'm glad these guys are working on the problem but I'm sorry this article makes it seem like these guys suddenly discovered this problem.

Jim Warren is the reason all of the California code was opened up and put online in the 1990s.

Carl Malamud has been working on this for decades, and among other things is the reason SEC filings are all online. He's been working hard on building codes for many years too. His nonprofit is Public.Resource.Org

Another nonprofit, free.law, has several programs to free up other legal resources needed to understand the law.
Ahh those were the days. I once sent a WinPopup message to every computer in the school board. So thousands probably.

As an idiot I used my account and immediately got suspended.
The problems you outline do not need AI to exist; see Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc for those phenomenons at play in the wild.

And so the answer to your questions are clear: there are people who, for a paycheck big enough, a title fancy enough, are willing to completely ignore the harmful effects that their vision and execution imposes on communities, individuals, democracies.

The interesting problems in tech now include how to build tools and systems to make people aware of how they are being messed with, and fight back.
Classification vs. Prediction
That's a really neat solution to this issue! Added benefit is that if a camera is found, Airbnb has a simple criteria to weed out the bad eggs.
Essentially, these news companies can't figure out how to reach more people, and because of that, they decided that others have to pay them for what they don't do. I'd call that extortion. It's the same level of stupidity as "blank media tax" and other similar extortion ideas.

Linking is not infringing anything, and should not be taxable. All this "massive theft" whining is complete bunk.
The U.S. used to primarily have for-profit firefighting. Switching to a state-run system drove out the commercial providers. And that's by all accounts, a wonderful thing.

Business for the sake of business is not necessarily good. If the business does not provide real value any longer, it shouldn't exist.
The book is a lot of worksheets and sections for individual problems. Think of it a textbook.

That said, it's still pretty good in audio-book format.
Tufte CSS works great for tabular data and print stylesheets too. I used it for Instant Pot Cooking Times (https://cookingtimes.info).
The point was, how do you know it has value if you can't figure out why anyone would buy it?

I was genuinely curious. A perfectly fine answer would have been "I try and sell everything, because I don't know if it has value to someone". But failing that, you had to have decided to try it for some reason....
Facebook’s AI team maps the whole population of Africa
I know, right? Every time my meteorologist gives me a probability of rain on a day that it doesn't rain I ask the same question.
That went to grammarly advertising real quick.
That is fascinating, impressive, inspirational - thank you for the link & the article.

And yet, it's also demotivating to the point of being depressing. Clicking through the chain of links culminating with Polen and Racket, the sheer depth of the stack required, the learning & work, to create beautiful digital+printed books, feels like it has much to be desired :-/
Russ Roberts invited them both to discuss their differences on econtalk- Nassim promptly declined. Until that happens, I think the twitter feud is without value.
That was done intentionally to insulate the smaller/less populated states from the control of larger/more populated states.
This may be the Apple II of AI-driven robot arms
The television will not be revolutionised.
Yes you are subject to laws you cannot legally know about. Check out Gilmore v. Gonzales: the case was dismissed as the law was classified so could not be discussed in court!
You should look at who backed the Vietnam. The Silent Generation and Greatest Generation where isolationists. Boomers only started protesting after the draft and the Tet offensive.
AI can infer information about data that does not appear in the training set, depending on the actual tech being used and what you are calling "new data".

An easy to grasp example from a while back in NLP is word embeddings.

We started out with vectors for each word in the training corpus, which meant we had no information for words outside of the training set, like you say.

Then people came up with "character n-grams", which built vectors for substrings, which allowed us to encode information for words outside of the training corpus based on the vectors of the constituent substrings.

You could imagine a system that could deliberate across levels of abstraction to find lines of analogical reasoning to connect things together in novel ways that people would find surprising and interesting in similar ways to human creative output, since it's all computation either way, but who knows how far away we could be from making such a system that could actually generate reasonable, surprising outputs.
Feels anti-competitive to have defaults to block mining while not having default enabled advert blocking.

I'm much happier for a site to mine on their tab while I'm watching a video than to show me 2 minutes of advertisements every 10 minutes. On mobile in particular, where video ads end up eating a large chunk of my data costs.
These two idiots are used to winning arguments by saying they know the most math. Now they're cancelling each other out.