skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Enjoyable read.

I don't feel like anyone ever addresses the fact that the initial web was modeled after academia, and yet most people were really just looking for a place to share their identity. The (free) companies stepped in to make the web accessible to them.

We're all angry at the broken promise of what the web could be and yet most people I know have shuttered their accounts in the negative nether regions of the internet. Facebook is a ghost town. Twitter was one presidential election from going under. Instagram is thriving because there's little direct communication (or hate communication).

And things are starting to happen again for the decentralized web. People are blogging again on their own sites (including ditching medium). Github has been a boon for collaboration and now is starting to help open science. New social media platforms are popping up too (e.g. Mastadon).

how will it shake out? no clue... but I do think that it will shake out for the better.
For encoding there shouldn't be a format specific difference. If there is, it is based on immaturity of the implementations. There were stages when brotli:0 used to be faster to compress than any setting in zstd, but now they have played catch-up and are the leader.

Zstd can be significantly slower in medium levels -- you just need not to be tricked to apply compressors at different window sizes. Zstd changes window sizes under the hood. With brotli you need to explicitly decide about your decoding resource use.

If you use the same window size and aim for the same density of compression, brotli actually tends to compress faster in the middle qualities, too.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...

Noam Chomsky has this to say:

"It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers."
Yeah I noticed that too. Best guess is they assigned some random "tech guy" to "put it online" and they must not have a standard for this kind of document? Doesn't seem like it's a good choice as surely that's terrible future proofing?
Crap is what is not used I'd say. Also there is actually little need of buying stuff fresh from the shelves of Donki and the likes.
I mostly agree with you that lying is generally considered speech (and I wouldn't want the government to necessarily censor in the way Facebook is doing here) but lying that causes panic is not considered speech: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...
The entire country of Venezuela for instance?
Ask HN: What are your favorite software products to use and why?
In any class - could be an operating system, desktop application, website, language, library, framework, mobile app, IDE etc.
wtf someone flag this
Was this flagged off the front page?
Unfortunately no SSL, so I won't be enabling JS.
People so often forget the shooting of a sitting congressmen at a baseball game just a short time ago. It didn't last as long in the news cycle as the white nationalist that ran over a woman in Charlottesville did. Granted, nobody died at the baseball game that i'm aware of.
Setting up a C++ project environment with nix
Wait, what would be the problem of operating under their own political leanings? That's exactly the point--Facebook has decided that they oppose hate speech and will not host it. That's a political decision, and that's okay.
What if your ISP doesn't care for security researchers or journalists, and therefore would like to terminate their internet access? Can a telephone company do the same? What about the electric company - they are often times privately owned after all.

What if they don't care for people who are gay, or from a specific country?

Could Facebook say, choose to ban all Christians or anyone who believes in a two state solution in the middle east?
I think social media does far better when it isn’t political media. One of the reasons HN and LinkedIn are the only two forms of social media I personally use today is exactly the fact that the absence of politics on both platforms make them tolerable.

The internet and politics in general seem to be a truly bad combination. I think it’s understandable too, because it’s just so much easier to say radical hurtful stuff when you don’t have to witness the devastating effect of your words in person. I mean, can you even imagine calling the parent, of a child who was mass-murdered, out to be an actor paid by George Soros face to face? You would have to be stone cold dead inside to do that, and I really doubt a lot of the alt-righters are that evil. On the internet though, it’s as easy as ordering a pizza.

I think platforms should be held accountable for the content they host, even if it’s produced by their users. I know that’s not a popular opinion on HN, but the fact is that Facebook has been used to organise genocide and that just shouldn’t happen.
This post appeared to instantly drop from position 1 on the front page to position 32-33 on the second page of HN just a moment ago.

What could cause such a dramatic and sudden drop, especially for a link that seems politically neutral (just sharing the report, no editorializing), and most of the comments seem to be about the redaction process...?
says who? they are people that no one voted for that decide for us what's hate speech and what is not.
Tried this for a few minutes at work (very heavy SQL Server shop). It doesn't play well with databases that have different schemas but the same table name.

schema1.users

schema2.users

schema3.users

schema4.users

The auto-complete seems to always choose the last one and it displays it as 'users' with no indication of the schema. This alone makes this unusable for me at the present time
Social media is a slow acting poison. It's extensive damaging effects will only be felt in 10-20 years. For the most part, it amplifies all the negative traits of humanity, twitter encourages ad hominem style debates and substanceless statements from all strata of soceity. Instagram/FB takes the need for human validation and the need to keep pretenses among our peers to a global scale. The next generation will be much more comfortable behind a screen where they can maintain an illusory persona than in real life. This is not taking into accounts the addictive nature of social media in general and how they employ research scientists to work on making their products more addictive.
The Information's 2019 VC Diversity Index
Former employer was paying $1200/mo + $40k install for 100/100 fiber via wave business. This was for around a 1.5 mile off of the main highway install.
IIUC the Kurdish YPG are anarcho-communists and have killed a lot of ISIS fighters.
But isn't the problem that a lot of airports (like Heathrow and Schipol) are operating at capacity? So the only way to get more capacity is to increase the size of each individual aircraft.
...on April 18 [2017], Kori Ali Muhammad, a 39-year-old African-American man, was arrested and charged with killing three people in a shooting in Fresno, California. Police said they believed race was a factor in the murders and Muhammad's social media presence included Black Nationalist posts. Muhammad's father said his son believed he was part of a war between whites and blacks and that "a battle was about to take place."
Thankfully there is now the SMS Retriever API that lets you do this without having access to all messages, and the Play Store no longer allows apps that require this permission without SMS handling being a core functionality of the app.
$209 for junk....when a perfectly good series 3 aw can be had for $199
> I've never seen any popular candidates talk about changing the voting systems.

Popular candidates are the ones that get elected. By definition. So yes, trying to push forward better candidates supported by a party the support of which will automatically raise their profile is the way to fix the problem. Plus, as noted, voting for the changes you want (including reforming voting & districting, if that's your thing) at levels closer to home, where non-big-two candidates or oddballs within the big two might actually win.

How have we reformed elections in the past, against the wishes of entrenched, powerful groups? Replace or win over one of the big two parties (the latter is easier—the former's rarely worked) and push your candidates forward. The Democrats have a strong incentive right now to get rid of gerrymandering, for instance. There are local and state level movements to reform voting—it's mostly a state-level issue—so try to get some initiatives on the ballot. Work with that. One step at a time. Voting Green or Libertarian or whatever for President or Senator's simply pointless, good feels aside—though only barely more pointless than any other vote for a federal office, under the current system. It just doesn't matter.

Feel good, or get something done? For the former, keep on voting however you like. For the latter, work to change the ballot. Initiatives/referendums and influencing candidate selection in the big two. You can try other stuff, but those are the first things you should look at if you're serious about getting things done.

The basic principles are 1) the earlier you're involved in the process (e.g. influencing who's running, what's on the ballot) the more effective you're likely to be, 2) the more you're swimming downstream the better (if you can work in one of the big two, 100% you should), and 3) the smaller scale the election, the more likely you can affect the outcome (obviously).
Many platforms have been doing this. It's likely because the majority of tech folks are left leaning, whether leadership in the company or audience. It's basic marketing.

I'm not sad that some of these really hateful people are blocked, that's a given. But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be considered hate speech.
Downsides of using screen sharing solutions in customer support
This review from USENIX Enigma 2019 might be interesting for you. They tested over 80,000 of the most popular Android apps to examine what data they access and with whom they share it, how mobile apps are tracking and profiling users, how these practices are often against users' expectations and public disclosures, and how app developers may be violating various privacy regulations.

Some numbers from the presentation

- the "GPS icon" is visible for only 0.04% of actual accesses to location data

- of 42000 apps transmitting personal information, 21000 (50%) don't use TLS and send data unencrypted

- 1,325 apps that don't have location permission, actually obtain street-level location data and transmit it home

https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2019/presentation/eg...
Selfie Deaths Are an Epidemic
Good, teach children they're being tracked as early as possible. Turn them into good citizens of the surveillance state. Maybe we can share the data to some advertising companies, to improve their ads experience throughout the day. Turn them into good citizens of the consumerism state.

Edit: I'm sorry for the sarcasm, these kinds of products make me very sad.
Looks to be removed from mine as well.
Most likely it got flagged. Articles involving politics tend to get flagged on HN.
That sounds reasonable to me, as long as donations can be specifically earmarked for helping needy people or charity work.

Paying a pastor a median wage (if he’s full time—many have a job besides pastoring), having a building to meet in, and helping needy people in the church adds up quickly. For small and/or rural congregations, that might be most or all of what they can manage.
I'm not convinced by ActivityPub. A lot of people seem to think that it's cool but the documentation makes it look like it's just a schema for social media applications. It might be an obvious move to try to standardize social media platforms because they all involve roughly the same kinds of user activities. Interoperability is cool, I agree. But the ActivityPub documentation has a whiff of the old XML/"semantic web" hype about it. It's verbose, unnecessarily object-oriented, and it doesn't seem to advance any kind of new or interesting vision for the architecture of these interconnected systems.

I get that somebody probably needed to do this work of standardization. As a project it seems to lack imagination, though. There is nothing to get excited about as far as I can see. It's just a consolidation of very familiar social media functions.
it starts at page 208.
I've got to be missing something. How difficult is it to implement secure authentication to the server that has access to the database? Am I just doing it wrong? Because it doesn't seem overly difficult to me to secure my web services.
It's the kind of thing the NYT has been doing since Snow Fall back in 2012 [0], to mixed feelings [1][2][3].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/new-y...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020689/the-new-york-times-fight...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/08/...
Nope, Poland. And it's not just Holocaust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...
Amazon and Google settle feud, bring YouTube back to Fire TV devices
This is a completely stupid analogy.
How exactly is this comparable to Benjamin Franklin?

The people being banned aren't banned because they are far-right. They are banned because they are spewing hate, or even worse: "Renshaw is a former spokesperson for neo-Nazi organisation National Front who plotted to murder West Lancashire MP, Rosie Cooper".

Far-right political figures that don't call for violence or murder aren't threatened of being banned.
The 'far-left', (left of establishment Democrats), is being targeted as well, people like Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal etc. were targeted some time ago. You just never hear about it because the far-left has nowhere near as massaged victimhood spreading machine as the far-right and the so-called 'free speech' advocates on the right are not willing to speak against targeting the left's support for BDS etc.
It's the same on Android, with Contacts permission blocked it will show only numbers except for groups.

Furthermore it won't let you start a chat with anyone unless it can access your contacts to find them. However there's a great little app on F-Droid called 'Open in Whatsapp' that lets you start a chat with any arbitrary phone number.
After skimming the paper, my first thought was that I want to see how this compares to just adding normal wavelet for Fourier transform (computationally cost and accuracy) steps between NN layers. As I understand it, they are trying to do basically similar thing with new convolution operator.

Wavelet or FFT will not have any extra weights to train and can be highly optimized.
My, how times have changed, if Microsoft is not considered a bad actor. There was a time when MS was Satan personified for many people in the OSS community (myself being one of them).
The Berkley bike-lock ethics professor. The Las Vegas shooter was definitely left-wing. James Hodgkinson shot at some legilators. Oh, and this little group called Antifa that shuts down anyone they don't like violence.
Not just you, it's the next-to-bottom post on the front page for me. (it was #1 at the top 3 minutes after being posted)
This is an absurd claim. The British National Party is an explicitly fascist organization. Additionally, from the article: "Similarly, far-right activist Jack Renshaw has been banned. Renshaw is a former spokesperson for neo-Nazi organisation National Front who plotted to murder West Lancashire MP, Rosie Cooper." You might not like all the ways the term "spreading hate" gets used (I don't) but that doesn't mean it's devoid of meaning and misapplied all the time.
There's a number of responses to this comment, and others in this thread discussing free speech, its definition, and its implications.

Here's what I believe to be a decent resource explaining a number of common misunderstandings that come up in such discussions.

https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
By a broader definition it makes sense. People insulting and mocking each other, talking past other. Even the president.. Did we used to do that IRL in the 70's and 80's?
Yes.

It doesn't get as much publicity so few know about it. That's the problem with today's bias, and muting one side.
Only if you decide to use their platform, which you're perfectly free not to do...
I downloaded it from justice.gov
There's a good class at UIUC regarding signal processing:

https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs598ps/fa2018/material.ht...

Course is led by Paris Smaragdis, one of top researchers in the field of audio processing.
Did Corporate Tax Cuts Increase Wages?
> because you can just ask for permission from Android

You cannot ask for permission to bypass sandbox restrictions on Android. You need root access, which means physical access to do things like unlock the bootloader or an exploit.

iOS sandbox seems slightly weaker here due to the use of hidden/private functions to protect certain things, sideloaded apps would likely be a bigger risk on iOS than Android at the moment, but that's not something unresolvable.

In any case, the things you're discussing aren't really so problematic - isolation systems are only getting better, OS level ones are improving every day. We could easily have sandboxes at this level just as secure as the javascript ones.
"We organise ourselves in a system where: "a world in which goods and services are so cheap to produce that less and less capital is required for investment, and so easy to produce that less and less labour is required to produce them" is not a life-transforming utopia, but a catastrophe."

I understand - and sympathize with - your reaction.

However I have a suspicion that the authors stance is correct and, indeed, there is something catastrophic involved. If not due to the circumstances, then to our response to the circumstances (which, as you say, would seem to be heavenly).

If, however, you place stock in the notion that (most) humans find happiness and meaning and fulfillment in completing meaningful and valuable work, I think it starts to make sense.

You and I might have the personal makeup - or find ourselves in a stage of generational or familial development - to find meaning and joy in a post-scarcity, post "work", nuanced and refined existence. I like to think I do.

But I can imagine not having that makeup and while I might not be able to point to "the absence of scarcity" or "not having meaningful work" as my affliction, I think without a doubt something would be afflicting me.
> In the US there is no danger

Well it's the UK isn't it? They're a little ahead of you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
It is not just an appeal to Twitter’s authority. It’s an informed opinion based off working in a similar field and conversing with others in this field. So unless you can come up with some concrete data supporting your points, instead of just attacking mine, you are unlikely to change my opinion.
...by banning people they don't like...
It's not a violation of a US constitutional right to free speech, insofar as the Constitution restricts or guarantees against government actions.

But when people talk about free speech it is not limited merely to constitutional rights, especially in an age where most communication happens in platforms under some company or another's direct control.
> But choosing sides is dangerous. Not every conservative is spewing hate speech, in fact many from the left (even celebrities) post what could be considered hate speech.

I mean, the headline talks about far-right hate groups, and not about conservatives in general. Why is it that a lot of conservatives seem to take it personally when hate groups are banned? I think this victimhood complex is unhealthy. Facebook is not choosing sides by banning hate groups.
I was working on a project where we'd be printing several hundred thousand badges for several schools. We had all the data and just needed photos. The client sent us a DVD with several hundred thousand photos, upon inspection we realized that the photos where really bad:

- No single aspec ratio

- Some photos had no one in it (picture of a chair, etc)

- Some photos had multiple people in the photo (!?)

- Some photos were of such poor quality that you couldn't make out the person.

It seemed some locations let the students provide their own photo. This is the first time we'd ever encountered data in this shape.

My company had two options: Print the data as-is (which would result in thousands of reprints) or hire some temp staff to sort through the photos.

I asked them to let me try and sort them over the weekend with a library I just learned about (OpenCV). I was able to write a custom OpenCV python script a little over a hundred lines long and ran it over the weekend to crop and sort the photos into several categories (based on face detection) leaving only a few thousand that had to be manually reviewed! That had a real dollar impact and felt really good.
Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: Why U.S. Intelligence Agencies Must Adapt or Fail
The entire country of Venezuela is far from politically unified, unlike what you seem to suggest. In fact the opposition is not particularly more popular over there than Maduro.
Seems like the people who would be able to implement this stuff securely is also mostly the people who would not want to.

[Edit: spelling]
Thank you. He is also wrong.
piston aircraft?
I blame the internet for much of why politics is the way it is today. This is why I too like HN, it doesn't seem to take a side, as far as I can tell and I can ignore most political stuff if I want.
I don't know why anyone expected this to be a bombshell. If what we knew already wasn't enough, I have no idea what it would actually take to end this presidency. On the flip side, I have the strangest feeling we're going to see better polling numbers during the next U.S. presidential election.
Its explicit value is 519024039293878272000 (not nearly as big as some integers we discuss around here!).
Does this article meet conditions where flagging it actually justifies action? To me, I cannot see how it could.
How Ferrari Spins (2011)
Absolutely not suprising. What's this from?
I'd argue the type of malware described in this article is fairly to completely harmless to the user. Harm to ad networks and a bit of wasted bandwidth is basically the worst case scenario.

The wasted bandwidth would be made clear by the OS to the user too, so it'd be trivial to identify if it was a significant consumer.
No kidding. Remember all those U.S. laws enacted to censor 9/11 conspiracy theorists? Oh wait. That didn't happen because such laws would be unconstitutional.
> "The phrase is a paraphrasing of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. "

Hmm. Call me crazy, but I think that should be legal.
Is this supposed to be a negative example? Just asking.
so...
1) didn't kill anyone
2) not actually left-wing
3) didn't kill anyone
4) didn't kill anyone
It's weird to think that more work has gone into this one report than I will put into my career in my lifetime.