skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did my Master Thesis on this kind of stuff. There are many Apps among the top 100 free ones that ask permissions completely unrelated to their functionality. Yeah I know, not surprising. What surprised me at the time was that Android gives away much information "for free". For example, if I recall correctly, GET_ACCOUNTS was granted automatically and it allowed to get the "title" of every account on the phone as shown in the Android UI. Most Apps use the actual username as the title, google included (aka, every App could read your email address). Nice exceptions are Signal and WhatsApp.
Graham Hancock: America Before - Ancient Advanced Civilisations
Honestly I don't understand why Zuck doesn't sell up at Facebook and use his considerable money and brains to move to philanthropy, like billg. His personal brand is going to continue to dive while he's the face of this bullshit.
We live in a culture where there is an normally an intense focus on the benefits of technology and not really a lot of regard for any of the possible the negatives. I.e. there is a huge bias at a cultural level. I guess this a lot to do with idea that consumerism is the solution when things get difficult in life. If you study history you can see how this normally presents itself - and even effects the science c.f. the smoking industry.
the irony probably escapes them
Sadly this cron has fired the shell script author, and no one dares to touch it.
It's a ridiculous metric.
Pardon for the potentially offensive remark, but to me it always looked a lot like German.

I had German in school for a total of six years and this had a side effect of giving me the ability to read a newspaper in Norwegian with a rough understanding what the text was about.
The school is I think less neurotic than many in our area (prosperous, urban), and the parents vastly saner than those described by Caitlin Flanagan in her article in The Atlantic.
Saying "unintentionally" here is like saying you unintentionally stole someone's TV when they gave you their key to walk their dog.

It takes extra work to upload those contacts, which means several managers and developers decided to do it and then spent time implementing it.

For the FB employees reading this: what is your tipping point? Would you say no to that assignment?
Reading this sort of things is getting gradually more grating for me to read.

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. The author constantly points this, points how growth in the "long stagnation" never materialised into better conditions and a better standard of living, and how that didn't change until war came.

Yet he never ceases to operate in the same system and to try to find the answers within the system. It never even crosses his thought that... perhaps the fundamental tenets of the system should be changed, or at the very least questionable. All he does is find convoluted ways of patching the a broken system from within the system.
I am looking at https://usbkill.com/. What is the purpose of the device? The manufacturer calls it an "ESD tester" yet there is an "anonymous" version available: https://usbkill.com/products/usb-killer-v3?variant=447760856...
Eh. My parents have had their Billy bookshelves since they first came out.

I’ve had Ikea stuff for over ten years easily. I still work off of a solid pine Ikea kitchen table I got for $60 CAD about 11 years ago(I bought two! My parents are using one). It’s my home desk.

Some of it is worse than other stuff but I’ve never had the problem of having to junk it so soon as all that.
Example of what? Is everything Nazis used supposed to be banned? Weapons, food, water, computers, trains?

Doesn’t seem like “Nazis used it, therefore it’s bad” is a valid argument. I agree that the government having a list of personal preferences for no reason is bad, but census data is useful for other reasons, and not having it isn’t going to stop other committed groups of people from doing bad things.
I am working on a little python framework to efficiently distribute hyperparameter search on a Spark cluster. We haven't released the first version yet but will do so in the next two weeks. https://github.com/logicalclocks/maggy

A limitation of existing hyperparameter search algorithms is that they are typically stage or generation-based. For example, if genetic algorithms are used for hyperparameter search, one has to wait for all models to finish in order to generate a new generation of potential parameters from the best performing individuals. However, some instances will have suboptimal parameters during a given iteration and will know quickly during the training that they can stop early. Hence, the early stopped machine can’t be provided with a new set of parameters early but is instead idle.

Compared to stage-based algorithms like genetic optimization algorithms, maggy (the framework) will support asynchronous algorithms, that are able to provide new candidate sets of parameters as soon as a worker finishes evaluating a combination and does not have to wait until all models in one stage finish. For this to be possible, we establish communication between the driver and executors in Spark. The driver will then collect performance metrics during training which enables us to stop badly performing models early during training and reassigning the executor task with a new, more promising set of parameters (new trial) right away, instead of waiting for a stage to finish.
> so we're reddit, just without the memes?

Kind of? And with slightly higher average standards of discourse? And I believe this is actually a compliment.

In my experience, HN comments under article are almost always more useful and more informative than the original article. The same is the case with various subreddits. When I read, say, /r/SpaceX, I also immediately jump into comments, as there is better quality info there.

This applies to mainstream news stories in particular. On HN, there's a good chance you'll find someone who was - or knows someone who was - involved in the topic first-hand, and who then proceeds to debunk various nonsense a typical news story contains. That's a huge value-added.

> I think anyone simply quoting the article needs to explicitly show that that is the case because it was very misleading.

Sure, I think making it clear what text is quoted (and from where) should be an obvious rule. And it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not others read the article; it simply saves brain cycles trying to understand the comment.
True, but nobody uses them and there are few examples of useful UWP programs. App-Store on macOS isn't a success story and rightly so.

macOS = useful; iOS = nope
"Peace" is a true masterpiece. When you reach the end, you start thinking what was this book about. Suddenly you will figure it out and you want to read it again, armed with this knowledge. And you might need a few iterations before you will be finally satisfied.
You appear to be ignoring a few things here: First is that the downside risk from nuclear power plants is so great as to make them uninsurable. Second is that when a trillion dollar uninsurable event comes up, ignoring that the public is saddled with the cost. Lastly, you ignore that had public funds been used in the amounts needed to clean up after this private sector power plant on renewables instead, we would have renewable energy that is in fact comparable or larger than the scale of nuclear power plants, plus coal, plus gas, etc. Nuclear power even when it works costs too much. When it fails, it costs almost incomprehensible amounts.

Maybe some different type of nuclear power plant wouldn't have these risks and waste disposal problems. But none yet have been built to demonstrate that's true in practice.
Stonil Capsule
Kidney Stone

Stone disease or we can say kidney stone is one of most painful urinary problem. Surveys reported that more than a million kidney stone cases are diagnosed each year. Fortunately, most stones pass out of the body without any problem through urinary pathway. It is not detected early hence causes various problems in body accompanied lots of pain.

Kidney is filter of our body. It detoxifies our body and causes the formation of urine. Urine contains all toxic material and hence goes out from body. Sometimes materials become concentrated in urine and form solid crystals in kidney. These are called kidney stone. The majority of stones contain calcium & its chemical combination calcium oxalate. Stones form when there is imbalance between certain chemical urinary components. They vary in size from as small as grain of sand to as large as golf ball.
Causes of Kidney stone

No scientist is able to find the exact reasons for kidney stone. But some reasons promote the formation of kidney stone. They are as follows-

Surroundings and quality of water play a vital role in kidney stone formation
Excess of loss of body fluids.
A high animal protein Diet can also affect the probability of stone formation.
Crohn syndrome or gastric bypass surgery.
Obesity is risk factor for stone formation.
Stone formation has also been linked to hyperparathyroidism, an endocrine disorder that results in more calcium in your urine
Consumption of calcium pills
Infection in urinary tract
FWIW ff is my primary browser, I still turn to Chrome for debugging complicated js stuff.
Maybe the other side of that right now is, higher safety given using known designs? I also was looking for something distinctive but there is also a comfort in familiarity, when it comes to air safety..
> If he did, he may have had to admit that Panera Cares was nothing but an elaborate branding exercise, a solution to a problem we already know how to solve.

I would expect there to be a lot less food insecurity if we actually knew how to solve it.
Halva!
Down for me also in Romania, Eastern-Europe, not sure if it's region-dependent.
The Power of Lifetimes
The locked in store model in iOS also forces you in to a specific and rather puritanical morality when it comes to the apps you can choose from.
> You say that like two of the three aren't privileges afforded more consistently to the wealthy.

Agreed; this is well-nigh indisputable.

> In either case, the operative function is the wealth-hoarding behavior of the parents.

This paints with too-broad a brush (and is needlessly confrontational). At what income level does earning money — in accordance with the rules that have evolved in society — become "wealth-hoarding behavior"?
Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics?
https://medium.com/thelaunchpad/a-step-by-step-guide-to-mach...
What would you say are the changes that should be made then?
Is it personal if it can be inferred? When your water is used, electricity is used, internet is used, vehicle is used, all require use of infrastructure belonging to a second party, therefore the information from it is not just seen by you.
Well you can try the same with konsole. On my XFCE system it wants to install 71 packages, including stuff that a terminal emulator probably doesn't need like phonon. To be fair, this could also be due to Debian's packaging and it may well be possible to have a leaner konsole package.
You can now download the source code for all Infocom text adventure classics
I know this has been submitted a handful of times, but it's one of only a couple of blog posts I keep coming back to year on year.
One of these groups (the BNP) is an official UK political party and there are local elections next month, with postal ballets already been sent out. The party is pretty much dead now and has no parliamentary MPs and no existing local councillors (last one left last year), but there has been up to 59 councillors elected in the last decade, and it's unknown how many town and parish councillors there are (if any). I don't know how many candidates are up for election in these current elections.
From my Linux desktop experience, I could not disagree more. When my 16GB ThinkPad runs out of memory, the OOM Killer blinks for a fraction of a second to kill the faulty process. If I had a swap partition, disk IO would render the system unusable for hours before the OOM Killer kicks in. Also, I don't want my SSD lifetime be sacrificed for a neglectable amount of better RAM usage -- on the desktop, I either run out of memory quickly (because my code makes mistakes) or I never feel the reach for 16GB of RAM.

On the server the situation is very different, and a few GB Swap on a spinning disc might be a good idea even when having 128GB of RAM.
About (leaked) data falling in the wrong hands:

Dutch municipalities used to register your religion in the early 1900s. Then the Germans invaded and boom. The NAZIs had a list of every jew in the country and the rest is history.

About the incentive you mention: have a look at the facebook privacy incidents. Whether or not this incentive exists, data leaks will happen. The only questions are when, to whom, and what that actor will do with said data.
I was able to completely lock up my Mac with some odd combo of settings, had to quit Safari (after about 30 seconds of everything being dead). Didn't think that was possible in a browser.
Is there a good reason not to regard this as a standard few-parameter no-gradient optimisation problem, and use something like Nelder-Mead on it?
Nice bug discovered in web GMail on desktop
To reproduce, go to a folder/label/tab that has at least one message with an attachment (like a PDF, or video), then click the "select all" button to make all messages on the page are selected (50 or less, DO NOT "select all 3000 messages"), then right click the attachment and choose the bottom option "Open in new window", sit back and watch as 50 (or whatever the number of messages on that page) of windows open for your attachment.
I was an avid Kubuntu user in the KDE 3.X days over a decade ago. Some significant changes were made to the project poisoning the well for me, personally, since then. Still kind of curios: would the current KDE offer anything to a i3wm user?
Packaging Python Inside Your Organization with Gitlab and Conda
I believe "move fast and break things" is a quote often attributed to Facebook. In this case the automatic importing feature might have been something broken, or something working correctly with an excuse that it was "broken".
> Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

– Donald E. Knuth (1977)
> This is already possible with Android where F-Droid is a good example of a 'store' where the chance of being exposed to these shenanigans is close to zero.

There are many other stores where the chance of being exposed to these shenanigans is close to 1. Think of the article recently about super-shady app stores for iOS that misused enterprise certificates to sideload apps [0].

If alternate app stores were to be allowed on iOS, all that would happen is a great proliferation of these scumware stores, full of knockoffs, fakes and outright malware.

It's going to be almost impossible for a lot of people to distinguish between legit good quality, legit crap quality and non-legit harmful app stores, resulting in waves of malware and privacy theft that will make the old Windows XP days look like a panacea.

While it has its problems, the curated nature of iOS' App Store is a distinct positive for users.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/20/18232583/apple-ios-develo...
Interesting, Japanese designer Oki Sato also thinks we should have more things that are stupid [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/c3TPbj2_Xjg?t=311
'Spirographical'. Excellent word. I knew immediately what you were saying.
This is a great loss. When I was quite young I made the mistake of joining the Science Fiction Bookclub, unaware that it's intent and purpose was to mislead kids into over-buying books they didn't want. At the time, one of the books they sent me was Gene Wolfe's "Urth of the New Sun", and it bewildered me and fascinated me so much that I reread it in college, and realized it was part of a much longer tale. I went on to read virtually everything he ever wrote. Unlike so much science fiction (and fantasy, on occasion), Wolfe's uses tremendous texture and nuance; reading his work feels incredibly dream-like to me, even though there's nothing overtly trippy. As I get older, and recognize so much of what I once enjoyed as the same juvenile power fantasy told over with slightly different mechanics, Wolfe is (was) one of those rare genre authors who was doing something very different.

For anyone who wants to try a Wolfe book, the most accessible one is "The Wizard Knight", IMHO. It's still quite good, and has that gauzy, dreamy style and unreliable narrator Wolfe is known for, but is rather more straight-forward than, say, the Torturer series (which is actually part of the series in which Urth of the New Sun played a role). Ironically (to me) this is also the closest he got to "juvenile power fantasy" but ends up deconstructing the bildungsroman in a really beautiful, even loving way. Highly, highly recommended.

Also, I remember reading somewhere that he was a working engineer while he wrote some of his first novels; I presume he was writing full-time later. I think that's cool, too.
> is that a thing you want to fix though, or to prevent?

wanting to fix is pretty obvious. capable of fixing is a different story. biologically there is no fix (genetic engineering maybe? but that is super sci-fi). so we can try to correct with technology or social conventions but those fixes never change the underlying biological defects so how effective can they really be?

Look at the social engineering aspects of organized Christianity. How well did those work? Look at the social engineering aspects of the U.S. experiment like universal education and literacy. How well did those work?

It is a little bleak but in reality universal literacy has been a complete failure (in the U.S. at least). Probably 80% of the population is at the level of what used to be called "knowing your letters" but they are functionally illiterate (they have never done any significant amount of reading in their life, and aren't really capable of it). That is not a popular opinion, at least not for public consumption, so we can't even begin to address the issue because we refuse to acknowledge that it exists.
His work, which I came across in my early teenage years, was mind expanding. I am grateful for and to him.

Wolfe was also one of the authors that really made genre fiction academically respectable, without hiding in shame about what and who he was (cough Atwood cough). Entire future generations of writers - and students - owe him a thank you.
No, it is written in APL for extra conciseness. When they wrote it in shell it deleted the authors from the payroll.
On Blue's Waters is a masterpiece. The narrative structure is temporally very complex, but coherent, and alternates between wistful contemplation of the past by the protagonist (often times about things that have not yet happened yet), and and an account of that protagonist's search for Silk. On the whole it is a dream like experience.
Show HN: SQLiteQueryServer – Bulk query SQLite database over the network
Steve Kovach and Todd Haselton both work at CNBC and are referencing the same device.
The paragraph starting "Some people regard this sort of deflation as benign." is a lead in to some interesting observations and raises classic questions about what 'success' means in an economy.

Consider a case of demand deflation where farmers decide they don't need anything any more, stop growing crops in excess of what is needed to feed themselves and sit on productive land like stone toads. I think there would be near-absolute consensus that the situation was very bad.

The same situation but with coal and oil swapped for farmland would be different. I happen to think that would still be a bad outcome, but there is a pretty sizeable environmental lobby that wants exactly that and would call it good. Assuming it happened over a bit of time so that alternatives could be bought on line.

There is a key question here - who exactly should have the power to deny an economy access to primary resources (particularly those linked to land ownership)? Under what circumstances is that acceptable and unacceptable? That is the mechanical underlying issue for why bad employment numbers correlate to bad outcomes.

At the end of the day, reflecting on these issues makes me think we just need a land tax based on an assessed value of land + mineral wealth underneath the land. Something large enough that families have to repurchase their land once a generation. That is the only idea I have that is even a little consistent with property rights. The issue with dropping demand isn't that people are unemployed - I like being unemployed in the classic not-looking-for-work sense. The problem is that people are willing to work and don't have enough to live comfortably but are unable to get raw resources to do so.

The correct solution is to acknowledge that land is maybe the only resource that a human can't fabricate through hard work and then construct a gentle system of rewards and incentives to make sure that resources are deployed.
I’m going to have to say “no”; the word comes with a lot of cultural baggage, and it’s not clear what you might mean by “something we might describe with that word” if not Cartesian dualism — not because there are no possibilities, just because those alternatives are not well known.
Vintage Pens for People Who Think Vintage Pens Are Scary (2016)
I didn't know about this site, but checking myself out with it, its information is remarkably incorrect. Maybe that means I'm doing a good job of being a hermit? It claims I'm Christian (I was born into a Lutheran family, so that's an understandable mistake), am married (ha!) and maintain relationships with many people (ha), proceeding to list 5 people I've never heard of[0]. Salary is wrong, home value is wrong, and the only email address it lists is about 20 years out of date. Really no better than the other various people search pages I've seen, which also failed to impress. Hell it even does the fake "we're looking up all this full report information for you... please pay at the next window" thing that they do. If this were the best the corps could track me I would say we have nothing to worry about, but I doubt it is.

[0] Turns out they're my neighbors.
Other discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19688460
While it's true the reason things start and persist are different, many would disagree about the level of central planning in the US, with healthcare being an example odd where there is a good deal of government control (everything from pricing of procedures, drug approval, and licensing to name a few). Whether that's a good thing is another question, but I think it's oversimplifying to conclude that the problem is all due to corporate feudal overlords and not at all due to government policy. Further, there is a lesson to be learned concerning unanticipated co sequences in the origin of the current system that we're in danger of repeating by having further government control of healthcare.
Or maybe people could learn again "personal responsibility" and realize that everything they give to facebook is exactly like giving oyur life to any compagny like Coca Cola, and that these compagny can do pretty much anything with it within the limits of the "laws that are actually enforced", whose number is pretty much 0.

Stop complaining, start taking responsibility.
This thread is baffling. Most of the comment replies are about KDE, for which Kubuntu (with a "K") is a completely separate spin.

The XFCE-based Xubuntu spin includes nothing of KDE by default, and neither KDE or Kubuntu are mentioned in the linked article at all. Call me cynical, I just don't think most people clicked the link or even took a close enough look at the title here.
One of my most used programs. The more I use it, the more features I come to rely on, like using sshfs (although it's separate program), scp, ssh-copy-id, etc.