skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even humans don't always behave in clearly goal-oriented activities. Consider how hard it is to explain practical jokes, religious ritual, or modern performance art. ET intelligence would presumably have equally inscrutable motivations.

Given the distances and ages required for interstellar travel, these things are more likely unmanned probes than busses filled with tourists.

> It has been theorized that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
Very interesting project, the problem with Serverless service provided by different public cloud vendors is that programming and API are not uniform. I think Faast.js is on the right path to creating a unified interface for different Serverless services.
There are some optical issues with a company that has widely recognized shortcomings in hiring African Americans banning the person who organized the Million Man March. (This is not an endorsement of Mr. Fartakhan’s politics. But man, that’s a hell of a sensitive subject for Facebook to wade into.)
I used to be against this sort of thing, but now I think the faster Facebook, Twitter, and Google make themselves irrelevant for public discourse, the better. Their ad-based business model is just incompatible with free speech, and the more obvious that fact is to everyone, the better.

I still think it's bad when non-branded content carriers like web hosts, CDNs, payment processors and banks ban clients based on ideology though.
Yes, nobody writes bug free code and that's why having a car that can't update software OTA is a good thing. Got it. I do enjoy knowing that if a bug crops up I have to schedule an appointment at the dealership and take a day off work to drop it off to be upgraded instead of waking up to a bugfix having been already deployed.
The method also checks for things like whether the file is in /dev and whether filesystem compression is enabled.
My personal belief is that Facebook shouldn't be trying to censor speech this way, it's impossible to be (or appear to be) impartial. The people who are booted off just go to their own corner of the internet and never have their ideas challenged.

But to answer your question, https://www.facebook.com/kathygriffin/ comes to mind (with the beheaded Trump photo).
Doesn't blocking everyone except a whitelist defeat the purpose of having your IRC chatroom open to the public?
Mh, I think it's the opposite: people won't speak up if they are vulnerable. Tenure gives scientific freedom because it removes the vulnerability of being easily fired. If you're rich, you can be honest, because annoying people and getting fired won't hurt you - you're not vulnerable.
What are some example of benefits?
> A wall is less expensive to maintain than putting more people there.

Is this actually true, given that walls must also be manned, regularly maintained, repaired, etc?

> It's bad for the American poor because it depresses their wages and aids in fighting against unions.

Is this actually true? I'm really not educated myself on the matter. Do you have sources, studies, etc?
-1j; Flamebait.
I think the last 50 years have shown that simply throwing money at homelessness won't make it go away. Most modern projects to reduce homelessness have either had unexpectedly underwhelming results or surprisingly large unintended consequences.

I think that is about as clear a sign as we're going to get that our common sense notions about how to solve homelessness are insufficient, which means further scientific research is necessary.
I have a whole lightning talk about this, called "Why Software Sucks". The premise is that we are always dealing with the boundary between "barely works" and "doesn't work". Adding more stability, more features, etc just changes where that boundary is. After 25+ years in this industry, it sucks as bad as it ever did. Except now instead of a buggy OS, I'm dealing with, say, bugs in Openshift. Something like Openshift was almost unimaginable back when I started. Kinda sucks now.

And the improvements are less than you might think. On that same job, we were managing a couple dozen servers in two different data centers, and 200+ client machines, all remotely, able to deploy different versions of the software to specific machines. It was like "cloud", except we did it all without so much as ssh. We had a configuration management database in Sybase, and rsh/perl scripts, along with SMIT commands (I miss SMIT).
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How can you ensure the devices are not hacked though? If someone has physical access them, would it be possible to limit them from tempering with them?
But the IoT device will have to be attached to the actual good. How can you know the device is attached to the actual good and not something else?
The store is 4 months old.

All of these things don't happen instantly.

You asked for a viable strategy, this is it as evidenced by the fact they're already trying it. Is it guaranteed? No. But nothing in business, or life, is.
> A company building products that end up aiding the carrying out of genocides, for instance, is clearly on a more extreme end of the spectrum...

Couldn't that describe just about any company or open source project?

A database and office software end up helping you manage and track your genocide.

A camera company's products and photo/video editing software end up helping people create beheading videos and child porn.

When we create a general purpose product and release it to the world, we lose control of who uses it and for what purposes. In fact, that is a specific requirement for free and open source software licenses.
And that's at the time when people in Europe want to buy the Bolt for a much, much higher price, and cannot.
Yes, since those people deserve housing, education, and healthcare, the costs of all of which have grown dramatically faster than the minimum wage.
I believe it's a fundamental lack of faith in one's product or service that results in untenable corporate growth maximization schemes.
> Have you heard of MPI or even OpenMP ?. They can be used to accelerate fast computation in C++

these features are also available in fortran since forever
True, it does seem pretty unlikely. But if the reports are in any way accurate, then the explanation will be probably something that seems pretty unlikely.
>so the whole system is automated, distributed and tamper proof

No it's not. It all still depends on people honestly and accurately implementing the IoT component. It's just pushing the problem back a step.

All of these schemes ultimately fail because they face two challenges that inherently involved messy humanity and physical reality: the oracle problem and the enforcement problem.
What kind of marketing are you doing?
Do you have any specific policies around this? I suspect it would be hard to say definitively that there aren't remnants of data I've asked Google to forget still kicking around.
jesus christ the us market is amazing.
(yea yea there are trade offs)
Saying racist stuff constantly but playing it off as "ironic" and wearing a suit doesn't make it less racist. Good, they should have kicked these guys off years ago.
Hi,

Do you think serverless pricing model contradicts with batch operations ? I think that you normally pay for duration of tasks and ram usage etc. Batch jobs are supposed to be running long. I'm probably missing something here. Would you tell me little bit more ?
We should all hold companies accountable and not celebrate every “modicum of privacy”.

Look at what companies do, not what they say they do.

Yay, you can delete all your data... says the company which puts hidden microphones in consumer products, leaks copious amounts of user data across unrelated services, releases a browser which automatically logs you in to google services, lifted its ban on personally identifiable info in its ad service etc. etc.
But if you have to trust that the devices aren’t hacked why can’t you just use a database and give each device a private key?
I assume none of that. I know people who died in 9/11, people who died in Mumbai, and people who died in the San Bernardino shooting. I don't need to be told by anyone that the terrorist cowards behind those bombings are our enemies--that much was obvious from them bombing us.
For years 'InfoWars' was promoted on YouTube, allegedly they now ban Alex Jones and his brand of media, along with - now - Facebook.

During the Bush years he did act as a 'gatekeeper' for people questioning the war. Rather than people get to useful facts they only got as far as Alex Jones rants. This had a useful effect of neutering anyone questioning the particulars of how the war started.

I would not say it is sad to see him banned from every platform but you have to wonder if he has outlived his usefulness.

The bigger problem is the recommendation algorithms, giving him the oxygen of publicity. People would never have discovered his content without these algorithms, unless a friend personally recommended 'Infowars' et al.

We should still have the option to read or watch content that does not agree with us in the realm of politics. I have not read 'Mein Kampf' myself, however I have listened to that one clip of Hitler actually talking rather than delivering a speech. I found it useful for understanding a little bit more about that war. There may be neo-nazis we need to protect from such hate speech but it is also at a cost to understanding history.

With Alex Jones there is that theory that he is the same person as Bill Hicks. That story does interest me and I would like the option to study some original Alex Jones content to see if that is a credible conspiracy story or just some entertaining hogwash. If every trace of Alex Jones is banned from the internet then I won't have that option.
Why don't we consider in the supernatural like angels instead of aliens

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2012/04/space-angels-aliens-o...
AI Evolved Creepy Images to Please a Monkey Brain
Reading the article here are the things Jack does:

1) 10 day meditation retreats

2) Sauna and ice baths

3) Walking 5 miles to work

4) Daily intermittent fasting

5) Drinking salt juice

Could you point out which of these activities would be deemed 'quackery'? These all seem like fairly benign things, with backing from scientific studies or centuries of tribal knowledge being passed down.

I doubt we will ever escape the cult of idolization, that seems to be a recurring pattern no matter the century. Jack encourages a healthy lifestyle that if more people adopted in moderation, would end up being a net positive. The current norm of over-consumption, over-medication (1 in 6 Americans are given psychiatric drugs), and over-stimulation is one that has had a noticeably negative effect on society. Anyone that bucks this norm and encourages a more mindful approach to life is alright in my books.
Sounds fine to me. HN bans and threatens to ban people too and that's a good thing.
They mention there are 'misaligned interests' in supply chains, but I am not sure what interests are misaligned?
The people studying this stuff definitely need to be better than that. They can maybe take hints from authorities but they need to check facts for themselves.

But for the rest of us, we have no choice but to trust authorities in some way when deciding how to interpret some new result.
Glyphosate (Roundup) Is (Still) Not a Carcinogen
Clean thy URLs: How websites leak sensitive data to FB, Google and more
>after being told not to-- would put their nondescript FOB security key card in their wallet.

But what specifically are they supposed to do with the security key card? What mode of securing and transportation do you envision?
I don't disagree, I think Google will suffer in the Cloud game because of their reputation to 180 and kill products. But I do think they will continue to gain ground in both customers and features. As I said though, Azure will likely benefit the most. The main reason Google will remain in the race...imo is because there is still a deeply seeded hatred of Microsoft amount a big enough part of the community.
>I don't remember who first said it but blockchain has exactly one killer feature, Bitcoin.

So zero killer features, then.
Facebook bans Farrakhan, Yiannopoulos, InfoWars & others as 'dangerous'
Meditation broadly is known for having both risks and rewards[1] (edit: studying qigong I heard occasionally of the dangers of qigong psychosis[2], a related problem). Extreme meditation can produce greater discipline, clarity and so-forth. But it stands to reason it can produce more problematic results too.

[1] https://qz.com/993465/theres-a-dark-side-to-meditation-that-...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10336217
There has to be some sort of US free speech legal action that could be taken to stop this crack down by an internet platform company on free speech. I'm not sure how many people actually take FB seriously as a 'news' platform, but it can be useful to discuss the way corporate entities such as CNN present information on their specific home pages on Facebook.
OK, so when they have a section titled "San Francisco is not for you", you pay attention, you read the programming, you accept it as truth, and then you work until you are 73. YMMV. Good for you. Good luck.
Exactly. This was a reasonable explanation for the first major wave of sightings in 1947, or even the WW2 foo fighters, but by now it would require such secret advanced technology to have remained black and un-reproduced for several decades.
Off-topic, but I wonder if there's a name for this kind of marketing, where a company will write useful and/or interesting articles that end up in search results or content aggregators.

I don't know if it's more effective than traditional advertising, but it's certainly more pleasant.
There never has been a right to free speech on some private companies system.
Yes, religions have never accepted money for perceived benefits or relied upon physical symbols of faith.
No he means in the way they pressured a young programmer into killing himself as retribution for just looking at some research papers.

The similarity is the ott aspect.

Feel free to ask more questions.
So if some critical mass of the population find Mark Zuckerburg offensive can we get him banned?
Left-aligned bloggers/organizations that report on extremist right politics got caught up in a mass ban for their reporting and cried foul about it just last week actually.
This is awesome news. Deplatforming works and these guys are so blatantly harmful.
That just punts on the problem. It's basically not solvable - at some point you have to trust humans anyway.

The only reason this works well for, say, bitcoins, is that they are a digital "asset" created on the chain themselves. Everything else trying to tie a physical asset to a chain has the same problem, you can't do it without relying on trust outside the system.
Only happy birthdays, congrats for graduations/wedding/babies/house, and condolences for deaths.
I think this is one of the more interesting and important debates of our time. As so much moves online, we realize that our speech belongs to these huge companies.

On one hand, it's great to see these toxic people kicked off, because deplatforming them works wonders in terms of stopping them from spreading their hate.

I think most of us have some doubts as to how it might play out in the future, though, and there are of course questions about how healthy it is for such huge corporations to have that much sway in the first place.

There are all kinds of other shenanigans going on with many of these companies too:

https://popular.info/p/trump-ad-contagion-spreads-on-faceboo...
The need for spirituality and search for deeper meaning is not going away with secularism. It transforms into purifying or self actualizing behaviour using certain foods, doing certain exercises, asceticism, meditation, being part of movements and scenes (congregations). Singularity or life extension are the ultimate nerd rapture.

I speak as secular fanatic myself. I have meditated 20 years now. 2-4 hours per day and have done maybe 50 week long retreats (over a year of my life meditating 8-10 hours a day) I teach newcomers. I'm worried of all this startup and commercial mentality around meditation. The beat and hippie generations had similar eastern spirituality fad and false prophet phase where vulnerable people were abused and taken for a ride. There are better ways to relax, there are better ways to fix anxiety and mental problems or become more productive citizen. I would not recommend meditation as alternative to therapy. The goal of really fanatical meditation is something completely different.
If I was worth almost $100,000,000,000 dollars I'd be batshit insane and think the world revolved around me, too.
The cost of the braces & treatment was competitively priced, too. It's almost always the parents who pay for it- the gift cards go to the teenagers and make them financially invested in being good to their faces.

Are those visits free?

The cost of visits is included in the overall price, as are replacement brackets / etc. for the first few. The advisement / planning process part is free, and they weren't pushy at all- my parents asked if my then-8-year-old sibling (he has overjet) needed braces, too, and they recommended waiting until all the baby teeth came out. [ For comparison, other companies / doctors I've heard of recommend them to young kids frequently, even though the teething process causes structural changes to the jaw and generally makes another round of braces a necessity].

On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him,

The T-Shirts are really nice, TBH. The company name / logo was on the back, with a simple message on the front, and they were made of soft, puffy synthetic stuff. I liked wearing them- and wearing them was optional- there were a few times when I changed into the shirt in the bathroom five minutes before the appointment and took it off five minutes after- they're pretty lax about it.

plus having some useless trivia knowledge...

The trivia questions were pretty easy- "what is the outer layer of your teeth called?", "what is the capital of $state?" etc. It's not that big of a deal.

something something vacation

He pays for most of it, and it's a lot of work, in a third-world country. Not much by way of resorts there, though there are days off & hikes.
Ignoring for now the larger debate over censorship, Facebook's implementation of this ban is suspect. All of these accounts have been alleged to be in violation for months, if not years, and some already had been partially banned (Alex Jones was banned from FB but not IG). Why now? Were there new violations? And/or is it a new policy change that affects how FB will be banning accounts moving forward? Is FB going to do bans for a specific user across all platforms, instead of a platform-by-platform basis?
It is reasonable not to want to engage with everything. It is not even possible to engage with everything.

However, that particular paragraph of slurs is not a reasonable excuse to not engage with everything. That particular paragraph is indeed "just a way of giving yourself an excuse to not engage with opinions cloaked in the veneer of righteousness".

Note that not having time to deal with everything in particular is not "cloaked in the veneer of righteousness"; it simply is a fact of life, not something that one can claim as either righteousness or weakness. The particular problem with that paragraph is the veneer of unearned righteousness it confers on the listener, not the lack of engagement.

It is also not reasonable to expect people to change their minds by virtue of being insulted enough. I don't think I've ever seen that work once no longer in forced school environments, and even then it's a pretty darned weak persuasion technique, despite its enduring popularity.
Except they are selling the 35k model.
I saw another very interesting use that I don't fully understand from a technical perspective, but it basically promised to accurately report position-at-time, via a system of transponders.

The use case is, I can tell when Fedex or the local pizza place is lying to me about my delivery being 30 minutes away, or half a mile down the street, or whether the delivery driver actually attempted to physically deliver my package to my door at 5:47pm or not. (Or Ikea can verify that their subcontracted delivery driver actually got the couch to the buyer on Sunday, or both Uber and I can know exactly where I was dropped off and picked up and when, etc., etc., without either party being able to lie about it.)

A friend of mine agreed that the idea was good, but looked into their implementation and said it was a horrorshow.
It’s only unfortunate that it took social networks this long to ban their toxic behavior and talk. These people did a lot of damage. A lot. All in the name of free speech. And to those saying, just because Facebook can, doesn’t mean they should. These people had the same freedom. Just because they can, they shouldn’t. But they chose hatred. And here we are. You reap what you sow.

Facebook doesn’t owe them anything.

Edit: a couple of words.
Can I make the observation that a 1400sqft (127m^2) 2-bedroom apartment is friggin' huge! My Parisian 3BR (F4) apartment was just over half of that and didn't feel small.
It's damn great. It has transformed the way I deal with traffic.
One of the big concerns for buying an electric car for someone like me is the range anxiety and not practical enough if I could not take it to long drives (SF to LA for ex). Tesla has actually solved this problem on 3 fronts: having its own charging n/w around the majority of US highways, having more energy efficient batteries that can drive to 300+ miles on a single charge, and making the charging process speedier with superchargers. Until other car manufacturers do this, I am not convinced to buy anything except a Tesla.
I've beat up on Google a fair amount. But, companies can get in so much trouble for outright not telling the truth, I don't believe it would be worth it for them to do so. The only big tech company that has a history of outright lying and being provably shady is Facebook.
> Signal handling in POSIX breaks multithreading in practice because it is so crazy hard to get right

In my experience, it's pretty easy to write async-signal-safe code --- which is almost always also thread-safe --- if you follow a few simple rules. I don't understand why people have so much difficulty writing correct signal handlers.
Is property truly private when it's the public square for 1/6 of the population of the entire planet?

It's like if someone owned all of the streets outside of your house and censored you on their private property.
You have a regulatory body to provide outside auditing, high monetary penalties for violations through neglect, and if the violations are intentional, somebody goes to the pokey. Kind of a codified and structured version of what the FTC does now, except with real teeth and without the problems the FTC faces in enforcement.

If you don't like that approach, there are other ways to make the idea work (or, since this is HN, "well actually" it into a fine powder).
Cars are more and more reliable so people can hang on to them for longer. We're also at a milestone, crossing from ICEs to EVs and this may discourage people from actually committing to a new car.