skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Content moderation is difficult, and there are many legitimate and arguable edge cases.

The existence of these edge cases and difficulty of moderation does not negate or excuse FB's overall behavior, which goes far beyond, as noted by several examples in the article.

Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook: “This is essentially the crack cocaine of their product. It’s the really extreme, really dangerous form of content that attracts the most highly engaged people on the platform, So they want as much extreme content as they can get.”

This is the same reason that FB makde a top level decision to leave posted a video known to be maliciously edited to make the subject look drunk or impaired -- the subject is the person 3rd in line for the Presidency of the United States. Nevermind that this effectively amplifies & legitimizes false propaganda on one of the world's largest publishing platforms.

This is the same reason that FB ignored massive interference in the US election by Cambridge Analytica, Russia, etc. The content was surprising and increased engagement time, nevermind that much of it was false and micro-targeted at people's specifically tested fears, and corrupted the electoral process.

Anything that people cannot turn their eyes away from, simply to extend "engagement" time and rack up counts of adverts displayed. The ruthless pursuit of attention in the attention economy.

The only restraint is the limit of how grotesque the content can be before people turn away, and that boundary is apparently being continually pushed forward by exposure.

Of course, they justify it all on varoius grounds ranging from 'freedom of expression', 'let the viewers decide', 'we're not editors', etc., ad nauseum.

To be clear:

This is beyond malicious, this is knowingly (or at best intentionally ignorantly) poisoning society for their own profit.

Not that this is unusual; corporations have often poisoned the water, air, & land for their own profit. Except that this is at the scale & scope of modern technology.

If we don't want the tech industry to soon be seen in the same light as the old smokestack or cigarette industries, this needs to be curbed.
Couldn't agree more. Take Harold McCluskey [1] - "The Atomic Man" - who was involved with a pretty horrendous accident at Hanford, WA - and ended up with radioactive Americium-241 [2] embedded in his face/hands etc. - continuously irradiating him with a-particles.

You would think - "That's it for that guy"... Well, he ended up dying of pre-existing coronary artery disease - nothing to do with radiation or cancer, despite having massive amounts of radioactive material in his body, post-mortem.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_McCluskey

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium-241
Switch from Windows/OS X to Ubuntu
I wouldn't call Firefox bloat-free with things like Pocket integration. But yes, it's an awesome browser anyways!
A ton of people want to get off platforms (including medium) that they see going the wrong direction, and making it easier is great.
The issue I can see from such techniques is the same issue with all pesticides and that is are these species we've deemed pests necessary for the food web? I know it seems silly but apparently mosquitoes are a major biomass source for fish and other species which may not be easily substituted with a less dangerous one. Maybe the more correct answer isn't killing off the mosquitoes which feed off humans but find a way to eliminate malaria itself. I'm being naive in my assessment, to be honest, but that's just my thoughts on the matter.
Today's modern is the future's old school.
> Yes, that is exactly what I mean.

OK, I'd like to note that it's also the past -- CGI was (and in some dark corners still is) a thing.

> Every single person whose product is not Internet infrastructure, that wrote or configured their own unnecessary custom LXC or Docker and VM environment because 'Docker changes everything'.

Yeah but those people now have way easier to run local environments?

> If a company's product is machine learning for detecting cancer and their ops person has a custom Docker/kubernetes environment they're misusing their employer for their own technical interest

???? If your company's product is machine learning, and developers who must work on that product need to set up their environment on their local machines, docker is easier to get started with than VMs, runs faster, consumes less resources. While it might be arguable that it's easier, there are literal money savings to be had by running a docker container instead of a full VM.

Kubernetes has much more complexity and many more tradeoffs involved so I can see that being a much heavier decision.

What you're saying is that overzealous ops people who are looking to pad their own resumes should not be allowed to run amuck, and I agree with that, but docker is not the poster boy for engineering largess -- and I'd argue it never was. Companies and research groups/smaller distributions have been using containerization very productively for a long time.
There have been at least two cases where the president has tweeted altered videos: 1. Showing Jim Acosta "karate chop" a Whitehouse intern (a few frames removed from the video to turn the lowering of an arm into a violent "chop" 2. A slowed down video of Nancy Pelosi speaking, to make her sound drunk / mentally incapacitated.

Deep Fakes or not, I think people are largely already comfortable with questioning the authenticity of videos.
Excellent points.

> not make the Forbes rich list or a Nobel prize

...not to mention that many scientists gave up opportunities to go after Nobel prizes to focus instead on more meaningful topics of research.
I agree that SQL as the lingua franca for talking to relational data stores is not ideal, and that in various ways it could be improved. I personally would start out with some of the issues of cosmetic syntax orthogonality, though I realize there are bigger fish to fry.

But two things come to mind on reading your comment.
1. For the problem of Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) which query language is used is not that important. If one accepts that there is one general purpose language for application development and another for managing persistent data, you will be left with a situation where there is a bunch of redundant code to write in whatever query language and application language you have available, and it would be nice to not have to write all that by hand.
2. Over the years, I have encountered many projects (languages) that attempt to address various deficiencies in SQL. I feel like a lot of these projects make life too hard on themselves. Rather than building extensions to existing database engines, they want you to adopt not just their new language, but their whole persistence stack. If I was smarter, and I had a design for a "better SQL", I would try to integrate it into Postgres or some other existing database engine. I guess that's what some of the ORM authors are trying to do, but by compiling their language to SQL supporting all databases at once. But returning to point 1, that seems pretty separate from the issue of Object-Relational-Mapping.
reporting what another site wrote, dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009017
Mass timber is more fire resistant than steel.

Edit: In building applications. Steel softens and loses its strength in the presence of heat.
I understand perfectly the need to switch from Chrome, as I've only ever used Firefox. What I meant was to understand the difference between Firefox and this browser (other than the point of breaking up homogeneity, which I agree is a great thing overall)
Isn't BlazingDB working on something like this?
React bindings are ready for testing: https://github.com/drcmda/react-zdog :-)
By safeguarding against Smurf Suite. And by blowing the whistle every time gangsters show up and want to use a baseband chip to abuse people.

They had an opportunity in June 2013 to say, "we're aware of the former intelligence chief James Clapper's acknowledgement that his March 2013 testimony to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was erroneous ; we are taking every action possible to thwart efforts by the NSA to collect information about our users as described in his recent letter and as disclosed last month by Edward Snowden."

At a time when many people (including some members of Congress) were hoping that Clapper was going to be prosecuted for perjury and the entire regime of illegal spying was going to be provable undone, Qualcomm, a potentially huge contributor to safety of the public, did and said nearly nothing.
Let's try, then.

My understanding of "intuition" is having some subjective feeling of knowledge about aspects of a situation or being able to predict what is likely to happen in the near future automatically, i.e. without consciously trying to work it out. At first glance this seems to match with common dictionary definitions of what intuition is.

What I meant by "fuzzy rules" as applied to predicting where the ball will go after my tennis opponent hit it was that I do not measure exact speeds, angles, etc. and then deliberately calculate an expected trajectory, but I see roughly where the ball is coming from, how fast and at what angle my opponent is hitting it and where it starts to go. From this, after enough practice, I have a "feeling", i.e. an intuition, about where it will roughly end up hitting the court on my side again. This merely serves as an example.

What I am trying to get at is that as far as my knowledge goes, a lot of what we humans call "intuition" in our own behaviour by any widely agreed upon definition is just the same as what a trained AI is doing - applying a heuristic learned over time to make a decision based on an input.

No, just because the trained AI can play a game well does not mean it will outdo humans at any task. But a lot of human behavior is not that exceptionally special either, I think.
According to Wikipedia,

>At present, radiation levels have dropped considerably, compared to the fatal levels of April 1986

Which says that yes, Pripyat should have been evacuated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat
What is the difference between what you are describing and a language?
Urql: a GraphQL client library
They've recently rebuilt the roof of the "collège des Bernardins", also in Paris and as old as Notre Dame, using steel beams and titanium tiles...

Doing the same for Notre Dame would be sensible.

They will do as they see fit, and rightly so.
Unfortunately, there aren't many good captcha systems that don't do the equivalent of what ReCaptcha does, because we're at a point where fingerprinting users is a strong signal to help identify contractors doing captchas on behalf of bots.

Even some silicon valley products use captcha-breaker services. These services present themselves as sophisticated APIs but in reality they're just dispatching work to humans who accept pennies an hour at internet cafes; a competition with Amazon's mechanical turk for digital sweatshops. They're common and cheap and the tech industry feeds them. Undercutting the workforce doing the captcha busting is the only viable way to stop that.

Your real alternative is to do the fingerprinting yourself.
For automation I would recommend ratelimiting endpoints. I personally tend to use 5 requests per IP/second along with 100 requests/minute as default and then override specific endpoints to e.g. 1 request per IP/hour.

For user input I recommend keeping the first comment submitted by a new account/IP hidden until you/moderators have approved it, after which new comments from that user no longer needs to be approved before they become visible to other users.
I had a similar feeling when reading it. I know little about the details of the underlying issue, but the article makes it sound like the politician in question is advocating for pollution and traffic jams. I guess anything is possible, but I suspect liberal out of context quoting.

For example, "previous setup was better (because A, B, C). Yes, we also had 3AM traffic jams, but we lived with it, it was not the end of the world" could get tranlated into "3AM traffic jams are good". My 2c.
It works because most bots do not keep running the javascript after pageload like a real user's browser would.
Three anti-science lobbies dragging our world back into the dark ages:

1) anti-vaxxers
2) anti-nuclear
3) anti-GMO

Let’s have a better public education before it is to late.

I grew up near Chernobyl and my parents still work there. While no one denies it was a huge disaster in which people died; they way nuclear is portrayed in (most) of the Western world is disgusting.
As of today (accounting for all past death) nuclear is the safest form of power generation (statistically even safer than solar, measured in deaths/mwt).
Do we want to stop climate change? If yes - nuclear is an essential part of the solution.
What was up with the Dreamcast and fish? Fish Life, Seaman, plus that game with the fishing rod controller[1]. Plus I'm pretty sure an Ecco the Dolphin game was on there too. Someone at Sega really liked the ocean.

[1] http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/ddrgame_2249_134074308.jpg
But unlike Penn Station they're just suggesting modernizing the hidden sections the public doesn't see.
Customers. They allow us to do what we do and get paid for it. It is our job to do right by them.
> "Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm"

Why should the makers of phones use Qualcomm technology? FRAND standards aren't laws, only good faith handshake promises unenforceable in courts.

Can't make the argument that "Without Qualcomm chips, our whole phone business would die" and "Qualcomm doesn't sell important enough technology for us to pay a percentage of our phone retail price"

Vertical integration is the headache of the phone manufacturers. Don't like it? Sell modular phones with a missing modem slot and have customers buy the modems directly.

The Chip industry is a very capital intensive business driven by volumes and i fully expect to maximize my potential earnings were i to spend tens of billions building up an unrivalled technology portfolio which is not the same as a monopolistic market position.
13 Minutes to the Moon: New BBC Podcast Tells the Story of the Apollo 11
I would want, and expect, a cleanly installed browser with default settings to pull and display requested web pages in their entirety.

As much as I am in favour of ad blocking, anything which modifies the content of a requested resource should be opt-in.
Well done. Would love to see a similar process that works for a Medium Publication (which has multiple authors, etc.).
Clinical trials are expensive. Trying something on yourself is not. I'm not advocating any of us do that. But if the mouse researchers actually believe it's not harmful and believe their own results, why wouldn't they do an ad-hoc experiment on themselves?
Regarding the 10 missions before Apollo 11: It's a little more complicated. Apollo 1 is the name that was given to honor the astronauts who died in the pad accident. Apollo 2 and 3 didn't exists. But a whole bunch of other tests did exist testing Saturn 5 before we got to the unmanned Apollo 4, 5 and 6 tests. And starting with Apollo 7 humans were included. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions for details.
In a somewhat similar vein, learning & practicing “deliberate gratitude” saved my sanity.

Taking a mindfulness class was what introduced me to the concept, but regular practice of gratitude helped save my mind (and perhaps my life!).
> Are they though?

Emphatically yes? There's a pretty big gulf between low-budget/amateur stuff and more professional acting.

> It's hard to say someone is good at acting if they are put into roles where they basically play themselves.

That's definitely true, but like, even if Keanu Reeves only plays one character, that character just happens to be someone who's fun to see in a particular sort of movie. You still can't achieve the same thing by getting a random person to be themselves, and face-swapping their performance with Keanu Reeves.
Apple executives presumably don't have specific, detailed knowledge of crimes that will perpetuated with iMessage. They have a general and broad knowledge that some unspecified people will.
You’ll lose people who are blocking this kind of shit. Also you might end up on a Firefox blacklist.
As pygy_ explained above, colonialism has morphed into "neocolonialism through private corporations and puppet governments". That is a symptom of the widening gap in power between former colonies and former colonizers. That gap is compounding over time, making it harder and harder for former colonies to catch up. In that sense, the crippling effects of colonization are still felt today, and are continuing to grow with no end in sight.
This is like arguing that the Model T demonstrates that cars will never be safe enough to drive.

Yes, there are ways to do this wrong. We have a much better idea what they are and our standards for precision and reliability are much higher. The 1940s are long gone and we aren't the baby boomers. We require seat belts in all cars, houses to be built to fire and electrical codes, and household chemicals to have plain labels and clear warnings.

We also now know that we need to specifically target something like three sub-species of mosquito and that if we hit exactly those three the ecological impact will be essentially zero; we've verified that they don't compete with anything and that nothing eats them and that they don't interact in any of the dozens of ecological systems that professional biologists understand that programmers never learn about. We know that we need to hit exactly those sub-species because DDT happened. We know that we need to study things like evolution rates and virulence before deploying engineered organisms; we have, after all, all watched Jurassic Park.

The people working on this understand what will happen if their solution isn't good enough. You are not adding anything to this situation except uncharitable negativity. You cite DDT. I'll cite Greenpeace, whose blind opposition to nuclear power is still contributing to the ongoing death of our planet. Don't be Greenpeace.
Installing cmder, which runs over ConEmu, gives you a really nice terminal with lots of configurability.
Well, Ecto is not an ORM. It's a Data Mapper[0]. Rails' ActiveRecord is ORM.

I agree that some DSLs make SQL better and easier to reason about -- and that Ecto is one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mapper_pattern
I love Firefox's features, but I've tried it for a week and I just have a too big loss of performance. My 2017 Macbook pro with 8gb of RAM just doesn't cut it. The browser is something I use +6 hours per week, I can't handle it being laggy.

When I try it a little bit it seems fine, but after using Firefox for a week going to Chrome seemed like a relief in terms of performance. I'm missing some cool features from Firefox like containers, but performance is more important.
Normally they name telescopes once they are on orbit and working, because they don’t want to put a name on something and have it fail.

The joke with JWST is that it’s not allowed to fail.
The problem (to me) is it's often impossible to truly match the "original". The different materials, building methods, etc often create something that is close but not quite right. See the Washington Monument as an example.

Using a contrasting architecture results in "yea it's different but we meant to do that" rather than a "we tried to make it the same but it's still different". See the Louvre's pyramid entrance as an example--and yes, I know that was controversial in itself, but I like it.
It certainly does feel that Tom Cruise simply plays the exact same person in almost every movie he's in. But that just makes it worse, surely? Tom Cruise is amazing at being Tom Cruise; my low-budget actor who's going to have Tom Cruise's face plastered over him in post-production is probably going to be atrocious at being Tom Cruise. Maybe even creepily so; I'll spend the whole movie wondering what's wrong with him.
It's not that 99% of big data problems can't or shouldn't be solved by those tools. It's that hype makes everyone think their problem falls under the category of big data when it might not.

Hitting a performance or stability limit with MySQL with an unsophisticated schema/architecture does not mean you have big data. But that's the scenario that's common.
> (...) we might have entirely generated ultra-realistic and ultra-specific pornography that will ultimately lead to people just not having sex...

This is really funny... the church has spent centuries trying to convince people to not fuck around, and now we are achieving this goal through porn.
I have to agree with this. Tons of extremely smart people, but day to day was hell in the software side.
A lot of the comments here are assuming that the author is proposing something that he is not (perhaps making this assumption from reading the title not the article itself). So I'll summarize.

He's arguing that rebuilding the internal structure of the roof with wood beams would inevitably lead to another fire. Concrete and steel would last longer and be more structurally stable and resilient to fires.

What he's not arguing for is changing the visual character of the building. The steel and concrete he proposes would be in internal areas that people don't see. The ceiling which is what people see from the inside would remain visually the same. So would the exterior. The part that would use concrete and steel would be the interior section of the roof which is only seen by maintenance crews.

Separately, he makes the argument that much of the stained glass installed during the 19th century was "severe and flat" rather than "delicate and jewel-like like genuine medieval glass". He's arguing that we should install glass more closely resembling the original medieval glass, which would allow more light into the structure.

I think all of this is very much in line with trying to keep the character of the building the same.

EDIT: Reading the end of the article again, it's actually not clear to me whether he is proposing to put in clear glass or a stained glass that's a bit lighter than what was there before the fire. I think I initially misinterpreted and the former is what he's getting at.
If you need any information or help about Germany, you can contact me if you want (see profile).
"they are more parallel"

They are more parallel for very specific things, most of which go flying out the window when you try to use arbitrary precision floats. GPUs are not parallel arrays of CPUs; they're parallel arrays of what are very stupid and unoptimized execution units from a CPU's point of view. (The "stupid and unoptimized" is to some extent a feature; you can control them deeply, unlike the high performance CPUs, which are to the point where they're not just second-guessing you, they're second-guessing their second guesses. But they don't have a lot of caches, they don't reorder things themselves, etc.)

From the linked project: "Using the perturbation method, we can calculate only one point with an arbitrary precision in CPU and restore the rest of the picture with float precision in GPU."

Now that's where the big wins really are. I Have A Dream (which will never happen) of writing a programming language that makes it easier to mix CPU and GPU execution in some sensible manner.
Part of the cost of Hubble was that the teams working on the keyhole satellites was not allowed to tell the Hubble designers about "lessons learned" and the Hubble team had to find them out the hard way.
One could argue that a problem would the type of people who would have access/interest in such a thing. Seems like it would largely be restricted to the (relatively) rich and tech savvy at first, and could precipitate a trend in these people no longer reproducing and passing down the genetics which may have played a role in the success that engendered their ability to acquire or use, not to mention develop, these products in the first place.