skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I interpreted it is that Scissors just are. For a given group, at any given point in time there are maximally controversial statements, "edge cases" that can collapse communities. They are not obvious to anyone involved, and they may change over time.

(Imagine this as fuzzying communities. Crafting inputs that trigger worst performance of an algorithm, hit a point of numerical instability, or straight out exploit it as a security vulnerability.)

In the example of wedding cake, at some point in time, for a large group of people one of such "maximally controversial statements" was a statement about a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. The US is large, so things like this just happen. And one of such cases happened at this particular point in time where statements about it are Scissors, people started talking about it to each other, and the whole thing exploded into a national scandal.

What I believe the protagonist of the story had is a Scissor predicting machine. A social fuzzer. The difference between using it and waiting for a Scissor to be generated organically is that the event need not actually happen. All that matters is that a controversial idea is posted.

Think about it for a moment. Did that story with bakery really happened? If you're only causally made aware of it through social media, would you be able to tell if it was just a fabricated story spread by a bunch of folks on Twitter? Do you think people involved in the drama on both sides of the issue actually verified it? (And no, mainstream news outlets aren't good at checking their sources either.). The point of a Scissor is that after a while, it doesn't really matter what the statement is about, it's simply a catalyst of group division.

In the real world, I would hope a Scissor based off fake news would have less impact than one that grew organically out of a real story. Within the story world, I think Scott Alexander makes the point that a computer-generated Scissor is just as much if not more effective.

So, to answer your questions: the Russian Scissor Machine generates a statement about a bakery refusing to make cake for a gay couple. They post it on-line on US social media. People start getting at each other's throats. Maybe it so happened that there was a bakery that at roughly that time refused to make a cake for a gay couple. If so, someone finds it and it becomes the object of the Scissor statement. If not, no big deal, someone in their zeal fabricates a story, and it's not like either side actually has time to verify facts between retweeting and downvoting. At no point anyone is paid or bribed or otherwise aware of what's going on. The Russians just post a statement and watch the US people tear each other apart.
If you normalised winners by country wealth Switzerland would still be a top contender.
Logs and Offsets: (Near) Real Time ELT with Apache Kafka and Snowflake
When I want to get back to a pristine state, I prefer

$ git reset --hard origin/master

over the suggested

$ git reset --hard HEAD

If you use git and don't know the difference, read this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8196544/what-are-the-git...
Damn this site sure does not want to let you use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll the page. It starts highlighting individual lines instead and completely consumes home/end.
The parent statement is objectively not truth.
The inputs to those functions might be coming from external data sources, or aggregated. These have a cost too. But mostly, it just adds up. At a thousand features, you have a 0.05ms budget for each. Without taking into account network latency since you won’t be running those models inside the application server.
It's not always that cut and dry. If X is already well known, it actually has the opposite effect -- it capitalizes off of X's brand and familiarity and drives people to the new product. It's a common technique (that is frequently misused) in marketing and advertising.

I don't know if X=Zapier here is that effective, but I recognized it right away, and clicked the link to learn more.
I am in a similar boat, except I just Githubs desktop client. In the past 4 years, I think I have had to use the command line under 10 times.
Asking an employee to get a sick note is a ‘public health risk’
Source Available is pretty sweet if you have a paid product you'd like to do detailed audits on. Especially in regulated environments (finance, medicine, etc).

Many enterprises prefer a paid service, as such contracts usually come with somebody assuming liability for data on the system and being around to resolve problems you'd otherwise need to distract an in-house team with.
While I'm not a fan of how the NBA is handling this, I kind of lay the whole thing on their doorstep.

Political commentary is not new in the NBA. LeBron was told (indirectly) on Fox News to "Shut up and dribble" as an example. So if China/Hong Kong was an untouchable topic as it now appears to be, why not send out communications to teams that people aren't to comment on it? Does that stop someone from doing so? Not really, but in this particular case he walked it back and the NBA now has to be incredibly defensive. This seems like it could've been avoided so it is an unforced error on their part.
Since when, people started calling a tall 6" screen a compact screen size? To me, a less than 5" phone screen is a compact phone because my fingers can reach every corner of the phone with one hand. I have been searching everywhere to find a manufacturer that makes a really compact, usable, lightweight and productivity Android smartphone. I don't care for multiple or punch-hole cameras, pure view or infinity display and high-end CPU/GPU. The closest phone we can get right now is Google Pixel 3.
That sounds like a great bill. Anything that lets people hold businesses accountable re:accessibility without opening gaping loopholes for legal shenanigans like that seems like the right balance here.
That's not true at all. Maybe in America, I have no idea, but where I'm from its applied equally.
Stop trying to be woke. It is super-cringe.
How on earth is content this shallow drifting to the top of HN? Is any "non expert" software designer walking away from this enlightened in some way?
How Dictionaries Are Implemented in Python
Awesome! I will subscribe!
You can't use someone's event as a platform to express your political views when their terms forbid it.

Freedom of speech does not protect you form the consequences of your actions.
I am really struggling to ever put my phone down. I get stuck in a loop of checking email, then Facebook, then a series of news websites including hacker news. Then repeat all day.
Yeah pretty much every app I run nowadays is Electron. Don't love that, but they bring me enough value that it's 100% worth it for me. I'm with the other commenters that I don't like having to google a git command every time I have to do something more complex than add/commit. GK is perfect in that sense
"Orthogonal to being right" might actually be too optimistic here. For whatever reason, people who want to resolve disagreements this way often hold positions which rely on their own supposed lack of power as justification. So to some extent, winning the power struggle is actually correlated with being wrong.
Not having security vulns in your software costs money. A large number of users aren't actually harmed by vulns or don't care about them.

But if you went around saying that really it isn't important to fix vulns since they don't affect that many people you'd be rightly raked over the coals.

"It is expensive" isn't an excuse.
> If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to do it as a general principle, and that means tolerating speech you don't like too.

Sorry, but I don't see a world where supporting open, self-proclaimed Nazis is the same as supporting advocacy for democracy.

I can believe that we should drown out the Nazis and amplify the voice of democracy. That doesn't make me a hypocrite. That makes me someone with an ethos.
The various secret government programs did whatever it took to protect our precious bodily fluids from foreign contamination. Visible hazardous waste disposal is a great indicator that something interesting going on. So you hide it in a hole and pretend it's for the greater good of whatever dogma you sold your soul to.

Lord knows how much hazardous waste has been carelessly buried under orders from dogmatic maniacs obsessed with "winning" at all cost, including our future.
Interesting. To my knowledge, South Park was never imported into China. Maybe I am outdated, when it is imported to China?
How do you get gigs without a contract? That no doubt violates all sort of insurance, security and finance rules for most companies.
> And I always prefer not using the trackpad if I can avoid too.

this is emacs we are talking about :) you are supposed to use the keyboard for everything.
Until an HTML element/CSS feature you are using is rendered obsolete and stops working in Chrome :)
It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial.

Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
It hardly matters. Even if the courts upheld it, it will be difficult to find the perpetrators, who could easily be in another country. And even if you manage to pin it on a political party or action group, the fine will be far, far smaller than the (perceived) gain at the polls.

Fines of $100,000 are trivial[1] on this scale -- and most fines are smaller than that. Even then, many just fail to pay them[2].

It's hard to know how much these things actually move the polls. But politics is both a game of inches and a game of winner-take-all: even a tiny nudge that puts you over the bar has enormous payoffs worth literally billions. So even if the courts managed to uphold this, nobody who would resort to this technique would be affected.

[1] https://www.dispatch.com/news/20190913/fec-fines-ohio-gop-10...

[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/30/scofflaw-...
He might be talking about the one Season 5 episode and Episode 200.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_(South_Park)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Best_Friends
S3 breaks url format in a backward incompatible way occasionally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19821406

Otherwise this is definitely the way to go. Nothing beats static files that you can just cp into a bucket.
Well, that's a blunder for sure!

Didn't know it, thought I was talking to just some FOSS proponent, so sorry.

But even so, we can surely agree that the design is basic compared to GitHub no?
Sea 'boiling' with methane discovered in Siberia
I’m grateful to those who have fought and sacrificed for our rights. I think somewhere up the chain things get wonky. With our astronomical military budgets it should be easy to earmark two things: veterans’ benefits and ecological cleanup
Free text fields still tell me mine doesn't exist (in their years out of date database) so I wouldn't be worse off with a drop-down.
Will superintelligent AI "destroy" life as we know it? Yes, as pretty much every transformative technology before it has. Cars destroyed "life as we knew it". Computers did, too. We live in a world that is very different from the world 1000, 500, or even 250 years ago. Even our economically disadvantaged people live way past 40 years old. People survive debilitating diseases and lead productive lives, rather than being tossed in a ravene. Natural disasters don't wipe out entire civilizations (and at least in the 1st world, are mostly only economic in their impact).

Yet at the same time, other things have stayed the same. We still care about mostly the same things. Food, Freedom, and Fornication. And complaining about youngsters. I don't think that is going to change.

The fears that General AI are going to kill off humanity are predicated on the idea that General AI will get smarter than humanity. I posit a different interpretation of what is more likely to happen. General AI will require creativity to be able to outsmart humanity. And with creativity comes boredom. And distraction. And opinion. And argument.

I think General AI will be too interested in entertaining itself to take over the world. We've had people try to take over the world, on occasion, and it has largely not gone well for them.

But before that happens, people will start adapting AI to their lives, to the point that the line between "human" and "machine" will be blurred. So life "as we know it" will definitely "end". It will be replaced with a new form of life, one that isn't limited by only what nature can provide. One that cares about Food, Freedom, and Fornication.
There's also an epidemic of cyanobacterial (also known as blue green "algae") contamination around the US.

We've traveled all over the country and have personally encountered it everywhere -- from Oregon to New York to central Florida...it's all over the midwest, in the Great Lakes -- seems to be anywhere there's farming.

I'm not sure what you do for that, though -- not sure it can be filtered, and boiling just makes it worse as it's toxic when it's dead. I'm honestly more terrified of cyanobacteria than PFAS, and it's everywhere.
Second. It's worth the read.
well, it is not exactly amazingly fast on Linux either, to be honest.
I've really gone sour on the singularity in recent years. It seems to be yet another one of those cases where someone projects out from incomplete data and assumes unbounded infinite growth despite the fact that such a thing never happens in nature. Any time you see someone project out in a simple exponential growth curve you know their projection is bullshit. Growth curves are always S-Curves. Always.

It's like asking how many more flies there would be in the world if you failed to squish one back in the 80s. You calculate out the lifespan and size of the brood and discover that the entire solar system would be filled with housefly if you had let that one live. In truth the number of flies is bounded by food and water availability.

Artificial Intelligences are almost certainly going to run into the same limitations that prevent natural intelligences from becoming godlike. It's hard to quantify because our measures of intelligence are so vague, but from what I've seen of AI research thus far it will be a herculean effort to get something that's as smart as an average human and pushing beyond that is going to run into some serious fundamental limits in power density, cooling, quantum tunneling leakage, and so on.
Ask HN: How to teach Python and good programming practices to Matlab hackers?
I've volunteered to give an introduction to Python programming to some fellow physicists who normally use MATLAB. Rather than treat them like complete beginners, I'm trying to think of ways to pitch the material in terms of what they already know from their experience with MATLAB. They want to know how to do with Python the things they currently do with MATLAB: mainly analysis, manipulation and plotting of lab data. They also expressed interest in learning "how to program", i.e. they judge their current abilities to resemble "hacking" more than programming, and want to learn a language that employers would be interested in. However, they do understand some of the basic concepts about programming, like variables, loops, if/else blocks, mathematical operations, loading serialised data, etc.

I thought I'd start by showing them the basic syntax differences, then move on to the equivalent tools in Python to manipulate and plot arrays (Numpy and Matplotlib). However, at some point I also want to introduce lists, dictionaries, functions, defensive programming, and other key concepts that are often ignored by course that teach scientists how to analyse and plot their data.

Has anyone given, seen or had a course that was aimed at MATLAB users that I could adapt or use as inspiration? Should I treat them like absolute beginners, or can I pitch some of these concepts in terms of their existing experience?
Hehe indeed. I love how it's a big database with the ability to create different visualisations for tables and records.

E.g. you create a folder (DB Table) and then you create pages inside (DB records)
Or you create a board(DB Table) and then you create Columns(DB Records) and tasks inside each column(DB Records with connections another table).

Would also be amazing to open their API, lots of integrations would come out of it.

Furthermore, based on CrunchBase, they are a small team with a seed fund[0].

0. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sugarbox
So you want to replace Xi with some other member of the Politburo? Pulling that off seems unlikely to help much, and failure would strengthen his position.

I don't know any other internal regime change that isn't a revolution.
Training for Neoliberalism: Behavioral economics and its ideological tendencies
This kind of reminds of when we dump tons of salt on the roads when winter storms come around the east coast. It solves one problem but what other problems is it causing?

It would be incredibly naive to think dumping all these chemicals on the ground wouldn't cause some type of negative externality.
This is how I feel watching a government run by Donald Trump shamelessly self-promote and bash critics. I think America is rapidly turning into an India or Turkey type of situation. I don't trust our elections to be fair and if Donald Trump won in 2020, I think a lot of hope will be lost.
This is amazing. Lots of politics on this site recently, but this is beautiful.
This article is adapted from the book “Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think“

I imagine the idea is that if you want to go further, you buy the book.
Yeah, it's not like they've been harvesting organs of Falun Gong members.
New study links pollution to assaults and domestic violence
I don't disagree and for the record I'm an engineer. I don't think my points are actually counter to yours. :)
Fuck political correctness
ChipGAN Style Transfer Masters Chinese Ink Wash Painting
Beyond the Security Team
> 2 b) Maybe cloud functions are enough?

I generally agree, but eventually you're gonna start getting emails saying things like "We're deprecating Node 8.x in our Lambda / Cloudfunction / etc"
There is more to be done to protect, secure, and expand the rights of everyone. But they are still rights.

Privileges are things granted to you, often conditionally, by someone else. Using the word often sounds quasi-religious to me: "Thank Privilege for this meal we are about to eat, and our safe home, ...".
I don't really recognise a significant difference between a (real) monarchy and a totalitarian dictatorship, to be honest. Words change over time - North Korea isn't normally described as a monarchy but it has hereditary leaders with total power. China doesn't have hereditary leaders but the way power is passed between leaders is still pretty incestuous. The USSR selected rulers through various court intrigues and assassinations, much like many monarchies did.

You seem to draw a distinction based on how much power the ruler had: "absolute" control or less than that. But all despotic rulers exercise as much power as they possibly can. Modern tech arguably makes it easier to exercise more and more power (probably ... I haven't really thought about it). But if Henry VIII had the ability to censor information by flicking some switches he'd have certainly done it.

My point about violent revolution was that if you build an organisation capable of doing all the things Marx said was necessary, you've built a totalitarian state. Yes, in theory a violent revolution which centralises all power in the hands of the revolutionaries could work out great and turn itself into a democracy, but in practice this never actually happens. Instead the state sticks around and stays despotic, it doesn't go "right! job done!" and dissolve itself like Marx imagined it would.

Given Marx's preconditions for creating communism, eternal totalitarian rule is the only plausible outcome. People don't just give up total power once they killed people to obtain it.
I have to say, I don't think W3W is actually that great for simple transmission by voice. It doesn't seem like they've put in any effort at all to avoid similar-sounding words. I did a few searches on the word list and found a bunch of groups with very little effort:

* pace, placed, plates, pays

* blush, plush, brushed, brushes

* crave, craved, chafe, safe

* inks, mink, pink, pinks, kinks, link, wink, winks, think, thinks, blink, brink, blinks, clinks, slinks, rinks, drinks

* yappy, happy, nappy, snappy, sappy, strappy, scrappy

I kind of just stopped searching for each of these groups, I'm sure there's more for each one.

If I can find sound-alikes this easily, just by probability there are going to be similar-sounding adjacent locations.

I'm also not convinced that geographic proximity versus transmission accuracy is a tradeoff we need to make.

One very simple solution would be to add an error-checking word, which is essentially a fast-hash of the first three words. I'm not convinced given what we know about memory with regard to numbers, that three words is somehow the ideal number--storing four words in short- or long-term is not noticeably harder to me.
Perhaps you do not like their content, and I'm totally with you there, but I don't know that I'd classify this as "drivel". Sure, it's all about money in the end, but they're not wrong. FB/Google competitor? Check. Doesn't mean you have to like them. Strengthening journalism? You mean like, paying them money so they can keep the lights on? Check. Again, you don't have to like it (buy a subscription already).

Weasel words all around, but I can't point to where they're specifically lying.
Play May Be a Deeper Part of Human Nature Than We Thought
> The subscribers to The Guardian, worldwide, value its

> quality reporting

Said every person about their favorite news outlet ever. I'm sure there are a few people out there hate-reading other news outlets, but the majority read their particular news source because they believe it to be somewhat comparatively truthful.

> most other newspapers are beholden to the interests of

> their owners

They are beholden to the hand that feeds them, which in the case of The Guardian is a left-leaning politically biassed audience. It doesn't particularly matter whether what they say is completely the truth, as long as it gets people to pay their memberships.

Also, as with much of the big news corporations (especially the lower budget ones), reporting is typically what I refer to as armchair journalism. Most news articles appear to either be sourced from another website or have come from social media sourced (such as Twitter). There's an awful lot of back-scratching happening between news outlets.
And the superintelligence should worry about mental illness.