skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Indian, it bothers me how much blind faith people have in the Modi government. The crap they pull never gets talked about, and if you bring it up, Modi supporters will ridicule you and not even consider that maybe the Modi government could actually be doing something bad.

It's reached the point where many media outlets/persons are afraid to criticize the government because that leads to them getting trolled and harassed by BJP/Modi supporters.

It's a big f-ing mess. Like another commenter points out, there's no real opposition to the BJP. The only other major national party, the Congress, has a very long history of corrupt practices, and the current leader is a goddamned joke. I wasn't old enough to vote this year, but if I had been, I know I'd have a hard time choosing the lesser evil.
> Between harmony and human rights, it's absolutely clear to a westerner which one is more important.

What have been the human rights violations from the government, aside from responses to protester violence?

Labeling yourself "human rights" does not automatically make you right.

> It's possible to only say true things and still be biased. This is probably the most common way of spinning a story for "fake news".

Certainly. And you are immune to biases and spinning "fake news" ... how?

> Escalation of force, hiring triads to attack citizens, blinding journalist with rubber bullets, shooting live ammo at students in the chest,

"triads"? "fake news" much?

What else from this list is anything but a response to protester violence? Or do you think the policy should just stand still and take the beating?

> To an individualist,

Keep throwing labels around all you want, it doesn't make you right.

Your freedom to shine your laser light ends where another person's eyes begin.
No one knows. It's completely possible that China could bring an authoritarian but peaceful utopia. We've certainly had our time in charge and squandered it, I can hardly blame China for not trusting us and wanting to take charge from here on out, through whatever means necessary.

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I'd bet my money (but of course, pure speculation) that China would continue to take a path of minimizing risk, with little concerns for so-called "human rights". So, the same treatment the Uyghurs are currently getting I expect would eventually be applied to all groups that could be plausibly considered to be non-conforming. Considering the typically independent thinking personality of a lot of Westerners, I expect we would eventually be in for a bit of that ourselves. Whether some old scores are settled (Japan) is another wildcard.

Of course, all of this is not only speculation, but a work in progress - even if I do turn out to be mostly right, it is all subject to a combination of which particular person is running the show in China at the time, the general nature of Chinese culture (including how that changes over time as things progress), as well as whether there are complications in terms of pushback or natural disasters. So....who knows. But a lack of certainty in no way means risk management is a completely pointless exercise...if we'd been doing any for the last 20 years, we needn't have ended up in this current predicament where we hold very few of the cards, and any path we choose almost certainly comes with massive pain.

This Canadian youtuber has some interesting commentary on the matter now and then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0aCI3d0D8

The 2:40 point where he opines on China's approach to the Uyghurs is very interesting. Trigger warning: it is not quite compliant with the "facts of the matter" as dictated to us by all right thinking Western institutions.

I like watching these sorts of opinions on YouTube from people that actually know something about the world, rather than spending all their time in a classroom or TV studio, it shows how silly the "facts" of how we "should behave" are, and how it's just a bunch of largely empty ideology that's been drilled into Western people's heads through several vectors over decades. Chinese people have been subject to propaganda as well, but a completely different kind than us. We've been told ad naseum that all cultures think like us, and want the same things we do, but it simply isn't true. Going into battle for superpower status of the world with a head full of utterly delusional ideas doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me, but then maybe I need some more schooling.
Please see comments in this thread or Google about their standing for gender issues in the United States. They’ve positioned themselves as social conscious.
Theoretically this is a good thing, but it's way, way too late, since most people use web or mobile clients now.

Mozilla should include a proper PGP implementation in their browser. In fact, I have no idea why a browser that positions itself as pro-privacy doesn't already have a way to sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt text.

As far as I can tell, there wasn't even a discussion about this, which is ridiculous, considering the web (if you count it as a single system) is clearly the biggest communication platform in the world today.
Deep learning or machine learning?

I agree on the former, and quite strongly disagree on the latter, even if it means redefining ML to be dressed-up statistics.
This is true...

http://www.thehistoryreader.com/modern-history/hitlers-ameri...
I could consider things like catching on fire or assisting a crime (DDoS, botnet, etc) to be such cases where they absolutely should be on the hook to be required to fix.

And we already have a system put in place to assess. It's called CVEs. If you exist, you should be on the hook to fix.

It's called 'Being Responsible'. And corporations have a strong tendency to not want to be. That's why we need the 'stick'.
I don't know if they're higher administrative costs, but it requires more trust in Spotify.

In the constant stream revenue model, you take the total revenue Spotify is paying out to artists, and divide it by the total number of streams, and that's the cost per stream. Multiply that by the number of streams an artist had, and that's how much money they get. You only have to trust three numbers from Spotify, and two of them are global numbers, so other people will look into them.

In the stream cost per user revenue model, you do that _for each user_, and then sum up each artist's revenue. That's a whole lot of math to be done. Now, computers can do that, but auditing this will be far more complicated.
Show HN: Silicon Valley Meme iMessage Stickers
Student may have tried to hack West Virginia's blockchain voting pilot for class
I’m surprised they didn’t ask for a password too, after clicking OK on each dialog. I’m not surprised at the UX though, Apple has always done a pretty terrible job of that for power users.
Pretty sure there was a product manager who drove the project. This person needs to understand where the data is coming from and where it flows to. This person is also responsible for checking with legal to see that everything is in line.

Besides that, there're cycles of product reviews with directors and VP's.
Not 20 lbs of CO2 per mile. Most of the mass of gasoline is carbon. But most of the resultant CO2 mass is oxygen. So each gallon (6 lbs) of gasoline produces about 20 pounds of CO2. So in your example of a 20mpg car, each mile is a pound of CO2.
Ask HN: Automated way to see which apps will break on Catalina 64-bit?
Is there an automated way to see which of my apps, printer software etc will break when I upgrade to 64 bit macOS Catalina?
As I recall, they had their own system for how they stored food, so that they knew what was what.

Honestly, I don't remember how they took care of the cooking details, but I remember my father telling me that they talked about one of the hardest things that they had to learn to do in the blind school was to be able to cook meat, because they had to go by the sound it made while cooking in order to determine how done it was.
Faster isn't always better. Think of a control system with a delay element in it. Removing it may make the control system better. Or it may turn out that delay was dampening a positive feedback loop, and now the whole thing blows sky high.
I don't recall how user data was stored or accessed, but I'm certain there will have been separate fields, or at least a flag indicating whether the person opted out from being targeted by their phone number.

That being said, it will have been incredibly easy for a single engineer to make this mistake (code review probably should have caught it? But maybe it looked just close enough to the right data source), and it would have been extraordinarily difficult to discover.
IMHO it is very useful to be able to recognize why you are stuck on a thing yourself, too. There are different flavors of stuck - in my comics work, the resistance I feel when I need to sit down and do some serious plotting is different from the resistance I feel when I need to go design some stuff, for instance.

The sooner you can recognize exactly what flavor of stuck you are, the sooner you can switch mental gears into dealing with whatever needs to be done before you can progress.
> This is the new normal, folks. Consumer technology is manufactured for six to twelve months.

Not completely true. For example, just something I discovered recently is that some e-book readers have very long lifespan if you look inside and ignore the battery. There's not even an electrolytic or tantalum capacitors there. Really nothing that will expire.

If you don't kill it mechanically, these will survive for 10 years+ just fine. Even the internal memory holding the OS and your data is easily replaceable (uSD card, and no other memory that can get corrupted). Indeed you can easily upgrade your $150 2GB e-book reader to 32GiB for $6, with a much faster uSD card. Or even replace the OS completely. ;)

The only thing that makes these devices' lives limited is the battery and the cheap noname uSD card. They even make it so that display is easily replaceable, no glue or anything.

What I hate is lack of commitment to free software. Manufacturer will just dump incomplete old kernel code on github once, without a source code to also GPLed bootloader, after years of nagging from users, and calls it a compliance with GPL.

They don't even bother with mainline Linux support, that would make it so that anyone could use their device for whatever creative prupose and it would get automatic longterm software support for free, even after they would not want to bother anymore to support it.

It's not even a cost thing, I just reverse engineered one such device and it now runs Linux 5.4-rc2 and all HW works, including an eink display driver. It took about 2 weeks of occasional work. Instead the manufacturer probably spent huge amount of time hacking together some old kernel and messy SoC vendor drivers, so that the OS at least holds together for their purposes.

It's probably just some culture thing of not giving a fuck about anything but themselves. And there's a huge amout of waste as a result. At least some people sell these devices if they are just locking up/hanging (sure sign of uSD card data corruption) on eBay. But many will probably just throw it out. Such shame.

So yeah, some tech is indeed solid, but manufacturer will gladly mess all the benefits up on the software side, for no real reason, at least to me.
Agree, I think that's the only good thing here.
Please no. My favorite new library https://ant.design/ is a contribution to open source from China.
Definitely, the Green Revolution et al is a solid basis for optimism, especially with Ehrlich losing his wager on resource scarcity. And I do like the malthusian lineage you described.

This empirical optimism is also paradoxically irreverent toward the immutable attrition of complexity. Our creativity has limits, whatever they are just pick something. At the risk of sounding flippant, 200 years of “creative patching” is historically too small a window to say we can continue subverting this “law” with eternal vigilance (I’ve heard this described as “we are running out of tricks”). Maybe I’m oversimplifying when I say we would have to approach the limit of absolute foresight to achieve this, but I think there’s some truth to it. For example, I like these explanations of our rational limits, with regard to managing a complex society:

- CHOMSKY[1]: We have in our heads a certain set of possible intellectual structures. In the lucky event that some aspect of reality happens to have the character of one of these structures in our mind, then we have a science. And that doesn’t mean everything is ultimately going to fall within the domain of science. Quite the contrary… personally I believe that the nature of a decent society might fall outside scope of possible human science.

- ZIZEK[2]: Hegel says, the owl of Minerva only flies out in the dusk. [owl being the icon of wisdom] So philosophy can only grasp a social order when it’s already in its decay.

Particularly unsettling is our reaction to the blurriness of our creative boundaries—that we insist on walking blindly toward cliffs to find where they are. Optimism in uncertainty is great, but some projections cannot be certain until too late.

A final quote that might address your first points:

- OPHULS[3]: Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos—to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness...

Anyway, this debate is covered in the book The Wizard and The Prophet[4]. I think we can tell which schools we belong to.

[1]: https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=1748

[2]: https://youtu.be/lsWndfzuOc4?t=6703

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479243140

[4]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a...
Is orange tiger your color?
Why would somebody ever give their phone number to Twitter, Facebook, or any other service for that matter? You loose anonymity when you give away your phone number.
That wouldn’t help in any of the areas that the article listed. Most of the listed examples involve working in an organization with bureaucracy, dead lines, large teams, and time constraints.
It was entirely on topic to the post I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193515), which tried to introduce a clear distinction between progressives banning speech and China banning speech. I disagree.

I wish you would be willing to acknowledge that bans on speech that offend others are legitimately problematic, instead of redirecting the conversation to me personally.
For sure, there are submissions on that topic at every level of points, comments, and front page time. It's that way for all the hottest topics; if we replace Hong Kong with climate change in your query the result is similar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The hottest topics are both the most discussed and the most "consistently suppressed", as you put it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it's just what happens when you have 10x more submissions than front page slots. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN, no matter how much coverage it's actually receiving relative to other topics. You seem to feel that Chinese political stories are being unfairly suppressed for who knows what reason—but there are at least as many users (probably many more) who feel that those stories are overrepresented and that HN is going downhill because of it. There's an email in the inbox right now saying so.

The actual moderation principles we use about all this are simple and have been the same for many years. Here they are: HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, so follow-up stories that don't add new information are mostly off topic, as are riler-uppers that don't gratify curiosity so much as stir up indignation and flamewar. When there have been a lot of stories about X lately, the bar for X stories gets raised; HN readers don't like it when the front page has a lot of stuff they've seen already. That's about it. The execution has a lot of subtleties, of course, but those principles fully explain what you're observing.
That doesn't make any sense. I have not seen any evidence of wrong doing or improper use of data [edit for clarification: I'm talking about my literal observation in 2015]. Happy to speak on the record.
For some reason, a lot of people have convinced themselves that youth around the world all value rebellion and standing up for freedom. It’s not true. It’s especially not true in China. Young people in China are generally ultra nationalist and they support virtually everything the government does. If China bans something, the overwhelming majority of them will have a dozen reasons why it’s an excellent decision ready to go.

Don’t count on young people to take the west’s side on anything. They enjoy our media and the products our mega corporations make, but they don’t need them and they’ll switch to Chinese alternatives instantly.
> > As for turbines, most poor countries buy their turbines (of whatever type) from rich countries

> Which costs more and makes them dependent on foreign countries for energy production. Hence why they choose coal.

This makes no sense. Perhaps you aren't aware that coal power plants universally generate electricity using steam turbines? Do you think they're using pistons like an old steam locomotive?

> But these articles' optimism is contradicted by the actions of the countries in question. They're building coal plants.

Well, no. I mean, Indonesia is, but India isn't, and China isn't, and the articles claim that Vietnam is rapidly ceasing to. And politicians' choices often have explanations that go beyond maximizing profit.
Yeah, read the parts on disguises.

I love reading old texts... In part because they simply aren't read
>> I learned that to achieve better results that everybody else, you just need to do a little more upront work. People tend to not do that. The funny part is that after you do that upront work you are usually in a place where you have to work less than everybody else.

I think what you and Matt are missing here is the case where things don't work out. What if Wordpress decides after the trial that I am not a good fit? What if I decide that I don't like the job? What happens to the 3 months I spent working for less? How many under-payed jobs in your mind should an engineer do before the "math" stops working?
I was wondering about this as well, ie. if there is a qualitative difference between error and mistake. (English is not my first language, so can't really tell.)
Thanks a lot! Yes agree but the fact that they care very much and the other group way less is a sign that I should change it if I can resolve the situation like that. Why not make them "happy" If I have the chance?

The only reason I am hesitating is that I fear to confuse more people than I help. If people (including myself) would know what (actually had to look up the term again) "source-available" means I would have used it from the start. But nobody does. So the question is, is it worth confusing a big group of none-vocal-people to make a small group of vocal-people happy?
But I can understand definitely understand their point. So have to decide on that the next days.
So that's why sites have been annoyingly turning dark lately. In Firefox apparently this can be disabled by creating a new integer preference in about:config called "ui.systemUsesDarkTheme" and setting it to 0.
The US certainly has little interest on a strong united EU. But there are a lot more factors at play. Like having military bases there. And generally a lot more soft power / cultural influence. Still, do you remember the US announcing tariffs on car imports?
I mean, when Facebook came out with a similar admission last year, Twitter should have at least checked that they weren't doing a similar thing. But I guess that would have made them culpable had they discovered the same issue. So, just wait out till some employee "accidentally" discovers it!

Twitter would go head over heels trying to remove that one field from their sign up flow to improve the funnel. In fact they will copy what their competitors are doing to understand things better. But when it comes to security or using data, anything goes unless they absolutely have to address it for legal/compliance reasons.

Just the state of affairs of tech companies these days.
But clearly the US has by pretty much any metric won. You're discounting the power of the US and over-estimating the threat of Russia, too - which is pretty much anyone scared about the "integrity of US elections". It's a viewpoint that's usually rooted in the idea that if someone like Trump could get elected it must be a consequence of sinister action.
As they say, this is too little, too late. About 15 years ago was the time when it would have made a real difference.
Pretty much the only custom code that router vendors write is the web UI, which is sometimes a fully custom job and sometimes a reskin of DD-WRT or OpenWRT's web interface. Otherwise, they're generally shipping whatever code they got from the SoC vendor, which is generally a fork of OpenWRT from around when that SoC taped out.

"Use open source" would make the situation appreciably better, because it would mean not accepting any closed-source or out of tree drivers that lock you in to particular kernel versions and non-standard management APIs. Once those problems are out of the way, frequently rebasing the web interface on current upstream OpenWRT is pretty straightforward.
I actually thought about this very question when I was writing the story.

Truthfully, I don't have an agenda.

I can see, though, how easy it would be for someone to use this story to back up their particular viewpoint, when, in fact, it was just a memory about an experience that I had as a child... A memory that I didn't realize had such a big impact until decades later.
Not to mention the crazy restrictions around acorns
Welcome to HN, China of the internet. You get disappeared and only allowed to speak when the people in power say you can.
Stable sort means that the order of same elements is preserved. For example, sorting strings by length, strings of the same length would retain the same order between themselves as they had before sorting.
You can beat O(n log n). That limit is for sorts that use only a ">" comparison. A distribution sort, where you distribute the keys over buckets, can approach O(n).

The first software patent, for SyncSort, is for a sort that beats O(n log n). The basic idea is to read records for a while, get some stats about the key distribution, and set up the buckets to get a roughly equal fraction of the observed keyspace. If blocks of records show up with very different stats, action has to be taken to adjust the bucketing.
The US has used groups like NATO and the G7 to ensure that no European power would challenge US hegemony.
For an audio representation of TimSort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoR-1KwQh2k&t=274s
It's much more that these brands' marketing budgets and campaigns are managed by companies that lose contracts like this when a shareholder, partner, customer or press article brings it to their attention.

At the ecosystem level this works - groups generating content that is undesirable (perspective being from the advertisers and their stakeholders) are demonetized and -in cases where policing doesn't happen - entire networks.

No publisher or network is immune to this, even Google.

It's the macro digital equivalent to boycotting and lobbying and it's effective. Advertisers have a say in where they put their money, and their money indirectly and in some cases directly enables that content.

Best you can hope for is transparency and consistency in how the policy is governed.