skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So I am an older dude living in a coastal city with a high cost of living, and not a teenager who's easily impressionable.

And I cut the cord years ago so most of my screen entertainment is from youtube videos. And I don't even watch the `trending` videos that youtube pushes. I simply watch documentaries, old TV/movie shows, highlights of soccer/baseball (since I don't have cable TV), some game playing videos, and vlogs.

It was the vlogs that got me feel depressed even more. I don't watch vlogs of the pop stars but of normal people who are just going about their life. Like sailing with family, working on their big houses and cars, flying to places in airliners, flying around in private planes for work/pleasure.

These are completely normal/awesome people who I would love to have as friends. But as I watched the vlogs, I realized that I did/do/will NOT have what they have. Yes yes, it's shallow of me to think this way, of material goods.

With scripted TV shows/movies, you knew the nice houses/cars/toys were fantasies. But with vlogs, you know they are real people. It's true that they are often showing just better part of their lives, but still these houses/cars/toys are real in real people's lives.

Watching these youtube videos inevitably lead to introspection.

The other part of internet that get me down is real estate websites. Before internet, you really had to go out of your way to see inside of expensive houses. Now, with a browser, you can see how the others live. As someone who is paying $$ for dumpy/small space in an increasingly expensive coastal city, it surely does depress me. I initially started viewing the sites to look for my own house possibly to buy, and it inevitably leads to viewing more and more expensive houses. Soon enough, you wonder, what have I done with my life.

I've started cutting out vlogs/real estate websites. But I cannot unsee what I have seen.

For anyone who will see this as rantings of a materialistic person, I am pretty sure I am not. I can fit what I use/need in daily life into a suitcase, except for my 24" monitor. What really gets me is I can't provide for my family.

Oh well, maybe I AM a shallow materialistic dude who just doesn't admit to it.

>>> I wonder how we can increase awareness and ethical decision making around our industries actions.

Frankly, not sure what our tech industry can do to address the complaints I laid out...
Wow, this website is cool and makes for a fun and very interesting (and telling) comparison between old reddit and the redesign:

https://webtest.app/?url=https://www.reddit.com

vs.

https://webtest.app/?url=https://old.reddit.com

An order of magnitude increase in page size and energy consumed, and it takes 5 times as long to load, with 5 times the ad requests.
It matters so much how we define the world for ourselves. I can't make much difference in the world if I define the world as all of humanity. If I change my perspective and see my world as my family, friends, coworkers, and community I can suddenly see so many incredible opportunities to make a difference.

Look around and find the things that you can pick up and improve.
Anectodal comment here: n=1.

I stopped actively viewing news in all formats around 4 years ago. I actively shunned TV news, newspapers, radio, and I block all ads online.

Some still got through, making me more determined to avoid them: leaving the room when the news came on for example (my wife switching the channel over!).

But it made me angry because I couldn't escape it. I literally could not get away from it.

When I enter the supermarket, the newspapers are right in front of the damn door! I actually look away from them. Look past them. Whatever it takes.

I've now resigned myself to absorbing some of it passively but I have developed a kind of shield. I almost internally say "meh, so what!".

Almost none of it directly affects me or if it does I am in no position to do ANYTHING about it.

Almost. Some still gets through and pisses me off expecially since every news broadcast or story has a politician in it.

But it was depressing. I actually think that before I stopped I was depressed. Not just feeling down. Clinically depressed.

I am a different person now. I talk to other entrepreneurs: by definition, the successful ones are quite positive people.

I honestly think the constant depressing and negative news was what made me depressed.

The sooner you get rid of it, the better you'll feel.
Be aware that QTs QML makes use of a Javascript variant too.
The term 'poor man' isn't very informative to me. Does that mean it has all the functionality but is free or does it mean has basic functionality and is free, or is cheaper?
Google Web Light: Faster and lighter mobile pages from search
Social media has very, very little to do with it.

The fact is that no, things are not amazing in 2019 and there are not endless possibilities for people. You've traded social media for being blind to the woes that the poor face every day. People are dying because death is better than saddling your family with generational medical debt, the stress of losing everything if you get sick once pushes people beyond the limits they can handle and the lack of social opportunities due to working 24/7 to live piles on top.

I've had this discussion with my parents before, where they've straight up mentioned that they'd sooner die than potentially saddle me with debt if they ever get cancer or some other debilitating condition. What kind of fucking life is that to live?
Relevant article [1] and corresponding HN discussion thread [2]

Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye.

I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective."

[1] "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360626
A useful list of must-watch talks about CSS
Steven Levy:

"they tested was “Internet.” According to Hassan, Excite’s first results were Chinese web pages where the English word “Internet” stood out among a jumble of Chinese characters. Then the team typed “Internet” into BackRub. The first two results delivered pages that told you how to use browsers. It was exactly the kind of helpful result that would most likely satisfy someone who made the query. Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive."
>At least everyone can stop hating on Gnome now.

Performance isn't only reason for that. Mainly bizarre GNOME3 design decisions: lack of taskbar, tablet-like interface, atrocious file picker dialog, etc. Also maintainer attitude to themes and extensions, here's one rant from 2012: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
Paging fogleman (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fogleman) :-)
IANAA, but you file a gigantic "Schedule-D". I have never done it with crypto, but there is standard software to do it for non crypto stuff.

I used GainsKeeper:
http://www.wolterskluwerfs.com/tax-reporting/solutions/gains...

I see they do crypto, but I've never used it for that.

For companies, they have entire departments that consolidate trades and construct massive Schedule Ds
>I'm mad that I sat on a call representing my company's (not cloud native) cloud offering listening to Cisco tell us that the only way to get logs from god damned IRONPORT in the cloud was to use syslog! OVER THE INTERNET. FOR SECURITY LOGS.

Why is this an issue? This is how syslog works on literally every device ever, you set a destination and it streams it over UDP with optional authentication/encryption. If you want to do something hokey like consume logs over an api (what?) set up a syslog gateway and configure log retrieval how you like. You can't be mad at a vendor for not supporting your crazy log consumption scheme -- logs are push (generated), not a pull or sub or whatever you're trying to do.

A normal setup would be to have a logging cluster (elasticsearch or similar). Feed logs into it via syslog or logstash or beats or whatever other bajillion plugins there are, then get logs out via the ES api (or even better, do your analysis straight in ES).

The author just sounds mad he has to do actual work instead of attaching one product to another and collecting a paycheque for it.
They accept a certain rough percentage of bad data because having 100% clean data is a little impossible, but basically we constantly had people using our app on virtual machines, phone farms, reverse engineering our API, etc. It was a constant battle to ban them as soon as possible.

At some point, our ad partner contacted us letting us know that some of our data was coming from blacklisted IP addresses--AWS, Linode, known bots, etc. Ranges where a human almost certainly isn't actually viewing ads, and told us to fix it asap or get out.

We ended up licensing an IP blacklist. It updates daily, and it comes with both individual IP addresses and cidr ranges. We didn't have time to write a fraud system to ban users, or do this check via our api. So my solution was to check every IP that came in through our load balancers against the blacklist and blackhole it somehow.

Since we were using nginx, I swapped to open resty because that comes with Lua already fully baked in. Next, I wrote a Lua script that just checks if an IP address is in the blacklist. It even had a caching module! That was awesome.

The real hard part was where to keep the IP blacklist. I came up with the solution to use Redis. If an IP address exists as a key in the Redis DB, it's blacklisted. This "if key exists" check is O(1) in Redis as far as I still know. So I wrote a cron job that runs every day to download the new blacklist, expand the cidr ranges, pipe the individual IPs into a second unused redis db, save the DB and restart production redis so it picks up the backup and refreshes its list of addresses. This list was massive, btw, especially when you expanded the cidr ranges, some of which /8. And the Lua script would just run a GET query on redis. If the key exists, open resty would just return a 40x code. Lua+open resty and redis are all super fast so we didn't lose much by checking every single API request this way.

After that, the ad agency was happy and we didn't get booted. But it was a super close call. Basically if redis didn't exist or wasn't as awesome, I'm fairly certain some engineers would have worked a solid 72hrs to write the php needed for an effective ban system that could go into production. I wrote the lua/redis solution and got it into production in an evening. So simple and really fun to write.

If this were to happen to a company getting bad data from a browser, either they'd have to clean up the data or get kicked out as well. Ad agencies pay for this data, so it's not like they're gonna turn into a charity and accept it. I'm sure it also messes up their datasets as well. I can't even imagine what it would take to clean data coming from a known good source/ip but with bad info. Yikes.
>How do you keep in touch with people, then?

I use Instagram. My entire feed is just my friends. No celebrities or corporations or anything. Also, nobody reposts political garbage, even though the very same people do on Facebook all the time. And I've yet to see a sponsored story. It's just my friends showing off what they're up to.
The success of chain restaurants clearly shows people like the familiar. Food trucks are popular in a few cities in areas with young people, and maybe they will grow in popularity, but I don't see them outside of areas with high density of young people.

Restaurants don't have a high barrier to entry, but they are low margin businesses with high risk and low quality of life. You need a certain population density of restaurant-going population (younger people usually) to sustain a variety of restaurants.

Population density of Asia isn't comparable to most of the US, plus the US has stricter food regulations, plus people in the US have better options than working at a restaurant, so the labor is costlier, hence the food is costlier, hence eating out as often as Asia might not be possible.

My original point, however, was to dispute the claim that chain restaurants make it harder for others to compete. I can't think of a single thing chain restaurants do or can do to prevent competition, except maybe with liquor licenses, but there's no one stopping small Asian style shops from opening up other than higher costs of doing business in the US and insufficient demand.
Other modern nations have just as much social media - why then is this a pronounced US phenomenon?
Whilst playing about with useragents, Google started proxying sites through googleweblight.com when I had the useragent set as 'Windows CE'. I had no idea this feature existed.
Seriously.

Also, we're trying to push our users to go paperless as much as we can, and while the need for some printers is still present, if we could make some devices like the reMarkable being able to access our universal print queue and have people send their paper notes there (and retrieve it from the print queue on the reMarkable) prior to their meetings, it would really make the experience seamless to their workflow and eliminate another source.
Breakthrough paves path for a future free of batteries catching fire
I also agree with this. Even greener European countries are not particularly close to a sustainable level of emissions.

China's per-capita output is a problem. But it's not the kind of problem where we can just point fingers at it, and using that as a justification to ignore the mess we're making. (As we range from 'just as bad' to 'much worse'.)
Some realities cannot be reduced nor should they be reduced to analogies like "hive". Our social reality is irreductible being the most complex one known.

Hive mind as an emergent property still implies a common thing for which one lives. Or a queen. A peer that is one's reason to live. The closest thing I can see to a hive mind is the army.

We are all different and it is not because a person one talks with does not express a different opinion does it mean he thinks the same.

Would one say that lions have a hive mind?
Users flagged it, most likely because the post is a personal attack (a pretty ugly one actually) which is not in the spirit of this site as expressed in its guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We try to avoid posts that are personal attacks, not necessarily because we owe celebrities better, but because this kind of internet denunciation degrades the community, even if it also makes some good points. I think that's probably why users flagged it.

Trying to prevent the community from degrading is more important than any individual post, as it's the container that supports good discussion in the first place. The container is fragile. It's more fragile than it seems, because much of the work to prevent it from falling apart isn't visible.

Posts that feature indignation over information are always bad for curious conversation. When the indignation is directed against an individual, that's a multiplier of badness, because it brings out worse in others.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People will disagree, and some will downvote as a result. It's all meaningless internet points anyway, so why does it matter so much?
> Japanese mortgage lender Aruhi Corp. started using RPA Holdings’ services in January 2017 to automate some application processes. It deploys software bots to input data from scanned loan applications and then check that everything is in order. That’s cut the average time taken per application to about 10 minutes from an hour.

Can anyone translate that into programmer-speak? Is this talking about OCR or a CRUD form app or something else?
"doesn't need to do anything" is a qualifier that _you_ added, apparently based on a gross misunderstanding of the conversation. We're talking about defining an ideal target here, with deference paid to the fact that the status quo poses some inertia. If we're talking about an idealized frictionless vacuum, everybody would snap to the same emissions per capita, at the level required to forestall the negative effects of climate change. This would imply a substantial reduction of US emissions and perhaps an increase or small decrease in Indo-China emissions; increasing China to US levels doesn't make sense in any model, idealized or otherwise. Given that inertia means that the US reduction can't be immediate and drastic, it still suggests that mroe of the burden for emission reduction falls on the US than on India and China.
100 % correct. It is a kludge, but there is a lot of room in big companies to automate workflows between existing/ legacy app this way, where it’s not simple or maybe even possible to use APIs.
You're thinking too much like a human.

No, you're thinking too much like someone who understands chess but not Go.

Suppose that we built an opening book with a trillion reasonable courses of action on it. Each one analyzed well. As you have discovered, you will only go a few ply into the game. And all of the positions that you will be directed towards will have only a small edge.

Instead put a tiny fraction of the computing power necessary to build this book into self-training. You will get a better internal model and therefore a significantly stronger computer player. (That is how alpha-go was built in the first place.) This option will produce much better results for far less effort, and again leaves no role for a human to do anything useful.

The fact that a memorized opening book is useless has nothing to do with human vs computer vs cyborg. It has to do with the characteristics of the game. In chess, it is useful to memorize openings and both computers and humans do it. In Go it is a waste of energy, and it is a waste for both computers and humans.
NPM Fund
There are over 100,000,000 south of the border who have indicated they would like to come to the U.S.
It would be a tough fight for sure, and let's hope it never comes to that, but look at what insurgents in Vietnam/Irak were able to do against the us military with scarce resources.
Transaction costs, mostly. It's hard to connect developers and advertisers at scale. It's also difficult technically, does every car in a game need to look the same now?

Like, I totally think someone could make money from this, but it's unlikely to be as profitable as whale-hunting so it probably won't happen for a while.
This is the performance vs understanding dialectic. A bunch of humans built a machine that is superior at chess, but that machine can't teach humans what it knows.
The best advice one can possibly give is to start attending a regularly scheduled event that involves a lot of people.

Whether that is season tickets to a sporting event, attending church, a weekly tech meetup, volunteering on a regular schedule, a weekly open mic night, going to the same bar that has your favorite team playing, frequently attending art openings in town etc, all that matters is that people are partly there to socialize and it happens with the same group of people regularly.

Then, once you start going and seeing a few people more frequently, often you will naturally exchange phone numbers and/or get invited to another event and friendship will blossom.

And on that, seriously pay attention to your appearance. This means nice fitting clean clothing and shoes etc. Really make an effort to look good. Nothing fancy or expensive, just don't look like you just rolled out of bed. Even if you aren't in great shape, simply looking well put together helps 1000% in meeting new people.

Keep an open mind and avoid pushing your beliefs on others.

Don't give up my friend, there are so maybe people who feel just the same way that would love to hang out with you and become friends.
The best book I've read on population is Countdown by Alan Weiss https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Last-Best-Future-Earth/dp/0.... If you think we need to grow or that leveling off to 10 billion or even 7 billion helps, you'll appreciate reading the book.

Among other points, he recounts several nations that have lowered birthrate without coercion to greater abundance, prosperity, and joy -- Thailand, for example.

It inspired me to 3 podcast episodes on lowering birth rate: episodes 248, 250, and 251 http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-and-monologues-vo....

Also Limits to Growth's 30 year update https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19...
"Solved", in this case, means "computers can play the game at levels no human can beat."
Spiders interact with each other. Are they part of a hive?
It's truly deplorable what ICE is doing. Many people fret about what ICE is doing (including myself at times) to a degree that is absolutely debilitating. I think the point here — though OP has stated it in a deeply awkward and arguably insensitive manner — is that it is better to relieve oneself of crippling worry for things outside of their control, even if they are profoundly harmful. That is not to say that one should relieve oneself of profound and deep concern and compassion for those affected; and one, where is possible, should do all that they can to help in an authentic manner. A preponderance of crippling worry, however, seems to me to cause either (a) inaction due to despair (which in some cases may be as harmful as ignorance) (b) complete support of a harmful situation in question (e.g. the alt-right supporting profoundly cruel anti-immigration policies).
People of Alaska will declare independence (with little help of Russian tourists, journalists, and some honest news). This will not trigger a war, right? Independent Democratic People Republic of Alaska will join Russian Federation next day after that. Job is done.
Are your parents here with legal status? My parents have been legal permanent residents for half a century. Their only worry over the years has been if they were ever detained "back home" would they be able to somehow get back to the United States. If your parents have legal status, not sure why ICE would be relevant to their lives or yours.
"We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off."

-- Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Cap Theorem Explained
Rome never died, the U.S. was founded as an extension of the empire :)
I think we are falling in the saga of the Weimar Republic instead.
> Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones

I agree, and this could also be rephrased as we're not really human any more since the advent of writing or (especially) printing.