skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The planet's ecosystem has had billions of years to balance itself out.

Yeah, and that system wasn't built for all the rapid ecological changes humanity is throwing at it. Or at least when it encountered events of our magnitude -- e.g. a comet impact or a super volcano erupting for an extended period of time -- it resulted in very rapid ecosystem change, most things died, and it took the planet millions of years to recover comparable levels of biodiversity. Definitionally, we are causing the 6th mass extinction event since the Cambrian explosion.

The planet's ecosystem isn't going to "balance itself out" on timescales that matter to us (i.e. less than a million years) when we're putting the planet through vast habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, etc.

Even the population explosion of the moth and other pests are due to us. The planet won't naturally work something out because we keep creating all of this easy to eat surplus with our monoculture crops.

Thus, we need to come up with a solution to this problem. Ideally one of the least harmful ones possible. And it appears that lots of pesticides are really harmful to the ecosystem and us -- who would have thought, things with -cide in the name, kill/harm more things than we expected. And while the moth might be thriving bc it's resistant to our pesticides, many other insect species are collapsing, potentially due to pesticide use.

It's part of the reason Rachel Carson was in favor of this approach.

Sure, genes will get out into wild population, which is definitely bad for biodiversity. But I'm skeptical anyone has done the cost benefit analysis of this versus pesticide use on biodiversity.
That's because the aim of computer design in the few decades has been to turn such things into implementation details. If your primary computing device is a phone or a tablet you have no idea, and /no need to know/, what your photo's filename is. It's just there in the app and can be easily shared, edited or printed from there.

The question is -- is that a bad thing? For the majority of people a computer is a means to end and the fewer implementation details exposed the better. Just as I don't really want or need to know how a car works in detail in order to get from A to B.

What I see happening is that computing knowledge becomes more and more the preserve of specialists and that's a good thing. When I started to learn programming I read about why the command line was so useful and people were saying things like "you can batch rename files really easily!". But the only times I've ever really had to do that are programming-related tasks such as log files etc. Most people simply don't need to do that often enough to justify learning how.
I'm trying to write a drop in LLVM codegen replacement, ie something that takes bitcode (Which I already have) and generates x86_64, arm, object files etc. Back story: I've done compilers for most of my professional life but never did the actual native code generation myself, always using .net, java or llvm to do that part.

As a fun project, as I already had code to generate llvm bitcode from .NET, I now do mem2reg (convert stack spots to SSA registers), dead code elimination, constant folding and other small optimizations. That part now works, and I managed to create a simple x86_64 coff object file (with everything needed to link to it, including pdata, xdata) that returns the "max" value for a given integer.

That is about all that works for now, and I don't get to spend much time on it, but the end goal is to have a "good enough" codegenerator for non optimized cases, that could potentially be faster than llvm (to emit). The primary goal is to learn how to do this though :)
How to Build ECommerce Business with Mobile App
Could you say more or provide a screenshot? I’m very curious and concerned about this.
In my profile, they managed to obtain a `PURCHASE` event from Macy's -- for an in-person purchase at a physical store. Macy's has my email address and certainly linked it to my credit card number, but this is nonetheless seriously creepy.

I just tried to change my email address on Facebook and discovered that they canonicalize plus and dot variations in gmail.com addresses, and thus claim that the new email address is already associated with an account. Ended up having to create a completely new email alias on my own domain.
What you can do to prevent this is:

1) Install https://www.eff.org/privacybadger to prevent trackers from being loaded

2) Install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... to delete any cookies you might have accepted after a week time or so, which prevents the infinite gobbling-up of your data after innocently accepting a cookie once

3) Install the Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon containers to "separate" your browsing with these sites from the rest of your browsing. Links: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-conta... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazon-contai...

Also, if you are creeped out by this, just imagine the amount of data Google has on you. I'm convinced they have way more, just by virtue of every website having Google Analytics installed.
I use tinc for this. It does the mesh dynamically so I have a few nodes that are fixed and the others will connect directly or indirectly automatically. I deploy it using puppet and there's no need to update all nodes to add a new one. The cryptography and performance is probably not as good as wireguard but more than good enough for my uses. I think there's been consideration to using wireguard as the transport instead of doing everything in userspace.
Trump’s travel ban could extend to Africa’s top tech country, Nigeria
That is categorically untrue. Verbal cultures in Australia have kept an accurate account of a coastline that existed over 10,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, the supposed collective knowledge in books is constantly second guessed and taken with grains of salt ("bronze age army sizes couldn't possibly be the size they write that they are", "the winner writes the history", etc).
State of Cybersecurity at Top 100 Global Airports
I'm not sure to reply to the parent comment or this one, but as you mentioned advertising model, I'd like to reply here.

All the points mentioned in the parent comment has been done before: magazines and newspapers. (Some) people used to subscribe to multiple publications to get their intake of information. The wide ranging, impact based news is the daily publication specialty. The newest in your specific interest is the magazines' playing field. News special reports used to be in longform and discusses all the finer points, including analysis and graphs to see the big picture. Magazines with themes serves the intellectual curiosity.

Somehow in the age of niche creators, these companies die out. I think the saying 'the sector is ripe for disruption' is true, but not in the way of software or automation. Better business model is really needed. The business model has been done before; the evolution to bite-sized factoids is the consequences changing to more heavily advertising-based business model.

The limiting factor of paper space and physical distribution seems to strike a balance: news to be printed and distributed need to be worth it for the public to pay. Maybe bundling also made it work[0]. The specific 'small' niches in newspaper/magazines can be fulfilled by sharing the cost with the mass of subscribers.

There is a tradeoff in the wide influence of gatekeepers, but even in that time independent publications managed to survive.

I think finding this balance again is really the key. Should we go back to tax-funded publications? Or will people welcome a microtransaction for articles? Or should the publications deliver curated, less frequent summaries to make customers happy? I think the disconnect between the customers and paying for content is driving down the quality and demand (in revenue) of these publications.

The recent years have shown that subscribing to the publications themselves are not optimal. Putting up a paywall angers people, but The Guardian have never wiped their donation banner off their pages. The need to find the correct business model for publication is urgent for the masses too; democracy that actually follows the people's will depends on this.

I don't follow the current landscape, but what The Athletic is currently doing is pretty interesting for sports.

Me, personally, really like the 'The Espresso' concept from The Economist. They curate 5 stories each day and deliver it in the morning directly in the app. No space to switch tabs and disengage but space to dig deeper in the story through the links.

[0]: https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-...
By not perpetuating it.

Thats all we can do. But the most important step.
That is another Amazon company so can we note expect the same shenanigans?
I wonder how "pay to view" Internet would've worked. How do you know if the page/site you're going to open will be worth the 0.05 cents? There are/were kids in Macedonia who made fake news sites to make money from Google ads: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ , imagine that sort of behavior minus the G-middleman.

Could they have built an Internet where there was a system to claim refunds, with a "judge" who would decide? Could there have been a rating system ("90 out of 154 visitors said the information on this page was worth the money"), and how could that have been abused?
I’d like to see a thread that is like “Clues 21st Century Humans Didn’t Know How To ________”
> The primary process has been dominated by elite party members basically since the inception of the country.

Having a “primary process” is a actually a very new, more democratic change; it hasn't existed since the inception of the country; historically, Presidential nominations conducted directly and exclusively by insiders; originally usually by the party’s Congressional caucus, later (starting mid-19th Century and into the latter third of the 20th) in party nominating conventions whose members were chosen exclusively (or, toward the end of the period, overwhelmingly predominantly) by insiders at the state parties. Primaries were introduced by some states in the late 19th Century but didn't become the norm until after 1968, as a response first within the Democratic Party to the controversy over the nomination of Eugene McCarthy by Democratic insiders, and just after that a reaction by the Republican Party to Democrats opening up their nominating process.
I was born in the mid 80s; in my youth many families didn't have a home computer, and computer education in schools was... less developed than it is now. So if you met a kid who was good with computers in 1996, in all probability they sat down at their family computer and figured things out for themselves.

There were certainly people who noticed this correlation and predicted, if every family had a home computer, almost every kid would do the same.

With hindsight, nobody was noticing the kids who had grown up with home computers but hadn't figured lots of things out on their own, or controlling for things correlated with having a home computer.

You can see a similar theme these days - like the theory [1] that TikTok and Snapchat are easier for young people to use, perhaps intentionally.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-snapchat-app-design
Show HN: Open-Source Performance Metrics and Benchmarks for Machine Learning/NLP
Over any time frame, it's still quite extreme. To use influenza as a proxy, which has virulence comparable to the cold, the yearly incidence rate in China is <35 per 100,000. Even if this is a full 100x worse, we aren't even getting close to 50% infection rate over the season or a 6 month time frame.
Recently we had to evaluate if chatbot we built for an Austrian telecommunication provider would perform better on other NLP engines than the one we had in use (a cloud-based one). We took the training data and calculated common performance metrics, confusion matrices and accuracy scores for a bunch of the blockbuster providers (IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, Amazon Lex, Microsoft LUIS, Rasa and some more).

We published the scripts in a Github repository and a blog article with instructions: https://medium.com/@floriantreml/tutorial-benchmark-your-cha...
As far as I can tell almost every bank with an app is sending your email/advertising id/name/etc. to Facebook(+ other surveillance companies).
We're building an implantable device for blind patients that delivers electrical stimulation to the optic nerve via the retina.

The implant helps patients perceive visual information about their surroundings.

Pretty cool tech and fun to work on, too.
For me, one of the important elements in the results is the reduction in influenza with 60 and 90 sec. cold shower group. On the other hand seeing this adverse effect also made me nervous:

"One participant in the 90 seconds intervention group died unexpectedly of occult chronic pulmonary embolism at 56 days follow-up."

I know it is not because of the trial but it is unfortunate.
I was doing this for several months. I remember the biggest drawback was that cold water does not dissolve soap and shampoo as well as warm does, so it takes more effort to wash yourself well.

I stopped because I got sick, and never got the habit back.
Wildfires happen all the time in cold climates. It's part of the natural forest cycle. For example, here are the fires that occurred this year in the Yukon territory: https://yukon.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appi...
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS): The Definitive Guide (2020)
A good game show would be to
Take a dozen people who don’t know how to make fire and offer them $1MM if they can figure it out, allow them as long as needed.
I'm also in the planning stages of re-writing ~1M lines of C doing hardware control for a telecoms system. It's going to be replaced with Elixir (basically Erlang) because it's the perfect fit (which is unsurprising given its a telecom system).

My prediction is that it will be 10-20k lines of code when I'm done because there's so much obsolete cruft to remove. Plus ~1k of C as a shim layer to allow an incremental transition.
> Modern conversational agents (chatbots) tend to be highly specialized

Name a one chatbot?

I've never seen one other than a lame chose-your own adventure style path.

I feel like the emperor has no clothes.
Most hospitals are like this. The main areas, bathrooms and ORs are clean, but many of the staff-only areas seem seldom touched by sanitation crews.
I don't think that'd really be true, since they'd just have it stored in the background without you having a FB account (and wouldn't have the ability to see how bad it is)

not saying that's worth having an account though.
does that stop facebook from collecting data about you? I didn't think it did, and because you don't have an account it's not, or at least wasn't possible to control any privacy settings.
Not sure if this counts, but I stuffed some pumps into old cisco switches and use those as cocktail machines.

https://beastiebytes.com/robarboter.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4NPNJzPEr4
+1, this can go wrong in so many ways
Making fire was the equivalent of quantum computing, or any other bleeding edge technology humans endeavor to do.
Revolut is sending data to them, too. 202 interactions for my account.
Talkin' Jomboy, New Media and Copyright
It just says <number> interactions were received from Monzo.
github.com was always a corporate entity and subject to DMCA takedowns.

The notice link so others don't have to hand-type it: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-2...

I feel like that other twitter user / BSA / IBM as the originators of that takedown notice are more useful targets of animosity here.
Maybe running dynamic DNS client that keeps logs of IP address changes. Do DDNS clients keep logs. Maybe passive DNS would detect changes.

The point of the comment was that cannot just assume it never changed unless monitoring it contiuously.
One idea I like is to be able to depend on a branch. In Java it would be nice to depend on a branch, rather than dealing with snapshots.

Obviously that comes at the cost of coupling with the VCS. Maybe its not worth it. Interesting idea though.
which I did a couple of years ago.
Now I have no idea what they know about me. I use adblock and friends, but I wonder how much data about me they still manage to gather
I have a couple of other bank accounts and none of the others seem to be sending data to Facebook.
app to help me track my due payments
(always forget things like monthly fee for piano lessons or similar not automated payments, plus helps get an overview of upcoming expenses).

released recently as my first app in google play

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.due.core&h...
I would love to learn more about this product.
Between 1918 and 1946 mechanical brakes were phased out. By ww2, they were nearly extinct except on the cheapest or older styled cars. I would argue the bigger advance was tires. Even mechanical brakes are plenty to lock your wheels, but tires are the actual road interface, and old ones are amazingly fragile. Vulcanization was not even known at the start of the auto age, and the rubber would tear off in chunks.
Well, it didn't all fall out, but the forehead kept getting farther and farther back and I recall seeing an image of the top of my head and thinking "god that's awful" and have been shaving it off ever since. I could let what's there grow but... it's bad.
This moth species originated in either Europe / the Mediterranean, or Africa. It has spread worldwide. Thus, it is an invasive species. Introducing other invasive species as part control can really backfire.

Classic example being the Cane Toad. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad#Australia
Not really.

They have the Facebook Pixel installed likely to do retargeting advertising when a person visits their website.

It's one of the most effective methods so it's very common to see it everywhere.
I don't know why finding that other people have different work patterns and preferences would confuse you. I'm not "attempting" to use an iPad -- I've used an iPad and a Chromebook (currently Pixel Slate, also a tablet) for five years professionally. I used a MacBook before that. I'm old enough to remember hauling a VT-100 and an acoustic modem home to work on weekends a long time ago. I'm also old enough to remember people saying no professional programmer could use a personal computer, or a laptop.

I don't use Kanban or constantly switch to chat. I can see if my VPN is running by looking at an icon at the top of the iPad screen. I don't constantly task switch while working.

It has nothing to do with weight or feeling silly. I want to concentrate on one thing at a time, and I want a portable setup for working because I travel a lot.

An iPad developer setup won't work for everyone, but for the people it does work for it can work very well. 90% of my programming is done over ssh to remote servers, and the iPad can do that perfectly. The rest of my time is dealing with email, also fine on an iPad, or Slack, or reviewing PRs, which I can do right on my iPad.

Other developers have different requirements.
It's quite an amazing feat that C++ has maintained backwards compatibility.

Watching the ~11 years of Python 2 to 3 adoption has been somewhat painful, and many libraries have had to offer support for both across much of that time. (And I believe at time of writing Google isn't even 100% ported to 3 yet - please correct this if I'm wrong).

I couldn't be happier that Python 3 is finally king though, and major projects like Django are able to go entirely to 3 now.

Breaking changes in languages can be important and good, but they really can affect adoption of the new version by existing users, which is tough as often major users hold some sway in the ecosystem.

JavaScript has the no breaking changes problem even worse, because you have to support (within reason) all major interpreters existing in the wild, and cannot easily change the code, so "transpiling" has become the normal.

Microsofts support lifetime for IE11 also means this isn't changing soon. Lots of old browsers in the wild (even though it has improved dramatically over last few years).
Hmm, that feels incident worthy.

My bank should send precisely zero things to advertising / marketing companies.

Have you raised it with their Help team? You should.

Unfortunately I cannot as I do not have a facebook account so cannot determine whether or not facebook hold data on me without creating an account.
Just from looking at the animation,
the 'transition'/jump from on the buffer to the minibuffer looks very useful. And in general, it looks a useful way of drawing attention to the cursor if you don't know where the cursor is going to be.
Even before firefox containers, I used a dedicated profile for facebook only as well as using privacy badger and ublock origin. Facebook still collected data about me from external sites. I think mainly through my phone, possibly through linking phone number or email addresses.
Lack of communication and courtesy - disrespect to public good. I am happy to remove the mention per his request.
My off-facebook activity was empty. That's encouraging, because it looks like my countermeasures have been working:

- Fingerprinting resistance in Firefox (privacy.resistFingerprinting = true)

- First-party isolation in Firefox (privacy.firstparty.isolate = true)

- Blocking third-party cookies in Firefox (network.cookie.cookieBehavior = 1)

- Firefox container when I need to login to ad/tracking companies (Facebook, Google)

- uBlock Origin

- Cookie AutoDelete

- PiHole on my home network
Err Too many redirects
To suggest another axis you could expand along, there is a broader issue with notifications about planning. You could have a system that covered all things and you could ask it to notify you about applications involving:

"Forests within 100 miles"

"High rises within 10 miles"

"Anything within 0.5 miles"
This article suggests they did: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-suggests-nea...
This is related to their app not their website.
This was actually the premise for the film "La Guerre de Feu" or "Quest for Fire".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_Fire_(film)
Personally what's interesting for me is:

1. (Assuming you're an outside contractor) How much do you charge?

2. How do you do estimates on this project? Or do you just do it bit by bit?

3. Are you switching over part by part or will deploy in a period?

If you can, you should at least write a blog post. A book will be amazing though!
I prefer to eliminate the task switching as much as possible rather than optimize it. I mainly use a Chromebook, always in full screen with one app window. I can switch windows with a keystroke. I don't need or want a bunch of stuff cluttering the screen.
I found a mere four items in my activity list, all from several months ago, probably when I mistakenly used the wrong container or had uBlock turned off. It's nice to see all my anti-tracking software is working!
>From a different perspective, we can do better

But how do you decide what is better? Maybe evolution goes with a perfect speed in relation to all other forces? It's like you may want the planet to spin faster to get more birthday presents but this will ruin nature's processes in so many ways.
It's only not deadly because it hasn't spread yet.
Same applies to their app.

Doing retargeting for when (a) someone downloads their app but doesn't signup and (b) someone is a customer but has low engagement i.e. is likely to churn.
I use that. It has a JS console but it doesn't seem to have access to JS on the page like the Chrome console does. If I had Chrome or Safari web developer tools I would only have the clunky text selection to complain about, and I can live with that.
Might be worth a post on their community.