skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tech isn't innocent but you can't blame it all on tech either. Polarization has been a thing for decades upon decades. In the US a major shift occurred around the Civil Rights movement, after which Southern voters basically drifted away from the Democrat Party and coalesced towards the Republican Party. US politics has been polarizing along party lines ever since.

IMHO you won't fix it with technology as it runs much deeper. But you can remove comments to sweep a big part of the toxicity under the rug.

If you'd like a good overview of the longer story, Ezra Klein, who just released a book on the subject, was on Chris Hayes' "Why is this Happening?" podcast earlier this week ("Why we're polarized, with Ezra Klein").
You’re asserting that it’s worse like that’s a fact. It’s not. It’s much better than the old days now that many accounts are tied to your real name, and since enforcement of community standards became commonplace.

The US political polarization is more widespread, on and offline, but online discourse is still pretty mild compared to the old days of greater anonymity.
When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.
Yes, this is why so many projects have Contributor License Agreements - so the project owner can relicense at will.

It’s also why you shouldn’t sign a CLA if you disagree with that possibility.
So... would you consider that an argument against the sanctions levied against, for example, doctors who lie and fake data to stoke fears about vaccines and autism? What about fighting against conspiracy theories about the deep state and pizza parlors?

There's a tendency to wishfully think that people are rational and should be expected to sort out their own information environment with no governmental influence whatsoever, but I don't buy it at all. We're predictably manipulable, emotional creatures, and we can decide rationally to improve our information environment without falling into your implicit slippery slope.
It's not impossible, most countries have digitized medical records. It wouldn't be technically difficult to automatically send out a ping to a centralized location when a new patient is diagnosed with novel coronovirus. Politically, on the other hand, it's not going to happen.
Attention has long been studied in cognitive science, and has been a feature of computational cognitive models literally ever since there have been such things. Here's a paper from 1997 that explicitly uses attentional focus: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/1997v21/i03/p0305p0350/MAIN...
Cloudflare is not the golden standard for security.
How Fluentd Collects Kubernetes Metadata
I just got my preordered copy of Ezra Klein's "Why We're Polarized" which professes to study this topic in detail, in particular how it relates to politics in the US
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49930783-why-we-re-polar...

I have a feeling this issue is pretty complex. Looking forward to reading more about it soon.
I don't think any of these businesses would pay for What Got Done, but I think there are a zillion businesses very geographically close to you that would.

Oh, to clarify, I wasn't trying to sell What Got Done to these industries. I was trying to understand their businesses to see what new thing I could create for them.
Red Hat is known to backport features into RHEL kernels. Could Wireguard conceivably make it into RHEL 8.x?
Meena, Google's new chatbot that interacts like humans
What you're describing is a problem, but a different one. Def not zipper merge.

For merging (on ramps), waiting to the last moment is collectively efficient. For diverging traffic (exits) it isn't, especially if there's a backup.
Polygon animations with JavaScript
My life context made me sensitive to the negative side of digital devices and internet.

Whenever there's a power cut in the neighborhood, and there's no connectivity whatsoever I feel my brain expand. I feel times dilates, I feel motivation coming back, small ideas and curiosity.

Today's web is a weird pivot on intellectual energy. We used to have long and deep, it's been replaced by short and thin. They factor to a somehow similar amount of stimuli but in reality the latter is shallow and wearing off your, now deprived from depth, mind.
About a year ago someone posted a "Look at the cool stuff I bought/saw on my trip to Shenzen" blog post and one of the items featured was a bastardized Chinese USB-C and Lightening cable that technically met neither spec but worked with either. I think you'll see a lot of those for sale.
Podcasts for Bootstrappers
Can you explain the problem further?
He says this is a vulnerability in Whatsapp, rather than in iOS/Android-

But if a full-phone exploit is possible using the app, isn't that inherently an iOS/Android bug?

My understanding is that that an application should not have full access to the system.
I would expect that even if it were hacked/acting maliciously all you could pull is what the app already has access to.

Did they stack an iOS exploit on top of a WhatsApp bug?

(Using WhatsApp for remote execution, then a privilege escalation of some sort?)
I’ve been car free in SF for 40 years. About 31% of households are car free.

https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-...
Yes there is some concern that it would affect code size and/or make some optimizations impossible, but on the latter I have yet to see hard data that that is the case. We're talking about adding about 1-2 cycles of latency.

Note that the branch can be implemented in a way that compilers will lower into a CMOV, making the code size issue almost moot. I implemented that in fbstring back in the day:

https://github.com/facebook/folly/commit/be4c6d6b3e21914df8a...

This is the entirety of size():

0f b6 57 17 movzbl 0x17(%rdi),%edx
b8 17 00 00 00 mov $0x17,%eax
48 29 d0 sub %rdx,%rax
48 0f 48 47 08 cmovs 0x8(%rdi),%rax

A bit more than a MOV, but not that much.

> I'd personally think it would be interesting to test artificially increasing the sizeof() of strings from 24 bytes (the minimum needed to store a pointer, size and capacity) to something like 64 bytes, just to get longer strings using the SSO

And libstdc++ is actually 32 bytes :( It's easy to template on the inline capacity, you can look at llvm::SmallVector or folly::small_vector, but vocabulary types should have the smallest possible footprint. Vast majority of instances are either empty, or very small (think keys in a map).
He wasn't. I'm just pointing out he is doing a good job at it. It is no secret for people who work in the media industry that "entertaining" and "outrageousness" is a recipe for success.
"We" don't fix it.

This hasn't been going on for 7 years; it has been happening for at least 40.

The rage stems from the wage, which has stagnated for the working class for as long as I have been around to see it. People are trying to telegraph that unpleasant things will be happening soon, if all the people who are constantly dumping on their inferiors don't at least start handing out some umbrellas.

I think the tech has actually been a mitigating factor. Online mobs can't throw real-life firebombs. When people go out to actually do something, there are fewer people in the same physical place to pump each other up.
But the thing is, while facts are objectively true or false, a policy choice can't be objectively right. What you often see is, policy masquerading as facts.

"If you accept X then we need to do Y."

"I don't think we should do Y"

"Then you reject facts."

Something everyone seems to have forgotten is that intelligent, well-informed, people of good will can look at the same facts and come up with different policy prescriptions.
It's something I really like about .NET's regular expressions. Lookbehind has no limitations and will just match backwards with all features you can use in other parts.

So depending on the language or flavor you're working in, running away isn't really necessary.
Why Google Backtracked on Its New Search Results Look
The cost of police, fire fighters, schools, roads, etc. don’t go up with the value of the home. There is no reason that you couldn’t charge a flat rate to every property owner - including businesses.
How to Optimize PDFs Using Go
Erm... defunding journalism by who?

Private funding is making the situation worse.

Public funding is the instrument of authoritarian regimes- state sponsored media.

I think the root cause is lack of objective, critical thinking skills, and the glorification of "how it makes you feel" being more important than "is this reasonable".

I.e. emotion driving reason, rather than reason driving emotion.
Why do so many bad drivers have luxury cars? A new study blames disagreeable men
Show HN: Python Implementation of Synthpop
Thanks for reading!

The plan is for my income to increase over time. The benefit of launching businesses is that each time, I learn skills to increase my chances of success in the next attempt.
On many keyboards, ^] can be typed with ctrl-5. Also, ctrl-2 is ^@ (NUL), ctrl-3 is ^[ (ESC), ctrl-4 is ^\, ctrl-6 is ^^ and ctrl-7 is ^_, all of which can be hard to type on national layouts. Except for ^@, these correspond to the last digit of the character code in octal: ^[ is 033 etc.
What is a good book you can advise for someone with maths background to dig into GA?
Just a friendly passing comment, but I'm not sure you have the correct take-aways from speaking with business owners.

With the quarry example, you couldn't get them on the phone. How about conferences, meetups, trade shows etc? Furthermore you probably need to search for companies that might _want_ to speak to you: younger owners, companies with less to lose etc.

In the sheet metal example, it sounds like you had already decided what you wanted to build for them before even meeting them (an improved software solution for their shop management apps). Maybe trying to just speak more generally about their processes and difficulties would tease out problems you might not have considered.

I'd return to this approach/phase and give it another go to find a market fit for the ideas before you start doing a line of code.
You could try looking into Qutebrowser, which is a keyboard driven browser designed with vim controls and is configured with python, so there is some room for extendability and scripting.

Without doing any work, I can:

(yy) Yank the URL of the current tab to the clipboard

(gD) Move current tab to a new window

With some work, it's not impossible to get the features you want, or something close.
I was trying to understand their businesses to see what new thing I could create for them.

That's legit.

I guess the core of my original point was that there's a big regional hub of businesses whose operations you do understand (i.e. SW businesses) that's right at your doorstep. (I'm assuming from your other blog posts you don't know a ton about sheet metal bending, whereas you do know enough to be dangerous with software, but I've been wrong before!)
> The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

I've found that usually when a conversation is going on, particularly in text format, much less information is conveyed than you think at the time.

An interesting thing I've done before is to go back through old conversations where I thought I really "bared my soul" about a particular topic.

Often there is next to no information actually exchanged. What I was actually doing was feeling strong emotions. They were in no way conveyed over to the other person.
Oh I understand perfectly well the reason why the Senate and the Electoral College and superdelegates in e.g. the Democratic Party were created. It was because the founders were afraid of actual democracy and they wanted to ensure their own positions. It has had the effect that a certain constituency (rich white men) are privileged above all others. There is a disconnect between the narrative we have told ourselves about democracy and the actual system we have. I would like to change the system so that it better serves our entire population and not just rich white men.
The metaphor used by the language differ. That’s the point.
Apple's chargers already have moved to USB-C.

It's the cable included in the box with newer iPhones that is USB-C on one end and lightning on the other.
For me they have nothing (success! :)

I use Firefox + FB container + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger and recently started to use CanvasBlocker as well. I have Firefox configured to delete all cookies on closing (except for few sites to avoid the need to enter the 2FA code every time I log in).

I've also set Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection to "Custom mode" with "cross-site and social media trackers" blocked [1] and to use block list "level 2".

I also have the "Do Not Track" option switched on.

I don't have a proper smartphone (never owned one), just KaiOS-powered dumb-phone on which I use Facebook mobile (i.e. their web site) all the time.

Also no Pi-Hole or similar stuff.

I use a throwaway email account for Facebook.

______

[1] Just now I've found out that there seems to be a new option, to disable "all cookies from unvisited sites", which I'm going to try as it looks even better.
He just doesn’t like it that Mark isn’t 100% aligned with his PoV. Go ask Thailand and all the people who lost jobs what a nice caring guy Soros is.
Which is why I avoid it directly, unless I'm not touching the code at all. If I'm just using it as-is, then I don't care.
We use it on slack and irc for debugging people's regular expressions all the time. Being able to have 30 revisions to a base regex to troubleshoot is fantastic.

Plus the quiz is awesome.
The Lucrative, Largely Unregulated, and Widely Misunderstood World of Vaping
if most of the web that you visited looked like 4chan, you should have been going to different sites
I'm not the grandparent. I'm not sure what you mean by "required", but, no, I don't think so.

You can represent a lot of algebraic objects and operations using matrices and linear algebra operations. The most accessible example of that is probably complex numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#Matrix_represen...

and I wouldn't say that "matrices are still required in complex numbers" any more than I'd say "matrices are still required in geometric algebra".
We could do that, but then it would be more like a poll tax or a head tax instead of a consumption tax.
Geometric Algebra in 2D - Fundamentals and Another Look at Complex Numbers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNlgMPzj-7Q&list=PLpzmRsG7u_...
If you want some help swing by #regex on efnet, happy to help.
Honestly, I think the large-scale nature of communities is a factor.

Moderators now are also more willing to ban accounts that are non-spam. Certain views are "harmful" and apparently people cannot be asked to not react to seeing things, or even ignore people, whether via some tool or just by saying "Oh, it's her again, I'll just skip over that." This places pressure upward on the moderators to make certain people go away.

Folks love gaming the algorithms to decide what will and will not be read and algorithms come into play because of the aforementioned large scales. Face it, the Internet runs on ad money and that can be tight, so everyone gets the bright idea to either let the algorithms do the moderation or to let people who have free time on their hands and the motivation to do it. Usually the motivation is expressed in some seemingly-altruistic manner but it always boils down to pushing their own views. Eventually some views become acceptable, others anathema, and you get that ghastly distillation where more moderate voices are driven off until finally you get a kind of ghost-town.

This is a pretty tough nut to crack from this vantage point.

One of the ways I see out is the admittedly computationally-intensive tack of making the algorithms only affect a user's personal view rather than making it site-wide. You can still run into the echo chamber issue, only in this case it is a bunch of people in their own private speech bubbles in one large chamber.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I have watched this sort of thing kill communities for the past thirty years now.
Libiquity Wi-Fri ND2H Wi-Fi Card Now FSF-Certified to Respect Your Freedom
The Last Time Democracy Almost Died
If you want to explore mastodon content without browsing through 100's of instances (and without registering for one), I built a simple aggregator

https://mastodonia.club

I am planning to add more features if people find it useful.
I understand the goal is not pretty pictures. But you're not using a hammer to remove random white noise from all your observations, you're using a scalpel to mask out completely predictable errors for very short periods of time. My amateur astronomer link was not meant as a scientific how-to, but as an illustration that even simple hammer-y methods work to mask out satellite trails.

There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.

This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.

Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.

An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.

I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.
Even more than this- the desire to silence and destroy those who disagree, sometimes physically.

Some have called this increased polarization.

I see it as a slide towards violent authoritarianism.
Nice work. A while back I looked into obfuscating some JavaScript code and came to the conclusion it wasn't worth it. I figured if someone really wanted it anyway, they'd find a way to de-obfuscate it. Given how easily (using that term loosely) you de-obfuscated the code, would you say my conclusion was accurate?
What's sad is this SHOULD BE OBVIOUS to anyone that's be emotionally detached from politics. It's the same people on both sides, just tribalism skews that the other side must be idiots.

I don't think the people opposite from me are stupid, just a different viewpoint than my own. That viewpoint comes from their experiences and their environment that is different than mine, that's totally fine, until they insist that I need to live like they do.
Telegram and WhatsApp are both pretending to be secure when they're really not. Signal is the only sane choice at this point.
Yep and yep. Health insurance in MA is $250/month for a high deductible plan (I was paying $500 in NY). This year, my insurance is only $40/month because I qualified for a subsidized plan based on my 2019 income (or lack thereof).
From the complex abacus the romans left us, it would seem that they used both base 10 and base 12 (for fractions - 360° in a circle is an extension of that).
Base 12 seems to be slightly better than 10, but switching over would be WAY harder to "finishing" algebra... (and we wouldn't have the quite important these days 10^3~2^10 approximation.)
I appreciate the attempt, it might even have real bearing on how people approach things (thinking materialistically vs mentally or emotionally)

but pay https://www.etymonline.com/word/pay#etymonline_v_10195

has roots before and outside of currency
In fact that example argues against Russell's third law. The recommendation engine is observing the user's behavior and inferring that watching a video means the user agrees with the video, and so starts an escalation until it sees a refusal to click/watch.

Simply watching a video is not an expression of agreement nor an endorsement of the content. Any of us read articles and books with which we may disagree if for no other reason than to fully understand the opposing viewpoint, and this is no less true for videos, audio, etc etc.

Want to know if the user actually likes the content? Ask them. Stop thinking that statistical inference is better or even equal to directly measured data from a specific entity, especially when dealing with qualitative concepts rather than quantitative.
For me, one of the pieces that really helped me understand architecture, was doing ops for years. Deploying systems, designing deployment solutions, and understanding how services fit into their environment helped me understand the solution as a whole. I was more able to come up with simpler, quicker to implement, solutions.

However, at the same time I was also doing lots of software development. I tried out lots of different solution styles. So don't ignore that aspect.
More moderation. More value judgements (and actions) need to be taken against content that is deemed unsavory. Bans, etc.

Higher barriers of entry. The right to comment and occupy mind space is given away too easily. Penalize new accounts, start with limited capabilities, disallow short comments, etc.

Highlight exemplary content.
Why not E^2 = m_0^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2?
Right, It's not a technology problem.

Not everything can be reduced to a technology problem.

This is an American, and even worldwide problem.

Everyone is writing about polarization right now.

Ezra Klein, who I normally loathe, has been doing the podcasting rounds lately about his new polarization book, which has a pragmatic take on the problem.

He doesn't see a way out right now.

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity

https://pca.st/huei9let

The Weeds: The road to polarization

https://pca.st/izsley78

According to Ezra, part of the reason we have this now is because our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities.

Why this stacking occurs might just be a natural process.

As for the media, It's not only the media's fault.

There was a feedback loop between media and audience.

When media was unbundled from the national model, only slightly more polarized people could be reliable customers and so media had to compete over them, which polarized the media, which polarized the audience etc...