skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger, and profiting from misinformation.

You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed.

You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do.

Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it.

They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it.

[Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them.

There are a zillion directions they could have gone.
Masks were alternative medicine up until about 4 weeks ago.
My Kindle's old enough that it doesn't support the ACSM files you get from Amazon. I'd have to convert them to mobi from the DRM'd epub - which I cannot download from the ACSM because Adobe Digital Editions does not exist for my operating system.
I believe the comment you responded to is referring to the concept of entropy in information theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
IF facebook offered me the option of paying $5/mo to just get API access to the things my friends posted, and I could display them however I want (LIKE FOR INSTANCE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER!) I would happily pay it.
This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

I see a lot of people complaining about things like this, but I also see a lot of people complaining that YouTube/Twitter/etc aren't doing enough to take down false/immoral/illegal content quick enough. [1]

It really sucks when a legitimate video is taken down by mistake. But it also really sucks when revenge porn is left up. YouTube is doing it's best to blend automation (fast but inaccurate) with human curation (more thoughtful but slower), and sometimes it gets it wrong.

I feel like most of the time I see posts like this, the situation is resolved favorably and relatively quickly. YouTube is dealing with two opposing issues, and is constantly doing its best to find a fair middle ground.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316660
A democracy only works if people know what's going on. Otherwise, the collective decision-making process is no longer connected to politician's actions and the whole process breaks down.

That's the most basic theory of any regulated system: air conditioning needs a thermometer. A driver needs to keep their eyes open to stay on the road. Any such system is a feedback loop of actuators (wheels / politicians), sensors, and some sense-making equipment in between.

Yes, I know it feels insignificant to cast a ballot once every four years, as one of hundreds of millions. But that election carries a lot of power and recognising and getting over the collective action problem inherent in democracy is sort-of among the duties of being a citizen, as opposed to a mere consumer.
Agreed. And to add, rebuilding is usually a faster and smoother process than building the first time, which I've found to be true for both physical and mental/emotional feats. It's very rare that all that "wasted" time and effort is truly wasted.
I've figured it was always sort of true that television news was of generally worse quality than print.

They've done good work at times, but it's still TV.
The Day My Coworkers and I Chose Our Survival over Our Supervisor
Sorry for the self-reference outside of a moderation context, but I wrote what turned into an entire essay about this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. It's about how this plays out specifically on HN.

Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.
That's not how the Internet works at all, archive.md is returning valid IP addresses, they are just the _wrong_ ones. They are actually returning Cloudflare's own DNS IP's. So all this is entirely correct from Cloudflare's point of view. archive.md just needs to quit being so stubborn.
> The CEO is awesome too, and often hangs around HN.

Lol, no he isn't awesome at all. CTO who hangs around is here is a way better person.
Sure, I don't spend much time yelling at idiots.

The point of my question is that activists tend to talk about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't ever actually happen.
What makes you think that? There's a link in jwt.io's footer to the GitHub repo.
What a world we live in that we have to worry about trademark issues for the name of one of the most common animal names a child could think of.
Local News Stations Run Propaganda Segment Scripted and Produced by Amazon
Yea! I watched it on a plane and thought it was more of Educational Entertainment than anything else. It had a place but not as a source of learning.
How to Read a Nonfiction Book
Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the window, submit your query, and receive a small number of leaves.

These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.
The degree to which “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is in effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes anything, then HN is outraged because it’s censorship, paternalism, all that. But if Facebook does not adopt an actively paternalistic attitude where it shows people content that they deem is “good for them”, then that’s outrageous too. Both complaints predictably rocket to the top of HN.

Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

There’s an amusing comment from
a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
Yeah. We're disabling the upload test until we figure out why.
+1 for No Agenda. A fantastic podcasts that helps you think about the news in other ways.
That's all true, but overall they've been steadily falling since 2010.

However I disagree with your view of the ecosystem. The web needs stability and consistency more than anything else. FF switching to Chromium would help with that. So many people have this knee jerk reaction of Chromium = Chrome = Google having total control. But don't understand the only reason Google has had this much control over Chromium is because no other major vendor used it. They were the biggest kid on the street. But now that MS moved in a few doors down, that's no longer true. Google has to acknowledge MS in a way they never did with Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.. And the same thing would happen if FF switched to Chromium.

Idk about you, but having 3 of the 4 biggest vendors all being forced to collaborate and implement solutions supported by at least 1 of the others, is 1000000x better than having each do their own thing. You effectively go from a monarchy to some form of democracy.
if you like openresty, dont miss https://leafo.net/lapis/

Lapis is a framework for building web applications using MoonScript or Lua that runs inside of a customized version of Nginx called OpenResty.
I like this, and so does my friend Confirmation Bias, who is pretty clear that the AI would select completely unbiased content relevant to me, not limited by any of the Bias family. It would be 100% better than the bias filters in place now, because my thoughts and selections are always unbiased, IMHO. (FYI: Obviously I'm not being serious. You clearly knew that, this notice is for the other person who didn't.)
I work in the larger media [Canada], and I am constantly engaged with the news. I like knowing what's going on in the world. I like being current with it. Especially local news.

Just the same, it's no less than healthy to unplug... as beautifully put by one of the Nelson boys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPrPtDoaB3s
Yes, screen reader users and keyboard users. People who rely on the focus order to navigate web pages.
I've never watched the news, but I regularly read sites like HN and Reddit. I feel like from there I get the 'outrage overload' effect as well, but IDK what to do about it. I could stop going on those sites, but then I would truly feel like I'm cut off from an absolute wealth of information. It feels different from being 'cut off' from TV news channels or websites that I would only really read if I was referred from Reddit or HN anyways.
also, get off facebook - it's just stealing your attention and rotting your brain.

stopped watching the news 15 years ago. this one mostly gets this right. stop watching the news. if something so important happens that you should know about it, other people will tell you about it.

also, you can direct your attention to things that do a good job to give you a signal to noise ratios: hackernews and very specific subreddits work wonders.
This was posted on HN a while ago: https://github.com/jstrieb/urlpages

Not blogging specific, but it allows you to encode web content into the URL.
I also noticed that you are using Hubspot for contact form and auth0 for logins. These are some great free services to get started with your app which I never knew about. Anything else that you are using?
Seeing modern internet speeds still puts a grin on my face. It's so fast. I really should not be getting >100 Mbps sustained to a regional server and 50 Mbps across an ocean -- those will always be local area speeds in my mind.

Not that you'd know it, browsing the web.
The units aren’t the issue IMO. You said:

> What they meant by that is 1/3 (of the students at a table) + 1/3 (of the students at a different table) = 2/6 (of the students at those tables).

That’s not what ‘+’ means. Addition doesn’t mean “I have this thing and the other thing; please describe the result”; addition means a specific operation on numbers (or on elements of an additive group, or on numbers with units, etc). But you cannot fully describe 1 student at table of three people as 1/3. Sure, 1/3 of the students at that table are that one student, but if you want to add across tables, you need more information and a better description.

Explaining this in a classroom setting may be quite challenging indeed.
You can make that argument literally for everything and anything.

Why need a new programming language? Well, because we think that our users deserve more choices.

That does not fly well when someone needs to fork out $$$ to fund the activity.

Back to the topic, what users really need is a way to run all available tools (there are many speed test tools out there) and provide them a "full picture" in one shot. Sure, the test will take 3 mins to run but it would more useful if you're concerned about usefulness.
All I can say is that I really miss the preprocessor. There are so many things that could easily be done with the preprocessor but instead have to be done with reflection or code generation in a more complex way.

Sure, it can be be abused/misused but I am not sure that's a good reason to take it away completely like for example in C#.
Except that in most practical scenarios, most models make basic mistakes that no human would ever make. In most cases, people have a very low tolerance for errors that humans would not make.
We're getting that fixed. Sorry about the trouble.
I am a US citizen but I try to keep up with tech and economics also for China and the EU.

I think all three regions are fragile, non-robust.

I am reading The Infinite Game which convinced me that the global winner will be the region that makes its citizens feel safe and adequately supported to individually reach their potential.

Lack of freedom in China and corrupt corporatism and federal government in the US almost makes me bet on the EU, but they have huge problems (Deutsch Bank, southern country's’ debt, etc.)
secret to reddit is to not go with the flow and only watch a small number of high quality subs
Reading books is the best habit I've developed since graduating from college. I've used this system to retain more of what I read. It's definitely not perfect, but it's helped me get a lot more out of my time reading.

Curious if others have developed different techniques that have been helpful for retaining and applying knowledge from books. I feel like I can still get a lot better on this front.
The fundamental flaw is this:

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.

The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.
Perhaps you guys should be more engaged with politics..
Reposting a frequently apropos quote:

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." — Nassim Taleb
24 hour news channels are almost useless. I still like the daily news magazine that's put together by networks, like NBC Nightly news. Weeklies like 60 minutes are usually fine too.
But missing the point. If I am worried about privacy from cloud players, why to trust another cloud player?

I would setup my own Pi-Hole if I wanted true privacy.

Missing something?
What does Voss' class have that's not in his book?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/Iran_Air...

Nothing, as long as you have the space to put them somewhere sensible.
1. Thank you for the question; I do think it's worth asking and discussing.
2. I'm not sure 'bitch' should be a negative term, and my self-esteem is high enough that I feel comfortable owning the term.
3. I'm a growth marketer and I knew it would get a bunch of clicks.
“Blood” (game) ported to NetBSD
Looks like repl.it doesn’t support VB.NET so this is useless for my kids doing high school computer science, here in the UK. Shame.
It seems like the extortionists can keep sending claims until they stumble across a YouTube moderator who guesses wrong and clicks the "this claim was legit" button. Even if 90% of the moderators would get it right eventually your video is going to be down for good. Even humans make mistakes sometimes, so human-in-the-loop isn't a perfect solution.

The thing that really doesn't make sense to me is that when a moderator marks a claim as invalid it doesn't switch the automod system to requiring the moderator to review the claim before taking the video down. Ideally you'd like that to be the case for all videos, but presumably that would anger the media cartels that dictated the requirements for the system and just want a way to do mass takedowns that doesn't cost them lawyer hours or have the potential of consequences for them.
They go for entertainment and selling ads so they have to make it exciting with a lot of controversy. News is actually quite boring and uneventful if you read only reuters or apnews.
According to Amazon, it was just a press release, which they pushed via the same channels they push any other press release. (See the update at the end of the article.)
Proper Fragment Communication in Android
Whether it's companies or governments, press briefings are already an entirely accepted thing. If you think about it, it's a scary concept - someone with a clear motivation to control the story picks journalists they like, invites them to a place of their choosing and feeds them a carefully constructed narrative.

Flat out doing the segment for them seems like the natural next step.
"The return will be gradual, starting at about 10% building capacity, he said. The company aims to ramp up to 30% capacity by September." Very very soft reopening-- initially thought that sounded a bit ambitious. The $1,000 for wfh equipment in the meantime is a great trend that I hope other companies implement.
> So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.

I've been on this for years. Free is a lie, and the idea that everything has to be "free as in beer" is a huge reason so many things suck.
Free hong kong!
My three favorites, on the topic of the news.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/media/2013/...

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

https://www.docdroid.net/4wgVecr/why-speculate-michael-crich...
Thanks for the comment! Yes, it is web-based for now. We have in plan to make a desktop app and also add offline writing. The writing records are encrypted before being stored in the database.
So if you shout "Fire!" in the crowded theater, people start running out and someone is trampled to death....you still wouldn't be charged with a crime?
The counterpart to stream processing is batch processing. With batch processing you run a job every hour or so and calculate a result, with stream processing you immediately calculate the result you want as the data is coming in.
A few years back, there was a documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad" about how Fox News and conservative radio turned a relatively non-political Democrat into an angry, active Republican.

In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.
>This might not be a popular opinion, but I feel like YouTube is doing their best with a really hard problem.

100% agree. Also true of Paypal, another common 'whipping boy' because enforcing various regulations around moving money while still providing good customer service is HARD.
C# has other mechanisms to achieve what macros are commonly used for, though. In a bit, with Roslyn's source generators there will be an even better way for some of them.
Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide how their code works. Older versions of the AI would eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of numbers representing a neural network could be), but between it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has made the model much better now".
> Whereas, when a machine makes that mistake, somebody fixes the bug and it doesn't happen again.

Well, that is kind of the problem with AI. How do you fix a "bug" (if you can even call it that) in a model you cannot fully understand? Do you re-train it on the catastrophic mistake and somehow give it more weight? How can you be sure that this won't lead to any problems where previously there were none? How do you explain to a customer that your model now doesn't make mistake A anymore, but now mistakes B and C frequently occur? The only safe bet is to write some auxiliary code, which first uses the AI as a black box, and afterwards explicitly checks the result for this particular mistake. If this happens again, and again, and again, you need a human to maintain and extend this auxiliary code and also adjust it to changes in the underlying model, at which point I am quite certain just using a person of average intelligence instead of AI will be cheaper, more reliable and more flexible.