skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethically challenged

Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma

Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
> I can lend or give a real book to whoever I want.

Yeah, this has been an issue for me as well. If I have a real book that I bought, I'm perfectly allowed to lend it to a friend for some period of time. Public libraries have done this on a mass scale for eons.

Amazon's DRM on the other hand only lets you lend a book for 14 days. WTF? A real book isn't going to care how long you lend it for. Even many libraries let you extend book loans for months as long as no other patron has placed a hold request for it. The solution? Strip books of their DRM.

I'm not out there to cheat authors of money. I'm not going to take my ebook files and post them everywhere on the internet for free. I'm support giving authors money when I buy an eBook. But I want the same freedom that a paper book gives me. The concept of borrowing books, and even photocopying a section or two from books for personal use, shouldn't disappear in the digital age just because we've gone digital.
Agreed, as a general rule I shy away from predicting things I wouldn't claim expertise in otherwise. This is why consulting with subject matter experts is important. Things as innocuous as traffic crashes and speeding tickets are a huge world unbeknownst to the casual analyst (the field of "Traffic Records")
Fast.com specifically measures your speed to a Netflix mirror, vs CloudFlare measuring your speed to a CloudFlare data center. Netflix probably has a box in your ISPs data center/head end that is closer to you (unless you live in a town with a CloudFlare data center, in which case the difference shouldn't be this drastic).

CF's score is probably more relevant since there's a lot more sites that are hosted there than netflix (which is just netflix).
Forgive me for being entirely ignorant about the field, but I've thought about this frequently and would be grateful for a decent answer:

How theoretically feasible would it be to create Meta-AI.

My naive (incredibly over-simplified) notion goes something like this:

- You convert open-source code into a generic/universal AST/IR format, and figure out a means to represent function inputs and outputs (behavior)

- You use all of the OSS code in the world as data for this, to train a neural network to start making predictions about what kind of AST inputs in a program lead to what kinds of outputs (function synthesis)

- You tell the program to look at other deep learning/ML code, and to attempt to optimize it's own code, while running, inside of isolated processes/VM's.

Something like Erlang/Elixir or Lisp should be capable of this meta-programming and self-code modification while still running. And the BEAM would theoretically be able to isolate actors in the event that the epoch doesn't pan out very well and just kill that branch/lineage off.

Is this insane? I've wondered about this for years.
Photos of the Sleek New Ride Ready to Return US Astronauts to Space
Many things are dangerous. Being careful means evaluating risks, not hysterically avoiding all risks at any cost.

Smoking costs more lives than COVID-19 and it is much easier to save these lives. Yet it’s acceptable to do very little. But somehow COVID-19 warrants endless lockdowns.
Ask HN: What will happen if Twitter disables Trump’s account?
Hey there, thanks for commenting!

If you don't use Facebook, probably you are not familiar with the Facebook ad manager.

It's a tool for advertisers on Facebook.

For each keyword you want to target, the Facebook™ Ads Manager shows the only 25 interest suggestions, the same that it shows to everybody.

We don't. We show you a lot more so that you can target interests that your competition is not.

Hope this clarifies it!
Of those it seems only telegra.ph has a good UI allowing easy link/photos embedding, and the result is really pleasing. All the others need to rely on a third party. Is it open-source ?
> song

You mean 9 minute beat poem.
No, I'm talking about what is required to get to the same as current VR. Beamwidth and pixels per degree are NOT equivalent. Beamwidth causes adjacent pixels to blur into each other, which is a much bigger issue when projecting onto the eye because it's such a smaller surface. The equivalent factor for a display would be the diffraction blur introduced by a pixel.

Back of the envelope math: at 10 pixels per mm, 500 nm light through a circular aperture[1] has a half-power beamwidth of .0013 degrees, so two orders of magnitude better than this technology. That is what you'd need for an ideal display. The bare minimum is just that the blurring at the retina does not cause pixels three rows over to bleed into each other.

[1]: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/2DApertures.html
Anti-Hackintosh-Buyers-Guide
Likewise - this is welcome news.

If it's mandatory, it should definitely be open source. Hell, anything that is funded by taxpayer dollars should be open sourced.
That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.
a guide for getting started with apache kylin
I very strongly suspect that’s not true.
It's less like that anymore. Group raids involving post reporting became a huge issue a while back, so most political pages use membership application questions requiring you to positively affirm or signal in-group association before joining. Nothing prevents you from lying to get into a group, but it's oddly effective as a mechanism for preventing partisan opponents from engaging in any dialogue.
Niantic to begin collecting 3D visual data from Pokémon GO players
That's only because sharing movies isn't as easy (files are quite large) and law enforcement goes after pirates.
If piracy sites could flourish without being disturbed, it would be absolutely impossible to compete with them. And this is the exact situation you have with book piracy.
So are you saying polarization makes it easier for people to vote? It sounds plausible and undesirable.
It's a good example and while being around the longest. I'm guessing some people find the comment offensive and so I won't add much more on why.
Open-Source Is in Trouble – Let's Collude to Save It
Everyone writing about what they think and what they did about it.

I think authors should get paid, and I should have free use over the artifact.

So I wired together some machinery to take a downloaded Kindle file, turn it into a PDF (using the underlying Calibre tooling), and send that to my Remarkable tablet.

I should make it available, think it would be useful to others (under terms that the PDFs are for personal use only- authors need to get paid).
I'm not sure why that means that the possible effects of colonialism on disease shouldn't be discussed.

It's obvious, isn't it? When you discuss public health issues it quickly becomes apparent that your own good health isn't just a result of individual choices, a large amount depends on the environment, that is on politics. That's a dangerous path that leads directly to questioning the status quo, and the political elites that profit from it can't have that.
Taiwan would be perfect if they had legal marijuana, and I could get a visa

Single-payer health care, really good public transport
Muddy Waters short thesis on GSX [pdf]
This is why twitter and facebook don't have dislike buttons. By removing a quick and easy way of voicing dissent to a point, people take to the comments to verbally punish others. For a site that is dependent on user engagement, anger/outrage/frustration/negativity in general is a gold mine. I remember when reddit tried removing the down vote button the comments got NASTY. They back-peddled very quickly from that decision.
Do you think prostitutes and migration originated with state capitalism?
I love the idea behind Gemini, and on a similar note, I'm wondering: is there a name for the back-to-basics, web 1.0 philosophy? Like, a name for the "sites that look like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com " ?
Is there an actual problem with routing SCTP over the Internet? ISTM that the main issue would be enterprise middleboxes being generally unable to deal with it, in which case QUIC may turn out to be more of a stopgap solution.
Unfortunately, until the server-side code is also open-sourced, it would impossible to say what anyone does with the data stored on a centralized server.

This is the first step toward making things transparent.
What're some examples of things that were called "alternative medicine" but that were later proven to work and regarded as "medicine"?

Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.
To my way of thinking, there is also a lot of communication with "requesters" (business people, designers, product managers, etc.), so they need to be in the time zone as the engineers too.
For my understanding, is it possible this could actually be a decent thing for the rest of world? Not ideal, but an improvement? Or is the argument they should just be using <cryptocurrency> ?
The current (mis)use of the term "fake news" has really been normalized by Trump - I don't know that its meaning will ever be recovered.
No I think this is important. Are they that wildly different from each other that they aren't that useful? Is one better than the rest?
Has anything significant left?
I think I have a very different understanding of the root cause of the o-ring failure on Challenger than you do.

The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.

My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]

[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...
> How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?

Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the company in a few years' time.
There is no track!!! Of course there is, because what we call mathematics education is broken beyond repair, but that's a crime.

Shutting down the student's curiosity about perhaps the only thing of mathematical interest that happened all day is not the best you can do.

Do you think you know what the basics are? Are you sure you know which example is confusing and which simple? Are you sure that ignoring confusing anomalies is the best habit you want the next generation of engineers or statespeople to learn as a reflex from an early age?
I noticed you conveniently left out Redshift. :) What about Snowball, Chime, Sumarian, and Route 53?
It would be great to start a new programming language by stating what sort of actual problem it will solve (or handle better) than the other gazillion languages. Example: Rust -> memory safety, because based on many studies memory safety is responsible for ~70% of bugs. If you are just doing a language for the fun of it is still ok, even though I would be less interested in reading the post. As far as Yatta goes:

"allows me to write programs as simple expressions, without having to worry about low-level stuff such as concurrency, with a beautiful syntax and a strong but dynamic type system."

The first part is true to I do not know how many languages, the second part is subjective, I think LISP and ML have the best syntax some people throw up after opening the hello world examples.
Agreed, but this is not the case. It would be "stealing" if they copied the text of his novels and sold them signed by a different author. In that case, the correct verb is "sharing".
I miss the days when my feed wasn't curated at all and just sorted by most recent post.

The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.

I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.
We used newsgroups and message boards long before Facebook. They weren’t as toxic, I’m assuming due to active moderation. The automated or passive or slow moderation is perhaps the issue.
Same! Good thing we have ethernet :P
Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical? I think you're speaking in hyperbole here. Stealing user data without consent (or with fake here read this 500 pg legalise consent) is unethical for certain.

But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.
The Best Password Managers to Secure Your Digital Life
They're both named after shoes.
Feds Arrest Member of Fin7, Group Tied to a Billion Dollars Worth of Hacks
I don't know enough about Three.js to say if that works well for them or not, it probably does, but I don't think a future where all libraries would do this would be very bright. If the library is big, you'd end up shipping a whole lot of unused code to the client, making the end user bored and angry while waiting the page to load (especially if they are the sort of person who hangs around in Hacker News). In fact, the direction has been the exact opposite in recent years! Look at how lodash has moved to exporting one function per one file so you can include just as much of the library as you need.
This is a false choice. The real problem stems from the fact that the model rewards engagement at the cost of everything else.

Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.

Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
> And anytime there’s someone trying to give a different perspective on the situation, there’s always someone who points out the political context.

Yes, the Chinese government hacking into scientific organizations of other countries has political implications. In fact, they are probably the most significant implications, so it's correct to discuss them every time.
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged

The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.

For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.

[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")
Nitrome to convert its Flash game library to HTML5
It’s 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3, and 1:3 + 1:3 = 2:6 = 1:3.

You add slices of pie thus /, and win a vote by ratios thus :.
I think people quickly will realise that if they're working at spaces like that full time in front of a laptop they'll soon be dealing with neck strain, back pain and all kinds of issues. I've worked with "just a laptop and a place to put it" and it can work for a while, but it's an awful full time replacement.

There's little that is special about software development from that point of view.

"All those people" who are in cafes really are a tiny little fraction of workers, and most co-working spaces I've been to have a wide variety of proper office environments because unsurprisingly a lot of people need a proper environment to get work done.

Everyone whose house I've seen who works from home more than every now and again has had a dedicated space.
In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.
Thank you for your kind words. We will keep up the work!
> Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else?

Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price. That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue over all else.

That's the dilemma.

Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right? (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about this)
Java 11 on Google Cloud Functions
SONIC has a very similar vibe to OpenStack and k8s. It's too big to fail, it has what plants crave, and you're dead if you're not on the bandwagon. Whether the code works doesn't matter.
Interesting to see repl.it featured by GitHub. Well deserved and yet unexpected.
I'm curious how you know the copy uploaded to ZLib was purchased with a stolen card? From metadata in the book? Or because purchase + upload date match? Years ago I remember seeing services on Alibaba that would get you any Kindle ebook you wanted – I assume they did something similar.

FWIW, I was quite surprised by your comment that "Folks like the OP won't support writers". The OP writes about _only_ being able to purchase a book in a way that involves submitting to very restrictive, platform-dependent DRM and not wanting to do it again. OP specifically contrasts this experience to buying from publishers who sell DRM-free ebooks as a counterpoint to the awful experience buying her/his book.
I don't have data to back it up, but I've understood from typography gurus that sans-serif fonts are great for signs, short blurbs, etc. But for long (multi-paragraph) reads serif fonts reduce eye fatigue. I think blogs typically fit in that category.
I've been there at Google a few times and can imagine exactly how this went :/. The one time I can tell about is the blogger disaster [1]. The top leadership, spearheaded by chief of legal was basically ignoring everyone's logical arguments at the meetings, the town halls, etc. We kept coming to the mic and telling them that their ideas of what is and isn't sexual are arbitrary, as are anyone else's. They said "no, we have experts and we have a clear definition" (they didn't). We explained that post-facto removing content people wrote is cruel and unnecessary. They claimed "nobody would care or miss it". (of course they would). We told them that this will hurt transgender people, who used to find support in blogs of others going through the same life challenges and blogging about it. Those blogs would be banned under the policy. They said they had data that impact would be minimal. (They had no data). Normal rank-and-file people at google all knew the idea was a bad one. We fought hard. They scheduled a 8-am townhall and announced it the day before at 9pm! We showed up anyways en masse! There was a line to the microphone!

They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.

We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").

I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.

This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.

To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...
CloudFlare - 595/29.8

Netflix - 700/280

DslReports - 400/638

Speedtest (Okla) - 602/621

All of these are on a Dell using a USB3 Ethernet adapter. The only thing that I currently have running gigabit not through an adapter is my AppleTV4 running the speedtest app.

AppleTV 4/SpeedTest (Okla) - 925/751
If you use a parachute one time in case of emergency, yes, it is a life saving device that still has a high level of risk. However, I believe they were referring to the people that choose to parachute for sport/recreation rather than emergency situations.
Google Duo no longer requires phone numbers on tablets (APK download)
Microsoft’s Jeff Teper: Teams ‘will be even bigger than Windows’
> What would you do now???

I would probably start crying, to be honest.

But in all seriousness, this is the kind of thing that makes me dread teaching. I mean, I know what is wrong, I just can't wrap my head around how to explain it, specially without going into stuff that would be too advanced for these particular students.