skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that half of Twitter's accounts are bots is not new: https://gizmodo.com/how-many-social-media-users-are-real-peo... (written in 2018)
Another older article puts the issue into a larger social context and makes some sloppy estimates:
"Since Twitter’s yearly revenue is between 2 and 3 billion dollars — that is as much as 50 dollars per potential customer on average and that doesn’t count what people are spending to purchase fake followers and bots. If only English speaking customers are targeted by Twitter ads, that means 150 dollars is being spent to grab the attention of each customer."
https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-fake-econ...
The Self as a Center of Psychological Gravity [pdf]
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …”
— Isaac Asimov
Could someone explain the downvoting please?
That’s what I don’t understand about the argument against price gouging. Fresh water is hard to come by, ergo the price goes up.

If the product wasn’t in demand it wouldn’t go up in price. By artificially forcing a low price it guarantees there’s going to be shortages.

By allowing the price to go up it will also enforce people use water wisely. That is they won’t start taking showers or watering plants with bottled water as it will be expensive.
Playing an ad in the shower after 5 minutes would definitely make me take shorter showers and use less water. You could be on to something there.
I think it probably did help raise awareness about endangered whales and inspire opposition to whaling.
probably depends on how meaningful the cost of utilities is to you. I try to use AC and heat sparingly just because I hate the idea of waste; it really annoys me if I have to turn on the heat a few nights later because I turned on my AC too early. but my whole utility bill is ~$70/month. I don't really care too much about saving 10-20% of that.
Perl 4 to 5 was before my time, but I read it wasn't really a major change, just to sell books. Perl 5.6 to 5.8 was the big moment where strings became (optionally) arrays of characters instead of arrays of bytes. This caused some amount of breakage, but was a long time ago now; anything else broken since then has been pretty minor.
Generally- so far, flua only drives the generation of the various files we derive from syscalls.master.

There's been some WIP to also use it for some pkgbase stuff, as well as an ldconfig lua script for use in post-install scripts now that pkg supports post-install.lua.

I've had my eye on a couple of other components that could use a rewrite with flua. A new flua-based replacement for kernel config(8) could be quite excellent, for instance.
Notice of Data Security Incident
The most riveting piece of art criticism I have experienced in a while. Wow, just wow.
Personally, I watched a guy who was promoting his crappy, plagiarized book go from 25k followers to 90k followers over the course of a week. They were all clearly fake since he rarely got more than a single like on everything he Tweeted.
Web portal > account/profile > account settings > billing

Then there's an orange "add/edit subscription" link and a "cancel subscription" link.

The process is well documented in an article on their help centre.

A simple DuckDuckGo search brings up the help centre article as one of the first results.
Here in Germany we commonly have negative electricity prices at exchanges and with a increasingly higher percentage of renewable energy is will only become more common.

It would be very easy to use the energy to heat up warm water in the already existing warm water boilers just by adding a cheap electric heating element to the usual gas burner. The necessary smart meters for billing are actually mandatory in new installations. However with current consumer electricity prices completely removed from the large scale exchanges and more expensive than ever I don't see that happening right now.
Editions exist to guarantee forward compatibility, it's actually a really good solution to a hard problem.
I bet 40% of all famous people’s followers are bots.
New Title: Humpbacks makes comeback after reduction of whaling industry: there, fixed it for ya.
How to Run Spark on Kubernetes
Thank you, it sounds like you have some insight about the process.

I'm aware of structuring, but I don't think most people are. I've heard about it only once in the news where a store owner had his money seized because he was trying to avoid depositing more than $10,000 at a time, over a long time period.

IIRC, this was the case: https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2015/05/05/...
Do you foresee an escalation in tactics on both sides?
Spark History Server on Kubernetes
"math = physics" is true on paper, because most, if not all, physical laws are equations. The issue lies elsewhere: ontology. One can subscribe to realist ontology in physics, yet become a Platonist wrt math. One can say that "particles exist and play the role of causal antecedents" and that "sets don't exist in this world and don't play the role of causal antecedents"; that's why many mathematicians subscribe to Platonism (sets, numbers, etc don't exist in this world, but exist in the Platonic world). Same goes for the so-called 'Platonic' love that many seek in the modern world!!
Gouging denies essentials to people who need them that can't afford "surge" pricing.

It's unethical in times of emergency, when the response needed is too short term for more capacity to be spun up to meet immediate needs. It allows the worried (wealthy) well to buy up supplies needed by petty, inconsequential bodies like health services.

So no, Amazon does not need to let prices rise.
They could get rid of bots with Captchas, but they don't. That suggests to me that the people funding Twitter want to be able to use bots.
Why no 3D? Could be a good starting point for other proj
Looks so. The virus seems to have "brewed" in the Congo basin for a few decades, possibly amplified by the vaccination campaigns of the early 20th century (as they'd be using the same glass syringes and steel needles for dozens of patients).

If it got out before the second half of the 20th century it apparently didn't manage to gain enough of a foothold to go pandemic[0]. Though the long incubation rate and somewhat mixed symptoms also make it somewhat uncertain.

[0] as may have been the case for Robert Rayford who looks to have been something of a terminal case rather than vector or victim of a more widespread infection
I think you're right. But the article is comparing low-carbon/zero air pollution solar panels with wood. They mention that air pollution can be reduced with special stoves over regular stoves but did not compare air pollution from no stove to non-combustion sources.

If energy systems were installed that could heat and power these places without biofuel at all you'd be vastly better off. I did not see that point in there.
It's not hidden. It's documented in an article on the zoom help centre.

Pretty much the exact opposite of hidden.
I put up with it because I’ve used Mail for many years without issue until now. Fortunately for me it happens infrequently enough that it’s mildly irritating to me so far. Much less irritating than when I open my MacBook and receive dozens of iMessages at once along with their dings.
Yes, it's new and it's fairly decent. I love mechanical keyboards (especially those with ALPS and TOPRE switches), but I realize low travel means I type much faster and it doesn't tire my fingers.

IMHO the scissor keys in the Magic Keyboard are really good because they strike a perfect compromise in terms of depth, comfort and speed. Also the board is really low latency. Not sure what tricks Apple has played with the firmware in those keyboards.
It's telling that I bring this up and this is the response I get. Maybe there is a possibility that it is a state sponsored disinformation campaign? There is overwhelming evidence that disinformation is being spread by several state sponsored groups.

Again, I said from my "limited view", as it's impossible to have all the information. It seems TO ME that there is quite a bit more targeted misinformation coming from the right.

I would love to be corrected. However, I don't think saying "I got a Facebook feed with lots of stuff stuff coming out of it", and "you're stupid because of xyz I assume about you for no reason whatsoever" qualifies in this regard.
This Zoom interview is great way of Quing and Aing, that’s my opinion
Yes and no. We already know there were too many named metrics to give each its own column on the system they were using (paraquet on a data lake), so what are they left with?

Does a column store like paraquet make a good time series DB? Trendy named time series databases I’ve had the displeasure of using would all fail miserably by high cardinality series too, so I’m not convinced there is actually a better thing than files on a lake for this stuff.

So, use some format to name the metric in each row. If paraquet, use dictionary encoding on that column and sort or cluster the rows ... will give go min/max pruning etc.

But presto is currently 5x slower to chew through paraquet vs orc so perhaps simply use orc. Or, for this data, Avro or json lines.

And then when you’ve used presto to discover interesting metrics you can always use presto (or scalding or whatever your poison is) to extract the metrics you have identified you want to examine more closely and to put them into separate datasets etc.

I’m just outlining standard approach’s to these kinds of problems.
DevOps Tools for Productivity
GPT-3 was pretrained on five datasets (Common Crawl, WebText2, Books1, Books2, and Wikipedia; see table 2.2), and then used on previously unseen tasks (Q&A, translation, cloze, etc.) without finetuning, i.e., weights were not updated after the original (autoregressive) pretraining. This promises a possible future in which general-purpose models are pretrained once, and deployed to production for multiple tasks.
I'd agree in general. On the other hand, astroturfing is much older that TWTR (or even AstroTurf), eg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque

Somewhere I'd read a book on propaganda by a fellow who produced it in ww2 and finished his introduction with biblical examples of the main techniques.
For a new political imagination, Israeli Jews must unlearn Zionism
I think the downvotes are missing the point. This is a key problem with standards: sometimes they standardize around something unreasonable. And tech is already riddled with all sorts of standards which are half-implemented in n different ways.

I think a better approach would be to have a specification for more robust negotiation protocols. When I see "standardisation," I already know that this means the same thing as "standardization" and furthermore that I should expect to see "colour"/"honour," organizations referred to in plural, "from today" rather than "beginning today" or "starting today," and even "jumpers" over "sweaters," "lorries" over "trucks," "biscuits" over "cookies," and more interrogative sentences in conversation. A British English speaker likely does the same process in reverse.
IBM AS/400 the best architecture in the world (1992) [YouTube]
I think this is a good point to throw out a reminder: danger is not binary. If it were binary all of these activities would be equivalent:

* taking a nap
* eating a meal
* riding a bicycle
* playing Russian roulette
My favourite essay on Emergence is by one of the founders of its investigation, John Holland:

http://www.philosophica.ugent.be/fulltexts/59-2.pdf
Astrology for Mathematicians
Why does Twitter allow bots to tweet? If a researcher can determine that a tweet came from a bot, can twitter not do that?
Anything that significantly restricts use isn't something that you can distribute as part of a BSD licensed system. The restrictions on that piece would need to be met by anyone using or redistributing the system, which is a significant departure from expectations.

Certainly, you can use GPL software with a BSD licensed system, and you can distribute GPL packages to be installed on a BSD licensed system, but if you include GPL software in a BSD system, it's no longer a BSD system.
> It is pretty easy to cherry pick a paper advocating whatever you want to advocate for vitamin D.

Which is just what you did before.
Flux or Argo can help with this. The operator lives on your cluster, and ensures your cluster state matches a Git repo with all your configuration in it.

Flux - https://github.com/fluxcd/flux

ArgoCD - https://argoproj.github.io/argo-cd/
I've gone through many of the same things, up to the point where I had to beg my father to remove some of the stones because it was uncomfortable that the toilet wouldn't actually flush.

I think that one-time-actions like these are easier to do without constant feedback. Somebody measures it, explains the savings to you, you do it once, done. Usage-based savings likely require more frequent feedback unless you're somebody that has a very fine-tuned habit system.
This is what I've been doing to get "rid" of the error. Still on Mojave as well.
I'm reminded of Rich Sutton's essay, "The Bitter Lesson:"

Moore's law is running on fumes at this point. The complexity of further scaling has reached geopolitical proportions. We need to get back to looking at more creative models in both the software and hardware domains.

the model achieves competitive results on many NLP tasks and benchmarks without finetuning

The article dismisses this result with the following analogy:

“No, my 10-year-old math prodigy hasn’t proven any new theorems, but she can get a perfect score on the math SAT in under 10 minutes. Isn’t that groundbreaking?”

And I tend to agree. We've had a game of benchmarking brinkmanship for a while now. At what point are we going to see some groundbreaking applications?
> I do miss the days of ‘cap deploy’ for Rails apps.

Oh boy I do not miss them. Actually I'm still living them and I hope we can finally migrate away from Capistrano ASAP. Dynamic provisioning with autoscaling is a royal PITA with cap as it was never meant to be used on moving targets like dynamic instances.
If “I think it’s wise to consider how much of that is personal bias” translates directly to “you’re stupid because of xyz I assume about you”, then it seems like we’re not effectively communicating.

I’m sorry for the portion of that where the fault is mine.
Where is bash not installed?
Generally treaties occur after interested parties have realized their interests and undertaken discussions for a great deal of time prior to the signing of anything.
I'd like to know what "bot" means. Is it the new word for internet troll or do these Twitter accounts really have better AI than Microsoft or Facebook.
> If a researcher can determine that a tweet came from a bot

That condition is the key. Are you sure they can do that? It’s very tough to do with certainty.
When you put it that way, that masterful PR decision stands in stark contrast to this one. Any outlet that was planning to cover the launch on Wednesday and would never have covered SN4, but now plans to cover the Demo2 launch again today might be more likely to cover the SN4 failure.
It has been known for DECADES that Oracle is outrageously expensive compared to the competition. But the unwillingness of larger companies to go with open-source databases which have no multi-billion dollar company behind them has kept Oracle in the saddle all these years.
In a lot of places in the world fresh water is not an issue and a higher rate of usage actually helps with sewer systems and prevents them from clogging.

However recovering the waste heat from a shower, e.g. by running the drain water trough a heat exchanger with the freshwater would already help saving a lot of energy.
Sounds as if you prefer the Microsoft take on MVC, where they introduced the "UI Model" as an additional component.

(Real) Model -> fetch -> UI Model -> build -> View

^

|

v

build/modify

^

|

v

Controller

The UI Model serves as a simplified version of the "real" model that can also use the data structures/objects used by the technology used in the View.

In "original" MVC (outside of the use of this term in webdev), the "M" in MVC absolutely did refer to a 1:1 correspondence with the data at the core of the application. This works too, but when using various UI toolkits, adding the UI Model can make things feel a bit more natural.
My argument is that you can’t look at dead bodies per kW/h and claim one is better than the other.

It doesn’t incorporate the relocation of potentially tens of millions of people on a single incident. It doesn’t incorporate the political complexities and so on.

People don’t simply look at the probability of getting killed and be fine with being uprooted if something happens. People don’t want to risk being relocated overnight. The death thing isn’t even a concern, most people don’t even believe that it would happen to them.
Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...:

The standard license (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks.

You may not:
<<list of things you cannot do>>
- disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent.

I sadly suspect that Paul Förster might need a lawyer if anyone from Oracle finds out about that post. Which, given that this is trending on Hacker News, they easily might.
OP here -- feeling that hard right now. I have another side gig (maybe I'll write about it soon).
Working with a company that does ~300mm in revenue and date from contract sent to signed was around 45 days. I was blown away. still haven't been paid either. Hoping I'm embedded after this.
There's no reason why it shouldn't affect all google mail accounts equally. If the cause is frontend disconnections, it will happen to any account tier.
This is exactly it. Zoom is easy and pretty pleasant to use, but more importantly the execs that used to be able to just drag people into rooms and now find themselves having to use virtual rooms don't want to have to think about the tool. At the top tier bank I currently work for we switched to Zoom first on a trial basis beginning about a year ago, so way before the pandemic struck, so we'd mostly already switched. When the pandemic hit though, and 200+ attendee meetings became a thing, the higher ups realized just how smooth Zoom can be and went all in. Now there are conversations about how to enable screen sharing via zoom since we still need to use Citrix to log on to machines, rather than just having access to a VPN. A year ago, that was a no-go zone in discussions with IT, but now in no small part thanks to zoom it's a serious conversation.

If zoom can capitalize on this and stay the darling of enterprise while simple enough that anyone cares to use it, at low cost, they'll absolutely dominate this space within a couple of years I'm sure. I'd be surprised if they aren't acquired by Apple, Google or Microsoft, frankly.
I bet there are some ThisIDDoesNotExist websites that bots use to autogenerate vast majority of fake ids, probably by using ThisPersonDoesNotExist website.

You can generate realistc photos of IDs from countries that Twitter cannot positively verify those bc in USA there are ways to check authentity of your document. But IDs from Russia or Ukraine - no way.
You don't need to defend yourself against every critique, including this one.
I read it! I meant a large central non combustion power plant with district heating that doesn't emit air pollution or carbon. Not a biofuel cogen plant!

Yes you have to transfer the power and yes infrastructure is needed. These are important activities in the quest for not killing people via air pollution and stopping climate change.
Thanks, yeah think I've read about that version before. But "the magnetic field spins the electron around once", doesn't this feel a bit weak? You could conceivably just define "spin around once" as the B-field manipulation that returns the amplitude to +1, not -1. How do you define the B-field interaction in a way that is comparable to "spinning something around once"? I'm not trying to be annoying :) I feel this really is at the core of the spin-1/2 "rotate twice to rotate completely" confusion..

Because it's the "rotation" in comparison to the surroundings that cause the change in amplitude, a global rotation of the electron particle and the rest of the universe doesn't cause the electron to change amplitude, as then it's just a global coordinate transformation.
Just because I sometimes go through a tunnel doesn't mean I want to live in a cave.
Not surprising at all. From my experience with Twitter, I would say 45-50% of all tweets come from bots.

I feel like there are 4 types of Twitter users: 1) bots, 2) influencers that heavily use automation to the point where they are almost the same as a bot, 3) famous/popular that are somewhat to mostly real, but have someone else managing their account for them, 4) real people who think 1-3 are all real that gained their followers organically.

Probably most users fall on categories 1 and 4 above, although most of Twitter traffic is probably generated by tweets of 2 and 3.
How to validate your startup idea
I'm a big fan of Postgres, and it's got plenty going for it. That's not to say Oracle isn't a good database in its own right. The knocks against Oracle tend to be lock-in, complexity, price, but rather than go in a checklist comparison I'd rather say what's unique about Postgres:

- Based on its license it's very hard for any one company or individual to "own" Postgres, this makes risk of a company as a bad actor being minimized pretty appealing

- Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here

- The improvements for app devs from things like JSON, to a variety of index types put it in unique territory among relational databases

- The extension framework is truly unique and stands to be where a lot of future innovation happens.
Historical Data Analysis: Looking at SpaceX Past Missions
My takeaway is that "news" from commercial outlets like MarketWatch (the publisher here) largely is not fact-based. Compare to reports in February about waves of anti-Asia discrimination, correspondeding to a major and ill-advised Democratic information initiative.

I don't know if Twitter has bots or how they tilt. What I do know is post-coronavirus commerical "news" outlets have lost my trust, as has much of the political establishment, red or blue.
I don't mind gamification personally. I'll do it to myself, even if it's just the harmless kind of "just keep running until you've reached that tree ... now that tree over there" to keep me going. Gamification works even if you know that it's gamification.

I agree that it brings up ethical issues when you're using gamification for behavior modification of others, but on the other hand it's also a bit like communication (as in "you cannot not communicate", the absence of a signal is a signal as well), when you choose not to gamify something, you're choosing to strengthen the habits that are currently in place.
> One cannot claim that both A) masks are "not effective at stopping COVID" and B) "people in hospitals needed them more than the average citizen". It's a laughably obvious contradiction.

One can claim that N95 masks are effective at reducing infection rate of hospital staff when properly fitted, changed regularly and worn by people who are trained not to move them around, touch their faces etc etc.

One can also claim that masks which are not well fitted, worn by untrained individuals, who may wear them wrong and who may touch their faces more as a result of wearing them, could cause more harm than good.

No inconsistency there.
His son Hans is responsible for a whole body of work in river engineering.

https://www.engineering.uiowa.edu/news/life-and-pioneering-w...