skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"algorithm shows it first to a small subset of users. These people may or may not follow the creator already, but TikTok has determined they may be more likely to engage with the video, based on their past behavior. If they respond favorably—say, by sharing the video or watching it in full—TikTok then shows it to more people who it thinks share similar interests. That same process then repeats itself, and if this positive feedback loop happens enough times, the video can go viral. But if the initial group of guinea pigs don’t signal they enjoyed the content, it’s shown to fewer users, limiting its potential reach."

Applying an algorithm to human preferences will necessarily magnify and entrench our likes and suppress our desires. To my mind it accelerates existing social processes.

I've seen an increasing push to place responsibility at the feet of these platforms for the posts that are promoted vs suppressed. Another post the other day conspiratorially suggested instagram promotes partially-topless posts over clothed posts (whereas in all likelihood - it is just what the masses want to see - that post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23548059). I guess it is in a similar vein that we see reports around tiktok discriminating against less attractive people etc.

I'm not sure if there is an easy answer to this but framed another way - Do companies and the algorithms they design need to curb the biases/excesses that are natural/intrinsic to the people that use those platforms? When you speed up the discovery/propogation of human bias - are you morally or socially obliged to create speed-bumps; or is it ok to accentuate the kinks IF they are already present in the social fabric?
That looks perfect. Thanks!
This always perplexed me...there must be a reason.
DuckClient/Wedgetail also exists for this purpose.
I haven't played with ZIO that much. I do like it though. It seems to make your Scala code much more functional.

I'm 100% TypeScript now and miss Scala. I miss using monads. But since Typescript doesn't have for comprehensions, using any of the monad libs for TS (like fp-ts) is messier than plain old TS. Also, Typescript doesn't have pattern matching, thus ADTs are more painful in TS.

But TS is a nice language. Instead of monads, they have stuff built into the language to make things easier and cleaner like null coalescing (compared to Option) and async/await (compared to using IO or Future). I can live with that. I've grown to like TS.

I'm curious what abstractions you had easier time with in TS compared to Scala.
Pay USA resident workers more salary and block foreign labor that forces US wages lower.
Admittedly I know very little about the topic, but I wonder if it's feasible to locate large concentrations of methane and capture and store it.

Maybe give us a chance to at least slow the feedback loop down.
Would you rather pee in the open air, knowing you won't get cited, or in an unventilated public restroom that doesn't ever get cleaned? I'd pee on the street, too. Capital improvements always need maintenance and service, and homes for homeless, addicted, and/or mentally unwell people are no exception.
What’s Facebook’s Deal with Donald Trump?
"...the way that dissent from the herding dynamics can be an effective way to game the attention economy..."

, yes, go on...
Hydrogen production at wastewater treatment plants
From a quick reading, yes. Your tool identifies code that is never run. The featured tool identifies code that never _will be_ run if we make X change to the API.
Meanwhile Barr (and predecessors) complain about sigintel "going dark" due to encryption... always sounded like a red herring to me.

When you manage to break an encryption method you protect your zero-day investment by encouraging everyone to continue to think you can't.

#SetecAstronomy
Yes, the poor performance of the US government in COVID-19 is astounding and unique among governments. In no small part due to exactly this attitude.

The US Government was the first institution in the world to put a man on the moon. A half century before the libertarian corporatism figured out the market incentives to merely put stuff into low orbit. Which even communism figured out a half century ago.

And even now the lead investor is government, because both public and private equity is too chicken-shit to lead investment in even tried-and-true tech when the dollar amounts get too big.

Excellence in government is possible. There is no magic "gub'mit" pixie dust which makes that institution by fiat incompetent.

Governments and businesses are just collections of people doing stuff. Getting all religious about the difference between the two is counter-productive. The question here is one of utilitarian division of responsibility.

And, btw, capitalists didn't save the day on COVID-19 in the USA either. 120K+ dead and growing. We failed the dry run.
Trello all day. Each book gets its own list. Each item in the list is something I want to remember.

Yes you have to write it out but this cost:

1. forces you to only save what matters
2. encourages you to compress the info which requires you to understand its essential parts

I record the notes as I encounter noteworthy things. At the end of a book the trello list is effectively a compressed book and index to the actual text.
I think that's probably a ways off.

I don't understand why someone can't put in a few basic measurements - waist, hip, bust, inseam - and filter clothing based on those, today. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be a damned sight better than putting "plus size dress" and getting keyword-stuffed listings made for a size 0.
Sorry, but I always thought the equation meaningless...
I am trying not to be too negative, but if I were to summarize the article: TikTok wants positive PR and describes its algorithms as being 'generic' in an attempt to counter allegations that they have an agenda.

That's pretty much all there is to the article.

The algorithm described is 'the most generic way' I can think of and how pretty much everything starts trending or disappears in the void that is the internet. Content shown to some, it's liked, gets shown to more people, positive feedback loop, that's it. If you found this article interesting: honest(!) question: what is it about it I am not getting?

There is no way to know how it works exactly, it's just PR from TikTok, saying "nothing fishy going on, don't worry"

btw: the cover picture is haunting me; good pick with regards to it being about TikTok
> So, stepping back, the tech elite's attitude toward US education scares me. It's going to do to our schools what that particular set of neo-liberal MBA programs did to so many iconic American businesses.

I flag this argument as thought provoking.

Though... I've reservations about it, as I believe students are being failed far more pervasively and profoundly, than is almost ever suggested. First-tier astronomy graduate students so lack integrated understanding of their field, that they are pervasively mistaken about the simple color of the Sun. Harvard freshman are described as having had such "good" teachers, clearly presenting well-organized information, that students now lack both skills and willingness to wrestle with a body of knowledge and build their own understanding.

I still buy a conservative argument, that things could still be horribly worse. As much education around the world illustrates. And certainly, subculture groupthink and reality disconnect is a well trod path to disaster. And being unable to see the flaws in ones own community is ever popular. So I'm delighted by a reminder to check the mirror.

But while things could be made much worse, I don't think people appreciate how profound a disaster we are already living. And are thus severely underestimating the potential payoff of improvement. And are thus severely underinvesting in it. But as you point out, the incentives around what form that investment takes, are scary at present. My reservation is, the status quo seems underappreciatedly scary too. I've a not-quite joke, that if by some miracle you could raise everyone's science understanding to that of Harvard freshman, it might be good for societal equity, but it would seem a pity, that you didn't try for something less badly broken.
Stockwell, the AI-vending machine startup, is shutting down July 1
The latest place I work has a dusty monolith full of skeletons and zombies. They’ve been migrating off it to micro services for like 5 years now.

I’d be nice to have a tool to clean it up. But the use cases is slightly different than this one.
On the front inside cover, I write the page number of each thing I find interesting/ useful. Especially the diagrams.

Then on the page to the right of that I jot down the things I want to learn more about and the ideas I come up with.
https://xkcd.com/384/
Of course an MS - which they recommend against - would likely cover additional topics (computer graphics, AI/machine learning, formal methods) as well as follow-on material to the introductory courses listed on the page.
I don’t like to desecrate the book, I use small stickies notes to take notes and put them near the margin.
Just wondering - what doesn't run? Or what popular software isn't compiled to run on aarch64?
It's also an indictment of behaviorism. And the scourge behaviorism inflicted on societies during the 20th century.
Curl user survey 2020 analysis
I've been scriblling points on 3x5 in note cards which I use as a bookmark. Might go through several notecards in a book. I then summarize/transfer over to my Notion workspace.

Interesting in seeing what others do!
http://archive.vn/fWFeM
I agree some OpenBSD security mitigations are dubious, but if I am forced to choose between Linux (too little) and OpenBSD (too much), it seems to me OpenBSD is definitely preferrable. (Of course, the best is to implement only effective ones.) Do you disagree?
Based on my crude understanding, I believe it’s too defuse to effectively capture and store or flare across the permafrost. This is why it’s crucial for us to responsibly manage natural gas wells that we can properly control the release or leakage of gas from.
I think they mean that they just write their thoughts/arguments for/against whatever topic at hand in the margins. Also known as annotating I suppose.
Domain name registration related shenanigans is so weird to me.

Lately I've been getting mail from various folks notifying me that the `.com` equivalent of one of my `.net` domains is going to be available. It's weird to me that it would be worth doing, but I'm assuming they're making money out of it.
I create a summary document for every new book that I start. I copy and paste the title, authors, cover thumbnail, description, and table of contents if I can find it inline. I print this 1-2 page document and use it as a starting point to add hand written notes.

If I’m reading an eBook, I use the highlighter feature and review my previous chapter highlights before starting a new chapter.

For paper books I usually have a stack of plain paper bookmarks that I cut from blank index cards (1.5” x 5”). I write keywords on the bookmark as I read so I normally have a tersely annotated bookmark for each finished book that I staple to my printed summary page.
The silence from SETI is deafening. I'm not even amateurishly familiar with astronomy, but I remember setting up SETI@Home when I got my first computer, and remember slowly realizing that the universe seemingly isn't "teeming" with intelligent life. Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent? Maybe we are alone in this huge universe?

It does feel at least a little depressing that discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence seems unlikely in my lifetime. Maybe even out of the cards for humanity. I have to wonder if building communications devices (or "devices" in general) is a uniquely human thing that simply wouldn't matter to an intelligence that evolved some other way.
digitally doesn't work well, it'll stick more in your head if you use pencil and paper. my process is read something, try to summarize in plain english in my own words, repeat.
Ex-Audi Manager: We have been asleep
This sounds like something that cab be also told a decade or two ago but it is yet to be true. I dont see it is being changed anytime soo
Poker Taught Me How to Deal with the Hand of Fate
I can't find confirmation to this in Russian news, which strongly suggests that this is fake news. If such a record were set, it would beat the +37.3C record set in 1988.

Note that the article says "if verified", which you should read as, "we just published this without verifying".

Here's apparently where everyone is getting this from: http://www.pogodaiklimat.ru/monitor.php?id=24266

Don't know about you, but to me the site does not look very credible. Other sources (such as http://www.hmn.ru/index.php?index=8&value=24166) suggest the temperature got up to 36C that day.
Perhaps a combined SoC with both ARM and x86-64 cores, with independent switching like Apple already has for GPU integrated/discrete graphics switching. I think this would be a convenient middle way through this compatibility challenge.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202043
>I can't find confirmation to this in Russian news, which strongly suggests that this is fake news.

Why?
Ask HN: How do you get technical mentorship?
I'm a recent grad and have been working on small startup teams. With the pandemic, it's been kind of a ping pong because funding has fallen through a few times. I work with subject matter experts but they aren't the technical mentors I've had in prior roles (someone who can review my code, provide meaningful guidance on systems design, etc). I am lucky to have a group of mentors I've cultivated over the years. But it's harder to find technical mentorship - not necessarily day to day but on a rather frequent basis. How do you all find technical mentorship? Open to answers from anyone/everyone who would like to share.
Learn OpenGL: Free E-Book
> Mansa Musa

That's a bit of a confusing thing, though, because he was also the emperor. (OT: I often wonder if his story is well-known in tech circles because of the end date of his reign.)
Ask HN: Volunteering to Fight Structural Racism
I'm an experienced full-stack dev and technical interviewer, looking to do my part to fight against structural inequality. Send me a message if you are, or know, a Black/Brown person who could use help preparing for technical interviews.
I agree - it's basically just a way to arrive at a meaningless number by multiplying a whole lot of wild-ass guesses together.

Do we have anything better, though?
This is one of the papers behind the "lockdowns saved countless lives" articles from a couple weeks ago. Basically, the authors fit the usual first-order homogeneous SEIR model to the initial spread of the epidemic. Extrapolated forward, that predicts a very large number infected. In reality, many fewer were infected; so they assign the credit for that to various binary interventions introduced on specific dates, and do a regression to determine which interventions helped most/least.

But the interventions that they consider are almost all lockdown-type (restrictions on motion), and their methodology assigns all the credit to the interventions considered. So any benefit from effects they didn't consider--mask use, voluntary changes in behavior, earlier herd immunity due to heterogeneity, etc.--gets falsely assigned to the lockdowns. So at best, this study may show the relative value of different lockdown-type interventions, for example their conclusion that school closures were relatively ineffective. It absolutely cannot show that the lockdowns were the reason for the difference between reality and that first-order model--that's an input assumption, not a conclusion.

Even the interventions considered show surprising results. For example, "WFH, no gathering, other social dist." in Italy shows a positive effect on the growth rate. I don't think that means working from home makes the virus spread faster; rather, I think they're mostly curve-fitting to noise, even by the already doubtful standards of econometrics.

I understand scientists' impulse to justify the lockdowns in retrospect, given the high social and financial cost (and I agree that in many cases that cost was justified!--New York and Lombardy certainly wish they'd closed sooner). I'm disturbed that the authors, Nature, and the popular press all seem happy to disregard the truth in order to provide that justification, and I fear the resulting public loss of confidence in science will cause harm for many years to come.
then in my opinion your dad is most likely a victim of insane extrapolation and distraction and/or a brilliant cult leader. this way of thinking most resembles 'brainstorming' not science nor fact-checking and while it can seem super intelligent in spectacular ways, is dangerous when not kept in check. from a psychological and sociological perspective.
especially when spoken by an authoritive figure or supposed credible source and taken for more than it is.
I thought it was comprehensive and fascinating.
> Maybe something is out there, but out of reach, or deliberately silent?

Have you read The Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu? It's a terrific (and recently quite famous + awarded) sci fi trilogy that explores this idea. That all sufficiently advanced civilizations have learned to be extremely radio silent in order to escape detection. Reason being that they all eventually conclude that, from a game theoretic standpoint, the only reasonable thing to do when you detect another civilization is to eliminate them before they do you.
This is all rather beside the point. If you can get a better offer elsewhere, take it. Ideally, develop two or three good offers and take the best.
Usually these comparisons are not very fair because it’s done by currency exchange rate conversion. For example, a person with mere $800 per month income in India can have superior life style than minimum wage worker in USA.
I have not, I will definitely check that out, thanks for sharing. I feel that SETI is something I'm woefully uneducated on, and can't find good places to jump into research before sources seem to go wildly off the rails.
Thanks! I haven’t done much at all, not sure if you’re involved with it but if so thanks right back, I do love Recoil and its potential.

I definitely should aim my criticism at the incentives more than the people, that’s a good point. I specifically like HN because it seems to have figured out pretty nice incentives (of course the lack of scale is the key).
It's worth noting that with Optotypes, the goal of having clear and unambiguous letters is inverted. The aperture of C, for example is much narrower than the comparable types because the objective is to see if the viewer's eye is able to distinguish the closed-aperture C from O.
> making the right choices

... does NOT mean pro-choice. It means "limit the ability to choose in favor of the right choices".

I, personally, like both "pro-choice" and "pro-life" names. These names represent underlying positions well. These names also have a good balance [between brevity, clarity, and highlighting key differences].
It was a figure of speech. Obviously he doesn't have an 11 figure bank balance.
Because....?
Amazon Private Labels and Antitrust
IBM Selectric Pica
This is an almost meaningless question. About all we can add is that in light of current technology trends, it looks possible. Which may well mean that it is certain.

What can we hope for? I dream of an endless dreamless sleep, soon. Every alternative I can think of sounds like horror.
The annual budget for just San Francisco is $12 billion (https://sfbos.org/supervisor-fewer-budget-information). That's 20% of Sergey Brin's net worth.

So no, I don't think that any billionaire is even remotely close to being able to sustainably spend what any country-level government can.

For another reference: the smallest GDP listed at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no... is ~$40B, and government spending is usually some 10s of percent of GDP.
More Wabi-Sabi?
> People view SRE in many difference ways. If you were to go through the Google SRE book, there's nothing explicit in there about building "platform" or doing any infrastructure engineering.

In a past life I worked on an SRE team that backed up data to cassette tapes using a fleet of robots with lasers. https://youtu.be/kQ2taAttvwo That was easy. Hard SRE work is more like Traffic Team.

My personal view is that microservices, libraries, frameworks, apis, abis, etc. have a great deal in common today with how we've always thought about internet routers. Ask yourself this: if JavaScript web apps could run traceroute, then how many stakeholders do you think would show up before your query even reaches the wire?

So I think what the author Nick is saying makes perfect sense. Yes, these platform layers can cause difficulties. Can we fix them? Yes, just read the SRE book. That same wisdom will carry over just fine to this kind of problem.
I've got a few books like this now on my to-read list (SICP, etc).

But in a profession that revolves around getting jira tickets into the Done column while my boss hovers over me with a stopwatch (so to speak), and then cramming leetcode for interviews when it's time to hop from one shitshow for the next ... I've come to the sad conclusion that, in this season of in my life, I just can't justify spending the additional time on such books.

These books might make me "a better programmer" for some amorphous, platonic definition thereof, but in the year 2020 will these actually help me to materially progress career-wise?
Thread about a similar topic from 1 day ago, 152 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23588469
Totally. The lego technic sets are a boon in that respect, mindstorms being a very good entrypoint to programming (“telling a machine to do stuff on its own”) in particular, and to engineering in general.

The new Spike set looks promising.
This wing was donated by "anonymous". All eyes look at Ted Danson
It's just that the speed of light is too slow for any relatively recent signals to reach us from such distant sources. Most of what we can receive is very old news.

nit: teeming
> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals

What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
But what if "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain"?
Because Verkhoyansk is in Russia and this supposedly happened 2 days ago there. Someone would have written about it.
Yeah, that's probably the point. You have to start somewhere.

Personally I'm blown away that some parameters, like the fraction of those stars that have planets, we are able to capably plug values in for.

I really never thought we'd be able to get statistics for things like that in my lifetime.

I mean short of faster-than-light travel, I had assumed ignorantly that astronomy would be stuck more or less where it is for centuries to come.
The SETI Institute has a very active YouTube channel if you are interested in updates: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzQdkHKOTVT_chwgDcau4sg

They also provide publicly available audit for their financials so you can see where they are at: https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials

As far as I can tell, they are still going strong. And the YouTube channel is always very interesting, and cutting-edge! It's not always about alien life directly, many times it is tangentially related (helpful [to the search] technologies, breakthroughs, panel discussions, etc). Perhaps not the most refined broadcasts, but they are always very educational and informative.
Dark Forest.

Let's hope we do not contact anything until we have really, really good weapons.
I knew someone would point out that you can't fit an A0 paper in a C7 envelope. :-P