skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm more paranoid about big companies selling me out for ad money than I am about phishing attacks. There's a number of sites where I feel like I should add 2FA for security, but I won't do it for privacy reasons. Logging into Microsoft Office for my job is a pain in the ass because they redirect me to the "Add your phone number" page twice for each app that I use. I have to click "skip this step" 4 times, since I'm using Teams and Outlook. Was the world a better place when every transaction you made in a retail store didn't come with a request for tracking? "Can we get your email? What's a good phone number for you? Do you have a rewards card? Do you want one? Any way we can peg you with a unique id and sell it to a data broker?"
You put too much responsibility on an overworked professional and take none personally.

A 30 second commericial isn't enough but a 5 minute doctor appointment isn't that complete either.
For Chrome and Safari users, Google doesn’t even need to do link redirection. Chrome supports the “ping” attribute on <a> links which basically tells the browser to make an asynchronous logging request in the background when the user clicks a link. On Firefox, Google has to keep using redirects. https://caniuse.com/#search=Ping

The official name for this spec is “hyperlinking auditing”...
And yet it has been long known D supports the immune system. Being technically-right here is not a good survival strategy.
Congrats on the launch, y’all!!!
Twitter hack teen’s court date “Zoombombed”
These are perennial issues. We've worked hard on anti-voting-ring measures. The voting rings in their case didn't work. Baity titles are a harder issue and require moderation. If you want more information about this, I'd need to see specific links. Most of the things people say about these matters aren't true; they're overgeneralizations at best, and often just imagination.

As for downvoting, people have been saying all the same things for well over a decade. The discussion circulates endlessly. Does downvoting get abused? Sure, but evaluating the system by specific examples is like evaluating an immune system by looking at what a couple of white blood cells did. You don't reprogram your immune system based on that—especially because the examples that stand out are always the cases that the system didn't handle perfectly.
There's no legal basis for that outside territorial waters. Which is why that was not done this time.
> I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Like the Trump family? I love me some "elite" autocratic rule!

The future never looked brighter. Idiocracy here we come.
This year I haven't had any more dreams than before Covid-19
The frustrating thing is that with maximum global cooperation between every human on Earth, we could drive the virus extinct in humans in a matter of weeks, simply by stockpiling a little food and staying away from one another. Even with the rather mediocre social cohesion that even the best countries can manage, the R-value can at least be driven low enough to render trace-and-isolate strategies feasible, and the virus defeated within months for all practical purposes. But huge swathes of the planet are not even attempting to make even minimal gestures, and that makes victory impossible. This is a test of our ability to cooperate, a prisoner's dilemma; and a critical mass is defecting.

I believe this inability to act as one spells doom for humanity in the long run, unless we can improve.
My comment was not an essay, it was a response to someone else's comment. The GP was explicitly saying that GPT-3 could probably produce many of the news content they read, and I was replying to that.

Please also note that it's not very clear to what extent the text of the article is edited - the non-bold text is written by GPT-3, but I don't think it was produced as a single block of text. Instead different parts (sentences? Paragraphs?) were produced individually, selected by a human from many other responses, and assembled together in the shape we are shown. The train of thought among the paragraphs is most likely entirely human work, not AI work, and only the best sounding paragraphs out of a lot of gibberish were likely selected.

It would also be interesting to see how close those paragraphs are to something in GOT-3's training corpus, in terms of structure if not explicit language.
The P versus NP Page
not just IBM, but the link to the microsoft layoffs is kind of mind blowing:
http://techrights.org/2020/08/02/microsoft-layoffs-secrecy/

>“Microsoft rarely, if ever, allows anyone working there to reach 55 and have their pension become vested.”

>“Microsoft was twice as likely to lay you off if you were over 40.”

>“Cortana is an analytics and telemetry app that data mines people while pretending to be a digital assistant,”
They aren't even being taken up by therapists charging more than her. They are being taken up by corporations providing online access to therapists for substantially less than she charges. The consumer is actually benefiting.

She charges $250 a session. Lets say she sees 6 patients per day generating $1500 gross revenue a day. She spends $20 a day in ads which works out to around 1.3% of gross revenues spent on advertising. That is an extremely low amount spent on advertising. The US Small Business Administration recommendation for businesses with revenues less than $5 million per year is to spend 7-8% of gross revenues on marketing.
mea culpa! That's fascinating, thanks for the link.
The problem with Twitter is they don't allow adding more than one security key (like Yubikey, NitroKey etc) per account. Google, FB, Github and almost everyone else who supports security keys does support multiple keys. Without it, I wouldn't disable SMS auth on Twitter, yet (the security key could die at any point, hypothetically speaking; which is why you have a backup or two).
Microsoft releases Open Service Mesh (OSM)
Dead CMOS batteries suck.
Actually they do, their rate of listeriosis is higher, increasing, and not linked to specific contamination in the supply chain leading to outbreaks: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2600261/

Maybe not a big problem compared to say, coronavirus, but I’ll take my milk pasteurized, thanks.
Ah, yeah that's what you mean - so the first time I built this graph I used the real dates and their difference from release to give accurate %s. This turned out to not work, because there wasn't enough space to fit the text underneath. I then explored making the graph vertical with accurate %s, but it still felt heavily one-sided at end with the beta/rc/release. all clumped at the bottom.

The third iteration is this, I moved the release date up into a sentence above, then had a mostly representational but kinda accurate overview of the three release stages. I think it gets the idea of the phases across, works in all browser sizes etc and doesn't take up too much visual space
> Sure, but it's verifiably the same object files as get put into the release artifact.

Well, not if you use LTO.
In that article, Apple says the connection setup is 1.4x faster, not that there is a 40% improvement in throughput or latency.
How many examples would be enough? Five? Fifty five?

Quite a lot of people here (including yours truly) have scientific background.

All I'm saying is: let's be careful and let's be skeptical - as real scientists are.
In Canada doctor will take it as a personal afront to bring up medicine the never heard of.
I've been getting stuff done in Haskell for several years now. The ecosystem is certainly mature enough for me.
Can't tell if the OP is being sarcastic. Just want to point out that "Tik Tok" is the sound an analog clock makes - which is also obsolete technology - except for the odd grandfather clock.
You cannot believe that Twitter did something terribly stupid?

“Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.” - Mark Zuckerberg
As a friendly reminder, they publish torrents for their downloads, which I would imagine could save them a lot of bandwidth costs on release day:

Linux: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7...

Mac: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7...

Windows: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7...
This isn't conclusive by itself. Thanks to the Internet, consumers can conduct their own research on what drugs exist to treat their conditions. Do patients in countries where prescription drug advertising is illegal ask fewer questions or have less understanding of or involvement in their healthcare?
Something not touched on in this post but I’d like to know is the preference for using Rails with a Single Page App built in a framework like React.

When our team determined React to be the way to go for the front end, I looked at all of the parallel dependency management and the backend complexity (one might call “sophistication”) of Rails, and ultimately decided to make the backend in Node instead.

Has anyone here experienced pleasant success with RoR+SPA?
Europeans were kept out of Africa by disease.
I don't mind ads per se, I mind intrusive ads that use more data and system resources than the content.
Were all of them bad science? (The first two were clearly so, but I'm not sure about the last ones.) Because if so, it's easy to look a bit more and find completely wrong conclusions taken from good science too.

But anyway, all of those were mainstream at some time. The point is that yielding to experts is anti-science. The fact that your experts work in a research lab instead of a church makes little difference here.

Scientific decision making requires that at a minimum you verify your experts results, and be ready to notice when they are wrong. This article is as anti-science as the policies it is trying to fight, and this is a bad thing that can only create mistrust from the public.
uBlock Origin does substantially more than just tracking blocking, which might be picking too much of a fight with very powerful entities.
I've run both Google Analytics and my own back-end analytics on the same site and found GA missing over 1/3 of my total non-bot traffic. Most of that traffic was Firefox.
> he knows, but can't communicate what he knows

One example of this was when he knowingly misled (as one player in a coordinated effort) the public about the usefulness of the general public wearing masks at the initial outbreak of the pandemic. Now that the truth came out, Trump supporters have indeed latched onto this as proof that what the medical establishment says is not always true. Whether the benefit was worth the cost is another one of those things that is unknown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XHC5Kxxv_w (1:30 onward)

https://www.facebook.com/BettzDNS/videos/10216890195312387/ (Note the rhetorical "fact checking" warning about the video.

Whether you like it or not, people will react to this behavior in ways that are non-beneficial to overall society. I wonder if that is taken into consideration when strategic decisions are made behind closed doors on what representation of reality is projected into people's minds. Another one of those things that will remain unknown I imagine.
> But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be though of as America’s cultural firewall

Why would they even try? You've got a nice big domestic tech ecosystem which would not have existed without protectionism. Most of these products aren't competitive at all. Nothing to do with culture, same reason Canada, UK etc aren't known for big tech successes.

Musical.ly is unusual in that they did actually work on an original idea and decided to launch the product in America where it took off first. Ended up not playing the China game early on.

> With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic.

Pretty much every big American tech company does that. Nothing notable about this.

> I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.

Understanding in what way? You work on a product and you optimize it for your users. If you work in a 100% domestically focused ecosystem obviously you'll design your products a little differently. What happened here is a Chinese company was for a change actually working on a product with a global userbase and they had to make them happy.

The whole thing is borderline insulting to the founders.
Home Office says it will abandon its racist visa algorithm
Click Here to Kill Everybody (2018)
Is running e,xperiments on users of HN without their consent ethical or moral?
Wow :) You should save this comment and revisit it when you are 35ish. This attitude is exactly what companies want. It's Apple charging $1000 for a phone, and makes (say) $300 profit but you willingly hand over $1500 to them. Would you do that?
I'm just always curious when I see it - is the monetization of the links something done as an afterthought, to get some cash from a project you were working on anyway? Or was it the other way around, looking for some side income and then came up with the project?
Newton’s 2nd Law: Higher Order for Greater Entropy? Life to Intelligent Life
My selling point is that is on the web. You don't need to download any programs, and you would be able to access your databases from every browser. And the Web-app will be saving all your connection string for later easy use. To be honest i'm not really sure if anyone would use such a thing.
Yes, yes and yes.
The toolchain and the dependencies should be pinned.

Otherwise sooner or later you'll hit the customer's issue that you won't be able to reproduce - until you realize it's some subtle bug in the specific version of your compiler.
Didn't they just acquire them last year? Is it b/c they're trying to cut costs or did they want to kill the company from the start?
Especially shady if your product is supposed to remove that kind of malware
Why is Jonathan Swan being applauded for simply doing a journalist’s job?
Seem like the concept of coming sort of prepared to an interview and asking follow up questions is considered an extraordinary effort and a skill journalist are not required to demonstrate on a regular basis. How could this be considered “journalism” in a functioning democracy?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/08/04/axios-jonathan-swan-president-trump-interview-hbo
> I'm not even convinced that schools teach math as a tool

V.I.Arnold has written an excellent rant about this: https://www.uni-muenster.de/Physik.TP/~munsteg/arnold.html
I'll see your PG list, and raise you the latest fogus best things and stuff (of 2019) list.[1]

1: http://blog.fogus.me/2019/12/30/the-best-things-and-stuff-of...
Pleasantly surprised to see that cloudron offers setup for this. I might try that out tonight, thanks!
In my BMW the navigation screen started to peel after 4 years (small area in the corner about 2mm x 6mm). They have replaced screen assembly under the warranty, list price was $2,500+
I was counting NFC based things as tap-to-pay. I use Apple Pay for most of my purchases.

But they always say that doesn't count. And I see why. You still gotta wave down a waiter, ask them to go fetch a machine, wait for them to come back, potentially sending them back because they split it incorrectly. That's not the same as scanning a QR code on the table, having it load up your bill, splitting it if needed, and making the payment. If that works as well as I imagine it to, that could all be done in the time it takes to wave down the waiter.
Why wouldn't you just record the authenticator code somewhere?

You can easily generator OTP codes the same as any of the "authenticator" apps using, for example, oathtool [1]

You don't even need the code to be stored on a computer. Just write it down somewhere safe if you're paranoid about getting hacked. The seed codes are usually 16 characters or so.

[1] https://www.nongnu.org/oath-toolkit/oathtool.1.html
Point taken. What about swap?
Interesting, thanks.

Do you think that documenting the tech and publishing a hash of the document would help? I've seen some services that offer to do this, but I'm not sure if this would work in a court of law.
OK, so, this obviously uses energy in order to do this work. How do we guarantee that that energy was produced in a carbon-neutral fashion? And how do we know that it's better to use the energy for this effort than simply directly using it for industry etc? Is there really such a surplus of energy that doing this makes sense, vs. using that surplus to decommission current mass-scale emitters of carbon (like coal plants)?

I find all this stuff to be too pie-in-the-sky to have any real chance at success. We're at what, ~400ppm of carbon right now? So to produce a single metric tonne of carbon, you need to process 2.5 billion metric tonnes of air? If my calculations from https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/weight-to-volume are correct, that's nearly 2 trillion cubic meters of air.

I think I need someone better at math because I don't trust those numbers, but all in all it seems like you'd need to have MASSIVE fans blowing tremendous amounts of air around, AND you'd have to capture at a very, very high rate, in order to get enough to be worth it. Surely all the energy spinning those fans cancels out tons of energy generated by wind power plants. What the hell's the point?
As a fellow scientist (also very enthusiastic about science), the problem is that some factions are trying to bully through what are actually policy positions in the name of “science”, thereby hurting the credibility of the institution of scientific truth seeking. Articles like this one are definitely only hurting, from the longer term perspective.

Eg: However accurate/inaccurate/useful/useless epidemiology models might be, “science” can never answer questions about the recommended scale of our activities/lockdown/reopening. It’s ultimately a matter of values and judgement based on risk-tolerance given current situation and needs (which might also take into account model predictions and uncertainties). It is asinine to expect epidemiologists to make final policy recommendations (or for leaders to defer responsibility to them), since they understand only one piece of the puzzle. It is ultimately a judgment call to be made by political leaders elected exactly for that job.
Quick, someone train an AI on labeled GPT-3 outputs. They can be labeled as "good" "ok" "bad" "bad grammar" "convincing argument" etc...

There's a website, scribophile.com, for crowdsourced literary criticism. We should make something similar but for AI training. The key difference is that the critique of AI output would be more structured (in the form of labels you can apply to sentences, words, paragraphs, etc...that you highlight) than unstructured.

Another website that is more structured than scribophile but is used for crowdsourced photo critiques instead is photofeeler.com. An interesting thing they do is that if someone is consistently "harsh" or "lenient" on photos, as measured by their standard deviation from the average rating, their feedback is adjusted accordingly. My email is in my bio for collabs.

Note: No one should dare submit GPT-3 content to scribophile. It is a beautiful, sacred, and fragile place for humans only.
Your comment is similar to the one in the article where he attacked and accused someone who is right. Biased people can never recognize their own bias.

First off what he said was not factually untrue. This very article proves his point.

Fact: There was an entire thread responding positively to fake content while voting down the few people who were able to see that the content was fake. The one man with a substantive reply was literally accused of not being "civil" when he did no such thing. This is 100% toxicity laced with false etiquette.

If you want to be unbiased you can't say things like something was factually untrue if there is a fact in the main article literally proving his point.

Really whether reddit is more toxic or HN is more toxic is up for debate. It's just different types of toxicity and there's evidence going in both directions. Don't be like that fool who in the main article.... every story and statement has multiple angles.
Colorado State athletes, staff say administration covering up Covid-19 threat
Not sure that's the reason why you were downvoted.

Perhaps (I am trying to guess) it would have been more helpful to explain why these four add-ons, individually, are so necessary. Or perhaps a more expanded comment on why you picked these, and what effect they provide.
The extent to which this is the case is massively overstated, particularly with regard to the “culture war” aspect I infer you mean from your comment.
> If you pay just a little attention, you absolutely can: GPT-3 is not saying anything.

Check out Figure 3.13 in the GPT-3 paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf.

The authors experimented with 200-word news articles, to see whether 80 human judges could tell the difference between human-generated and GPT-3-generated ones.

It turns out they could not: the human judges correctly identified GPT-3-generated content only 52% of the time, essentially as good as random guessing. (And no, the machine-generated articles were not cherry-picked for the experiment.)
I am not on a ‘side’. In fact there are no sides here. There is reality where these are common words that mean specific things. And then there is a mass hallucination that the compound words consisting of “black” and “white” preceding the word “list” is somehow an underhanded racial slight.
See also "body odor" and "ring around the collar".
That's interesting. Number of versions is probably a weak signal for this --- but how many browser versions should the dev a small site be looking for?
Things DO break...
I've become pretty convinced that sms-based 2FA is an anti-pattern. I've seen too many articles and anecdotes about sim-swap attacks to feel at all comfortable trusting sms as an authentication method.
Side benefit: It helps a ton with testing changes instead of clearing everything and starting over!
> Riiight. And to see where exactly you are on the screen you need... guess what, look at it.

If your cognitive functions are a limiting factor, sure?

One of my cars has a touch screen and a knob to control it. It took my about 2 days of owning the car to know how many knob clicks to get to "Change input".

At worst I might glance at it for a second if I overshoot by an item, no different than when we had individual knobs for everything and you might occasionally glance to see how far you turned the knob

-

Also, maybe read things twice.

> voice control suck but that's how you make it work with a giant touch screen

Read that again, slowly.

It means that they add a touch screen and make it work by patching in voice. You didn't need to repeat my point for me.

-

Your problem is you think this is some sort of debate where I'm backing "Team Big Touchscreen And Voice Controls" and you're going "aha! Gotcha! You don't like voice either!"

No. I don't. But you're wrong, people do want touchscreens and crappy voice controls, and Tesla's cult following is proof.

That garbage interior is hailed as futuristic over it's tablet, and everyone is following them because, despite your illusion that what you want is what everyone wants .. people like the idea of a big shiny touch screen in their car to make it "futuristic", that's why people end ip retrofitting 12 inch screens into their 10 year old Camry now.

MBUX is above the bar that's been set in useability, but they don't set the bar because they don't have the image or mind share to do so. If tomorrow morning Tesla removed the screen and replaces it with AR goggles I promise you that will be the new bar.