skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hyperreality - Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced post-modern societies. Hyperreality is a way of characterizing what our consciousness defines as "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. Hyperreality is a hypothetical communications infrastructure made possible by information technology. It allows the commingling of physical reality with virtual reality and human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Individuals may find themselves for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world.

Hyperreality is what I thought of when I saw the comments here. I think, these are 20somethings and lower 30s techies who, despite living in an incredibly privileged time compared to decades ago, believe that they're living in the worst of times.

Yes, there's meanness on Twitter, lies and manipulations in the media. I think if you live in that world, it's never been so "unstable" - a word used repeatedly in this thread's comments.

Statistically, there is less not more deaths from things like terrorism, less not more things like racism and sexism, less not more suffering from disease and so forth. I'm talking about statistics, here, not perceptions.

But the hyperreality of the Twitterverse paints a very different picture.

So now we have grand essays defending censorship on the grounds that society is more unstable than it ever was. Than it has been in a decade, yes. Than it has been in 30, 50, 80 years? No.
One idea I've been entertaining is to propose laws against abusing public office to promote materially false information.

That, by itself, would force some measure of restraint.
“In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2. In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code. On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS)
> That's not a thing I said.

Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.

> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.

But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
Chrome is dumb. I feel bad for all you Chrome users who will end up assuming that Google's idea of the Internet is normal.
I'd say it is kind of the new normal that companies treat their customers like criminals.

Locking away your backpack in a supermarket, bag inspections in the cinema, online tracking, and captchas. And good luck if you ever get annoyed at the barrage of unnecessary captchas and just click random stuff... You'll get shadowbanned.

Because nothing says "robot" more clearly than getting offended by useless interruptions.
Does anybody use ReactOS regularly? What's your experience with it?

Very curious to see how far it's come for practical usage.
It used to be the case that you turned the GC off when running on embedded, but you are correct that ARC/ORC runs on embedded devices and will indeed make these even easier to program against in the future. Whether running things that normally require a GC on a tiny microcontroller is a good idea is of course entirely up to the programmer.
Don't be fooled by the pro-censorship narrative (although that is course the point of censorship).

Claiming people believe there are microchips physically inside vaccines is a major distortion of what these people think. In fact even the Reuters article doesn't say that. It's the age-old tactic of making up something ludicrous that sounds vaguely like a group's concerns and then claiming they all believe it so they shouldn't be listened to.

What they are concerned about is the creation of a system that enables rapid marking of people to identify if they've had certain vaccines or not. Sometimes this surfaces as talk about "quantum dots" or "dot tattoos" which is a reference to research into a way to imprint codes underneath people's skin. The microchip idea comes from the fact that this is already done for animals (rfid tags).

This provokes concern in many people for similar reasons to the (supposed) Chinese notion of 'social credit': the point of tagging the population with a physical marker of compliance is to enable very efficient stripping of their rights if they haven't complied. Sort of a step short of imprisonment. For instance, some politicians already talk of blocking air travel for anyone who wasn't vaccinated (against many kinds of things).

Now if you trust vaccines, no problem. But scientists are busy setting fire to their trust in all sorts of ways so the population of people who don't trust them will only increase:

1. Rapid "moonshot" vaccine development programmes that are skipping the long testing process usually involved.

2. Rising awareness of how politicised academia has become. See the other story about Nature magazine.

3. A Swine Flu vaccine that caused neurological damage in a small number of cases (but Swine Flu hurt a tiny number of people too, so the cure was worse than the disease in this case).

4. Insistence on a waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers.

5. Many examples of low standards or making contradictory statements about viruses and COVID.

6. Demanding that anyone criticising them is silenced.

And so on. The list could go on all day. Point is, it's entirely rational to be lowering trust in scientists at the moment, so any effective system of tracking and enforcement around their decisions is going to be legitimately controversial. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to observe that standards have been considerably loosened around vaccines this year.
> AFAIK, the only remedy is to regulate algorithmic control of people and their content by laws more tightly. At least the appeals process needs to be more transparent and there need to be way more humans in the loop.

This sounds sounds like a very good (discrete) idea to me, well worthy of a dedicated HN thread of it's own, something like "What are the plausible societal pros and cons of forcing(!) social media companies to expose the implementations of their filtering and recommendation algorithms? What bad and good may(!) come of such a policy change?"

I think it could be argued that the way we as a community go about discussing world events is suboptimal. As it is, a commonly recurring pattern (here and elsewhere) is that some singular event occurs, a news story gets posted, and then we have the same general discussions/arguments that have been had many times before (here and elsewhere, many of them decades/centuries old), just in a somewhat differing context. Within these discussions, a large number of very important philosophical perspectives on the particular incidents appear in the comments, but are rarely discussed in depth. And then, time goes on, we all go to bed after having "had our say", and wake up the next day to do largely the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, day after month after year after decade.

I wonder...if we A/B tested a new, experimental approach, where rather than the genesis or focal point of the discussion being a news article about a specific event, instead we chose an abstract, philosophical topic as the primary topic of discussion, and then people posted instances of relevant events, and discussed those events in the context of the main philosophical idea...might these conversations bear more fruit, or fruit of a different kind?

Going further with this idea, might it also be plausibly beneficial to have some sort of a modified version of the HN Guidelines in place for these types of discussions, in order to encourage certain types of thinking (open minded, non-axiomatic, exploratory, minimized criticality and dismissiveness), and discourage others (excessive certainty and materialism, etc)?

Does this sound like a generally good idea or a bad idea?
I used it as a proof of concept to test the service. Mapped an office space in QGIS. The IMDF format is actually quite nice and portable. It’s really just GEOJSON with some extra properties and can be migrated to any map/service that uses the format.

The actual blue dot generated after mapping is pretty spot on. A slight delay while it catches up to you when walking but honestly some of the best in class when it comes to performance.
We can't discuss human rights in absolute worldwide terms while looking at immigration systems, because there's no universally agreed set of human rights to discuss, as far as I know.

But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.

Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:

- The right of young children to be with their parents

- The right of spouses to be together and start a family

- The right to get married

- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation

- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine

- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter

- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)

- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do

- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do

- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else

- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised

- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
So the tide has turned. Maybe it is time for US to deal with these solved problems in China.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11405320

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11406131

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17876727
> We are so afraid of losing "one correct idea" that we allow orders of magnitude more bad ones to flourish and drown out good ideas anyway.

The price we’re paying is not just that one correct idea. We’re giving up debate. That is expensive.
I think we need to be careful about the free speech debate in this case. Free speech applies to civic life, not your relationship with a business. Near me we have a bar that doesn't tolerate swearing. On your first offense, the bartender gives a warning. On the second offense, you have to leave. The bar owner has the right to make a rule that makes his business a more pleasant environment. As a result, the bar does quite well. Google has the right to do the same in order to make the experience of YT better.
As a former Army officer, I completely agree with the CJCS recent statement that the military will play no role in the election process.

Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).

As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
The suggested constants for additive recurrence in that wiki article have given me grief in the past. It is surprisingly simple to do extremely well with better choice of constants:

http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-... (yes, no HTTPS, but incredibly illustrative)

Discussed in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17873284
Using the FB [...] is a continuing fucking disgrace
The very next sentence is “But in shallow waters, there's a rapid route to the atmosphere and methane escapes before it is oxidized.”

Most sediment collected by dams ends up there because it weighs more than water and so filters out as soon as the water stops flowing. As rivers reach the ocean that process generally produces vast and very shallow silt deposits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary You can even read about what happens in dam removal when that same sediment flows down stream and ends up very near the surface. There are some very striking images of this processes when muddy flood water reaches the ocean.

PS: Also by deep water their talking miles deep. Dead fish end up falling miles in most of the ocean.
I'm not sure that's true, amongst some demographics at least.
How does this sort of comment help? To be constructive, please:
(1) Describe /why/ this is a privileged position, and
(2) Describe /why/ this is "blind-sighted".

As far as I can tell, the OP is right; It's political instability that can instantly touch the globe, along with WMDs, and a head of the state who seems unwilling to adhere to peaceful transfer of power (see: "Will he go?")

I'm really tired of the word "privileged", so much so that I've become a snowflake and get /instantly/ triggered by its usage. It seems to be the "commie" of our era.
Yes, and it might be very reasonable that some areas of those are underfunded while other are wasteful. The reasons for this discrepancy might very well be policies that are upheld by republicans, like inflated healthcare costs, who knows? You're just providing a generalization. The meager output with the same input suggests that there's too many middle men and I wouldn't just assume that Republicans are more willing to stop the siphoning of taxes into private pockets.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is the type specimen for how to avoid having a political career end in (martyrdom or) failure.
I've not been an absolutist free-speech person but what you've arrived at works equally well for me.

It seems obvious to me that humans… and I am one!… are not able to handle things that well. Often we have to look at outcomes to populations to really get a sense of what's going on, as we view things in this blindered way and are deeply persuadable in known, exploitable ways. And that becomes a meta-game: become immune to a particular crude argument, fall to a more multilayered argument, and so on.

A key factor here is this (in my opinion): conspiratorial nonsense is not nonsense. Even if it seems bonkers and useless, there's something about it that is serving a purpose, but it's very likely not the purpose that it 'says on the tin'. For instance, there is a great deal of 'nonsense' that exists for the purpose of goading humans on to acts of random terrorism, and for grooming humans to be an extension of an army from somewhere else. Building an army to destroy a country is a VERY high-value activity, but it's not done by showing up and going, HI! I represent the army of Kazakhstan! Please acquire a weapon and shoot your countrymen for me for the glory of country that is not you!

So it's done, by quite a few state and non-state actors, in different ways. And when you've got a global pandemic and the ability to propagandize your country's enemy and get 'em to normalize licking each others' nostrils… well, you do what you can.

Hence 'conspiratorial nonsense' toward nonsensical or nonexistent ends, that happens to fulfill a purpose other than what's argued by the conspiratorial nonsense. The key concept here is that it's possible to misinform on purpose towards a defined goal that's orthogonal to the apparent misinformation.

One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of this, as Facebook and Google have learned, is that if you're doing that and you have access to big data to inspect how your misinformation is affecting POPULATIONS where you can't directly get response data back from the targets, you can use the big data to ask questions like

"Which of these two arguments for hunting lizard aliens that are also pedophiles, most inclines the target towards murdering black people? Which accusation towards this political figure most inclines the target towards inciting civil war and overthrowing the government of the target's host country?"

And that's how it's done. Given sophisticated enough ability to interpret data, you can direct 'nonsense' VERY effectively towards explicit other goals which aren't hard to work out if you're not the target. You need the data, though, otherwise you're fumbling in the dark. Google and Facebook are complicit in this to the extent that they go, 'you gots the money, we gots the honey' and place themselves at the disposal of anybody wishing these services.
Industry Report: State of mobile ML in 2020
Our Mind-Boggling Sense of Smell
The Barbell Strategy for Content Marketing
Steam store and web API are down
Linked above by @phonon https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups
Dash Charging vs. Quick Charging
This brings a whole new angle to HP calculators' motto: "By Engineers, for Engineers".

I actually love this little projects which extend the life of useful tools for a very, very long time.
Seconded. I'm on Fedora and it wasn't a bad experience, I had to go to the Brother website and download the drivers and run some binary blob thing as root -- not crazy about that -- but it eventually it worked.

OTOH, my Win10 work laptop found it on my wifi, connected, and was good to go in about 5 minutes. Didn't have to download, extract, and run some random vendor tarball, just said 'find" and it found.
youtubers are also subject to libel (or slander?) laws. the ones with a large audience also make enough money to be worth pursuing in court. newspapers are no more liable than youtubers for merely being incorrect.
I am curious about that. It is GeoJSON (RFC 7946). So you can certainly still read it, but you just can't access to the specification itself? You don't need the spec to reverse engineer it, its all in plain text.

There are other applications that implement S3 compliant storage. The interface is the same from the outside. Is that because Amazon can't do anything about it, or because they don't mind it? I would think implementing IMDF would be a similar situation. You can't reproduce the spec maybe, but your data can still be compliant with it?
> YouTube is almost certainly going to be banning literal doctors with actual PHDs from expressing scientific opinions which later turn out to be substantiated.

How are they going to deal with situations where health authorities in different countries have different positions? Like right now, Germany recommends masks and Sweden doesn't. Are they going to censor anti-mask videos in Germany and pro-mask videos in Sweden?
>Political neutrality doesn't exist. “Do not discuss politics” is a defense of the status quo

Yes there is such a thing as 'political neutrality'. Every time you contract a plumber, you engage in 'political neutrality', because neither your nor the plumber interrogate yourselves on your political affiliations. You want your plumbing fixed for a fair price, and the plumber wants to get paid for a job well done and get back home in time for dinner.

Just because you set up a false choice of "you're either with me or against me", doesn't mean the rest of us will play your little game.
Good work, stuff like Espruino and MicroPython are the modern version of 8 bit BASIC.

As I regularly mention, most microcontrollers are much more powerful than 8 and 16 bit home computers back in the day.

Good luck for your endeavors.
... which is still available on FreeBSD today.

* https://freshports.org/games/bsdgames/
Isn’t Trump the counterpoint to this? Nobody from the monied establishment wanted him yet here we are...
Origin Stories about Unix
It obviously fluctuates but to take the most recent one I updated, for a ~300 euro sale point (shipping excluded), physical product, in France, contested market (not a mass market product, many small vendors, no clear leader but also no brand attachment) my cpa runs at about 25 euros.

I have never sold below 100$ product, I have for services but I was taking a loss for the first 6 months per customer to acquire a base.

My best performing campaign in an entirely different market (education) is for a 4000$ product/1 year service combo, cpa is at 150$ but basically one out of every 10 leads is a sale (cyclical depending on time of year so this is a "make bank for three month" thing).
I was thinking that this sounds excessive but them I remembered that I recently relented and reinstalled Google Keep to make my grocery store shopping less chaotic by ordering items according to store sections. Waking past the same isle half a dozen times because you can't locate items is just too frustrating.
Don't worry, we are already putting computers into our cars, so the things will only improve from there. /s
You can't have it both ways. Either you're a democracy and the citizens are responsible for the actions of their government, or you're not.

You can't hand-wave that away with "our democracy just works slowly" or "but the popular vote this and that". That's the society your democracy has formed over decades. It's your responsibility.
Interesting. Does the domain setup forward to your web mail account?
Barnes and Noble hacked, systems taken offline for days
I once wrote my signature on a piece of white paper and scanned it in. Then used paint.net to delete the white parts and save it as a transparent PNG.

Now I just paste that over the appropriate place on electronic documents and email it back.
Not at all. Things like the Laserjet 4 were workhorses. No planned obsolescence in sight.
It seems like the most successful SaaS companies eventually expand beyond their initial product category to become a platform with a wide range of services and a whole ecosystem around them. Some go really wide, like Salesforce, while others seem to try to keep some coherence around the core product (at least for now), e.g. Zendesk and Intercom. It seems Twillio wants to go quite wide too.
Banking and the payment industry have a lot of different compliance and laws to adhere to. Much easier for startups who’s business model is sign up and use my web app.

At my previous job there were conference rooms converted into mini-libraries for the legal/tax teams to review for the 170+ countries they did business in. It was so hard in some places that they would just outsource everything to 3rd parties and resellers to get over the headache.
I have met someone who got a stupid patent — IIRC it was a two bit binary adder — because the patent lawyer messed up what he sent to them.

He didn’t check before it was filled because he didn’t care (the point of the patent was “we needed a patent protected system to be granted a license to a codec”), and it was granted anyway.
This. Also, serverless and redis don't really make sense together - these things I'm supposed to "not care" about are things that directly affect the design of the system. Redundancy, eviction strategy, etc. - things I need to plan for.

Redis shouldn't grow infinitely. It should be memory bounded. Your code should expect evictions - in fact, almost every key in your redis cache should have an expiry.

Redis shouldn't be used over the internet like this anyway - you want colocated (in-datacenter) instances for sub-millisecond latency, otherwise what's the point?

RedisLabs IIRC also only offers encryption as an enterprise feature, which is something that has always left a bad taste in my mouth.