skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author/post neglects the most important reason for valuing generalists and learning from them. (Hyper)specialists have a hard time understanding context outside their narrow domains, and filtering the relevance of their own specialization to a situation. Having access to a highly sophisticated hammer, everything looks like a nail through their lens. Consequently, there have a hard time communicating with those not well-versed in their field. Eg, while being taught in grad school by a world renowned expert, I realized that he’d been teaching the subject longer than any of the students had been alive!

Generalists are typically far better at motivating the relevance of a problem/situation and filtering out the important details from the unimportant. That clarity serves as a great platform on which to then incorporate the inputs of specialists from different fields relevant to the situation.

Of course, none of this is meant to defend or elevate people participation in random internet discussions, or generating “content marketing”, to “generalists”.
> do we really think some small fry BBQ restaurant franchisee can do adequate IT security now?

They can certainly follow instructions from their payment processor.
I have friends in my running club, cycling friends, Peloton (half virtual, half local) friends, friends from cities I used to live in, friends who have moved away.

Former coworkers who are also lifelong friends.

Current coworkers I enjoy being friendly with.

It's not either/or.
When we determine if an aircraft trims, or a boat floats, it is not correct to say it is statistical engineering test of the probability of failure. You formalize the properties the system must have in order to not fail, and you use conservation equations to ultimately compute whether or not the system satisfies those properties. Margins are used to account for parameters that have uncertainty attached. All of these elements are subject to symbolic mathematical formalism. One can quite clearly state the inequalities that must be satisfied to be, e.g., controllable.

It's unclear how this would be any different than mathematically formalizing a distributed system, identifying the properties that constitute correctness of operation of that distributed system, and symbolically proving that subject to certain assumptions, the distributed system model does or does not satisfy those properties. This would presumably be consistent with the Dijkstra view of mathematical correctness.
> a few bad apples

You know that the aphorism is "a few bad apples spoils the bunch", right? The underlying metaphor is that you have to get rid of the entire group because the infection has spread to all of them even if it's not immediately visible from the outside.
Salary increases are less effective at achieving the goal. If the company thinks a $5k desk and monitor setup will make me most effective, I might think that with a $5k bonus I'd rather spend it on other things. Stipend + stipulations is the best way to go.
Not sure what being able to program has to do with being able to drive.
> [T]hese waterways annually moves over 500 million tons of commodities, including petroleum products, farm inputs (e.g., fertilizer), coal, and grains--accounting for 4% to 5% of total commercial tonnage shipped in the United States. High-value cargo in containers rarely moves on the inland or intracoastal waterways.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11593

So it seems you're correct--factories don't ship via inland and intracoastal waterways. But they appear to be extremely important for low-value commodities, such a grains:

> America's farmers depend on the inland waterways for more
than 60 percent of our farm exports.

https://www.mvp.usace.army.mil/Portals/57/docs/Navigation/In...
Docs mention that the uppercase keyword feature is inspired by Modula 2. However, I expect that most editors can highlight keywords so I don't see how this is a problem. If it is a problem it seems like there is a simpler solution.
Usually they have some sort of system where you use touch tone.
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.

This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
There are some societal tools that exist to fight against baseless slander in a public forum but, tbh, the US has resisted adopting those.

I would rather live in a world where the powerful can be baselessly attacked compared to a world where the weak are unable to fairly attack them - if we need to err on one side or the other I prefer to put up with trolls and scammers.
Best NECO Expo Answers 2020
There was no hard proof, but there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence. Yes, it's possible Taiwan's CDC was overly suspicious due to memories of how SARS was covered up in 2003. However, given the way epidemics spread, the wiser course is to take circumstantial evidence of transmission very seriously.

I agree with this entirely. But I don't think there is any evidence that the WHO - or China - thought otherwise.

I'd note that the WHO bulletins from both Jan 5[1] and Jan 12[2] mentioned "Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported." (Jan 12, Jan 5 was similar).

Now this turned out to be wrong, but that doesn't indicate a cover-up. As your link from Taiwan said, no one definitively knew.

I'm very aware of the messages (not emails) shared by the doctor. I know he was forced to retract them by the regional government, and later exonerated by the central government. I think the dates here are important - as you mentioned it was Dec 30 he sent them, and by Jan 20 the central government had taken over. I do think the Wuhan regional government did try to minimise news of the outbreak, and I think criticism of that is fair - but needs to be tempered by acknowledgement that the central government acted relatively quickly and didn't try to hide things.

I think it's likely that external pressure from Taiwan, Japan, Korea and elsewhere made it clear to the central government that they needed to intervene.

[1] https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...

[2] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
> I don't want countless people to be pawns of the wealthy. I don't think very many people themselves want to be pawns of the wealthy.

It's not up to you. People can visit whatever websites they want, your subjective judgements about the nature of the content on the website isn't relevant. If they have a problem with the website they are free to visit another one.

> Very many people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news.

That's their choice. Very many people will continue to use pornhub and there is nothing the church can do about it... yet.
Interestingly the article says it does not work on humans because it is just a image shown for a short time that people do not register the images.

Seem simple to handle, as the car computer see an image, it checks if the image show up in a second scan. Since the computer scans are very fast they should not effect to computer processing/reacting to driving the car.
Do you see anyone going around with a massive LED array on the back of their trucks to blind (targeted) human drivers? Because that's even easier than floating around a panel with a specially crafted video feed. Yet I've never heard someone do it.

Sure, leading a self-driving car astray is more of an accomplishment than blinding a human, but comparing crimes by how entertaining they are to a bored unemployed DIY sociopath does not seem very reasonable to me.
WebRTC is a horribly fantastic mess of complexity which is very hard to work with without using a third-party provider like https://simplewebrtc.com. Your head will be swimming with acronyms like ICE, TURN, STUN, etc. before you even understand the basic signalling mechanisms.
It’s totally fine by me if they want to take on the legal liability of being a publisher.

I think it goes against the stated purpose and core mission of their platform. So perhaps they are lying to their users, and even to themselves.

> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.

It also may be an illegal campaign contribution in some cases.
This thread also summarizes my experience pretty well.

To take this even further: I encounter in my day to day many instances of people making claims that are easily refuted with a quick online search. I have realized that correcting people over their lack of scientific knowledge is perceived as nitpicking and inappropriate. We got our incentives backwards. If we cannot speak up over misinformation to our peers, then they will spread faster than the truth.

Sadly, I've had to accept that in order to be perceived as a much stronger source of truth, I have to correct people less.
> I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general.

yeah - this is the same sentiment out founding fathers had (in US obv.)

> I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests...

That's why we vote. The system created relieves us of worrying about being manipulated by powerful people, by letting the people run the government.

The truth is, your opinion only counts as much as your vote. That's how it should be. Your fringe opinions shouldn't count more than the rest of the people's opinions. So go vote. And let that be that.
And it should (at least looking from outside the system) stay that way. That's pretty serious business and violations should be treated harshly. Some flying items did not exist or were not massively adopted just a few years ago, but I would not like it to become a "new normality" to expect them where they should most certainly not be. As far as I'm concerned, just shoot the damn thing down.
The "Findings" passage of section 230 itself called out the internet as "a forum for a true diversity of political discourse".
Virtual Desktop is what VR needs – Hanselminutes podcast
Being able to drive safely is not the same skill as being able to construct a system that can drive safely.
I don't get eye strain anymore but I used to. I think it goes away with time. I have bad eyesight and posture though so I guess I shouldn't give advice.
> What changed

Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital expenses. What changed is that your average business IT (bigcorp or mom's basement) now has reliable access to the internet, which means that an operational expense for software has just recently become possible at all.
Where are you seeing the current and past board members? That’s what I’m trying to diff against but I can’t find good sources.
I sort of find the idea of self-driving cars as ... selfish?

Don't want to drive, take the bus.

The idea that we all need our personal chariots (and now robotic chauffeurs) seems to me to be the height of irresponsibility.

And, yes, I am guilty of owning a car myself and feel guilt about it. But for some reason the self-driving bit just seems to take it to another level for me. Maybe too there's an air of elitism about it since we are in fact talking about cars that cost what most people make in an entire year.
As would a human given a sufficiently official-looking stop sign. In fact I think it's actually impossible for an automated car or human without figuring out the "troublemaker"'s identity whether the stop sign is fake or not. And it's not always possible to pin down someone's identity (if the person is wearing a brightly colored construction vest what do you do?).
Which nations have performed the best? And by what metrics?
It's sad that the a6000 isn't there.
Agreed! I think that's a great model. Panic did the same thing recently: https://nova.app/buy/
That's why you shouldn't show skin in the game unless you actually have skin in the game. That is, you should have upside.
Camera Fingerprinting Authentication Revisited
I’ve just started nuking entire two-hour blocks of time out of the day, which is always pre-filled with back-to-back half hour crap meetings, so that I can go out on a bike trail. Most of the time people don’t seem to care, but on occasion when someone asks me why I wasn’t at their precious half-hour crap meeting, I respond that I had some kind of “carers” issue, and if there is anything relevant they need from me to send me an email about it, and I will reply with the info. Amazingly, that seems to effectively address whatever issue the crap half-hour meeting was for.
Not only you can trust the opinion is genuine, you can also gauge it.

You probably know your friend well enough to tell if they know anything about toasters or evaluating consumer products in general, and whether their views and needs corresponds to yours. So you rate the recommendation for ToasterGenius Model Z somewhere on the scale from "my friend is a bona fide toaster expert / fanatic", through "my friend toasts as much as I do and is attentive", all the way to "my friend doesn't know first thing about toasters, and also doesn't understand the concept of communicating uncertainty about one's beliefs".

This kind of ability is what makes word-of-mouth within your social network super useful. On top of that, if your friend ends up purposefully shilling for a MLM, they're doing that at the risk of immediately burning your friendship.

(Tangential: MLMs are social cancer that prey on relationships between friends and family members; they should be excised from this planet.)
Also your eyes are far better at quickly adapting to things like wild changes in brightness and contrast than any camera
Thanks for the explanation. I can half-agree, but think the meta-discussion about the role of Twitter and Facebook in shaping the US politics is worthy of discussion even if the NY Post article turns out to be a wholesale fabrication.

You might be interested that I also posted this article [https://blog.erratasec.com/2020/10/yes-we-can-validate-leake...] which talks about the relative ease of validating the emails using GMail's DKIM header. Unlike this one (where I think the first two pages of comments are actually pretty good), that one got very few votes and no discussion.
Only tweet that's been posted recently :
https://twitter.com/hyunzaki/status/1316868346139365381
My brain's production designer didn't succumb to the poorly lit spaceship trope.

If the ship's powerplant has enough power to boil a small ocean, it sure can power a couple nice LED bulbs.
You've done an excellent job at identifying the problem, but I am extremely doubtful that this could be improved by focusing on algorithms and improving people's ability to discern information. When somebody has adopted a irrational position on something, it's not always possible to reason them out of it - especially when reason wasn't the primary factor in adopting that position in the first place. People often believe in things because they have emotional ties to it, or because they think it's just part of their self identify.

The real question is how to do we stop everyone else from piling on top of these people and turning them into high visibility punching bags (which in turn propagates the bad information further and actually makes some folks more sympathetic to the people who now appear to be bullying victims). And that's not a question of intelligence, but one of morals and ethics.
But what if self-driving cars were 10x safer than human-driven cars? Seems like your issue is with the personal vehicle bit, not the self driving bit.

>Don't want to drive, take the bus.

And what if my area has shitty bus service?
> An alternative approach would be exemptions for non-profit sites.

Another alternative would be "leave this problem alone, it's working just fine". Site operators can and should have the ability to ban anyone or remove any content, for any reason or no reason, and doing so does not mean they should be liable for everything they might have missed. (In practice, "liable for everything they might have missed" is equivalent to "unable to operate" for anything but the most massive sites that could theoretically afford an army of moderators, and it'd have a chilling effect even there.)

Destroying the concept of moderation does not make the world better. The liability shield is the whole reason Section 230 exists: to make it possible to have enjoyable communities online, without incurring so much liability that you have to shut them all down for fear of getting prosecuted.

If you want unmoderated communities, they exist. Go use them. Stop trying to destroy the concept of moderated communities.(Removing the liability shield would be tantamount to destroying such communities.)

Some people want the audience of moderated communities, but they don't want the standards of those communities. There's a reason unmoderated communities have fewer (and different) users.
Name the board member. The former CEO can be dignified by keeping his name confidential , but this is a founder and entrepreneur discussion forum and this deserves discussion about this individual. It is also relevant to the story.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing about, and discussing who it is and possibly who else has had the same experiences - as long as it isn’t mudslinging but a professional discussion. Similar to the letter.
I was never a paying user of Adobe products, but my understanding was that they'd release a new (yearly?) version as a paid upgrade. It would presumably have a killer feature that would encourage enough of the users to buy, which (hopefully) retroactively funds the cost of the new version's development.

From the perspective of their business, it's advantageous to have the consistency of $X / month forever instead of "hopefully a huge yearly sales month, followed by mostly nothing until next year". Businesses like predictable revenue.
No one is totally stopping you from saying whatever racist/misogynist/Russian disinformation stuff you want.
BUT... this private company does not have to be obliged or subjugated to your speech whims.
I see no violation of anyones rights. Just a private company exercising its rights in its policy. I wish people would Stop whinging.
Disagree. Platforms are immune to liability of their users. HN could become a platform and abide regulations like the phone company.
The Just-world idea I really don't think gets the attention is deserves.

It's obviously everywhere but you see it in tech when people say company X deserved Y because they didn't do Z when they get Black-Hatted for instance.
When they want the protections of section 230, they claim to be platforms, when they want to block content on a political basis, they act as publishers.

I think they should have to decide on which they one want to be, and I think platforms should have greater protection against liability than publishers.
I think verified government accounts based on a person's role in the government would make more sense. It gets rid of the ambiguity you're talking about. If Trump was forced to tweet from @potus, the verified account for the POTUS, that makes it clear he's communicating as the POTUS, not a private citizen.

Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..
One wonders if the author is a sociologist of knowledge or if they are themselves engaged in dilettantism.
> have no say in what stays on, or gets removed/hidden (except, again, illegal stuff).

That would eliminate HN, Reddit, basically anywhere with a moderated forum. How do you run a site like Ravelry (knitting/crafting site) with a rule like that?

Under your idea, the reddit would consist of "News Sites" and "4chan". (Actually even 4chan does some moderation).

There's no way that would be acceptable.
The shocking thing is that 3M went to Dickey's.
Those projects failed because Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have enormous network effects that make it nearly impossible to usurp them.
Specification and verification in the field: Applying formal methods to BPF JITs [pdf]
Mighty Networks https://www.mightynetworks.com/about started in 2017 as something similar to what you're describing. Now they've shifted to "powering brands and businesses that bring people together via online courses, paid memberships, events, content, and community–all under your brand, instantly available natively on every platform"
Might be relevant for you
You are just one guy in the Internet, relax, dont give yourself too much importance. While people fight to stop the "tin-foil brigade" to have their loony youtube channels, they enshrine Hollywood actors, Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?
It should use the accepted abbreviation for million "MM"

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot....
The phone company does unfortunately allow spam callers
Not the algorithms OP is referring to. Those are black-box learning models which discover what to recommend based on - in the case of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - what generates the most advertising revenue.

The "particular values, agendas and biases" you're referring to are just advertising revenue, not some political bias installed by the developer. If you WANT to believe there are such developers working at those companies, I can't stop you. But the evidence isn't really there. Make some friends who work at those companies and see what you can find out from the people who actually develop the tools you're accusing of having such political bias in.

Now, if we are talking about political bias in these platforms' policies, you might have something.
> So if @Jack solely owned twitter it would be ok?

This is a nonsense hypothetical.

Without limited liability, Twitter would not exist in its current form or size.
Yah, that's a railgun, but it's not what everyone around CEM called the railgun.

The difference being one between a .50 caliber machine gun and something that can sink a ship from 100km away.

I worked across the street from CEM at the time. Firing the railgun was a big deal. The mechanical stresses on the electrical systems were pretty severe.

The vast proportion of what UT CEM was doing in that era was with the big gun, for Navy and SDI type projects.
>w.r.t. your #4: Usenet also had epic flamewars as users failed to self-moderate and groups which suffered particularly from this were very hostile to new users.

No different from the present day centrally moderated platforms - whether Facebook, Twitter, or HN. There's significant amount of objectionable and even illegal content on Twitter. The central moderation is a figleaf over it.

>w.r.t. your #5: how does 'participation in some groups is subject to moderation, but participation is optional' fit with the platform/publisher dichotomy?

To re-emphasize: >>Certain groups were centrally moderated through middlemen; (participation in those was optional), and content was explicitly submitted to moderation.

Easily the key distinction is that the moderators weren't part of the platform. It was not the platform doing the moderating. It was pre-arranged users that were designated by the community to have a say who selects the best posts to then forward. It wasn't "this post breaks our ever-shifting rules"; it was "this post is good enough for me to to forward it to the list". The proverbial firewall separating the platform from the users doing the selection is the key distinction.

The closest modern analogy of how the moderated Usenet groups were is "a public-read, private-commit Git repo, with project heads accepting pull requests at their discretion".