skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TLDR: On Topic is a Chrome extension that tries to help you focus. Specify topic(s) you need to focus on, and as you browse the internet, our NLP analyzes the content of each page you view. If a page is irrelevant to your area of focus, it gets blocked!

Hi HN,

Creator of On Topic here. The idea came to me while I was a masters student in the Georgia Tech OMSCS (online masters of computer science) program. I’ve always had a hard time focusing, and studying online was very difficult for me. I would be watching my college lectures (which were hosted on YouTube) or reading some blog relevant to one of my classes, and without fail would end up going down some totally unrelated rabbit hole.

I tried using existing content blocking software and editing etc/hosts, but this didn’t work for me. Why? Well for one: My lecture videos were hosted on YouTube, so blocking YouTube was a non-starter.

I quickly realized that a truly useful focus enhancing software would need to be able to block “topics”, not just domains. Using some of the NLP techniques I learned during my degree, I hacked together the On Topic extension. It allows you to specify topic(s) you need to focus on, and as you browse the internet, our NLP analyzes the content of each page you view. If a page is irrelevant to your area of focus, it gets blocked! Right now it works on YouTube, Reddit, and most news-sites and blogs.
Simpson’s Paradox in A/B Testing
Are you sure you're talking about orcas, I'd think there'd be videos of that? Seems crazy. I've only seen one video of a lady swimming with orcas but she was very familiar with them
I would seriously doubt a good source exists. In fact, I am as certain as a single person in a single jurisdiction can be, that the records required to generate those statistics would require information unwillingly released from multiple governmental entities and that those entities would make it as hard as possible to generate meaningful data.
Reading all of the opinions on side projects is interesting. Particularly those of you who think rather negatively of it (or the expectation of it). And probably rightfully so. When I was picking my major/profession, I liked coding as a hobby and thought hard about going the CS route. Even just taking a few 100 level courses turned me off because it wasn’t fun. I even took on a small consulting gig and didn’t enjoy building things to someone else’s spec. Or working on things that I subjectively found boring. I realized coding was my hobby and making it my profession would take away the joy. Some 20 years later, I work in finance. I don’t love it. It pays the bills. I don’t keep up with finance, markets, etc. in my off time but I still code as a hobby and enjoy my side projects. No chance I’d be happy as a software engineer. It’s dizzying seeing how much has changed in past 20 years and how much you have to keep up with. I have the flexibility to ignore things that don’t interest me (eg. I have no interest in the cloud or learning 500 products offering of AWS). I don’t know if that helps you feel better or worse, but it’s at least one alternative reality to the one some of you are living.
Yes, I agree. What I meant was for mobile phone manufacturers who don't upstream their code portions and abandon it after a while due increased costs of maintaining the multiple versions. In other words... old hardware only works on older kernel release and new hardware only works on new kernel release.

It'd be much better if they upstreamed the changes instead of fragmenting the entire ecosystem with custom forks.
Much in the same way that the Chinese firewall is just determining what it is okay with flowing through its fiber pipes.
Electric car sales triple to 10% in race to meet Europe CO2 rules
Yep, turns out "shall not be infringed" meant exactly what it says. I keep trying to find where they say that we only need single shot hunting rifles, or that any scary-looking guns should be banned. But I haven't been able to turn anything up.
Rich people don't have babies? Heck, now-a-days they're the only ones can truly afford them.
This will happen. The windows nt kernel is better by design (dont crucify me for this, but it really is), but this decision will come from another perspective - "we need to pay large sums of money to kernel dev. depart and we are having huge problems with HR to deliver what is essentially free and we can pick higher management bonuses for eliminiting that cost. It is not a technical question - it is $ question and linux wins here. I dont like it, I prefer freebsd but this is the sad fact:

Management bonuses > any technical knowlidge or reason

The whole IT progress was destroyed by this fact, from OSes to the cloud, from irc to fb, from cats videos to having live cat. From optimal protocols for the task to http. From native gui to html/js abomination,... from laundry machines that live 20 years to the ones that get broken in few years... It gets destroyed when complete analphabets drive the decision about progress trough their vision of getting more money.

At the end you will be running windows. With its look and feel, but with linux as kernel.

(I know that I am not great for anyone here, feel free to downvote me, but do take time to think about it. Consumerism destroyed the computer science and it is not getting any better)
check out archive.is
Splice array method in JavaScript tutorial
File Types Blocked in Gmail
As someone who has invested time and energy into setting up Wine, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how painless it is to set up a Steam game with Proton. That is to say, you click 'install' as if you were installing a Native game and then when you click 'Play Game' it shows you a quick warning that Steam will be using a compatibility tool and then will boot up without any more fuss.

The caveat is largely that not all games are solved by this [0], and the official Valve whitelist needs to be turned off in settings to use it for all games, but even with these it's still a marked improvement in Quality of Life and barrier to entry for running Windows games on Linux.

I'd give it a go if you have time/inclination. I can recommend it as someone who is now Linux only as a result of this.

[0] - www.protondb.com
I would guess that apart from 'super gear' making people feel more confident, it also would draw in even more people with power issues into police ranks.
Updated for the clarification :thumbsup:
Care to quote where he made any quote regarding the history of anything at all?

He was criticizing facebook for their views on censoring content. All the bullying in the world does not make criticizing facebook holocaust denial.

Also I'm Jewish, no need to convince me the Holocaust happened.
Maybe this? https://www.getwatercooler.io/
Whole lot of people defending literal Nazis in here.
Yes! You could die in a car accident tomorrow, you can also ask the car companies to make safer cars. You could die of cancer within the next six months, and you can also ask the medical companies to make drugs to fight cancer.
Noteapps.info Release Notes
I am being downvoted by the enforcers of orthodox opinion here. Which brings me to the real reason that you shouldn't worry about a slippery slope from Facebook becoming the arbiter of Fact: Because you actually want the slippery slope to happen! You are confident that they will use their power to censor your political enemies and enforce your orthodoxies on the world.

<3
> Wikipedia seems to not do well with widespread misconceptions.

Maybe the right answer is to expressly mention the misconception and why it is incorrect? That hopefully would deter such editors.
I guess if you've got a Ferarri it's a problem for your PA.
Sorry, but I'm not sure what part of my comment that you're responding to.

Maybe you're rebutting my parent? Because I've never heard of a regulation towards drive-by-wire, so I suspect this particular aspect of automotive design is a result of a free market.
Not sure now - But at some point Symptoma was being marketed as a tool for physicians. In that context, I think this would be a very helpful tool.
But the domains are drastically different. I assume you mean legalese as is used in Law -- modeling reality of law is hard, but modeling reality for computers is not hard, we've worked hard to make things very deterministic and demonstrably so.

All we do is send instructions to computers all day that are mostly executed perfectly, changing the language you use to speak to the computers is the point of higher level languages, and I strongly consider english to be just another frontend (in the LLVM sense), just one that is a lot harder to encode the semantics of fully. But the thing is, you don't need to encode the semantics fully -- just make paths one at a time for certain functionality (ex. `read_file(path: string): string` can have it's first "call sentence" be "read file from <path on disk: var> and store the contents in <new const var>")
The Past, Present, and Future of Cloud Engineering
All hate groups seem dated, sadly hate doesn't seem to just sort of become a thing of the past :(

As far as you question goes to some extent yes. I wouldn't want to see some sort of litmus test for groups that clearly aren't purely a hate group.

A specific christian identity group (randomly made up here) that is hateful, no problem with removing them. All Christian groups, no.
I genuinely don't really understand what's trying to be proven here.

I mean, it's just how our eye+brain work indeed. You can make it "better" by dezooming on the images, or "worst" by zooming in, which is just as expected.

It doesn't really seem far from other techniques for image compression, just a less good version of those ?
They say "Family" but that's for marketing. If you have friends you trust to pay you, they don't actually check social security numbers or anything.

Cricket wants as many subscribers as possible, so they give discounts to groups of four.
I agree with your first part that there is not necessarily a causal relationship between military equipment and killings.

But your "no need, ever, for police to have automatic weapons" part is, to me, just wrong. In general, police should have enough kit to easily overpower the criminals they expect to face. We have been fortunate in many areas (e.g., most of the US, Europe and practically all urban areas) for the police to not need automatic weaponry. But this is not universal. In other parts of the world police may face a much better equipped adversaries and automatic weapons.

We should strive to make the world safer so the strongest weapon the police on the street has is a book for writing fines, but until we are there we should equip law enforcement to overcome threats they expect to face. My 2c.
I wonder what the details around that are. So if I drive the APC on a training run once per year... is that "using it"? Have any of these departments actually lost any equipment? ie. is there any enforcement of that rule?

Is it the actually equipment they must use, or is it the funding? ...because if it's the funding, that's a pretty standard accounting practice.
> I'm just thankful Facebook and Twitter weren't around to police wrong think during the gay and civil rights movements tbh.

But during that time, there were mass media. They didn't allow the now-considered-right-thinking viewpoint (in the case of gays) or were not consistent in support of it (civil rights). Those who were pro-gay and pro-civil-rights needed alternate means of communication. The same may be true today.

Fortunately, we have such means - email, phone, text, snail mail. You don't have to talk to people who think like you on Facebook or Twitter. If the mainstream media becomes too censorious, talk somewhere else.

Note well: This does not mean that I am in favor of Facebook censoring, especially if it goes several steps further than just holocaust denial. But if they do, it's not the end of dissent. Dissent just grows underground.
I agree. The github page links to a Google colab page though(https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1WJfLJH0mBzXGGeRfvQa...) where the first image has a diagonal grid with much less frequent lines. This version of the illusion is more compelling to me.
Ah, you strike at the contradiction embedded into the US First Amendment.

It's almost like the Amendment was built as a practical tool to constrain government from actions which history showed led to people rising up and overthrowing a government, not as a holy shrine of virtues that were self-evidently virtuous.
Plural? Like one could make sense, in a siege type situation or bank robbery in progress perhaps. The sort of event that might happen once a decade or so maybe.

But how many sieges or bank robberies are they expecting to need multiple of these?!
So we've now had several interesting cases of how breaking changes to something popular (even foundational) are made and how that works out:

- Perl 5 to Perl 6. I think this was an unmitigated disaster. 20 years ago Perl 5 had a lot of users. I'm pretty sure it's completely irrelevant now;

- Python 2 to Python 3. It's been almost 12 years and we still have Python 2. Personally I think a lot of bad decisions were made here, like getting rid of s' and u' string prefixes (before adding it back in Python 3.3). Unfortunately I think Python 3 is now in a state where each minor release makes language changes.

Which brings us to IPv6. It's been 25 years and we're still asking "are we there yet?" The biggest lesson for me is that IPv6 is a classic example of the Second System Syndrome.

Faced with the limited prospect of making future breaking changes, everything got thrown into IPv6 without solving the two problems that actually matters (ie roaming, reliable UDP). The only real problem with IPv4 is address space exhaustion. And we've had decades of NAT to kick that can down the street with probably decades to come.

I honestly don't know how this will ever happen.
It sounds like you have a very, very specific idea of what should be considered free speech, and you seem to have very little tolerance for people who hold a different opinion on that topic. Rather than saying "we disagree on what should be considered free speech", you describe the people who disagree with you as confused and ignorant, who need to be educated with more debate.

I have news for you: people can have different ideas about what should be within the limits of free speech and what should not. In fact, different countries have entirely different laws regarding what is protected as free speech and what is not.

Let's consider the harassment example that you brought up: in principle I agree with you that people should not be allowed to harass each other. However, when you can quell unwanted speech by labeling it "harassment", you create an incentive for people to label more and more speech as harassment. We see this issue in practice all the time. In many places, stating facts such as "men and women have biological differences" is now considered harassment and can lead to losing your job.
broker fee of $545,260

boy am I in the wrong business... I'm imagining something like: "Hey you want to buy?" ... "Yes!"... cha ching!
I hate it. “17 days ago” - yeah, thanks, now let me manually figure out _when_ that was. I can see how some folks would like “30 minutes ago” but why not give both (a timestamp and relative offset)?
I believe at this point it's negative, negative carbon. We are at the point where we have to start taking carbon out of the air soon. It's also not about satisfying "us" whoever "us" is. It's about preventing collapse of all life on earth including ours.
> The way I understand it, this car was taken in by a garage for 'seat installation'. I presume this means after market seats.

It was even more basic than that. They were installing a child's carseat for the owner, and I believe it was an anti-theft system that was triggered.

The story reminded me a lot of the rental car that bricked itself because it lost cellular service - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/02/driver-stranded-after-c...
Hello for Creators with Focus on Simplicity/Elegance/Usability Based on FreeBSD
> The bottom line is that the sale netted us about US $108M, and we expect to grant at least US $5 million per year on an ongoing basis, depending on how our investments perform, to a wide variety of Internet and amateur radio digital communication projects. To date we have made about $2.5 million in grants, so we're only getting started."

Provided they stay true to the goal, and don’t capture the money for themselves via “administration costs”, this this is probably a good thing for amateur radio in the long term.
We use our car almost every day (groceries, errands), it would cost dramatically more and take more time to rent vehicles. These sorts of posts always seem over-fitted to highly walkable areas. And maybe that's the intended audience but they rarely qualify the advice.
Being driven away is exactly why rules and legislations like these exist, so that no one has to "walk away" because of hateful people spattering their bullshit.
Thanks for engaging instead of what seems now to be HN's standard response: downvote anything they don't know/understand...
The standard has been stable for 23 years however various implementations are under active use and development (MLton's latest release was 10 days ago.). On top of that, a fair bit of founding research into Machine Learning was done in ML, adding to potential confusion.

Allas, I'll stop shouting "get off my lawn" and let the young ones make their own mistakes...
OK, I feel unsanitary now. I've owned my car for 15 years, and I'm not sure that I've ever cleaned the steering wheel.
In ~2010 I was really interested in private server development for popular MMORPG games. People would take the game clients and build their own servers to play off of, then edit the client just enough so it was talking to the private server instead of the real server. People, usually amazing talented teenagers, would construct amazing experiences that rivaled and sometimes surpassed what the $100m+ game companies were producing.

Unfortunately, these servers were incredibly prone to griefing particularly DDOS attacks. And though the private server developers were very talented and supremely motivated, they didn't have the resources or infrastructure expertise to mitigate even relatively small DDOS attacks from 1 or 2 nodes.

Who was there as the universal solution to DDOS attacks? Freaking Cloudflare, and it worked, and it was affordable even by teenagers who had at most two nickles to rub together. Where are those ridiculously talented teenagers who built those private servers now? Probably running the world's infrastructure.
An additional short-and-sweet example, using HashMap:

use std::collections::HashMap;

fn main() {
let mut foo = HashMap::new();
foo.insert("bar", 42);
}

In C++, the declaration of `foo` would require a type annotation like `map<string_view, int>`.
thank you for saying this.
>Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

This is a very good way to put it. I haven't figured what the best stance would be yet, but it's clear that the old concerns about censorship are quite outdated. Almost no one can make information disappear, and instead, what modern platforms can do (as you've so well put it) is restrict or encourage virality.

What is the role of old free speech absolutists when ideas still remain accessible, but the fight is simply over how how mainstream, and how viral those ideas are? I'm not really sure, however I don't worry about things being censored on facebook. Cloudflare's power, although perhaps less impactful in practical terms, seems scarier: the withholding of DDoS protections from individual websites who hold controversial views. (and to be clear, 8kun's loss is probably a net benefit for society, I'm just thinking about the modern equivalent to a free speech principle)
This is a typical slight of hand in these discussions. We are talking about deeply intolerant, bad faith actors, and you substitute this with "censoring opinions outside the mainstream".

This is deeply dishonest by you. We are not talking about removing peoples right to use a platform because they are out of the mainstream and we disagree with them. That is NOT the reason. There is plenty of non-mainstream opinion around. There is plenty of things that a vast majority find disagreeable that no one is talking about removing.
That's an interesting set of distinctions without a difference.

> Some of those laws are meant to protect citizens.

Laws are made for the just common good. They may not be ideal, but that's what they exist for.

> Other laws are to protect property,

Again, for the sake of the common good. The ability to hold private property is a prerequisite for other goods we need to flourish.

> protect government interests

What is a government interest? You seem to be alienating government and construing it as some foreign body with competing interests. No, government exists for the sake of the common good of the society it governs. Once governments begin to turn into cliques that serve, e.g., some oligarchy (quite common), esp. at the expense of the common good, we call this a tyranny.

> and enforce codes of behavior.

For the sake of the common good.
I'm pretty sure I don't need to read arguments against the Holocaust.
In many important cases it's not too difficult. You look at the evidence and make the ruling. Finnish Supreme Court made precedent about banning fascist organization.

Here is summary in English https://korkeinoikeus.fi/en/index/ennakkopaatokset/shortsumm...

>Moreover, the Supreme Court noted that to invoke the freedom of association or the freedom of speech in order to disrupt parliamentary democracy, to promote national socialism as an ideology, or to justify the defamation or demeaning of an ethnic group was an abuse of these rights, as the objective was to cancel democratic government or to materially undermine other fundamental rights and human rights. Accordingly, the objectives and the activities of the association were not to be afforded the protection of the freedoms of association or of speech.
I wasn't expecting this reply given your original comment.

To clarify, are you saying that when threats are censored it's not an encroachment of free speech because they aren't "part of a dialogue"? If so, then how is holocaust denial any different?
There’s little reason to be optimistic about a coronavirus vaccine
Reading this again, you're right, it was a little pedantic. This is one of those topics I feel is just rife with misinformation, so I tend to jump on explanations that don't seem correct at first glance.
I can see how advancements in 3d metal printers would make this a trivial task.