skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The algorithms that optimize the shareholder value are against the idea of having a healthy debate on social media. Echo chambers deliberately implemented by Big Tech has led us here. It is a permanent damage.

If consumers of social media were shown both sides, perhaps we wouldn't be here in the first place.

Truth vs. Falsehood are like a special place on the nyquist plot and its stability criterion is like of an inverted pendulum. Truth is in an unstable equilibrium that requires constant vigilance, maintenance and upkeep. Falsehood thrives and the laws of nature (information theory) are on its side to spread faster, more vigorously and with ever increasing force. As shitty as it sounds, we need some temporary dampers.

Ultimately, we're here because we wanted to sell the right scent of soap to the right echo chamber.
Game company refuses to return account to owner because the thief spent money
I've ordered DoorDash a lot this year (pandemic and all) and the food has literally not been cold once.
Try doing a screenshare in Slack. You can't, you have to connect a voicecall before you can share your screen.

Now do it in Teams. You can share your screen without completing a voicecall.
This is so misdirected...

We need transparency, not this.

How is there not some sort of regulation to allow me to opt-out or configure these algorithms that target me for ads of curated content?

It's my f*cking data!
Hashicorp
Partisanship has nothing to do with destroying your country in order to get ahead. Any time the importance of a party is placed above the importance to the country everybody loses.

Unfortunately, we are witnessing one of the parties in the US doing this, repeatedly I might add.

If the democrats were doing this sort of thing I would be just as much against it. The point is: there actually is a party that is doing this, it is not 'some party' but a specific one.
Yeah. In a thread where the debate is about "people being able to form their opinions on their own" it seems like they really like to depend on spoon-fed talking points.
Are there more promising alternatives to open source funding than open core or charging for associated services like hosting, support, etc.?
> That's a bad idea

That's a compromise. The best idea is to memorize a totally unique machine-generated password for each separate site and service. But there can't be more than a handful of people in the world with the skill and drive to do that correctly. There needs to be some degree of tradeoff with accessibility, or you're just designing security for spherical cows in a vacuum.

I think a security savvy person using the function approach correctly is in much better shape than most people, and indeed most security professionals.
I live in a country that the US has sanctioned in the past for undemocratic election processes. Also, I'm familiar with our voting procedures and have worked on election oversight, data gathering etc.

If we had an election that had a fraction of the irregularities that are surfacing in some of these problematic states, I'm pretty sure we would have been invaded by now. Jokes aside, those states are a similar population size to my country so it's not apples and oranges.

Censorship is also something the US is quick to call out others for.
Wilk Elektronik from Poland is the only RAM manufacturer in Europe. Their Goodram brand is getting good reviews.

It ain't much, but it's honest work.
In my region(southern MO), a panhandler is someone who stands on the side of a street or sidewalk and begs for money. They often hold a sign.
Would you have considered book publishers as "gate keepers" of information before the internet? What has changed?
Facebook.com. has such a shitty user experience, I'm I the only one surprised it still has so many MAUs?

(This comment has nothing to do with Whatsapp and Instagram, just Facebook web)
I just don't get it. Who's buying this stock and why do they think that a company that is not profitable during a pandemic, with people locked in their homes and in-person dining outlawed, is going to be worth billions of dollars?

There's no loyalty in food delivery. Everybody is chasing the same promos. There's no moat. Just VC funded revenue.
> I’m unaware of any other OS which implements threads this cleanly.

I believe this comes from Plan 9.
Chrome extension developer here and I can absolutely confirm that this is true.

The last few years they've gotten more and more strict about which permissions they hand out.

The one I need is similar to ad blocking and every time I request ANYTHING new they're very strict about explaining why I need it.

Our extension Allows you to convert pages from HTML to EPUB and for this I need the ability to fetch any arbitrary image and read the data and that's not actually possible from Javascript due to CORS.

The turnaround time for each approval is also increased and it takes about 72 hours for us to get approval for every change right now.

Our extension if you're interested:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-polar/jkfd...
I can't find the comment now, but someone pointed out that misinformation and propaganda used to be a tool that only the local (national) government could use at scale, so teaching citizens how to identify misinformation and propaganda wasn't something prioritized in schools (lest you be considered 'anti-american'). With the internet and the current state of social media, suddenly anyone can broadcast any message they want at scale, including foreign governments.
Your very link quotes: 'investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing.'

Please do not spam non-evidence. It's "an impossibly high bar" for you. But do not call it evidence. I am familiar with the level of information collection that occurs, and I do not view this as a high bar.
> I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy

While that would cool for short-term, independent Oculus can stagnate. VR still needs many more billions to be truly usable, and I don't think independent company will be able to fund it.
>We call that "science" mostly because it is a state funded project.

Interesting perspective. I agree that arguably most of the difficulties are more in the applied side of things, although calling it engineering might be going too far.

The big looming physics uncertainty is crossing the 'burning plasma' threshold, where the plasma becomes dominantly self-heating. There are two aspects to this: (1) will the plasma settle into a nice self-consistent steady state? (2) will the large quantity of fast fusion-born helium nuclei destabilize the plasma in an unexpected way? Theory says it should work, but the proof is in the experiment (which is why SPARC & ITER are being built).
What a supercilious and condescending response, and verging on snark. Sure all software is likely to have bugs, but some software is likely to have less bugs because there's more test coverage or the software is conservative about what features get added/updated.

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Skype was great software, came out in 2003 (!) , at the time when whatsapp, facebook and twitter didn't even exist!

It was the first practical videocall software and pioniered the niche. It did more to improve my life than all social networks combined. I backed it with hard cash, paying for Skype premium or whatever it was called.

Then in 2011 MS bought it, and best as I can tell, has delivered no real improvement for the consumer.

The client was rewritten twice, now it's in JS, glitchy, slower and serves adds.

I think the world would have been better off with independant Skype, Zoom should have never become a thing.
aside from your subjective view as to what constitutes a "prominent Democrat" Hilary Clinton her self stated multiple times that election was stolen from her.

Multiple News personalities dedicated billions of dollars in air time to the meh Russia Stole the election narrative for 3.5 years.

So miss me with your partisan moral grandstanding
Not sure if this is true, but I heard from a reputable source that many Russian government workers are fully inebriated during the month of December. If this is the case, which I believe, it definitely could account for lapses in security on this base. However, and I do know this first hand, that plane is a big pile of crap! A general might fly on that plane during a wartime event, but Putin wouldnt be caught dead on that plane.
This move is about lowering his tax bill and nothing more.

"With a net worth of $134.7B, Musk recently surpassed Bill Gates as the second-richest person in the world, and he's on track to earn more than $50 billion in stock options. If he remained in California, he’d be facing income taxes on the profits when he exercises them. In Texas, there is no income tax."
What is your comment meant to imply? Your sarcasm is too thick to be interpretable.
I would have loved to have been infected. Go into deep quarantine for a couple weeks, listen to a ton of podcasts, then have immunity for at least 6 months.
I'm getting down votes here, does anyone really think Facebook wouldn't do this?
According to the special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, there was a concerted effort on the part of the Russian government to influence the US election, the Trump campaign was aware of that effort, and expected to benefit from it.

Given those facts, I think the bulk of the coverage erred on the conservative side...
>lol should have consulted me. been bullish on long on FB since the $30s .

Yeah that means absolutely nothing, you could have made 10x more bad trades in the same time. I'll "ask you" as you say when you have a proven strategy, not a simple lucky call.
This is cool! If you hit the pencil link on query results in the article, it pops you into a browser where you can edit and run Github queries yourself.
> it has to be more lethal than flu. And Covid19 was, but not by so much.

COVID-19 is five times deadlier than the flu. It's killed over 1.5 million people worldwide, and almost 300,000 people in my home country (USA). It'll be many months before enough people are vaccinated to ensure herd immunity, if it ever happens. Yeah, I suppose it could improve outcomes for an even deadlier next time, but calling it a godsend seems queasily rosy.
I'd recommend the NYT article that led to this recent pushback: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra... It's not at all anti-porn, and addresses what you're referring to.

This is just my own two cents independent of the article, but I think for any platform that allows anyone to upload anything, a blacklist system is inevitably doomed to fail once the platform is beyond a certain size. The only feasible option in that case is to whitelist, which is what Pornhub seems to now be doing going forward.
This about as far removed from reality as there is.

There are always "buts" in all of human rights. No right is absolute because we don't live in a world of absolutes. Free speech, without any limits at all, becomes libel, harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, sedition, etc.

Absolutism in rights is a thought-terminating cliché, evidenced by the fact that there are literal lifetimes of scholarship in regards to when rights begin and when they end, and which right to prioritize when multiple people's rights are conflicting with each other.

> The democrats were claiming fraud 4 years go due to a supposed Russian influence.The evidence was tenuous and circumstantial at best. I dont remember seeing a similar cry for censorship.

There was a claim that ended up in a Special Counsel investigation in which _multiple_ people associated with the Trump 2016 campaign ended up going in prison for, including Michael Flynn.

Comparing claims of potential fraud, followed up by investigation and mostly finished when such investigation discovered some things and disproved others, is an eminently healthy level of questioning over the complete insanity of fraud claims.

The current claims of fraud are not of anyone with a sound mind. Do not conflate one thing with the other; they're not anywhere near the same league.
This is the exact motivation of the project. One of the next steps is to provide a global user preference to signal the render. One step at a time.
I just can't help but see this as a turd being passed on to retail investors. Don't have high hopes. But in this market, who the hell knows.
> but at the moment, no one can say that with confidence if they are paying attention to the allegations

And yet marvel at the number of otherwise highly logical people who do just that.

> If Youtube feels obligated to correct what it thinks are misconceptions, they can present their arguments and evidence that contradict current allegations. They should hire a team of lawyers to put together the most up to date refutations of claims, and post that on relevant videos.

It's interesting that:

- a centralized, slowly changing "balance sheet" approach like this, which is a standard in project management, is rarely taken toward matters of public concern - I am a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a resource that enumerated all of the "just(!) a conspiracy theory" claims and illustrated how it is known(!) that they are false, I would gladly read it. Rather, the public has to somehow sort out what is true based on hundreds of "news" articles that get released into the information ecosystem on a daily basis. Or, just offload their thinking to The Experts.

- we regularly hear that we need more "critical thinking" among the public, but we never get further than talking about the incredibly important need for this

It's also interesting that ~nobody seems to notice these sorts of things (and when they are mentioned, it seems to generally displease people, for reasons that are not stated).

I sometimes wonder if these sorts of information management oversights, apparently by thousands of people in positions of power, are purely accidental.
The financial incentives are completely different, it's all about the money. YouTube is sensitive to public opinion because advertisers are sensitive to public opinion and they are the only way YouTube makes any money. Hosting companies are incentivized NOT to care about the type of content being hosted because this approach makes them more money. Further, paying for a service usually implies some guarantees about services rendered and discourages capricious enforcement of business policies.
Hackers hide web skimmer inside a website's CSS files
How would splitting Instagram work from a technical perspective? Engineers have spent 8 years building shared code and data centers for FB and IG. I'd expect it would take hundreds of people and multiple years to untangle them.
It has to be Siri first if they want adoption - probably brand the thing as Siri.
The fact that they indicated to increase the rule limit for over a year but haven't done so yet (the beta still has a limit of 30k) doesn't seem like they really have addressed the drawbacks. I wouldn't think increasing that limit would take that much time if it's a pressing issue but maybe I'm missing something.
A monopoly over your personal relationships, I suppose.

Twitter, TikTok, and HN all thrive on strangers communicating with each other.
Intel, ARM and the Innovators Dilemma
Do you think Intel and AMD could simply switch to making ARM processor and beat Apple? After all they got more experience in chip design? Why don't they just do that now?
Your points are related to user behavior, not platform-provider behavior.
No, they do compete with WhatsApp, on the basis of those points of differentiation.
A custom Host header passed to the origin that differs from the actual Cloudflare-hosted subdomain, without changing its DNS resolution - correct. This would be helpful when the origin is hosted by an inflexible third party, or as a time saver to quickly switch between environments without needing to modify other parts of the infrastructure.

Example 1: A third-party service does not support custom domains, only responds to "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". For a clean user experience, I want "support.my-domain.com" to reverse proxy to "my-company.saas-helpdesk.com" while rewriting the Host header to their origin as "Host: my-company.saas-helpdesk.com". (I realize CSP headers and all sorts of pain might happen here - perhaps not the best example - but would be great flexibility to have around)

Example 2: My startup's origin only responds to "Host: beta.mydomain.com", and the developer with access to its code is on vacation. I want to release my product. I point "www.mydomain.com" to the IP hosting "beta.mydomain.com" but since that origin does not respond to "Host: www.mydomain.com" - it does not work. I need a Host header rewrite.

Thank you for your time!
Thank you! So I was looking at it from a purely functional point of view, without accounting for the earlier non-pure work in the literature. That makes sense; I was deep in the early Haskell world at the time.
Given how perilous the balance of power in the United States is and that the popular vote is not respected it isn't all that strange a thought that someone would do to the United States what the United States has done to untold other countries in the past: attempt to install a friendly regime. Who knows, it may have succeeded. At best, an election was influenced without results. At worst the attempt worked.

I'm not sure if we will ever know what exactly transpired, for me the off-the-books attempt to set up a direct line of communication between Kushner and the Kremlin looked extremely bad and is one of the strongest bits of outward visible proof that there really was something extremely dirty going on. Besides all the circumstantial evidence the direct evidence by itself is telling and I can not imagine any previous - and hopefully future - US administration caught with their pants down to that extent.
Recording internal meetings to raise an issue isn't the best way to deal with the situation. I'm not surprised she was let go. The company probably saw this as dangerous behavior.
> If you are against censorship, how can you stand behind such a President, who wants to control the messaging that every citizen hears and believes, and whether your own voice even counts?

Because this supposedly omnipotent being can't even tweet without a warning message attached to it?
https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

http://www.mtv.com/news/2460774/miyamoto-wants-nintendo-to-f...
There is definitely a political slant. It just turns out that one side is obviously factually true for all neutral observers, and the other side is in the equivalent of a collective psychotic break from reality.
Haaaa! I did not know that. Thank you for sharing!
I'm curious how many people educated by the University of California work for Elon Musk.
What does this have to do with freedom? Private companies can’t take away freedom, only the government can.
Nobody has accused Google of burying search results about these court cases, so you can't reasonably pretend that's the debate we're having. Please keep the goalposts static, so we can discuss productively.
> $100 Apple-exclusive yoga mat

that's actually surprisingly not luxury level pricing.

You can pay something like 60 to 80 bucks on a good quality, thick but still portable mat.
I hear you. What do you suggest otherwise? The society will crumble with volume of misinformation and lies cranked to 11. Truth would drown, by a long shot because even if data is presented, people are brainwashed to ignore it because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Can you talk about the alternative? I hear you but I feel like there is no choice. We're in a shitty situation and it is natural to feel fear and have a knee-jerk reaction at any solution (not just the one Google proposed).
No, but in our case, moving the sensitive data to a table queried less frequently than one used as a queue shrinks our logs considerably.
So if I sue the state of Hawaii on your behalf and claim your HN username is AnimalMuppet, they would throw that out (as I don’t have standing)?
Are we going to have a story for every new item in the Apple store?

It is a bit odd, but considering the launch of Fitness+ is Monday, it's not that weird.

And at least it's a good quality Yoga mat.
Yet they can do so very easily at the flip of a button, so to speak. The capability exists, and simply because potential competitors choose to not compete in the same space is what makes WhatsApp a monopoly?

See Skype, for example - the largest market penetration for a period of time and practically no one uses them any more. They were video-centric, yet the user base is already there for an extension into a primarily text medium. Not tied to an employer, doesn't require an invitation, subscription, friend network, setup to use, etc...
Here comes the Google Chrome change that worried ad blocker creators
In many places in Texas it's just not economically viable to build a basement. Two examples, Houston has a very high water table, Austin has very hard limestone
Just because they're biologically adapted doesn't mean they're not uncomfortable. The hypothesis is that it makes them feel warmer, similar to how drinking alcohol makes you feel warmer in a blizzard. I imagine the sensation (if true) might be maladaptive to the extent they forgo other behaviors that protect them from the cold, but humans have gotten really far tending to our physical pleasure while often ignoring their unhealthy causes.

EDIT: A better example: by all accounts (laymen, primatologists) wild chimpanzees apparently hate rain. If chimpanzees had the choice, all things being equal (e.g. safety, access to food, mobility, etc) a chimpanzee would always choose to sleep under a roof in rainy weather. Yet as far as we can tell they're otherwise well adapted to the rain, including to sleeping in the rain.
Or the commentary is largely coming from those normally absent from HN.
An ad blocker that did not auto update would quickly go stale. Removing updating support for extensions would be even less popular!

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
Cool, random internet person.
For anyone missing the context here, their "Fitness+" service launches next week: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/12/apple-fitness-plus-th...

But it hardly seems like something that merits being on the front page on HN...
Google gives Chrome users an easier way to sync info across devices
Link to the research article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20008198.2020.1...

While studies of this kind are still very hard to make and very limited in scope (in this case, uncontrolled and with a very small sample size), I'm glad to see that we are lifting the unnecessary taboos around things like MDMA so that proper research can begin to get done (with 6-8 decades of delay compared to what we could have had, but still).

Props to MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) in the US for paving the way to that change.
I wonder if this is because of the SoftBank cash crunch. Or if it's just nobody has figured out how to make money with Boston Dynamics. Though if the 1 billion sale price is true, maybe flipping BD is the only way to make money with it.
There are also state inconsistencies on servers. Configuration files are not updated correctly (maybe even with a silent failure), binaries are not updated correctly, temporary files left over interfere with the update, cached files do the same, etc.

There are many reasons why resetting the environment on deployment is a solid and cost effective solution to many issues.
Having a grasp on reality != political slant

You can be a conservative and acknowledge the President states falsehoods at an unseen pace.
If a vaccine contains a known allergen, is giving it to people with severe allergies even a test of anything? Is it possible for allergens to not cause allergies despite being present?