skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given your background, I think it would be worthwhile for you to pick up ESL [0] and read some relevant sections (supervised/sparse/linear methods). It's a great book and a good starting point for thinking about ML methods for high dimensional data.

Also, might be useful to took at webpages of some researchers in this space and courses they teach [1,2].

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/ElemStatLearn/
[1] https://scholars.duke.edu/person/dunson
[2] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bee/
One way to explain the apparent contradiction is that free markets aren’t the same as anarchy. Businesses should be free to compete, but that doesn’t mean they should be free to do anything they believe makes them more competitive. Free market supporters believe they are more efficient than alternatives, but there may be principles of more importance than efficiency.

Plus, certain behaviours are in the interests of specific businesses but damaging to free competition as a whole: monopolies, censorship, etc.
> I mean, isn't that the fault of the Republican party that they can only maintain control by gerrymandering, having millions of American citizens without representation, supporting anti-democratic institutions, and voter suppression?

> If the idea of having more voter participation is antithetical to your political party, perhaps it is time to change your party.

Indeed. The GOP is undoubtedly ultra-right wing, and this sounds mighty authoritarian. We've seen a pretty strong nationalist streak in them recently, as well. Conservatism pretty much is the idea that "everyone has their place, and they should stay in their place." Can anyone tell me how that's not fascist?

Reminder:

> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions
Can We Crowdsource Language Design? (2017) [pdf]
> The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant.

Only if you take a US-centric view. If you take a world-oriented view, the US military-intelligence complex is by far the most destructive terrorist organization in human history, doing things like erasing democracy in Latin America and overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran which was going to take away its oil.

What the MAGA terrorists did for 4 hours to the US Capitol, the US has been doing to the world for more than 50 years.
I don't know. I'd venture a guess of "no" on pluggable apps. It does have a plugin-like architecture with e.g. adapters for Twitter. I've never used it, only seen it in action. It's an activity and data tracker written to serve Brad Fitzpatrick's personal needs. When he was still at Google, he was paying someone to hack on it and maintain it. It has some rudimentary "analytics" insofar as there are various ways to present the data stored in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlAU_da_U4s

https://perkeep.org/doc/overview
There’s no ideological consistency to be had here. But I don’t think either side has ideological purity... which is good!

But I do find it strange that people seem to think you can attempt a coup of the worlds most powerful country and face virtually no consequence or blowback? As the Emerson quote goes “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
This comment is what is called "attacking the strawman".
2021 will be better if you do these things
"Build your own Twitter"

"Build your own Facebook"

"Build your own hosting service"

"Build your own iphone/android"

"Build your own ISP"

I don't like where we're heading
You’re unintentionally making a straw man. There is no contradiction.

I believe social media should be regulated more tightly. Until then they have the freedom to remove the content according to their TOS.

Just because I’m pointing out that they have the freedom it doesnt mean I believe they should continue to have the freedom.

Government regulations are desperately needed.

Even more so, government enforcement of existing regulations are needed. There’ve been many threats of violence on social media with few being investigated.
Sleeping Dogs, wonderful writing even if the plot wasn't philosophically deep or anything

Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.

But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.

I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...
Yes, the question really is are they liable for the violence that's produced through their algorithms?
Right, and if Facebook and Twitter don’t like it they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start their own ISPs!
Thank you so much for posting this! Found it a while ago and found it very inspiring, but I recently tried to find it again without succeeding. So thank you!
I just booted with a new temporary ID and it took 50 seconds to generate the cryptographic key. After 3-4 minutes, Urbit had bootstrapped itself and was accessible over HTTP.

You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example:

mkdir urbit
cd urbit
curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest
tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1
./urbit -c mycomet
An Alternative to Decentralized Web
This. Regulation would be of harmful misinformation. Arguably, these companies are late in their self-regulation. People were tired of the endless excuses for double standards.
As a utility, power is regulated differently from Internet service, so no.

If you're genuinely worried about this with regards to your ISP, consider writing to your lawmakers that ISPs should be treated like utilities as well.
Possibly a precentage. Downloading the app is not always 1-to-1 for signing up. Someone could be using the web-version, then decides to download the app.
That's the case for protected classes. I just think it should be expanded.

It shouldn't be that way if media companies weren't coordinating behind the scenes to ban stuff together. But given that it's happening, it's better to have more freedom.
>It does actually

No, it does not, anymore than Iran or China get to dictate rules, and for the same reason: the EU has no jurisdiction and no leverage. The EU of course is free to setup their own Great Firewall and block off anyone they dislike, and for people or businesses with assets under their jurisdiction they have an angle to go after that way. But a person or business entirely out of their territory is completely free to flip them the proverbial (or not so proverbial) bird. That is the fundamental nature of "law".

I'll add it's curious this seems to come up on HN with regards to the GDPR so regularly too, precisely because of my first sentence here. It speaks to a real lack of foundation in understanding the basics of law. Are people writing this actually thinking through the implications of every country being able to unilaterally dictate practice worldwide? Or do they think only the EU has this power?
My favorite example of how over the top things have become is that Google has monopolies inside of a monopoly. Youtube has something like 98% of the video streaming market.
> Initially, the company said too many customers had requested the sites be blocked, so it would block them for all customers except for those who called the company and requested access. However, the company backtracked on Monday and said those who didn't request the sites be blocked would still have access.

They have a screen shot of the email that says they'd block it for everyone and if you want it unblocked you'd have to call and ask for that. It's a report of an entire event, from start to finish, not just the part where the ISP realized they were making a mistake and decided to change their mind.
> It's a private company, they should be free to choose what kind of content they want to provide

Censorship is just a classification of what they are doing. In both cases, it is selectively application of blocking of contents based on one's political believes. Calling them censorship is not an assessment whether they have a legal/illegal/legit/reasonable/unreasonable cause to carry out such acts.

I just find this approach somewhat ironic.
CFAA doesn't care about that. There's problems with that law, but I really wouldn't want to push on it here.
One thing to keep in mind is you shouldn’t use your employer-provided computer for coding up your side project :)
We’re the only species with which our species communicates maths. But we observe other species expressing mathematical properties we communicate. Does (for example) a snail “know” or “understand” the “golden ratio”? Who knows! But a snail’s shell expresses it. That’s partly something we can observe (so it can be designated “invented”), but partly something that appears so much it’s either a biological commonality, subject to some unknown universal constant, or an expression that many forms of life find a way to express.
> You cannot yell “fire” in a movie theatre.

That’s the standard illustration of the Schenk (which suppressed what is widely now recognized as core political speech) “clear and present danger” test, which probably comes to a different result under the Brandenberg “incites imminent lawless action” test which replaced it
Kind of, but noone voted on the official POTUS account being effectively banned.
"One of my theories based on life experience is that many fields do not attract the brightest people to begin with, and consequently many of the ideas from these fields are not pressure-tested enough." very well articulated, i have thought about this many times, basically a lot of physical sciences face this
You just jumped to a conclusion. In another comment in this article I specifically said only messages that are related to the commission of a crime should be released and everything else should be deleted.
It doesn't matter who's doing it, it's still censorship.
didnt Sony do that?
I think mirroring free speech standards under the law is probably a good starting point - i.e., censoring is bad by default, but not all speech is protected, and calls for violence and insurrection are a relevant and timely example of non-protected speech.

I'll reiterate that this should be a starting point, not necessarily a hard and fast rule - there may be more nuanced situations where the standards that are appropriate for the government are inappropriate for social networks.

There's also the question of what levels of the stack it's appropriate for any censorship to occur at. Even if censorship of a particular class of speech is appropriate in general, it may not be appropriate for an ISP specifically to conduct that censorship.
|| If you, dear HN reader, can't see the threat to your freedom in this then you are blind.

Forcing a private corporation to provide a platform for someone else is also a form of tyrrany.

|| Oh, and to call that invasion of the capitol an attempted coup is a real stretch. What were they ever going to do other than get arrested??

They were going to kill our representatives in government. That was their intent, and it's a bit odd that you're making excuses for them.
Don't be silly. Courts will decide based on the meaning in context. A reasonable person may very well conclude that that quote is a call to arms. I mean I don't know how a court would interpret this specific example, but polar bears won't factor in their deliberation.

The provisions against incitement of violence in the AWS TOS are standard. If Parler sues AWS, a court will actually decide on whether Parler violated the TOS. And I'm pretty sure that the AWS decision will hold. They didn't do this lightly.

Refusing service to trolls is a standard occurrence. The justice system would be clogged immediately if it were forced to decide every TOS violation before the accused party could be banned.
IMHO first you need to become a programmer then you can become a data engineer. So if you need to start by learning data structure then you are doing something wrong. Also the topics suggested in "Algorithms & Data Structures" could easily be skipped, the information is drastically misleading. We should seriously have some fact checker, otherwise this kind of bullshit article keep trending on HN and people keep wasting their time on learning LSM tree (what the fuck is that in the first place).
Failing to hold people accountable for their actions does not radicalize people, but teaches them to correct their behaviors. Maybe if this guy's parents had done it when he was younger he wouldn't have found himself on a no fly list.
malactors is not a word. You can just say bad actors.
No, I'm not trying to call you out, I'm actually interested in what the answers might actually be. And how we might actually measure them.
The people who are supportive of this move by Facebook and similar moves by other tech companies aren’t motivated by a newfound sense of liberalism. Many have been arguing that the government should have been forcing FB et al to do this kind of stuff (ie, stopping “hate speech”) for years now.
ISP's should be treated like utilities... dump pipes.
Can I challenge the argument of self-contradiction being made by many here? (disclaimer - I'm not advocating for / against the action either way).

In civisilised society / discourse one must assume rules of engagement in order for co-operative interaction between agents to take place. To take an extreme demonstration - if you club me over the head and steal my meat while I approach you to trade, then a co-operative interaction cannot take place; physically so.

If we impose the additional rule that we must continue to observe those rules of engagement with agents who themselves have ignored them - then it's pretty clear (at least in the extreme example) that we expose ourselves to exploitation. And many philosophies and cultures do impose this rule (Christianity - for example).

In the process of discourse - it's plausible to argue that the ability to express oneself is one such rule of engagement. So, this ISP might feel that FB etc have broken the rules of engagment, and they might feel that they are under no obligation to adhere to those rules for agents that themselves aren't playing ball.

Now you can challenge this line of thinking on all sorts of interesting grounds - and I encourage folks to do so. However - the discussion gets nuanced fast...

I don't think you can just claim this action as prima-facie self contradictory - and to do so, I feel exposes the bias and lack of generosity in those attempting understand this action.
The unfortunate thing about getting in the news for being headquarters to nazis is that's how other nazis find you.

Idaho (particularly northern idaho) is still nazi town.

Fun story, the guy from the oatmeal grew up in northern idaho and made a blog post about the nazis there.

https://theoatmeal.com/blog/bus
That is correct.

Any rationalization is post-hoc, done in support of the pre-existing (and pre-determined) goal.

As such, because it's entirely post-hoc, this leads to moving the goalposts, and any respective adjustments in rationalizations.

The primary question one must ask, in these circumstances:

Is my counterpart arguing in good faith?

If the signs point to bad faith (e.g., telltale language, gaslighting or similar methods employed, etc), then rational argument is not their currency.
Thanks, yep I am. Will check that out
How are these companies regulated?
According to you.
It will be interesting if the protestors organize using end-to-end encrypted chat apps.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have been pushing for curtailment of end to end encryption. This might be what gives popular support for that.
Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility.

Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep.

If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was.

Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.
Isn't this hypocrisy on both sides?t How are big government liberals not concerned about not regulating private companies who are censoring political speech?
In other words, corporations should be able to do whatever they wish within the rules, but in order for that to happen, there should be rules.
I'm sure both their customers will be highly upset.
Really? More pedantry? We aren't talking about silencing those that "support storming of the capital". We are talking about silencing an entire party of people. Donald Trump received approximately 46.8% of the popular vote. Is that not slightly less than half of the voting public?

46.8% of the people who care about this stuff are being told that they no longer have the right to speak on platforms where it would matter. That's a very serious problem.
> very few places AFAIK actually process their HTTP server logs into a form that can be queried by SQL.

There are at least two tools that support directly querying log files with SQL:

* logparser -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logparser

* lnav -- https://lnav.org

lnav uses SQLite and provides quite a few extensions, so quite a lot is possible. The logs are exposed via virtual tables, so there is no separate import step.
Game theory mode:
Tit-for-Tat

Welp, it's a race to the bottom of the tech stack now.
Are we really so stupid that we cannot see through this kind of thing and need to actively censor it to have civilized society continue to function?

When do we just give up on democracy completely?
> Can't conservatives go make their own video hosting platform?

Can't %group% go make %something%.

Forget conservatives. Anyone who makes their living making video is doing so based on YouTube's whim. If they kick you off, even by mistake as has happened multiple times, you have no recourse. That's what makes them a monopoly. That is why they need to be treated as a utility.
It’s not unusual to see a newcomer decrying HN as hypocritical, where in reality it’s just not a uniform group but many different people with different opinions becoming prominent at different times.

Many accusations of hypocrisy boil down to just that - different people with different opinions treated by the outsiders as a homogenous group.
Repetition Works: A new type of cognitive behavioral therapy
Biden wasn't using Twitter as one of the tools to commit the crime.
I'd maybe swallow this explanation for complex conjugates as applied to QM. (They're still extremely useful for e.g. circuit analysis, as a practical application)

But it's not just complex conjugates, but eigenvectors as well. Also spectacular: "the square root of a negative number, which by definition does not exist"

Uh. That's a complete lack of connection to anything beyond 10th grade math. Maybe not the ideal foundation for criticizing QM.

And yes, I get the complaint that QM comes with a lot of "if you just hold your nose and accept this", and intuition doesn't really work for it - but that's hardly a valid criticism by itself, outside of saying "well, this is hard to understand".

And the idea that a mathematical model isn't perfect and as a result of that can't be true really just betrays a complete misunderstanding how models work.

This piece boils down to "I don't understand it, and so it can't be correct".
Exactly! And then they make arguments like the content moderation argument going on to depend on them more! I want to depend on them less!
This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.
Not just me. Look around in this thread. You're outnumbered.
For non-tls connections they could.

Some examples of isps meddling with unencrypted connections:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

https://thenextweb.com/insights/2017/12/11/comcast-continues...
There are conflicting reports of how she died.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rosanne-boyland-died-capitol-ri...

The Onionesque headline is apparently too good to fact check though, because lots of media outlets are running with it for laughs.
Do they not claim jurisdiction though? I understand a site not wanting to get involved and just deciding to block off the EU.
This effect has been known to the Internet for a long time...

For example, here is a web page by Jean-Louis Naudin (Google his name + 'electrostatic' and/or 'lifter', etc.) which dates around February 14th, 2002:

http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm

...and contains references a patent by Townsend Brown (Google his name also) "US Patent N°2949550" which dates around Aug 16, 1960 -- which also describes the effect...

And of course, there may be other earlier patents, foreign and/or domestic, if one does the appropriate research...

But it's nice that this effect gets some more publicity here on HN...
Looks to me like this kind of reasoning will eventually go all the way up to "they can start their own society", and at some point, it will actually happen. surprised pikachu
Depends on how much they're paying you.
The idea of universal grammar is that it is the portion of human language that is hardcoded into the genetics of humans. We would not expect other species to have the same universal grammar that humans do.
The Paradox of Abundance
I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform.

That, itself, is propaganda.

Here's the elephant in the room:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Quote:

Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.
These people wanted to return to an aristocracy according to wikipedias history section of right wing, so his point stands I think.

But I'm not knowledgeable about history, so do elaborate if you know details please.