skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change.

A lot of these issues seem largely peculiar to the US. Trumpism, birtherism, Pizzagate, "Stop the steal", QAnon, etc – all movements originating in the US, focused on US-specific political issues, and with most of their followers in the US. Other first world countries don't seem to have this issue to anywhere near the same extent.

And that's why I don't think it is "a credible existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change". A credible existential threat to the future existence of the United States maybe, but the US != civilisation. The US could all magically disappear tomorrow, and human civilisation would survive. It would be a setback, no doubt, because the US makes an important contribution to the global economy, but nothing the world couldn't recover from.

And, the realistic worst case scenario isn't the US magically disappearing. The realistic worst case scenario is that Americans get worse and worse at co-existing with each other to the point that the idea of breaking up the US becomes mainstream, and then it maybe actually happens. If that came to pass, it would be the end of America as we've known it, but it wouldn't be the end of human civilisation.
> going to be hung by the same people that elected him. Not exactly what I normally think of when I hear "coup" or "violent insurrection".

Right, because he violated the trumpian cult of personality. How is that not scarier: murder someone unless he violated his oath to the constitution in order to keep an authoritarian leaning election-losing person in power.

Killing government officials to result in a transfer of power. It's a sudden, violent, illegal seizure of government power. That's a coup.
It seems extremely likely that Apple will send a DMCA takedown about this project. Why wouldn’t they?
Thanks for posting this! Your repo is a fantastic bit of reading for people who are curious how to make a non-standard visualization with React JS.
This seems like it might be more valuable to a health insurance company or a government health agency than to doctors. Basically the tool tells them what to prescribe to be most effective so customers don't have additional future claims, and this saves the insurance company money. They can also offer it to doctors who have agreements with them as an incentive to sign on etc.
> Make something people want. It's Y-Combinator's motto and a maxim of aspiring internet entrepreneurs. The idea is that if you build something truly awesome, you'll figure out a way to make some money off of it.

> So I built something people wanted. Consumers wanted it, doctors wanted it, I wanted it. Where did I go wrong?

There's a HIUUUGE difference between what people say they'll do and what they will actually do.
This is an obviously impossible burden to load on someone, and I think you know that. If democracy is legitimately lost in America, it will happen via a series of events that we today cannot conceive of.

It is more useful to think events like the Capitol incident as causing long-lasting damage to democracy, and there is a non-negligible possibility that societal schisms will widen, as opposed to heal. What that will look like in the future is anybody's guess.
I am very curious to know which pre-trained models work better for this task and whether it's possible at all to do without a neural net...
I think things can and likely will change -- facebook did not exist 20 years ago, and the masses will probably move on to another platform in 20 years from now.

I'm more interested in how decentralized platforms might impact the current trend of verified accounts and use of real names. I can see a couple potential outcomes with decentralized platforms:

1) The use of pseudonyms grows further and speech gets even more divisive as people can speak without it coming back tarnish their real-life identity.

2) The use of real names grows more popular as people want to own their speech without fear of being de-platformed.
Yea, so that's more of a comment on the accuracy of the auto generated labels, because this approach doesn't assume a different representative set of data than with human labelled data, just that less of the data is human labelled.

So it comes down to how good the auto generated labels are(from a human perspective), which is a fair point that I didn't address much in the article, but in general comes down to a good QA process(which is applied to both human labels and machine labels equally because humans also make mistakes in this stuff).

In the article the dataset was small enough and the labels simple enough that I could run very quick visual inspection over the results, but for more complicated tasks we have a more rigorous human review process for evaluating label accuracy(again to both human and algorithm produced labels). The auto generated labels may not be more efficient overall if they require a lot of correction after review, but for this case, and a lot of other ones, they just are empirically are.
I didn’t downvote but perhaps the overtly scientific writing. I had trouble understanding it even though I have some background in medicine.
Saori Kobayashi Interview: Cultivating an Ethtronic Sound (2015)
This is what I saw my doctors were doing. Also I saw cardiologist comparing my diagnosis using Google images.
We’re just gonna pretend they didn’t beat a cop to death on the way in, are we?
He has my empathy. Never had a problem for most of my life, then got sick in a way that I was given hydrocodone for 8 months. I took more than the label said, a lot more, and at some point a switch clicked over in my head. After the hydrocodone was gone, I switched to alcohol only because it was easy to get. I've been sober a while now, but stopping the drinking was MUCH harder than stopping the hydrocodone. Alcohol is a beast once that circuit breaker trips in your head and you start drinking large quantities daily.

It's very hard to explain to someone that hasn't gone through it. Suffice it to say that quitting isn't really about willpower.
Did you have any "disaster recovery" plans in place, what you would do if the cloud failed.

I think looking at this issue with the example of "Parler" may be missing the point. The issue worth debating is surely not whether Amazon made the right decision. Of course they did. The issue worth discussing is who gets to make this decision in light of what the decision implies. Due to how much businesses are choosing[1] to rely on companies like Google and Amazon as service providers, these "tech" companies can easily kill other businesses by denying service, without violating any laws in the process.

These "tech" company middlemen are generally not treated like utilities under existing laws but the question is whether they are being treated as such by customers, the public.

1. Perhaps not so much consciously choosing as being persuaded by tech company salespeople and, IMHO, biased "media coverage" (=hype).
I agree with almost everything you say except...

> a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course)

It didn't succeed, and in retrospect, it didn't look very effective. Many (but by no means all) of the participants were clowns.

However, it was absolutely an attempt. People died in an attempt to storm a seat of government and install a different regime. People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", constructed an actual gallows, and then went looking for him. And they did this, let's reiterate, in an attempt to overturn the election. The people trying to track him down had specific objectives in mind (however realistic or otherwise they may have been) and they weren't "giving him a bouquet of flowers and a hearty thank you for performing his entirely ceremonial role in the election process".

We can argue about how incompetent the insurrection was (clearly, very), and how close it came to achieving any of its objectives (still quite unclear). And we can certainly argue about whether a single failed insurrection attempt justifies the response; I think a very valid case can be made for the "no" argument. But words have meaning, and the word "insurrection" means precisely this.
Definitely - see the downvotes on my other related comment about him today. Really sad how people have been conditioned to be so negative.
> The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded.

Anyone who has studied American history knows that there's been a fairly recent revisionist movement to convince everyone that our republic is actually a democracy. The truth is that this country has always been a republic. The founders of our government hated tyrannical democracy.

Hamilton: "It has been observed by an honorable gentleman, that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved, that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."

John Adams: "Democracy, will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues, and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

Adams again: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide."

Ben Rush: "A simple democracy is the devil's own government."

Madison: "Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure."

Madison again: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

I could go on and on.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the left has fully endorsed this. Trump lost because turnout was high -- because the left shoehorned executive actions through elections commissions and governors under the guise of COVID. They increased turnout by mailing everyone a ballot. The left fired up their base and increased turnout by promising direct checks into voters bank accounts. They increased turnout by promising free healthcare. The left wants to double down and provide citizenship to 11 million illegal aliens, forever increasing their voter base. And finally, most brazenly, they want to abolish the electoral college to ensure that their coastal majorities can never be overridden.

So no, democracy isn't dying in the US. We're more democratic than we've ever been, and there's no sign of it stopping.

It's the republic that's in danger.
We directly stream arrow across devices, skipping grpc indirection / confusion, and have done that since near the beginning of arrow. Others do too, works great :)

Flight is interesting to us bc they're thinking through parallel i/o. I'm guessing grpc overhead there is more tolerable, though yeah, I'd be curious. I had similar initial reservations, esp as we were happy to remove slow google protobuf stack stuff as part of our switch to arrow :)
Parler is back up using DDoS-Guard. All its data now flows through Russia
I've looked at various political debate subreddits over the past few years. But over time I considered how these spaces could be used nefariously. If I were a propagandist, I'd throw all of this content into some deep learning doohickey and let it generate sample responses for my army of trolls, and let them quickly edit the best samples to create more complicated arguments more quickly, until the bots are consistent enough to run amok as truly convincing persons.

Kinda like when after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, there was a thought for a while that chess tournaments would include humans working with a computer model to help them make decisions. For some time a human working together with a computer to make decisions was superior against a human or computer alone -- this hasn't been the case for a while now as chess models advanced.
Would Read the Docs suit your needs?

https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
what is legal and illegal for that matter also depends heavily on your location. please keep in mind that a general comment on this topic is most likely difficult, maybe impossible.
No, because that “storming” only happened in your imagination. The protests were hundreds of feet away and the violence started when the police tried to clear the public park for Trump to have a photo op. If you look at the footage from the journalists who were assaulted, there was nothing like a risk to the White House perimeter:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-02/channel-7-journalists...

If the Trump supporters had similarly stayed outside of the gates, nobody would even remember the protest as more than a bit of trivia.

(Edit: I added “storming” to the first sentence to avoid any confusion about whether I was referring to the well-publicized bunker trip)
I imagine that if Atlassian could get permission from its many JIRA customers, then doing a text-based ml-categorization of issue descriptions alongside completion times would be extremely interesting.

I'd wager that data is just as poor overall, but the sheer volume of data available might be able to help get some sort of consistent conclusions from them.
Propositional Dynamic Logic
The problem is we don't always write perfect code, so if you forget to return or break on any given branch (I.e. in some else statement) you could get stuck in the loop forever. Remember Apple's famous goto fail; SSL bug? Sometimes it's not so easy to eyeball the code and follow the execution flow.

Specifying the condition for the loop up front makes me feel more confident about the loop safely concluding once the work is done.
Census blocks are not that big. There are 7M of them.

You can see them in NYC here: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/#11.61/40.764/-73.991...

Things like parts of Central Park and Piers are there own blocks. So, unless they capture homeless people living there, the population is zero.

My guess is in places like SD there are still plenty of farm areas, commercial areas, schools etc which have no people.

South Dakota looks like it has 80k census blocks and 800k people.
> them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course)

Even if this was an insurrection, I don't see how that means you need to clamp down on freedom of speech.
Do you see any sort of visual imagery when dozing off to sleep? Have you ever played a lot of some visually repetitive game, like Minesweeper, Tetris, Bejeweled etc? I find that if I play a lot of those (hours) then at night when I shut my eyes I can't get rid of visualizations of these shapes in my mind, it's even kind of annoying.
Did he say storm the capital?
This was in reference to a quote from a software developer comparing software development to building a bridge. That is why "he has never built a bridge" was emphasized.
Kathy Griffin's career still hasn't recovered and this was imagery not a call to action. I find it funny when Griffin gets brought up as if she wasn't "cancelled." Its an example of even treatment not hypocrisy.
Ah, yeah. Consumes a lot more than it produces would be a more accurate note for mushrooms, where most plants are the opposite.
Awesome to see this pull together a lot of the core elements that are fall into the "other stuff" needed when launching a SaaS startup.

I think a lot of developers have prototypes or code that can bring value to customers but packaging the business functions around it slows them down if it doesn't scare them off altogether. This is a great step toward helping that.

Do you have any thoughts on how this might eventually integrate with some sort of functions as a service?

Also, any plans to support AWS cognito/dynamo/s3?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_189...

No hypotheticals - this one actually happened, and the resulting undemocratic government was seen as legitimate and retained power. (To be clear, democracy once lost can be regained, but it was unambiguously lost.)
50ish percent of all reunified children in the state of Georgia are back in care in less than a year.

There is no data available for total recidivism, but I would more than guess that the vast majority of the negative outcome foster stats come primarily from multi-cycle children. Meaning they go in to care, get reunified, then go back in care, and wash and repeat. Tada we are at 16 years and the trauma fruit of "family preservation" policy is ripe for the picking.

"Family preservation" is the pervert uncle of a mantra that is the anchor that has dragged foster care outcomes down for decades. Supported by the "evidence based policy" con that has been propagated by services companies.

I have not had a child in my home that was not the victim of the family preservation cult. In case you don't know, let me explain the toxic buck passing shit storm of terrible that family preservation programs are.

This practice is the plan of taking child neglect cases and not removing children, but assigning a social worker to write a safe plan, such as parent can have no contact and child must live with grand parent that lives in the same house as the parent. Then when that fails 90 day later(80%), we do it again and wait 90 days, and then we wait 90 days, and then maybe we remove the children from the then child cruelty or child endangerment case. Then the charges, which have no impact on the permanency case for the child are usually dropped.

We then reunify the children after 12-18 months, and then start the 270 day safe plan again after 6 months or so, and then place the children in care, and then reunify after 12-18 months and then start all over. So all of the people that are telling the kids that they are there to help just keep placing children back with the parent that has demonstrated over 2.5 years at first reunification, their in ability to provide for the child.

This legal/policy structure allows for children to exist in a grossly traumatic cycle of permeant psychological and physical damage. This is a legal problem and not a foster care problem.

So much of the entire legal system is structured around 'reunify at all cost' that children simply pay all the risk cost of the second chances that bio parents are given. For this type of "justice" that is propagated by people that have no experience or non-"academic" knowledge of long term trauma in children.

Children should at least have the right to speedy permanency, and should not be forced to dole out second chances to bio parents that they can never get back. You only get one chance to by 5 or 4 or 3 or 2.

There is also a lot to be said for separating child welfare laws from family laws. I mention that because in many states we end up with divorce law that bleeds into welfare cases, specifically regarding visitation of children with parents, even physically or sexually abusive ones out of fear that a TPR may be overturned.
Electric utility can shut off your data centers power if you don't pay the bills or break the contract. Same for your ISP.
So the big reality disconnect is that the courts are totally in love with the child "protection" agencies and hang on every word they say in the delusion that they are saving the child by putting them them into foster care, when in fact they are just putting fodder into the prison system.
Changing your name might work for: potential employers searching by your chosen name. (Assuming you can also change the name which your qualifications are in)

Won't work for: Google/Facebook tracking you across the web, probably not even 10 years ago when this article was published. You're still the same person.
You know, that would make sense...if we didnt have an entire summer of rioting and looting organized on Twitter and FB where people lost their livelihoods and some their lives causing 20 billion in damage. They are still on the app store.
They constructed a gallows and were calling for the death of your Vice President. They beat a police officer to death.
As an economist thinking about a move into health economics, could I reach out to you to discuss opportunities in the field?
> The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded.

That would be a crappy democracy if it could be eroded by a bunch of idiots taking an unauthorized Whitehouse tour. Fortunately, absolutely nothing happened to the democracy and it proceeded on its course. What could actually erode the democracy is nation giving up on free speech. That'd be a real sign of nation in severe distress.

> I don't listen to your news

Maybe you should, then you'd know nothing happened to the democracy.
I used to be a non-technical manager “managing” a team of developers. I later (through circumstances) became a developer. Looking back at the games my team played with me I can see why many managers are cynical about the estimates they are given and attempt to negotiate.
Beware, once you install Synergy on Mac, there seems to be no way to uninstall.
It's because we're on average very unhealthy - part of that is the disconnect from others, we don't have genuine community. We used have multi-generation households: kids, parents, grandparents, maybe even great grandparents all helping out - everyone learning from a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge.

If we weren't in this current dis-eased state then also the community of rational, reasonable people, would be ready and able to rally to counter any threats in the physical world.

What concerns me the most is the online bubbles of irrational, propaganda filled narratives, where if you attempt to engage and counter their narrative at all with reason, you'll be near immediately banned/blocked.

These irrational mobs will find a way to communicate in groups, and they may begin to use encrypted private messaging exclusively. The only solution to this is strong community - online and offline - along with creating a culture of healing, to open people's hearts and minds; we already know these mobs are being influenced by foreign bad actors who want to destroy democracy and cause turmoil, so they need to be confronted/addressed as well.

If we can't get these online mobs under control somehow, to reach them and start helping them reason, if things escalate to guerilla-like civil warfare, then we'll have to start creating borders around our cities with identity verification required. Hopefully it doesn't come anywhere close to that, if it does it could be within 20 years though. It really depends on the policy that gets put into place - people need a UBI and at least 80% of their health needs covered, otherwise dis-ease progression, including stress, leads to lesser educated people with less critical thinking ability, and more hate for the system they will blame for their hardship and suffering and want to destroy said system.

Edit to add: lazy people downvote, add a qualitative reply instead.
I think you're missing the fact that illegalization is pushing these substances and their users into the black market, deep in the margins of society, and essentially leaving the rest of us powerless. If we were to own up and legalize it, we would be in a better position to treat it and to apply preventive measures. Plus we wouldn't be financing the underworld. As far as I can tell, facing the hard issues, like working with the most disadvantaged people, is the only thing that makes a difference, while illegalization is about rejecting them.