skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beyond the debate on whether or not downvotes are useful as a tool, I think about the higher-level implications of a change like this.

One of the most powerful media platforms in the entire world can institute a change like this under everyone's watch, and none of us have any recourse.

A couple of programmers in their two-week sprint can fiddle around with some Javascript and push it out to the masses, and suddenly large swathes of the historical record are gone forever. (If you consider downvotes to be historical, that is.)

Imagine if someone could white out a section of a book and apply the changes instantaneously to every printed copy of that book in existence.

I think about the implications of being able to look back on human history, and how that historical narrative is increasingly in the control of technology companies and a relatively small amount of people who decide to change that narrative for everyone else. I remember many chronological videos that specifically call out the dislike ratios of some YouTube videos as evidence of the negative backlash certain companies or individuals have received. With no dislikes, that point can no longer be made. That information is lost.

During a live recording of a Japanese entertainment group I watched, whose videos will be preserved on physical discs and be watched by thousands for decades to come, they announced on camera that, in the span of their two-hour performance, they had reached trending status on Twitter. All they had to mention was the word "trend," and the audience responded with enthusiasm. The influence of Dorsey's creation has permeated so many of our lives, including the people who, ten years ago, would never have cared about what bizzare-sounding technologies like Ruby on Rails would eventually enable them to obtain: a universally understood, instantaneous signal of approval.

I believe that the record of who we were and what we did will be important for us to be able to look back on, as it has been for centuries. But it seems that, in the coming decades, that will not always be up to us to decide - just a couple of people in the engagement bureau who decided for us that the alternative was better.
The real complaint from the surveillance police state is that people use encryption for privacy -- whether it's basic communications privacy (end-to-end encrypted text and voice) or basic financial privacy (cryptocurrencies that aren't being made progressively more trackable).

Part of that "used for crime" shit is about things that are against the law just because nobody reported buying a car or something like that, too.
China’s loan contracts reveal its hold over low-income nations
I love the idea !!! Not sure when i'd use it but non the less i think it's awesome.

I'd say that users that would want this feature would also like some sense of "security" that the post is actually deleted. there is no sense of that.

another 2 cents :) How about letting us decide when it gets deleted rather than the magic 7 days?
That's an awful lot of work to perform a double-spend. Whoopty doo.
Nope, there was certainly a lot saying that you only need TLS on login pages and sensitive data pages. And that even sites with login and payment pages are ok to use http on the rest of the site.
This is slightly off-topic but I wanted to say that the restriction on HN to not be able to downvote direct ancestors (and locking downvoting behind a karma threshold) seems to have served it very well. The restriction of direct ancestor downvotes in particular is a habit I really wish other sites (eyes reddit) would actually implement. It prevents the most common type of downvote the "You have attempted to shame me by trying to disagree with me and thus you must suffer" type.
> it was a war situation for the US anyway

Right.... so we needed a strong military, right? No point relying on 'love' alone?
The vast majority of YouTube users don’t meet the definition of “customer” — that would be their advertisers.
When the cost of a service goes down the demand goes up. It would be notable if cancer treatment was an exception to that rule.
This is, of course, a customer-centric move for Youtube (of course keep in mind, you the Youtube viewer are the product, not the customer).
Asking for donations doesn't work.

It can work. It just depends on how strong your community is.

When I lived in Houston, I was a member of a local discussion forum that was on a .info domain. One day, a domain squatter offered to sell the .com version to the sysop for $15,000. The regular users pitched in, and got the money together in a few weeks.
They wanted the overreaction, this entire controversy was nothing more but a marketing trick. Sony was deleting top comments with constructive critique from their YouTube video and leaving up only the abusive ones so it would appear as if people hated this movie only because they're sexist or whatever. And that worked, deciding to see or not to see this movie was pretty much a political statement.
YouTube rode to the top by streaming petabytes of copyrighted material that would get anybody who tried to replicate their path destroyed by copyright strikes
I liked this video. https://vimeo.com/230220635

I had similar preconceptions from Python's REPL. Now after reading (at the least the first section of) the article and watching the video my mind is blown.

I've also been dabbling with Emacs Lisp recently and it appears that you can do basically the same thing.
I don't know if these large tech companies act on normal incentives. They're almost post-modern corporations.

I don't think anyone truly understands their decision making process. It's above even the leadership. Scott Alexander mentioned this in a post this week:

> Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diver...
Attempting to call a method on a nil interface value produces a runtime panic. Otherwise, it is the type that implements an interface, and it's possible that the type works even if the specific value of the type is nil. For instance, you could have a 'myIntPointer' type that is a pointer to an int, and implement a String() method for myIntPointer, and at that point a nil myIntPointer still has a String() method and implements the fmt.Stringer interface (although it may get a runtime panic if you actually call the method).
I think you'll be looking for a while if your standards for an employer is that you have arbitrary access to the data they use to make decisions. There are a handful of radically transparent employers out there but it is the vanishing exception, not the rule.
Ping the guy from https://web.sponsor.ajay.app/ maybe he likes or dislikes the idea ;)
There’s been something wonky about YouTube downvotes for a little while now. If you go any children’s video (I have two toddlers so am accessing them all the time), downvotes often outstrip upvotes. The reasons are unclear, maybe competitive pressure from rival channels astroturfing the votes? Take a look at this[0] video from Sesame Street, 1.3m downvotes for a fairly decent educational video, vs 1.7m upvotes? How is that even justified? I can’t blame YouTube for removing a metric which looks like is being manipulated on a massive level.
[0] https://youtu.be/783EsrHchXA
I mean yes, there is parametric ML (maximum likelihood, MAP, GMMs, ...) and there is non-parametric ML (everything neural network, SVM, GBM, random forrests, ...).

I'd argue that the latter had bigger success in the past since the prior on the data distribution is usually wrong in real life. Think about a prior for image data distributions or the same in nlp. Forget about it.
They were referring to difference between hot vs cold water and it drying out your skin, not the effectiveness of cold vs hot water at sanitizing.
How do they know it's "remote" and not "working during a pandemic"?
You buy them at the local auto parts store and put them either in the car somewhere or on the bookshelf of other auto repair books, of course. I didn't think twice about spending 20% of the purchase cost of a vehicle on the rebuild manual for it back when I drove stuff that needed a lot more work. I drove some cheap cars.

As far as stuff like fridges... you don't need a fridge repairman, just someone who has worked on a variety of things. For a while, while I was doing laptop repair work, I didn't really need manuals for the bulk of the stuff I was taking apart because it was just a laptop. They all came apart in a handful of ways, and as long as you keep close track of where the screws came from and got them back where they went, it wasn't a big deal to get some random laptop apart.

If you can find a YouTube repair of your particular product, and the video is well done, OK, I can see value in that. My experience has been that it's usually a lot of mumbling, terrible light, and weird camera angles that I can't map to anything actually on the product I'm trying to repair, so it's generally not a good use of time vs just going and working on it. Shoving your cell phone kinda sorta in the engine bay, pointing it at some shadows, and "mmfffs the bolt... ffssssh" because it's windy out... eh? Or just a 45 minute "teardown" of a simple product that hasn't had any of the random futzing around and reading the manual out loud edited out.

Maybe we just fix different things.
You realize you aren't talking about the same sense of the word?
Just pick the video with a lot of upvotes that has a good title card and is early on in the search results.
My wife (a senior consultant, and director of medicine at a major Australian hospital) took her sabbatical at Stanford Medicine in part because of the elevated level of stage IV cancer presentation in the US.

Key quote: "these are cases we hardly ever get to see at home".

The financial disincentive to seek care is strong.
Frag or Die
Old school CS nostalgia.

Disclaimer: This has very little to do with programming.

But I suspect there are many OG gamers among us that will remember this viral video from 20 years ago with much fondness.
The actual study is paywalled, but you can view the main figure here: https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/094169...

I'm not sure "patients wait for Medicare" is necessarily the right interpretation.
Does is also have unassembled companions?
noisy signal is better than no signal, which in turn is better than manipulated signal. at least with this change they won't be deleting[0] dislikes anymore.

[0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
Myth or not it’s in the original Atari manual and hardly worthy of a downvote.
Pretty sure the rationale for Korea/Vietnam was exactly "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation", just targeted towards the USSR/communism
Wow so all that junk mail I get in the mail every day is dwarfing the co2 emissions of Bitcoin?
Pretty cool.
Banner isnt what i was expecting tho. I wish ratio/size was a little bit more flexible.
https://anon.sharehub.live/post/ckmy1ym1s001213mxua9uz245/Ca...
You are not paying, right? So you are the product. You are targeted with ads tailored to your viewing pattern; your data is what creates value.
Ever Given and Suez: Why Ships Keep Crashing
Yeah, slowly but surely YouTube is destroying itself. Which is very sad, because it's been an amazing resource. I'd love to see ByteDance do a YouTube competitor. (Or, dream of all dreams, see something distributed really take off.)
"Data driven" is frequently code for "we'll pick metrics that support what we want".
>The original Satoshi paper made his idea sound like it would be possible to implement as peer-to-peer^1 without third parties. All the implementations I have seen to date involve third parties.

Bitcoin sort of stopped being developed years ago and pretty much everything shifted over to Ethereum where the ethos of Bitcoin were further developed and most of the things people talked about in 2010-2013 were actually developed. For example, Uniswap is completely peer-to-peer and decentralized. Most of DeFi is. If you are at all interested in what is happening in this space it's worth taking a look at what exists and what is being developed.
(USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms).

Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
Yes, this is more evidence of the failure of the American health care system. If the US healthcare system really cared about outcomes, it would want people to be diagnosed earlier. It is clearly more economically efficient to treat malignant cancers earlier. We (Americans) all end up paying more with the perverse system we have.
So here's a question that I'm sure a good answer exists to: given that an untested safety mechanism is guaranteed not to work when you need it most, how are SCRAM systems tested?
But that's the point! Yours and others' belief that down voting is a mean to register dissent. Since dissent is orthogonal to quality down votes no longer indicate lack of quality. Thus the metric becomes meaningless. In fact, if Google and other tech companies were to continue using down votes to measure quality, the end result would be strengthening the majority's echo chamber.

Suppose there is a YouTube channel about how a minority in a certain country is discriminated against. Given what we know about discrimination, it is very unlikely for the majority to believe that it is discriminating this minority. Thus you have dissent and the possibility of hordes of angry down voters "brigading" that channel. These brigades may even be organized or supported by country in question because it doesn't like the negative views the channel is conveying.
Right, I agree with your premise.
In this particular case, the company is interested in more content production. Who are disincentivized by downvotes.
In the real world most encrypted communications is probably people using HTTPS.
I think the platform just realized that Harry Mack has been uploading videos there.
If the author thinks crypto is “predatory” now just wait until DAOs blend with military contractors
If you want a free speech platform you should advocate for a government funded competitor. You might think that the NSA would instantly prune comments but you'd be failing to see the 800 lbs gorilla which is the US GAO and FOIA requests that'd hamstring anything the intelligence branches tried to do (outside of, y'know, legitimate threats).
When you first become eligible for Medicare you get a special 'Introduction to Medicare' appointment with your doctor. It takes an hour or so, includes extra tests, and discussion of different topics. People might not be 'waiting for Medicare' but instead may simply mention things in this more detailed appointment, or get extra tests, that they wouldn't normally.
Oh, the irony.

https://iili.io/qkNFd7.png
I feel like it's unlikely for pack prices to continue to drop 21%/year. Tesla+Panasonic have gotten pretty good at reducing pack costs, and while Tesla's in-house cells could reduce costs significantly, IIRC, a 21%/year reduction in costs for a decade would be significantly less than the materials cost.
"I spent all this money on offices, better force the minions to sit in them"
The lunar day is 29.56... days long. Some months, they had 29 days. Some months, they had 30 days. But there's still that pesky .06 days that accumulates over time, pushing the calendar out of sync with the astronomical events. In our calendar, we add a leap day every four years to catch that "leakage". They would add a month occasionally, but they did it at random intervals, so sometimes the calendar would have drifted 5 days off the gregorian before they corrected it, and other times it was apparently up to 8 weeks drifted from gregorian time. So the amount of drift was not in lunar month chunks. It was in accumulated drifts of .06, that got corrected at random intervals.
Are you sure the elevated stress and lowered productivity are due to remote work, and not other environmental factors (i.e., a global pandemic, lockdown, etc.)?
No - I'm afraid you are mistaken: what Hitachi sold was a "massager" - they were "distraught" to discover it's salacious "alternative" uses as it harmed their brand. Hitachi only agreed to continue selling the product as a joint venture (IIRC) if they removed the Hitachi name from it. So it's rebranded as just the "Original Magic Wand" now - no Hitachi :)
> If your money starts losing value, do you A) put it under the mattress or B) trade it for things that you can either use now or that retain/grow their value in the future?

It depends on the situation. For example, if one lives paycheck to paycheck or close to that, then I don't see how they would not put a bit "under the mattress" (emergency fund) and spend the rest on basic needs. There is only so much food one can buy to store at home for future consumption. On the other hand, if income >> costs, that's a totally different story ...

> Sorry, I understand the confusion given I used the term 'salary'. I should have said something along the lines of 'value' or 'goods'. The split between workers and owners depends on the surrounding conditions.

No problem. Re: "depends on the surrounding conditions" - it is a very diplomatic way of avoiding touching the core of the income inequality issue.

> The point is that dollars are tokens that represent goods produced, at the time they were produced. Not how much energy or effort went into those goods.

Not sure I understand this point. It seems to be against one of the basic economic principles that I remember (price of goods = cost of production + margin / added value) - where cost of production implies exactly "how much energy or effort went into those goods". Perhaps, I'm dumb as rock or completely forgot Economics 101. :-) For example, if a TV model A costs $200 and model B costs $2000, it is not just because they "represent [different] goods produced", but because model B is much more expensive to produce and/or it has much more added value [real and/or perceived] than model A.
I don't get the point of likes and dislikes on YouTube. In more than a decade of use, I have only in the last year or two used the like button and from my TV. Views matter - not likes.
I don't follow. "Modern" in this usage obviously means contemporaneous with the article's publication date.
It would be interesting for someone to look into the value of the commercial real estate holdings of the big tech companies in any examination of why they are declaring the end of permanent remote work.
Agree, patients wait for proper medical insurance and care would be better.
Seeing a specialist at a decent hospital can cost you over a week's paycheck out of pocket just for an introductory 15 minute meet and greet.

It isn't so much as 'waiting' as having no other option/getting stuck in some system where you've got no viable way to really figure out the cause of your symptoms.

Not to mention the 55-65 age range seems to be particularly bad for for disposable income.
bitcoin is the worst form of currency except for all the others.
The nation’s hottest housing market? Surprise – it’s Fresno
Perhaps, but this is the last Google product I still use. If they break YouTube like they did search, chrome, cellphones, and email, I guess I am off to find something else which must hurt their bottom line eventually.
You don't have to, use GA with ads, if you go the "maximizing clicks" route. Yes, it's less accurate.
Very unlikely, the Android driver infrastructure is quite different from Linux.
This should be the follow up study. Are there higher rates of higher state cancer in America and do they correlate with access to health insurance?
...and they also vary across groups of humans. We are not all the same.

Each of us is a n=1 genetic experiment.
How much data is contained in the 500 genes of this cell?

I'm kinda curious the minimum number of bytes it takes to make a living cell.
Emo subculture is about hating people? Where on earth have you picked up this opinion? If anything, emo is about dealing with being hated.
I printed a page of text and then scanned it back in. I spent quite some time messing around with the resulting image and couldn't see any dots. My printer is an almost new, Canon color laser so I would've expected it to be spying on me.

Is there some software or a web site that will scan an image and decode the dots?
Companies have been testing this for ages. It's the holy grail to have remote work on par with in office.
This round was the first priced round and consolidated all previous fund raising (which were in SAFE).
This is typical anti-bitcoin rhetoric, it’s nothing new and not completely unfounded, but the author lacks any awareness of the true value of crypto currencies, makes no mention of proof of stake, and assumes that speculation somehow justifies outlawing trading because it’s now gambling.

A few points:
There are some interesting and somewhat out there justifications for the energy use, and there are a couple very simple ones:
1. Bitcoin emits less carbon than gold mining, and does the job of gold (as a store of value) to a much higher standard.
2. Proof of Stake could replace proof of work, eliminating any carbon emissions worth mentioning.

Bitcoin offers sound, secure, reliable money / store of value. The author elects not to even directly mention this because there is no good argument or replacement for this. If you say gold, read above.

The author believes he can just straw man serious bitcoiners (not the gamblers) into idealistic yet flawed cultists or something, when in reality the technology has no replacement, is greener than its competitor, and offers to the world, the service, and asset, of sound money.

The article appears in such bad faith (I’m willing to hear criticisms of crypto currencies, but only from those who demonstrate their ability to play with its basic mission statement and functionality; this article is pop-sci parroting) that I almost believe this is some kind of paid hit piece.
Comparison of likes to views works well enough. Actually, they don't even need likes, they can understand good and bad videos just by analysing how long viewers spent viewing the video.

Likes (and dislikes) are needed mostly for viewers who might want to feel helpful.
Nope.

The speakers and your ears are far more non-linear than any difference caused by changes of power cables.

"A fool and his money are soon parted." is an old proverb well worth keeping in mind.
I can understand where the confusion comes from, but I think it's a matter of context. I would never have thought that they would want to build a runtime that runs TS directly. The effort would just be insane.

Hence the implied step that TS needs to first be transpiled to JS before getting executed in the runtime was always in the back of my head and I'm guessing this is the way most people think as well.

And from a black-box perspective, whether TS first gets transpiled to JS or run directly doesn't make a difference. In that sense one could argue that it is a "TS runtime". This is a petty semantics-fight I don't want to get into though and I've probably already said too much :).

If you are interested in something that gets close to a TS runtime though, have a look at AssemblyScript [0]. It compiles to WASM and tries to keep most of the syntax of TS. Very interesting project imo.