skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not less.

At issue here is a fundamental problem that humans have been struggling with since recorded history, who decides what's true?

When we have demonstrated bad actors at every level of discussion, from authoritative sources down to internet trolls - how do we identify truth, especially with all of it's nuance, without degeneration into a Ministry of Truth, and punishing dissent?

While I understand that the constant battle against misinformation and disinformation is exhausting, isn't that what you're signing up for by engaging in a medium that encourages discussion?

If you don't want discussion and contrasting viewpoints, perhaps you're better served by publishing a blog, or a book, or academic paper where discussion is much slower and involves published responses?

Edit: the irony of a comment like this being downvoted isn't lost on me. That's ok, I knew when I wrote it that it would be.
There's a concept called the Overton Window, which refers to a range of opinions that are mainstream-enough to be held without being considered a kook of some sort.

These are just methods of injecting fringe ideas into mainstream discourse to make it seem like 'normal' people think these things. A lot of this just functions via repetition, see also the 'Big Lie' technique, which has a history going back quite a bit further than last November.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Large-Scale Study on Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Representation Learning
I'd also support just showing a warning when the apparent URI and the actual URI differ. Though a tool to automatically pick the canonical URL from the page source would also be neat.
It’s also not as easily biasable.
If you have to manage 100s of devices, you prefer thin clients. As a user, you want control over your device and rich functionality.
Dumb clients usually give you dumb services.

I thought we have moved past thin clients and moved on to centrally managed software, either in the form of javascript web apps or as apps from an app store.
That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to be right. There are no points given out for merely participating.

This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can’t make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.
Was the web supported by ads before Google? I don't remember.

Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?

From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.

So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.
Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, any of the core devs at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, anyone who has studied blockchain and cryptographic currency systems for the past 10 years, etc. Keep the wool over your eyes.
Diagnoses are billing codes. They are not labels, identities, or personality traits. This reductionism is rampant, even amongst highly credentialed professionals. It is therefore my opinion that one is better served to investigate why they're using maladaptive coping strategies, learn new strategies, and demand that they be supported by the very community who allowed them to decay so far. (We can argue causation until the cows bones have fully composted, but that's a dead end.) Mind you support is like a crutch for someone with a broken leg. If you give someone with a broken leg a wheelchair and don't let them walk for two years their uninjured leg will atrophy causing another problem. Likewise, if left untreated a person's broken leg will not set correctly causing a cascade of problems until the damage is appropriately treated. Mental illnesses, barring: brain damage, disease, etc, are often times the result of a cohort of untreated wounds in a persons past that are difficult and increasingly expensive to heal with time, but it is our obligation to engage in whatever ways necessary so that when it us on the bench we can be supported. Any more specific examples I can give are likely to be far more controversial than what I've already said and I would prefer to stay on topic regarding the treatment of serious mental illnesses like MDD.
Things being paid from advertising, rather than from user's pocket, is also patronizing. When things are paid from user's pockets, it's the user who controls whether the expense is made, to whom and how much. If things are paid through ads, it is companies (and their management) that make the decisions, not their customers. I argue that paying from your own pocket is a more free system.

However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
> This is what I run into. But that's not exactly a dynamic language problem. It's more of a data-oriented programming (in the Clojure sense) problem.

Yes, all dynamic languages have this problem. I have transitioned to statically typed languages and it has been very peaceful so far :)
There's a difference between "I don't spend literally all of my time productively contributing to society" and "I never productively contribute to society".
> Yea, I'm sure the new CFO starts with 2 weeks vacation, too.

LOL

I would add that if the company has "unlimited vacation time" it's really important to press and find out how much time people actually take. I like to ask for averages or how much time <executive not doing the interview> has taken off in the last few years.

That'll tell you what the limits really are.
Sell your soul XD
Still cheaper than the Iraq and Afghan war though.
Fix HR and hiring committees first. The best usually don't get past these folks, who e.g. demand PDF resumes, job titles, work references and have no idea how to read beyond buzzwords or how to evaluate github profiles.

Once you get past the silly, it's usually easier.
Rejection of BLM and SJW ideals. Desire for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. Much of the world is much less left leaning than the united states. Not that all of the united states is left leaning overall, but a lot of very important institutions, such as universities, education, and traditional media are.
I find it useful as a way that anyone can contact me securely - especially when needing to discuss something with tech teams in other companies who might not be on Slack etc. I think it's actually a great product and it's a shame that Zoom don't seem to.
Okay, do you have an example of someone being hurt by tracking and data collection done by Facebook and Google?
The phrase "MAGA" became a marker of Trump affiliation. That in turn made it odious to people on the other side of the polarized political spectrum (few Americans have a problem with the literal idea of improving the USA, of course, but in human language signifiers can become associated with signifieds beyond their supposed literal meaning).

Then, when some people sympathetic to Trump internationally saw that MAGA hats were 1) a marker of the "Trump tribe", and 2) annoying to their perceived ideological opponents, they too took them up. Thus things like QAnon and MAGA spread memetically to some of the protests seen in the last few years in Europe.
I guess we will see, but I welcome the change. I'm glad someone is doing something to reel these social media giants in.

I'd like to see transparent moderation logs first and foremost.

These billion dollar companies are not immune to regulation just because they exist on the internet.

It's funny when you hear the "it's a private company they don't have to respect your 1A" then the same crowd comes by and says, "you can't force them to respect people's 1A, that violates the companies 1A!"

When did we start caring about corporation rights more than people's rights?
I would guess the anti-globalist sentiment of MAGA is shared by people throughout the world who prefer local control.
See I thought this was gonna be about the Church of the Walls from Attack on Titan.

https://attackontitan.fandom.com/wiki/Church_of_the_Walls
Netflix Drive: A file folder interface for Netflix Cloud Services
pg is one of the people introduced me to lisp and i think lisp is the greatest idea in computer science. so his ideas have some weight for me, but lately the disconnect is quite unbearable. he is again picking the wrong side in history.

will these supervillians ever stop? nothing less than world-domination is enough.

microsoft tried to own everything about computing, they largly succeeded. they even infiltrated schools and still every pc is sold with windows-preinstalled.

then came google/facebook/apple... and they all want to own the entire internet.

unity wants the entire gaming/gamedev/computer-graphics. i am sure there are schools out there have unity classes, just unbelievable. "unity-developer" is the norm in job titles now, and i have never once heard "photoshop-artist" in the title of a job description.

this particular case is no exception.

ok, most logical conclusion is i too am envious.
Nope. Not since they started storing people's private keys on their servers.

For me, that was the "they've jumped the shark" moment.
Take a drive in many US cities. There are many empty high-rises that are unlikely to be filled. Eventually, there's going to be a demolish or "stabilize in place" decision for lots of these places.

There's a big warehouse in the downtown of my city that's been abandoned for 30 years -- it was a refrigerated produce warehouse that had a built in train terminal. It will never be demolished unless someone with unlimited pockets like Federal government wants to build something there.
I could see some of what you're saying as well. Although I would argue that if people think it's dead-end job working on someone else's toy -- the company leaders aren't focused on winning. They're still going to attract new employees for the wrong reasons, or at least for reasons that wouldn't get me to want to work there.
Exactly. The tech is farcical (surely even a proponent of them can see that?) but that's not really Mighty's fault.

It's bad because their strongest viable business plays seem to all involve leveraging their access to people's browsers in not-so-nice ways.
I think 9to5 does a great job and few on twitter looking through every single detail of the released email in court with Epic vs Apple.

Those words of Steve might have been true back then. It is far from the truth today.

At least Apple no longer sees selling more devices as their primary motive. Remember when the App Store started, Steve thought it would be about the size of their iTunes Store.
By comparison, BP paid around $65 billion for the Deepwater Horizon cleanup, fines and claims [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bp-deepwaterhorizon-idUSK...
I would say net migration increases of unskilled and uneducated populations into developed nations is a common thread whether it affects a country directly/indirectly.
interesting question. Maybe because react mainly developed by facebook for facebook and they sorta let us use it?

maybe just the degree to which community participated in development.

maybe react today is where rails was 5-10 years ago in its life. give another 10 years assuming react is still massively used framework, it'll face similar issue. I don't know, interesting question.
There's no such thing as 'nudging' it into the sun. If you don't push hard enough, it will enter an orbit that coincides with earth's. And to push it hard enough you basically have to get it going away from earth at the speed earth orbits around the sun, which is quite fast.

Anything less, and it will be in an orbit that floats close to the sun then floats back up towards earth, more or less forever.
It sounds like you would be happier to see the next sentence get into greater detail about how targets ads impact privacy today. But the article does in fact do so (look at the paragraph that starts "This model has some major drawbacks..."), and the next paragraph you refer to ("Most products are a much better fit...") builds to that point by explaining why targeted ads exist at all.
it's not the same, but it's almost idiomatic to leave unfinished python code with "..." (the ellipsis object)

def foo(bar, baz):
...

is a valid (empty) python function
What's the spread of "quality" in the journals you review for? I would assume that there are still some organizations (say IEEE or SPIE in my field) where the reputation counts for something.
Cinder is fully compatible with the CPython's C-API
>> plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there)

Sh, it's OK, everyone does it, you are not alone :P
>You restated the above commenter's cost from $10/month to $10/year for some reason.

fyi... That was my fault because I later edited it without realizing others had quickly quoted it. I made a typo "$10/year" which was clearly a mistake because no mainstream service for videos/music/books charges 84 cents a month.
> the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.

I think you are being overly pessimistic by several orders of magnitude.
I'm not an expert on web fonts etc, but if they want the site to look "native" on each platform and to use whatever the computer works best with, why can't they just use `sans-serif` and `monospace`?

It's my (limited) understanding that that allows it to use the browser default.
It could be a placebo, or Apple's implementation (I don't use a mac at night to judge) but the Windows and ChromeOS implementations seem to work for me. It doesn't improve sleep quality so much as helps me wind down at night and actually get to bed.

I can't say it helps eyestrain for me, either. The only effect I get is that sleepy time feeling comes in smoothly and naturally.
The second paragraph begins with how much the author gives to charity. So I'm assuming that the author is very aware about ethic questions, and the whole piece is about painting the whole privacy intruding industry that dominates the entire world in pinkish colors.
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No.

I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free.

If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time
Not all relationships have to be transactional, in fact the best ones are not :)
> Any remedy he and his colleagues come up with will be of keen interest to Japan, which is coping with the aftermath of its own nuclear disaster 10 years ago at Fukushima

I can't believe Fukushima was 10 years ago already. It feels like it was just last year.
I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people.

No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.
For some manufacturers it matters more than others. Sony doesn't support their cameras much after launch. They could theoretically update some color science (something that does matter) or add some minor features, but I've never updated my A6100 and I don't think there's any updates available anyway. To contrast, part of Fujifilm's market value is in their "film simulations" which are effectively more advanced LUTs that (mostly) attempt to mimic different film stocks, and Fujifilm has been known to have good long-term support for bringing new features (including film simulations) to older cameras through firmware updates. For example, the Fujifilm X-Pro2, released in 2016, received a firmware update in September of 2020. It only optimized performance for a newer lens and fixed some bugs, but the fact it got anything at all 4 years after launch does not appear to be the norm.
I highly recommend this video from Levin. It was my introduction to his work.

What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
The West has a deep obligation to end the pandemic globally, but it also has every right to end the pandemic at home first. Israel, the US, and the UK are acting like they're at war against the pandemic, and finally, they're winning.
Yes, just use C with asan, msan, valgrind and frama-c. Why invest in types?
Hey, if your boat is that close to you, skip the WiFi and send the daily report over marine VHF.

In fact, if you decouple the delivery method from the report generation, you can have have it running even while under sail and do periodic data collection and logging. If you get a Marine SSB radio, you could even collect the data while crossing an ocean!
I'm not sure if it's a possibility for you but you can hire internationally if you are operating remote. You can find cheap, great talent from many places especially if you are paying in USD. For like 40k you can hire entire competent teams in Poland for example.
Wasn’t that always optional?
Google Wants to Make Everyone Use Two Factor Authentication
What alternatives would you suggest? What are you willing to bet that they will stand the test of time without also becoming overused icons of language? "Reached out" at least has a warm diplomatic connotation so I personally don't mind it at all.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-laser-...
Yes, this is a seemingly never-ending cycle.

1. Software is too heavy, let's push it on the server
2. Dumb client gets faster
3. Servers cost money, let's use the unused CPU cycles on the client
4. Bloatware happens, go back to 1.
Last time I checked, all the abilities for directly manipulating JS reference types in WASM had yet to even be deployed outside of developer trials. So there’s a much simpler solution that (a) doesn’t depend on “just” statically analyzing the binary and (b) doesn’t use features that most browsers don’t support. Just expose precisely the Firebase or whatever functionality you wish to through normal WASM imports. No overhead of checking the file for safety at all (beyond the built-in WASM validation and translation of course). And binding the functions for e.g. WebGL directly with a lookup table for passed in object values is going to perform as well as anything else that is actually supported today (and it’s what game engines that support WASM currently use).
> How will ad bidding work with FLoC?

I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
This is where I'm at as well. I set myself up when friends were setting themselves up, but never really used it for anything. I published my proofs, but as far as I can tell they didn't do anything for me.

Seems like the new PGP key signing party.
> Unknown but remote risks with any vaccine are really quite substantially less dangerous

How the hell can you say anything with confidence about an "unknown risk"? It's unknown.
Shorter!

<a href download>Download this page</a>

(Explanation: href is equivalent to href="", and an empty string is a valid URL string, a relative URL with no scheme, no host, zero path segments, no query string and no fragment. # is a valid URL string representing the same URL, but with an empty fragment (rather than no fragment).

URLs are resolved relative to what the HTML spec calls the document base URL, and relative URL resolution of an empty string against that will yield that base URL sans fragment, just as resolving # will yield that base URL with an empty fragment.

Note also that you can’t just omit the href attribute, or else it won’t be a link.

Also note that a <base href=…> element will affect the document base URL and is thus likely to make both of these links do the wrong thing.)
And animal husbandry!
You're begging the question. Are they a net good? Do they make us prosperous? Do they create jobs, etc?

Because there's a strong case to be made that they:

- exploit the credulous, mentally-deficient and emotionally unstable

- carry significant externalities in the form of personal data collection & malware

- contribute to psychological distress (anxiety, degraded sense of self-worth, poor body image, etc)

- cause financial distress by encouraging unnecessary spending

- act as a vector for selling harmful products (tobacco, predatory loans, etc.)

etc.

If you want to take the consequentialist approach, you have to contend with these questions as well. You'll also have to admit that the net balance is unclear at best.
I'm not sure what this kind of cynicism actually gets for you.

If you approach any job ad with the assumption that whenever they try to put a positive spin on the working environment they offer, they really mean they'll manipulate your labor to squeeze out productivity at the cost of your sanity...

... why would you work for anyone?
"I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give."

It makes me sick to read this garbage.

This charity bullshit is what too many rich people hide behind to rationalize the crap they do to humanity.

Bezos and Gates destroyed so much good on their way up, they will never be able to buy themselves out with charity.

Same goes for the author of that article. It's nice that they want to help people in need, but doing so by shitting on the rest of humanity certainly isn't the best way to do this.
This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue how much work it would be due to my own naïveté. Indeed, we broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand, it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and decision making.
As evidence against the idea that people left to their own devices will not work to the benefit of society, I present all progress in human history. At no point was there something other than a human leading governments or industries.

The real question is, how many of these driven people do we actually need, and what are the proper ways to let work with the other people.
I love the fact that a large portion of medicine is basically debugging and reverse engineering as a profession.

It seems to be a good time in the debugging of these complex pathways as there's another, related avenue of signal manipulation research that may lead to scar-less tissue healing (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6540/eaba2374)
He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts his money where his mouth is.
So what would you consider a reliable source? How much time are you willing to put into evaluating your source?

Pretty much anything on the internet is written by random people, all of whom could be great authorities on the subject or complete crackpots.

A couple more sources on the Myth of the Flat Earth, written by random people on the internet and found by a google search:

[0] : https://www.discovery.org/v/the-flat-earth-myth/

[1] : https://jameshannam.com/flatearth.htm

[2] : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003172170708800...

[3] : https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2012/12/20/why-did-so-many-peop...