skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Respectfully, I just can't understand what the exact argument is here. Are you and others saying that- because Facebook is huge & used by many Americans, it can't have rules of behavior on the site? 'Facebook is very popular, thus it's not allowed to moderate content'- try saying it out loud to yourself. Is that what you're saying? Asking in a non-snarky/good faith way- like what is the actual argument?

If you accept that Facebook, like every platform in Internet history has content moderation rules- then Trump violated them, hence his suspension. Here's my logic chain, I'm open to a critique:

1. Facebook has content moderation rules
2. Trump violated them by inciting a riot or insurrection
3. The penalty for said violation is a suspension

Where is the problem in the chain? That Facebook isn't allowed to moderate content, that inciting a riot isn't punishment-worthy (??), that the punishment is too harsh.... Where is the exact issue?
> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though.

I've seen this sentiment expressed before, but it's never seemed persuasive. Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.
We were told the same thing about the lab leak theory from: Social media companies, Mainstream media, and the government.

The reason for distrust is valid. We live in an age of rapidly increasing censorship and the CCPs growing reach of control in American discourse. Skepticism is becoming the default for very real reasons.
But that’s not what decides if cash is viable. If we had a huge mugging problem, we would call for better law enforcement, not less cash.
If you Facebook friend your work colleagues and introduce your wife then they already have easy access to what you like and who you're sleeping with, no?

Search history and medical info would be more concerning than that information, on average, I would guess.
Looks like it's still got a ways to go to be a true daily driver, especially in terms of a web browser, but it's certainly usable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOeOfBl3mbI
Is that actually true? Wouldn’t this imply you could launch a DOS attack against cloud providers just generating divisions by zero?
Google translating here - is it because plumpst means "fallen" and also sounds like the sound a phone might make when falling into a canal?
NY Times article on the same topic:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/p...
But that doesn't stop their abuse.

Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.

You're ever getting away.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
> Aliens being non-peaceful fails so many logic tests though.

Actually aliens being peaceful fails the logic test as evidenced by our experience with the only intelligent species we have encountered so far, humans.
> The large online platforms don't need to track you - you give them your data willingly.

Most people don't know the extent to which companies track them across the internet and their devices. It really would be better described as "stalking" given that there is a clear intent by most online platforms to be as stealthy as possible when it comes to their data collection activities.

> Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you, but because you keep posting things to it.

That's not at all true. People who have explicitly chosen to _not_ have a Facebook account still have their data sucked into the maws of Facebook's data collection systems. [1]

> Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an effective advertising profile that is decentralized and anonymized

Cookies cannot possibly be used to build up any sort of decentralized "advertising profile" across the internet - either you allow third-party cookies for tracking and the advertisers become the centralized data collectors or you don't and the cookies don't really provide any information that a website couldn't already collect (and which, critically, wouldn't be useful to produce an advertising profile for anything other than a single website).

> [..] which I think has some value.

Value for whom? It seems that you're very interested in talking about the value of data for those who collect it and are completely disregarding the value or cost to the people who are being tracked.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921092
Flexible Date Range Picker
I suspect the big part is putting "DNSStubListener=no" into the [Resolve] section of /etc/systemd/resolved.conf if you want to have something else listening on port 53.
"If you use Facebook we will collect and sell all your data"

"Okay, cool"
This is enlightening. The 1989 ransomware that had a PO Box in Panama is hilarious. Really? Panama?

Good point, thanks.

However, opaque ledgers may make it difficult to hunt them down (Zcash, monero) in the future.
Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook"

Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone
You can only think of him as a soldier giving his life to defend everyone elses.

Well, a draftee, involuntarily having it taken for the good of everyone else. Damn that's no better.

I don't want to enjoy benefits that were aquired by theft and murder.

I tried. There is no good here and no way to make it ok.
A terrestrial adversary could be prepping the battlefield. They supposedly submerge under water, so maybe they are just carry supplies close to our coasts or they are building something. They could also just be prepping a contingency plan that they don't plan to enact unless a war starts between the US and them.
They are hiring people with security clearances to work on the Govt. cloud. Unsurprisingly, many people who have a DoD security clearance work for the DoD, it's not a huge community.
That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd be on the green. I've written about this extensively:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though, because the odds are good that they do answer the question.
There are enough students who have their parent's money and don't think twice about spending it.
That is not what he is suggesting, as far as my understanding goes. Rather, that this is yet another iteration of "we have always been at war with Eurasia". And, do not conflate your perception of disinterest from the government with whatever classified research took place during this time, especially post WW2.
There's a whole culture in the defense industry and associated bureaucracies that pushes the idea of scaring the public. They justify it with a firm internal narrative that there are huge threats out there that only the defense industry/officials really understand, and anything they can do to increase readiness is therefore justified. It just so happens that these interests align with the monetary interests in that industry, and there's a big revolving door between industry/lobbyists/officials.

I had a Political Science professor in college who came from that school of IR thought who evangelized it, and then a couple of others who explicitly called it out and attacked it, which was shocking to me as a student. It feels like par for the course as a more jaded adult.
The US government was always pretty tight-lipped about UFOs until recently. FTA:

> In an unprecedented move, the US government is preparing to issue an unclassified report detailing what it knows about a series mysterious encounters with unidentified flying objects.
It's really, really weird that nobody ever talks about this (your first sentence).
Nothing killed it, it still exists, but it's being replaced by increasing automatic testing or (as you note) letting customers/users do it for us.

Automated testing is almost universally better, except that it misses out on the exploratory nature of manual testing. Many critical systems utilize automation + manual exploratory systems and convert discovered failures from manual testing into part of the regression test suite (which is increasingly moved towards automation over time).

And yes, the first two (users will report bugs or customers will test contract work) are definite signs of a lack of professionalism.

Notable: Manual tests are almost universally integration tests. They are not unit tests. The dogma in the 00s/10s was that unit tests were the best tests (fortunately this was not universally held and is dying down, unfortunately it's, in some circles, swinging the other way to oppose unit tests wholesale; baby with the bathwater). Unit tests are great tests, but they are not integration tests and it is the interaction between units where many issues arise. (This observation is not unique to software, it's true of most physical, electronic, and hybrid systems as well.) You need both kinds. Integration tests, manual ones especially, are expensive to execute and this discourages many companies/organizations from pursuing them even when they have a way to automate the regression test suite after the fact.
Recipe: Mango Juice – Mango Basil Mojito
Microsoft's Censorship of Search Results
I'm curious if tank man posts got flagged an unusual amount of times?
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This is a bit weird... The Reboot is sponsored by DFINITY, which is the company behind the Internet Computer and did a presentation at the World Economic Forum in 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw)

The WEF is 100% pro datamining the shit out of everyone, and AFAIK they only invite people who share their vision of the future. So, why is DFINITY making presentations for them while also sponsoring anti datamining journalism?

I'm not saying that "THIS IS WRONG!" I'm just confused as to what's going on here.
Faults for divide by zero are a terrible legacy thing, Arm etc do not do this, you test for zero if you want to, otherwise you get a value.
> Seems to me that the only inherently peaceful alien race would be the one that never had the evolutionary pressure to compete for resources - and that seems like an impossible occurrence.

Not only that, but the moment that peaceful species encounters a non-peaceful species it would be wiped out, as evidenced by numerous extinct, or in the verge of being extinct, species on planet Earth. So peaceful species are going to be short lived and may not last much, in Universe times, to have too much contact with other species.
^^^ Underrated comment of the day. Once I was going to write a short story from the perspective of a dog that lived with Daniel Dennet, but thought nobody would get it, which was the story.
It is often easier to reach for my calculator, calculator app, or the address bar, to do arithmetic, than:

echo "2 + 2" | bc -l
“Tank Man”
Starch breaks down into glucose, while sucrose is glucose + fructose. Refined fructose is uniquely harmful.
Mozilla licenses almost everything under the MPL, which seems to reduce interaction with other open source organizations. I wonder if it bothers them, or they're OK with it.
"The bonuses, meant to offset the salary cuts the management team took in 2020, were distributed while the company was calling for a bailout from Ottawa. The government agreed to the package on several strict terms, including guaranteed refunds for customers and a cap on executive pay.

But the terms of the deal do not apply retroactively. Moving forwards, under the bailout agreement, executive compensation at Air Canada must be capped at $1 million per year until all government loans are repaid."

The government did cap the salaries, I've not done any super deep research but from the articles I've read, I've not been able to figure out how this was allowed.. except this article that mentions that they're not applied retroactively, and that the payout was because the exec team went without salary. Not totally clear in the Canadian press how the whole thing actually panned out at the end of the day. (fwiw: I didn't post my original comment as an opinion on the situation, only that a similar conversation is happening in the Canadian press. :))

https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/06/01/air-canada-paid-....
How paranoid should I be of a browser plug-in that promises to track every interaction I make and provide that data for advertiser targeting?
Agreed, same for crypto miners IMO. These consequences are significantly more benign than if real criminals had gotten into the system. It's essentially a decentralized bug bounty program that every large company who connects to the internet has to opt in to.
Well, no one gets promoted/a raise by writing ‘and everything is actually fine’ right?

On the engineering side, similar more often than not. You get promoted by solving the ‘big problem’. The really enterprising (and ones you need to watch) often figure out how to make the big problem the one they are trying/well situated to solve - even if it isn’t really a problem.
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No, usually it’s polynomial. Radius squared, that is.
> has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we haven't found it.

We didn't know of any other sarbecoviruses that had furin cleavage sites, then we found them in bats in Thailand, then the goalposts moved to how this paricular furin cleavage site is weird.

Once a decade passes and we find animals with beta-coronviruses which have the same kinds of furin cleavage sites, I'm sure the goalposts will move again.
Do they love the shell or just piping small CLI tools? Because I’m fairly sure it is the latter, which can be easily implemented in anything.
I can't read past the paywall, but regarding the first photo (and the one I've seen the most), Kyle Hill makes a very thorough and compelling case for jet engine exhaust in IR, here: https://youtu.be/I_n1xpKBBcs?t=1074
It was interesting to see with a tradeshow in mid-march, where suddenly in last few weeks before it exhibitors started cancelling (starting with big Asian companies), some even just days before the event. (which still took place, but from what I've heard was quite empty)
No, because the non paired males eventually die.
> Unopinionated products have to cater for everyone though, and that creates bloat and complexity.

I don't think one has to lead to the other. Flexible/configurable software often also means extendable (and thus potentially smaller out of the box) software. If it's bloated from the start that's not because of a lack of opinions; in fact for me it makes the software more opinionated because it may come with a lot of stuff users don't need. For example Firefox is pretty flexible and extensible, you can even rearrange the UI, but it comes with things like Pocket that nobody asked for.

Imho programs shouldn't try to cater to everyone, but they should be flexible enough that they are able to if needed.
Don't get me wrong: I am baffled by some of the reports (especially, as you note, those that have multiple witnesses or multiple independent pieces of evidence).

But of course alien civilizations—or (non-human?) co-terrestrial civilizations—are such an extraordinary hypothesis that I do not see why they should be treated as more plausible than (as you note) something like shared delusions.

Let me expand upon that a bit. My (tongue in cheek) explanation is this:

Humans have an undiscovered facility for shared perceptual delusions and (seemingly deliberate) confabulation. That is to say, individuals with shared cultural contexts may respond to the same environmental triggers (weird reflections, social stressors, I don't know!) by hallucinating the same things. Moreover, upon experiencing such a hallucination, some subjects will confabulate corroboratory evidence, perhaps even (unconsciously) going so far as to tamper with radar recordings or (unconsciously) colluding with other "witnesses"—and individuals who engage in this confabulation have no memory or recollection of it later.

This is a totally wild explanation, and I don't actually believe it. But is it as plausible as alien civilizations? I sorta think so!
>I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely has value.

I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has
value.

>but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be collected.

Why ?
> Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity.

I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people.

It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve.

Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w284...
These threads are long, contentious, and often go in circles. To save time, I propose a scale:

1. It was definitely zoonotic, and suggestions otherwise are racist conspiracy theories.

2. While it's impossible to rule out a lab leak, I believe it's zoonotic unless confronted with hard evidence.

3. While I admit the possibility of a lab leak, I secretly am pretty sure it was spillover.

4. Both lab leak and spillover are plausible, and the best priors are past experience (dozens or more spillovers, probably one or two lab leaks).

5. Lab leak and spillover seem equally likely, and a lot of the behavior of the CCP, WHO, EcoHealth Alliance are suspicious.

6. It was almost certainly a lab leak, the CCP is covering it up.

7. Definitely at least a lab leak, probably an engineered bioweapon.

8. Kill Fauci, he was in on it.

This article is 3. The recent Vanity Fair article is 5. Most virologists I follow on Twitter are 2 or 3. As I say, you can save time in responding by just posting the number of where you are on this scale. Explaining why you think so won't add too much more information, it's a function of what sources you pay attention to and that can be pretty reliably inferred from the position on the scale.
Nah there is trash tons of trash at the bottom of the ocean. When James Cameron went to challenger deep they found plastic bags at the bottom.
Sensitive topic, so I feel the need to state that I am not trying to troll by saying this:

I do not see this argument as idiocy.

Many stores have signs out front stating, "If you enter this building, you accept that you are being filmed". Many are recording you before you even enter. They do not require explicit consent from people willfully choosing to enter.

Should we really assume that the client has not taken any responsibility when they willfully type in https://www.somewebsite.com/ and hit enter?

Since users can block cookies/javascript, or simply not visit websites they don't trust, I genuinely do not understand at which threshold of manual intervention we can finally conclude that a user has accepted responsibility - if their voluntary decision to visit does not count.

I get that companies sharing data and doing nefarious things with your personal information is not great, but I don't see how this does anything to help with that.
Unsurprising given DDG simply repackages Bing results
In the sense that previously one computer was running the software at a time, and now 1000 computers are running it because I copied it onto all of their disks/memory banks/CPUs.

I still control all 1000 computers, but I'm doing something I fundamentally cannot do with a single copy.

The question is a bit murky, not because it's unclear I'm making copies, but because some copying is fair use. For example to execute a program I need to copy it from the hard drive to ram, and (pieces of it) from the ram to the CPU. That's generally considered to be legal, despite being copying, approximately because it's necessary to use the program. The exact line here is not well defined.

(Also not a lawyer, just a nerd)
> On the flip side, they would be free to pursue their passions and discover themselves, be that in art or artisanal pickles.

You're very optimistic
You are neglecting a third possibility in that it was accidentally generated in lab conditions. The furin cleavage site is a large insert relative to its closest aligning viral genome and is consistent with adaptation to cell culture conditions. The situation would look like someone infecting cells in a dish with some starter virus and continually passaging the supernatant to cells in new dishes, to examine the evolutionary adaptations. This person could have accidentally synthesized SARS-COV-2, and using improper safety protocols, got it on themselves and then went out and infected someone else.