skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only programmer who finds Stack Overflow to be highly overrated? I used it recently for the first time in several years as I was learning a new technology, and the most valuable answers should have just been in the documentation (or maybe they were in the documentation but Stack Overflow covered up the results.) But the majority of the time I find the documentation just significantly better and give up on SO.

To say nothing about how outdated some of the results are. I tried exactly what Joel suggested. I typed "Rich Text Editor" and searched stackoverflow.com. All top three results were at least a decade old (okay, the youngest was like 9 years 7 months, but I'm going to round it up). They were closed, jut clogging up search results with deprecated answers.

In the time before Stack Overflow, I agree there were many good sources online. I also agree that the printed PDFs of sources that some people passed off as books were horrible. But I do remember a lot of very good books at Barnes and Noble.
Ironically the biggest problem I have today is that a lot of Q/As on SO are old, so it's hard to know if the answer I found is still canonical or if there's a better/different way to do the same thing, and I didn't perform the right incantations into google to find my answer.
"BSD forks" but for phones and with Department of Commerce overtones.
Lawmakers have dealt with this problem for a long time. It’s well solved.

If they wanted to prevent this kind of behavior there are two straightforward approaches:

- make it also illegal for the consulting company to pay a ransom.

- attach Strict Liability to any ransom payment, even if made through an intermediary. The executives quoted above from the paying company could still face criminal liability for such a payment disguised with plausible deniability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability
That's true, but most people people consider mathematical truths to be actual truths, and this is backed by the predictive power of mathematical models.

You can doubt the predictive power of math itself, but I have yet to see a clear example where rigorous math deviates from nature.

The fact that effects seem to follow causes naturally leads to the idea that there is a language which you can use to symbolically represent the process by which the universe evolves in time and space. The attempt to realize that language is what we call "math."

My point is only that the idea of the logos is not at all dissimilar from that, and the idea that someone who is intensely interested in logic and mathematics would also be interested in theology is only natural to me.
This reporting is so strange...

> Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.

I'm not sure I could sell SO any worse if I tried. It spends more time describing a niche audience than the actual product ("a website used by developers"). Wow. Contrast with how they word the description of Prosus:

> Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus’ biggest acquisitions.

There's several superlatives you could use for SO, but it's more important to have a hedged form of "most valuable" for the investor I guess.

Or is the reporter just simply uninformed? I don't get it.
I think the tough part is you can't really ban failing to think in the presence of an algorithm. People see an algorithm produce a result and often assign far too much confidence to it.

"The satnav directions say to turn onto this pier."

"The model says this house is worth 200k less than the ones in the whiter neighborhood a quarter mile away."

"The system recommends the patient have 40% allocated home health care hours per week going forward."

"The algorithm says this grainy footage of someone far away from the camera in the dark and the rain is X."

If you put humans in the loop informed by an algorithm making judgements, the human will often defer to the algorithm. Does the algorithm give an output that indicates its uncertainty? Based on what model? How equipped is the human to consider that?
At least I'm not being held hostage, but PayPal has just had their last interaction with me.

After few sales of an un-marketed old product for most of the pandemic, someone tracked me down and wanted to purchase. Agreed on options and I said I'd have an invoice out in minutes.

Should be easy, right? Login to PayPal, fill out invoice info, hit [Send] . . . . Nope, something wrong, contact support. Phone w/half-hour+ wait times, support ppl 'cant hear' and line drops, repeat, send email, both put me off, took a bit of info and said a specialist would get back to me quickly. Yeah, right.

While I was waiting, I apologized to my customer and checked out alternatives. I'd worked with Stripe on a previous project, and they now have manual invoices (i.e., not only code-generated from website=>API).

Signed up, got authenticated, setup invoicing, sent invoice, got paid, and the money is in my account, and the product packaged and on the loading dock -- all within an hour or so.

More importantly, Stripe did a setup and execution from scratch in less time than I squandered even getting to initial PayPal help, and more than an order of magnitude faster than PayPal even began to send a useful answer my issue.

Done with PayPal - strongly recommend not using them -- and never store money there.
What Sarah Palin thought was a thing for about 6 months after that election and then the media found something that trended better.
Just like Klauss Schwab from the World Economic Forum says the "cyber pandemic" is coming.

First they test the idea at Cyber Polygon (similar to event 201 which simulated a virus pandemic just before the fake "cov1d" outbreak)

https://cyberpolygon.com/

And then they will just do it. Problem is, just like cov1d - IT'S ALL FAKE
You can set some flags in about:config to make the UI more compact:

browser.proton.enabled to false
browser.uidensity to 1
Petros/Petrus jokes in the bible?
> "save file" is greyed out when you download a file, requires an extra click

Always thought that was a security thing, so you can’t be tricked to download a file you may not want.

Separately, I do wish FF had “Save As” for downloads. Right Click and “Save Link As” is not compatible with all downloads.
Ellie Kemper and Twitter’s Two Minutes Hate
Yeah I read this the first time around.

My point was to explain why a trade tool's value is determined by its ability to trade with it, and demonstrate why legality of the currency itself matters.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand the concept of currency in the first place. Something being rare is not sufficient for it to have trade value.
Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine.

If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong.

> Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?

The box is comparing a source image to an image with a name attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.
I do wonder if the “check for win condition after every X number of frames” is for performance reasons.

Since I believe it’s every 21 frames that means you could perform 20 other functions dispersed across the 20 other frames, but if the system doesn’t need to do anything in that time then I don’t know why you wouldn’t just check every frame.
Aside from the branding and history problems here, actually kind of surprising its been this long before a mainstream brand came up with a "vetted" crypto miner. Interesting.

Press release is extremely vague, but I read this to be they have implemented their own eth mining client to set up their own pool? Normally miners and pools take a small cut, there is no mention of that here. Surely they are going to do the same? Are they going to cover their own payout transactions, or charge end users?

Its possible this could actually be a bit compelling if they're not taking a cut, although way too late to the party, and ironically their reputation is starting out far worse than anonymously developed miners on popular pools.
Ofcourse that's true, but no-one is (or at least should be) eating multiple kilos of bananas, coffee and chocolate. They are not a staple food like meat and potatoes.

All I am trying to say is that in the total carbon footprint of a person, they account for a miniscule part of the whole, and that things like a well insulated house, transport, etc. will be vastly more important
In my experience, the lifecycle is more like:

* Person in the business area implements RPA. Business area is happy.

* Person who implemented RPA moves on to greener pastures.

* RPA breaks, business area calls IT.

* IT is horrified at the unsupportable mess that's just been dropped in their laps.
Good to know - so I can opt out of it ASAP.
Does anyone know something similar for Android Mac pair with low latency?
The lessons you learn from using Rack are lessons about modular synthesis, not Eurorack. These are valuable lessons, and because Eurorack is also a modular synthesis environment, most of those lessons will carry over to a hardware environment. The same lessons will also help when using an older pre-eurorack hardware modular (e.g. Moog or Buchla) or a different software modular environment (e.g. Reaktor).

I don't think that it is accurate to call Rack an emulation of the hardware. Rack itself doesn't emulate anything at all. Some of the modules emulate specific hardware modules. Many do not. There's also no actual voltage in Rack, just a nomenclature consensus on "1V/Octave", despite there being no volts anywhere.

ps. I love Rack.
At least ban speed cameras! I think we can all agree on that. Also, all those cameras that detect when you make illegal turns and send you nasty fines through the post.
I disagree, but you still make good points, which I appreciate. And I apologize for the "imagination" remark: not only was it not necessary, it's the type of comment very likely to result in significantly less productive conversation.

Usually I am hyper careful in how I address solely the merits of an argument rather than an emotional response or ad hominem comment. I'll say-- not as an excuse, but an explanation that does not excuse the comment-- the fact that I was winding down after working without sleep into the mid a.m. hours, and my self-reflection was clearly lacking. I'll do better, and again I am sorry for what I said.
Do you have evidence for this claim? I'm almost certain it's no longer true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27355269
I wonder what Tencent will do with all of the data
Ransomware attacks against the United States should be met with covert assassinations against these hacking groups on foreign soil.

Enough of this insanity - these are acts of war, and those responsible should be dealt with through covert, proportional military strikes.
It is not a belief that there is a natural order in society. It is a belief that even if you are starting at 0 you can still reap the rewards of your own hard work. Starting from 0 does mean you are less likely to end up a billionaire. But, you can build your personal wealth and pass it on to make your "familial starting point" higher the next generation.

You are arguing that all these things are in the way of equal opportunity. I am arguing that they are issues on their own. Equal opportunity already exists.

High medical cost is an economic issue that is exacerbated by social policy. Insurance requirements and hidden medical care price both played into climbing medical care cost. Insurance companies and medical providers do not care about the high cost as both benefit from higher cost. There is no market feedback from the actual receivers of services.
But if this study is to be believed, it shows that many of these viral storms could very well be inauthentic or non-organic. In other words, they are not naturally occurring. They only rise to people's consciousness out of nefarious intent. Take out the algorithm and you might have more sensible trending topics.
What are you looking up that you get "whys"? I consider myself lucky if SO returns "here's the name of the library function you assumed existed that does what you want."
Operation Condor is a good starting point for some truly horrific US involvement in torture, terrorism, and targeted killing
Citation: Louis Farrakhan
> The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces.

That's a limiting aspect of the physical world less light back = less details. Flagging footage for manual review doesn't need to be bias free just the end component that actually effects the person in the video.

Yelling fire in a crowded theater is legal.....

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
why would i want to make it impossible for government to monitor people ?

government monitoring people by itself is not a problem,
government monitoring people to harm people is the problem.

What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.
Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users.

Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.
> a note was placed on my account to never withhold funds on that account ever again

Did PayPal just tell you this or did you find out another way?
I know where you're coming from, but if the ROI is there, it doesn't matter if the first iteration is fragile.
Just make sure your monitoring and support are rock solid. If the RPA stumbles, someone needs to know right away, and they need to be there to catch it. And it should never be designed in a way that it could cause critical issues in the meantime.

I would add, RPA isn't as fragile as its reputation sometimes suggests anyway. Sure, using it on a top-500 site is going to be a problem because of frequent UI changes. But we've successfully used it on systems in less "move fast and break things" industries that have been there twenty years, and they're going strong.
This is great!
As a data scientist though, we should go farther and ban using ML anywhere in policing or the justice system. It just has no place in a system that's supposed to presume innocence.
Thanks again for the detail!

> Careful, don't get abused by the crypto community; there has been some more incidents lately where miners abuse CI systems.

Will do! I’ll have to do some detection of the workloads. I know other platforms are fighting this as well.
This is actually hilarious if you read the article.

They created a problem of their antivirus software flagging crypto miners, and instead of fixing that, they made their own crypto miner that is exempt from their flagging and said "see look, now its simpler and you don't have to disable your antivirus!"

And then they said its more secure and even simpler because all your crypto and keys get stored in the cloud, so you keep your crypto even if your harddrive/storage crashes.

Server side crypto hack incoming in..... three... two....

(double facepalm)
It's Italian car design history. But it's really just a bunch of confusing bubbles that makes me feel slightly dizzy. Not so dissimilar to some of the cars actually!
The lack of understanding of the downfalls and conflicts with facial recognition with justice system and this post is every reason why it shouldn’t be near the justice system.
So downvote the contributions, then -- but you can't do that if they can't be made in the first place! Read-only site for me too.

Then again, same stupid "earn points before you can post" system here on HN too.
Emails Show Fauci Ignored Warnings About China and Lab Leak
https://archive.is/Mrybd
it's about security and convenience.....it's a tradeoff so it's impossible to achieve both perfectly.

typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss of it in another.

example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that makes sense.
I mean, FISA warrants had (have?) a 99+% approval rate despite many applications having serious deficiencies.

Utah’s e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds.

Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence as shaky as a single anonymous tip.

The problem (at least in my opinion) isn’t that facial recognition itself is inherently evil, it’s that:

a) There are no standards around the algorithms themselves in terms of reliability. Worse still, this can inadvertently lead to serious racial bias.

b) It can launder lousy evidence (this person looks vaguely like this grainy photo) into solid scientific evidence (the algorithm says it’s a 99.5% match!) providing justification for all sorts of warrants and raids on even flimsier ground.

c) It creates lousy incentives in favour of creating a surveillance state. The police already have out-of-control hardware budgets, and many don’t like the idea of that budget being used to monitor and record people at all times they’re in public.

If we had better police and court systems and better privacy law this might not have been necessary - but we live in the world we live in so I can see why this county would do this.
But with all the smartphones around, someone can get the officer's badge number hopefully while they're beating you.
A product failed, blame the product owner (designer, maker, etc..)

Why are you refusing to blame the product owner

D is not a good language, it really is not, it doesn't offer any compelling advantage to justify accepting its flaw

Or simply put, its a bad product
A bad product doesnt have to be trash, just enough bad design issue to make it bad
I would strongly recommend new developers not to touch it
there are far better option

Say it as it is, its simple, its the truth

Its functional, people use it, but its bad
C++ is also bad, but its so overwhelmingly popular that you might want to learn it
D is bad, and is unpopular
You mean the rampant hate speech and misinformation enabled by 1A?
The executive branch using a crises to seize power is dubious. In the US the legislative branch has the authority to declare war, make laws, create, and direct agencies. Power is delegated to the President by congress (a progressively more common occurrence)
The backstory seems to be that WA state had succumbed to lobbying from Microsoft and had passed a law allowing facial recognition, with limits, in 2020.1,2,3 The OP, OTOH, refers to an new ordinance that only applies to one county. Statewide, it appears the rules are more lax.

Note that other states had already limited the use of facial recognition, by law enforcement, before California or Washington, e.g., NH in 2013 and OR in 2017.4,5

1
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-wants-rules-facial-rec...

2
https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-state-oks-facial-rec...

3
https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/blog/2020/03/12/house-and-sena...

4
http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/VII/105-D/105-D-2.h...

5
https://law.justia.com/codes/oregon/2017/volume-04/chapter-1...

I would bet Microsoft is lobbying in many states regarding facial recognition and privacy laws to try to get the laws they want. The news will report that they are proponents of passing laws governing these issues, but the point is that they want to shape how the laws are written to benefit Microsoft. I can find citations if anyone doubts this is happening.
if I may be so bold ( and presumptuous my suggestion is of any value) I wondered if your friend would like the risk and structured securities aspects of actuarial catastrophe risk markets. This pretty much has everything in it, from chaos theory to the statistics of the cadence of liabilities upon the different kinds of financial engineering structure that are used to distribute * the liability and fund the most difficult to reinsure policies in the capital markets.

edit : * and package, according to a tremendous variety of fiscal requirements and risk appetites. And naturally covering the most extreme conditions liability payments is historically a fascinating insight into how we developed our world across and binding together such tenuous links.
Love that example. Glad I do not spend money recklessly.
> What's something that corporate IT is obsessed with? Making sure the business isn't creating shadow IT and developing enterprise applications.

Though with Power Apps and Power BI all of that starts showing up on IT's dashboards (Azure Portal; Microsoft 365). Microsoft hasn't been great about messaging that, but unlike hidden Excel files in random network shares or VB+Access apps in PCs in cupboards, that "amazing CI/CD tool for enterprise applications" also means that it can't just live in the shadows and will get seen by IT.

If anything, I've seen "citizen developers" turn away from Power BI/Power Apps precisely because their M365/Azure admins are too micro-managing to use the tools for what they were intended for and such people just go back to that Excel+VBA macros on a network share in a broom closet.

Which yes, gets back to Microsoft is trying too hard to meet everyone's use case and in forcing Power BI/Power Apps into M365/Azure they've trapped out some of the "I just need to get stuff done" "citizen devs" because some IT departments are so scared of shadows that they are preemptively blocking one of the tools they could use to keep an eye on it better. It's a lovely irony.
Oh, me too. I wrote a whole rant and erased it before submitting the comment because I judged it to be unhelpful.
Foreign entities seek to use info on civilians for malicious targeting ops. This is an example of why the OPM hack[1] was so devastating.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...
Why would they -- SX, that is -- need so many different sites?
I agree. It's hard to understand how this is different than using a computer to detect, for example, credit card fraud. Both pour through tons of private data (typically using algorithms that don't make sense to a layperson -- or maybe even to experts since they likely use some DNNs) to determine is something problematic may have occurred. Both technologies can be used for nefarious purposes, but both can have safeguards that minimize the likelihood and impact of these purposes.

I'm way more scared of guns than I am of facial recognition and as a country we will never ban guns.
I kept waiting for the punchline but it just kept digging in the same vein. I'm not sure what else there is to gain from the text beyond the core gimmick.
I wonder if this will lead to lawsuits due to pricing discrepancies between insured and uninsured pricing. There's no legitimate reason to charge the uninsured more, but hospitals do it routinely.