skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> then that person has not in any meaningful way been censored by the government

Censorship is censorship even when it is not done by the government. I am not sure what point you’re making here. Leaving that aside, I would say this is actually also, in part, an action by the government. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about this (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...) but the summary is that private companies seeking favor with the current administration are incentivized to take actions that grant the sitting government power, in order to avoid undesired scrutiny or legislative action.

> This is not the poster case for trying to prove tech has too much power.

It absolutely is. There is no reason to take an action like this unless there is power in that action. There’s no negative harm to Twitter in terms of user retention or advertiser attractiveness from having Rep Greene stay on their platform. The reason Twitter’s biased employees and leaders are taking such actions is because they know it will meaningfully impact Rep Greene’s ability to be heard, which favors their politics and ideology. They have that power because Twitter, like most of big tech, is too big and is too shielded from competition due to network effects. Twitter is a telecom utility service, nothing more. It needs to be regulated just like we regulate power utilities or telecom companies.

> There's a long list of marginalized people suspended for no good reason who don't get to whine about it on C-SPAN or through their press office.

Ah yes, everyone who is unjustly censored by a private cabal of hyper-powerful tech companies is “whining”. You know full well that alternate channels don’t have the same visibility or reach, so this is a facile argument, even leaving aside your pejorative framing of those who are against censorship.
Yeah, I've read that too, but I have no idea which is more frequent. I'd assume the tainted drugs are more frequent, just because getting tainted product is more frequent than getting clean and relapsing, but I don't know.

I'll definitely recommend LSD or mushrooms, though. They are lots of fun.
Show HN: A an R7RS Scheme Implementation in WebAssembly
In an iterated game, the counter-measures described look like a 'firehose of falsehood' too. This is an under-appreciated fact and it is very much like what happens in a physical conflict. If you walk in late, all you see are two people throwing punches. If you get them to stop, both will try to convince you that the other started it.

The wikipedia article's use of the word 'false' and seeing this as a tactic of just one side in several examples is both concerning and suspicious.
Yes. The precedent was set when they did it for Gab. And Apple and Google are private companies that can ban an app for any reason they want, right?
the audience will move if necessary.

Open protocols should be the default. We have W3C recommendations that make the federated social web possible.
And Yandex outperforms them both.
> Deterministic or not - your experience of free will / anguish over choice does not change.

I agree.
Been a homeowner for 10+ years and it never happened to me either. I only see insurance people when I have a claim to evaluate the cost.
I'm programming in Lisp (Chez Scheme) now.

I've been a serious Lisp programmer (recreationally and sometimes professionally) for around 10 years and I have programmed in Common Lisp, Scheme, my own weird dialects, Emacs Lisp, etc.

At this point I feel like almost everything written about Lisp is silly. Taken as a language family as a whole, there isn't much that separates Lisp from most of the other languages that are out there _except_ syntax-transformations or macros which, frankly, most people should never use.

For me, the best thing about Lisp is the regularity of the syntax. What I like least about almost all other programming languages is all the useless syntactic doodads and wingdings. The brackets, the indentation sensitive stuff, the unneeded complexity that languages insist on associating with what is and must be the denotation of a tree, in the end.

The other great thing about the language is that you must use `let` or `lambda` to introduce variable bindings and their scope is, therefore, always perfectly clear.

Despite these niceties, Lisp isn't going to make you into a super programmer. It won't really help you solve hard problems. It might help you quickly solve easy problems, but in the end, most of the job of a software engineer is grappling with conceptual problems with which Lisp is only sort of helpful.

As long as I'm holding forth, I will say that I enjoy programming in Scheme _much_ more than I enjoy Common Lisp, which feels incredibly, uselessly, and old-fashionedly complex with all sorts of weird corners to stub your toes on.
That's fair. I understand that in the ideal world, it would be "can't." I guess my concern is that the wording kind of hand waves away any potential security issues, when people interested in this tech should absolutely be made aware of them.
No, the article isn't talking about sensitivity. We don't actually know what the sensitivity is from the data the article gives us. We are told that lots of people were screened and a small number had a positive result, of which a proportion were actually positive. You can't calculate sensitivity from that because you don't know how many actually positive cases were missed.

This article is talking about precision, which is the proportion of positive results that are true. And it's okay for precision to be awful, especially when the condition is so rare. But it's only okay if the result is communicated alongside a statement saying what the precision is, which it seems these were not.
Some American places have peculiar pronunciation, especially if you're not from around there: Illinois, Arkansas, Spokane, Raleigh, and my absolute favorite Bexar County in Texas.
When I say implemented in WebAssembly, I mean that I wrote it in WebAssembly Text format, not in another language and compiled to WebAssembly. Because the text format is extremely unfriendly, I did need to write a simple macro language on top of the text format.
You are not alone! This is completely unclear: the next guy reading your code will definitely "fix" the halting condition.
I'd either handle i == 0 outside of the loop, or use something like:

for (size_t j = size; j > 0; --j) {
size_t i = j - 1;
// etc.

Or even:

for (size_t j = 0; j <= size; ++j) {
size_t i = size - j;
// etc.
It’s not an easier interface. It’s much easier to write kernel modules than to mess around with eBPF.
Curious to hear: what are some rising Google competitors that try to do a better job?
Why 435?
At-home molecular test for Covid
Why stop there? There's also Indian English, International English, Singaporean English, Scottish English, Australian English, African English ... and that's just the standardised ones.
Well put. I appreciate your clarifications.
I guess, but I'm not really looking to get rid of it because I'm addicted or anything like that, I just want it gone. It's my account, it should be my option.
The 72% figure was a computer prediction somehow gone wrong, I don't know the details of what went wrong.

However, it's obvious Omicron is absolutely exploding--the testing system is completely swamped at this point so we don't know the real rate. That's enough to say that by now the 72% likely is right.
That’s probably not a bad substitution for the average person, but a bad one for a precise vocabulary.

I get the feeling though, that the need to compensate for mobile misspelling means a dumbing down of precise vocabulary.
"They Stole a Million", "the Clou!" (1994), and "The Sting!" (2001) are all in the same related series, in fact. So I suggest playing those sequels first.
I think the roads would be well served by getting rid of cars - it would obviously cut congestion massively. You would probably have to run a lot of buses in the transition period, but my guess is that cars degrade the experience of cyclists and pedestrians - without cars, more people would cycle and walk.

At the end of the day, radical change is necessary. We are facing catastrophic climate change. Cutting back (or indeed getting rid of) cars is one of the more painless things you can do in many cities. This is not like a legacy project, where it ultimately still delivers a service to customers in a buggy-but-functional manner. This is a runaway locomotive that absolutely has to be stopped somehow, and the challenge is to stop it in the least painful way possible.
Note that the examples in the "cdr" section are incorrect.

(cdr '(x a))
; does not return a, it returns (a)

(cdr '((x a) y))
; does not return y, it returns (y)

(cdr '((x a) (y b)))
; does not return (y b), it returns ((y b))
Interestingly enough, over 40% of all COVID deaths are diabetics. - https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/diabetics-make-up-40-of-covid-...
I have always found it a bit immature that English or American philosophers shy away from pronouncing the name of Immanuel Kant correctly.
+1 for Beat Saber. I played this a lot when our 1st was born since I could play it quietly during naps while keeping an ear out for him (he constantly sounded like he was dying, so we were on alert 24/7 hah).
I have one of those old netbooks and was looking for a lightweight linux distro to install in it, is Alpine the best one for this? Any other recommendation?
From the linked "doubled down" Medium article written by former SpaceX intern Sahil Gupta:

> Long story short, Teller said Not a good fit, Go start your own company (advice which I thank him for).

> Then as the call was about to end, I asked him, Hey is Elon Satoshi?

> There was silence for 15 seconds.

> Then Teller said, “Well, what can I say?”.

> Not a paraphrase. Actual words.

> Then I said Wow. Awkward silence. Bye. And that was the end of the conversation.

That's pretty interesting anecdote; the ending reminds me of the "count to ten" scene from _All the President's Men_:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvKBHCBBdf0&t=1m44s
Well economic anxiety you see…
Sure, your take is a bit overly harsh though. I don't think, with the exception of the odd mentally ill crackpot, most people do do this. Like, you don't see QAnon theories about systemd because well, it doesn't affect them at all, most people don't even know it exists.

By contrast, to give a recent and poignant example, the idea that e.g. _only_ a Harvard epidemiologist or equivalent should speak out on coronavirus restrictions is absurd.

They might have more precise data about specific models, but in the general case they don't know more about the impacts restrictions will have on anything else, they don't have a representative opinion on what an acceptable risk reward balance is, and it's also likely that they have personal bias due to their family and friends (as we all do).
This is very common in high-frequency trading. There's only so much you can do to capture the number 1 spot, and the number 1 spot means x% of market share, so a perfectly legitimate strategy is duplicate your entire hardware 5x, since now you're not 1/10th of the leading edge, you're 5/15 instead. Especially when the costs of spinning up a new instance are low, but you're going a lot via a small increase in share.
Possibly Washington DC? Can't remember now.
Getting on the internet in the mid to late 90's required a fair bit of intelligence to set up a modem and drivers, "kids what the hell is UART", configure DUN settings, download and maintain browsers, etc.

I blame the iMac G3 and specifically Jeff Goldblum for all of this mess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0QK0JfHzhg
wirecutter's picks are definitely bad, more like products to avoid.
Someone has to pay the bills. I don’t think receiving money to do a review is inherently wrong, there are just too many products to afford to review, but having a rigorous process to eliminate or expose bias is important. However, it does suck looking for reviews of a product which is not a main player in the market or category.
> They are most definetely not "plugged in". I cannot think of a single way in which their lives are worse as a result.

It doesn’t sound from your description like these people are in any way part of the “unplugged for self-care” demographic. They sound plugged in, and they sound normal. By your own account they’re on Instagram at least enough to find and share cool things from time to time, they post online about their experiences and they connect with people online who share their interests. The “unplug for self care” people — the Waldenponders — would tell them that they are in danger of a dopamine addiction and need to give these things up. The article is against such advice. Your friends’ lives would be measurably worse if they took it.

But supposing they were actually off social media completely, you could see the flaw in this reasoning by extending it just a little further. If you still know anyone, as I do, who never even touches a computer, you probably find that they are perfectly content without one. Does it follow that it would be a good move for you, too, to get all computers and Internet usage out of your life? If not, why not?

Another way to put it: I know people who are extremely plugged in. I cannot think of a single way in which their lives would be better if they were not. Where does that leave us?

> If you find the article persuasive, I presume you do agree with the premise. Can you help me understand why?

In addition to the above, I would say this: it sounds like you might be equating “plugged in” with specifically shallow things like “Twitter gossip”. I am quite sure the author does not see it that way (I know I don’t).
I apologise, profusely, if this is bad form to talk about a personal app.

After years of getting steadily deterioring quality search results, and being thoroughly fed up with it, I built an iPhone app (other platforms soon) that removes spammy websites from your Google search results and lets you add your personal, permanent exclusions. Launched it to Reddit which seemed to love the idea: https://searchban.com
This has bothered me for a while now, even DDG is getting increasingly less useful.

Google works if I want to buy something, that's about it. But finding any kind of news or actual information, particularly about incidents in the past, often feels impossible past some Wikipedia article.

At least until narrowing down the date range for the search to escape most of that SEO that just adds whatever you search to make it top of the list.

But even then, on certain topics going back years sometimes yields very weird results, where it feels like there was some kind of purge that only left certain outlets as "valid sources".

Which in practice means the web has become very good at forgetting, as often it's near impossible to rediscover the article for some headline from a decade ago, it's just drowned out by all the SEO if it never made any big waves to begin with.

Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, that's what a lot of these results often seem to boil down to, and it's bluntly depressing.
I'm not sure if people here are old enough to remember but there was a time in the late 90s where everyone was telling you their AOL Keyword (commercials, tv shows, movie trailers, print media, et cetera).

Walled-garden social is sort of the same thing in a way.
Consider also the possibility that they do want to deliver good results but their algorithms just passed their useful limit some time ago and people can game the system faster than they can improve the system, but there's too much money on the table to ever admit this in public.
My two big beefs with the Google search results right now are these:

1) looks like low-quality linkfarms (like Taboola and that other one) have a big comeback, under the guise of higher-quality content, but Google doesn't give a fuck anymore since 2013 or so when they kept twiddling their algorithm to reduce all the SEO shit;

2) Google started using those low-quality linkfarms and listicles as sources for its "authoritative" onebox answers to your queries ("featured snippets", or "knowledge graph", or how they call it). You look for answers, you get those things front and center as if they are "the" answer. Don't look further. The so-called "deep web" seems no longer to be a thing.

Well, there's also this little problem that for some queries you can easily get a first page of results with one or two organic results and the rest being ads, but that's peanuts compared to the first two.
Exactly.

I don't think its only the google search algorithm to blame, this has a lot to do with the extinction of old school forums and blogs. These days large part of the real discussions and posts without financial motivation have moved to facebook, whatsapp groups, discord, slack and other places behind logins and paywalls which google can't index. What's left in public are mostly blogs and websites motivated by affiliate or ad revenue and SEO'ed to death. So there simply is much higher garbage to valuable content ratio in the public, indexable web.
It's become more clear to me that pushing content based on past content consumption promotes harmful effects to both individuals and to society.

The data collection needed to provide such feedback is inherently prone to privacy violations and exposes safety risks (see what China is doing to monitor social media activity.) Secondly, these feedback algorithms can pull people into echo chambers of disinformation and amplify all sorts of negative feelings and behavior.

Not sure throwing more technology and regulation at the problem is a solution. In the end it will probably require a social shift; a realization that "social media" makes us less social at a deep level while providing the illusion of being social. Paying attention to the person in front of you used to be considered polite. Now it's considered old-fashioned?
Yeah, I went into a Home Depot store that wasn't my regular location a couple weeks back looking for dowel rods. Trying to speed up my trip I asked two different employees on my way to the general area of the store which specific aisle they would be on. Neither of them even knew what a dowel rod was, let alone what aisle it might be on, and obviously neither of them would be qualified to proactively try to help avoid the ones with knots or badly angled grain. It's not just that sales staff are ignorant nowadays, it's that the job itself has practically vanished.
Rhetoric is "the art of persuasion", essentially the art of changing people's minds through words and has systematically studied since the ancient Greeks, at the least.

Propaganda exists when large scale bureaucratic organizations attempt to persuade - ie, it's an extension of rhetoric and it has existed in a modern form since you have had modern bureaucratic states and organizations (large ancient organizations arguably wielded it).

The thing here is that the various labelings of the rhetoric-by-large-organization, from journalism to public relations to "information warfare" to disinformation etc, that have surfaced over the last, idk, 150 years, are themselves rhetorical forms. Our side "provides journalism", their side "spits out propaganda".

Moreover, finding a new colorful phrase for instances of propaganda has a couple important rhetorical uses - it gets people's attention and it makes people think some new and somewhat isolated phenomena is happening. "The big lie", "disinformation", "fake news", "extremist information" etc all might have a slightly different flavor to them, focusing on a given era, a given enemy and so-forth but they generally conceal more than they reveal. They're certainly rhetorical and I'd generally see them as propaganda.

And the topic of the current article? That too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
Wow. Just wow.

Not gonna pollute with comments about it that others have already made.

I will add that I am making electrical/gas renovations to the house/detached garage.

Basically we are adding LP to the house for my new range, and a gas water heater. Also ran gas to the garage for powering a genset. The past year or so has taught me the import of off grid solutions for certain things like cooking and hot water.

So, I had to dig a trench from the house to the garage. Code called for 18” deep, but I went as deep as my backhoe would allow. Grey pvc conduit was put in for elec, a separate tube for fiber, and pex for water.

The LP co, came and installed a 250gal tank on a pad I poured, then ran gas in some kinda pex-like tubing to the house and garage. County eventually came out to inspect and signed off, allowing me to back fill (partly down now). Next steps are to finish connecting the pvc to the house, finish the water run, and then I need to buy the copper for the elect run - probably $1500 worth.

The only bits I’m concerned about is getting the power shut off, and power lines moved to the underground conduit I’ve placed from the pile to the house as I’ll need an actual electrician or will have to wait a week for the power company to turn back on after the shut off.
You are right, the study is inconclusive.
That sounds like formula translator, aka Fortran!
>This matters because posix guarantees that open()/pipe() etc. will return the lowest file descriptor not in use[1]. I.e. this should work:
close(0);
fd = open(“/foo/bar”, …);
// fd is guaranteed to be 0

On a multi threaded system that isn't guaranteed is it? Meaning, another thread could call open in-between your close & open.
I recently tried to find some reviews for a computer I was considering purchasing. A "review" from this website was on the first page:

https://ecomputertips.com/

This is an example of what the reviews read like:

>As a desktop manufacturer Dell as an international company has established itself very well in this competitive market of digital gadgets. Check out best Dell desktop computers for specific requirements and beginner’s guide. In this 21st century, a computer has become a very necessary product to everybody’s day to day life.

This is what Google thinks is a front-page relevant search result.
You can unfortunately see this with DuckDuckGo: people are clearly targeting more than just Google. Python results, for example, are so infested by SEO-specialist spam that searching for standard library functions will return spam above the actual standard library documentation, particularly for more popular functions. Searching for "python datetime.now" or "python json.loads" will both return spam above documentation. This problem heavily impacts anything 'data scientist' spammers see as important as well; it's actually worse on DDG than Google.

What's frustrating is that these often seem to be a handful of domains, like 'geeksforgeeks' and 'towardsdatascience'; for a while, of course, there was also the "gitmemory" spammer who seemed to be able to push out Github results on both DDG and Google. Yet I think Google removed reporting and blacklisting domains from searches long ago, and I think DDG never had it, leaving the only option for removing them client-side scripts and extensions that work poorly. Likewise, no search engine appears to be manually blacklisting them. Yet as you point out, if one did, then the spammers would probably just move to using many domains, which would probably be worse.
> For the most part, why would I trust random employees at a store?

Don't trust. Ask questions. If the answers seem fishy, take your business somewhere else.
Good point. You've highlighted two ways in which these numbers might under count COVID fatalities based on what we know about correlation with both age and prior health conditions and morbidity with this disease.
Increasing capacity for hospitals is actually a hard problem, because the time it takes to train people to fill the capacity is quite high.
No, precision is true positive / (true positive + false positive).

Your first equation is sensitivity.
There are exceptions, but most people don't live near a store that has good selection.