skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The privacy policy says we _may_ share _anonymized_ reading data, aggregated across many users. Even that, we have never done, but needed to have in the policy to cover our asses legally.

Why would you legally need to specify that you might send data to advertisers and publishers? Even the examples you provided like "We may tell an advertiser or publisher that X number of people imported Z annotations from a particular book." suggests that even if you haven't done it already, you anticipate selling data to publishers and advertisers about what people are reading.

That's not a bad thing, in fact it's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from a service like this (along with making recommendations to users based on their reading history), but it seems weird to dismiss that as something you only put in there for legal CYA reasons.

Please understand the position I'm in. I have no way to know if you've sold data to advertisers and publishers. I can only know what you tell me that you do, or "may" do, in your privacy policy (in context of a privacy policy "may" should be assumed to mean "will").

You may actually be the most privacy respecting SaaS company that has ever existed, who never has and never will make a single dime on anything but subscription fees. I can't know that. I can only go by what your privacy policy says. To me, that policy makes your service look like it will capitalize on the data you collect from your users and that it depends on third parties like amazon, google, facebook, and mixpanel for things that you consider to be essential to your service. Your privacy policy says that you may share anonymized data, yet anonymized data is often trivial to deanonymize, and even aggregated data is not always sufficient to protect people's privacy.

From the information that I have, my assessment is that it's reasonable to expect that in addition to subscription fees my interactions with your service will likely be used to generate profit for you.

If that's wrong today, then I'm happy to have been wrong about that. If you never intend to make a single penny from anything other than subscription fees and you have carefully taken every precaution to the point where you can ensure that user's reading lists and interests couldn't, in any way, be revealed to third parties like Google, Amazon, or Mixpanel then I sincerely apologize for by assumptions, and I'd suggest that you could do a lot more to make that clearer in the information you provide. I'd even open with your intentions to only accept money from subscription fees in your privacy policy.
The tables turn when it's not just some fans doing it, which takes time and effort. AI generated images can be pumped out by the thousands, and big companies are behind these services. See the problem?
Then Paul would do well to keep some distance.
Posting a link to a web page that publishes the public tracking information without even mentioning any person’s name almost certainly does not constitute doxing.
Twitter suspends journalists who cover Elon Musk and Twitter
It’s just a bit funny how “absolutely no censorship” turns into “lol k only censorship that I like”. Somehow quite a lot of people who were “free speech absolutists” playing mental gymnastics to explain why THIS type is acceptable.

Disclaimer: I am not a free speech absolutist, and realize its shortcomings in public forums.
Maybe, but the last straw for me on that platform was preventing tweets from linking to arbitrary, non-doxxing Mastodon profiles (try it and see). I tested it to confirm and deactivated my account afterwards. Who would want to be on a social network like that?
Which inconvenient fact am I ignoring?

I took screen shots almost daily of all-cause mortality stats through the lockdown.

The entire time it tracked pretty close to the expected linear increase that we see year over year with an aging population, with the exception of a bump in April that was almost exclusively New York City. Given the reported quality of care issues that drove a lot of that, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

I also saw a sudden jump in these numbers right at the end of the year. Could have been completely legitimate due to delays in reporting, but for some reason the CDC refuses to release anonymized data sets that would allow independent analysis.

Which is highly abnormal.

Additionally, all-cause mortality measures don't do a good job of indicating covid deaths, necessarily. Many deaths were due to delays of care for critical conditions. I experienced this myself, and was fortunate to not have become a statistic. We had deaths of despair, and we have several conflicting studies about those. We also have a significant (maybe majority) number of the deaths attributed to covid being a six to twelve month acceleration of death for those who were at end of life, especially the elderly with comorbidities.

While sad, it's not quite the terrifying tragedy that the numbers without nuance present. It will be interesting to see if 2022 and 2023 see a concomitant dip in expected mortality.

I also spent countless hours hunting down source data (as much as was available) understanding how Covid ID was generated for cross region case tracking, data collection methodology and evaluting transmission studies and models.

I saw massive revisions of numbers post-investigation in several counties, such as Collin county in TX.

If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the data is a collosal mess. If you spend any time digging into the data collection methods and how reporting was happening you'd see this for yourself.

FWIW, my background is in healthcare logistics, data analysis and technology.

So if you are aware of some facts that I'm ignoring, I'd love to understand them.
Ah yes, famously aligned Saudi Arabia and Russia. And anyways, neither of them care about someone tracking his private jet.
Yeah, this person isn’t really an SRE if they are asking devs for these questions. SREs should be absolutely capable of doing all of this themselves in the codebase.
Does secret scanning also apply to public GitHub Action logs and Issues (or more generally, Checks logs)?

We found Action logs to be a much bigger threat now that many folks have learned not to embed secrets directly into the code and to use secret managers instead. But even then, the secrets retrieved in a step can be printed in plaintext if someone, for example, runs that step debug mode.

Issues can also accidentally leak secrets via for example, third-party code builders that print their output in an issue.
This is such an excellent observation (about Graphviz); you can see some of the rough outlines of the primitives that might get the job done, and how they might be composed. This area is so ready for new work. There are also some problems that maybe don't arise the same way in stat graphics and charts for data journalism, like coping with nested layouts, stable dynamic layout, optimizing topological properties, and intricate combinatorial optimization problems, to name a few things.
> I think "genuinely scared for his or his child's safety" is a real possibility.

I think he's scared for his own safety. In fact he has basically said as much. As rich as he is, he still owes a lot of money and favors to a lot of people. Some of them are quite powerful and ruthless. They're likely displeased at how he's pissing away the value of an asset in which they have an interest. Just because he's paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get him. If I had the kinds of friends or enemies that he has, and particularly if I had been busy converting the first into the second, I'd be worried too.
> What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems.

Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.

> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...

When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?

> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff

My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
can't wait to post by first beets ;)
Here the official website :

https://bisonrelay.org/

Really promising, architecture make a lot of sense.
> He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.

I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.

> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done

I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.

> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while

I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.

How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
What happened was: Musk was unhappy with progress so he fired bunch of executives and promoted others to take their job.

And voila: the new team successfully launched Starlink.

Remind me, what was the other company where Musk fired a bunch of people? It's been in the news recently.
I believe all cities people love to visit were built organically by huge numbers if individual actors doing what they thought best with their part of it.

Or are there any preplanned great cities I'm not aware of?
And at least it doesn't look like a dick.
The people who cheered Musk for his "pro free speech" attitude don't actually believe or want free speech. They want free speech for themselves and censorship for people they don't like.

See the terrorist attacks against Drag Queens.
I love the daily seethe posts about Musk. Surely He's finished this time. Nothing will happen. Normal people don't care and journalists are too addicted to Twitter t o actually leave.
Twitter has a very clear policy - anything that doesn't incite violence is allowed.

And the test is simple: "Does it make me want to punch someone in the face"?

Not "me" as in the average reasonable person, "me" as in Elon Musk.

If you post something that makes Elon want to punch you in the face, you will be banned from his blog.

"I personally wanted to punch Kanye, so that was definitely inciting me to violence. That’s not cool."
Also

You can't link to Mastodon on twitter

This is just getting more fun by the minute :)

https://mobile.twitter.com/oalexanderdk/status/1603584361433...
No, he banned a bunch of journalists for doing their jobs.
Not at all. the S&P 500 only down 20%, dow down just 10%.
> The "rules" are whatever he makes up on the spot.

He paid for that privilege.
Its amazing how people can downvote such a comment when not even 20 years passed since Iraq war.
The biggest feature I miss from Sass is the indented syntax (though SugarSS does that better since it has multiline support); for now I make due even if semicolons and brackets add noise. There's still a use case for Sass if you need to build a CSS library and the loops and stuff is useful, but for general, contemporary CSS authoring, wanting to reach for loops and these extra features is a sign of a smell more so than not.
Yeah, $13 billion being the generous side of the very most Twitter was ever actually worth, so that's the all the banks were willing to finance

Musk himself is personally on the hook for $25 billion
Thank you.

This fits with my general knowledge of how such things work. TLDR: Those with the most skin in the game were the most likely to try to save face and double-down on their stated beliefs. Those who had lost less had an easier time going "Whoops! I was wrong!" and getting on with their lives:

Some of the believers took significant actions that indicated a high degree of commitment to the prophecy. Some left or lost their jobs, neglected or ended their studies, ended relationships and friendships with non-believers, gave away money and / or disposed of possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer, which they believed would rescue them and others in advance of the flood.

As anticipated by the research team, the prophesied date passed with no sign of the predicted flood, causing a dissonance between the group's commitment to the prophecy and the unfolding reality. Different members of the group reacted in different ways. Many of those with the highest levels of belief, commitment and social support became more committed to their beliefs, began to court publicity in a way they had not before, and developed various rationalisations for the absence of the flood. Some others, with less prior conviction and commitment, and / or less access to ongoing group support, were less able to sustain or increase their previous levels of belief and involvement, and several left the group.

This is not inconsistent with what we know about the process by which people are radicalized and become members of extremist political groups and the like. Part of the process is that it becomes increasingly difficult to get respect, make meaningful social contacts etc with people outside the group. Once you pass some point of extremism, outsiders become openly hostile and their reactions give you no good path back from your position.

Being seen as "crazy" or "wrong" or "stupid" is too much to bear. Better to reject the entire world -- knowing it won't be nice to you at this point -- than to admit "Okay, maybe that wasn't the most rational thing to do."
> the way a cult generally arranges to control people is to cut them off financially, socially, etc.

So...cancel culture? Criticize the current #thing and get cut off financially and socially.

That would make #thing a cult, no?
They were banned for including a link to where Sweeney moved. I wonder if everyone who posts a link to these journalists will get banned too.

If it were an algorithm, everyone in Twitter would be banned by tomorrow. I hope it works.
> that promoting and publicising it makes it accessible to a wider audience that does have an effect on real world consequences.

So you'd be okay with banning misinformation about COVID and the COVID vaccine? Misinformation and agitprop had very real consequences in the real world.
what is "painfully easy"?
… okay, a journalist showing up at your house is not doxxing. If they then publish your home address? Sure. But a journalist knocking on your door to get your side of the story is not and has never been doxing.

And I’m saying this as someone who thinks the decision to publish LOTT’s real name was borderline, despite the fact that LOTT decided to use her real name for her domain registration.
Do you agree that title is clickbait? You are ok with titles that misrepresent or exaggerate to boost clicks (even if most of those viewers bounce upon discovering that)?
I was not aware of abduction before today, thank you!

I think we may agree in practice if not in theory. I did have the Hume-an problem of induction explicitly on my mind. It would be quite fair to say my epistemology is quite conservative.
I agree, but perhaps not in the expected way.

For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point.

So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception.

I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those.

Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies).

I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach!

...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.
US National Archives releases more than 12,000 documents on JFK assassination
-Lai Yang, pretty obscure, it doesn't have a Wikipedia page and I can't find much info on it anywhere, so this shouldn't be surprising.

-Euler #193 - This problem is not super obvious and I see discussions on it invoking Riemann zeta. ChatGPT was able to create a correct Mobius function on its first try. I have no idea how this might be related to the problem though.

-Elasticsearch - Why on earth would you expect it to know this?

You've cherry picked some super niche stuff that this brand new AI can't do and name dropped some fancy theorems. We're all very impressed.
I'm shocked there's so much push back on this here. This was written in 2019 but it applies even more so today. All the recent advances in AI for the past decade have, as a base requirement, massive amounts of compute. Not a proof but it should be a big red flag that if you don't believe Sutton, you should maybe consider.

Put it this way. Do you believe premature optimization is the root of all evil? Then why do you believe that some subtle, intricate optimization for machine intelligence will win out over brute compute force? It's not that there's optimizations to be done, it's knowing what optimizations will yield the most value after the space is explored with better computing capabilities.

To me, this is almost like a generalized "Proebstings Law" [0], where compiler optimizations give a doubling every 18 years compared, to say, some type of generalized Moore's law which give roughly a doubling in compute every 1.5 to 2 years.

[0] https://zeux.io/2022/01/08/on-proebstings-law/
Yeah it was a janky setup. I think the root was 14px which was converted to rem and then multiplied by a scaleMultiplier depending on user settings.

As you pointed out the obvious solution was to increase the root size, but that would have significantly changed the UI for a lot of users… so I just targeted all form inputs for webkit only and set the default size in rem using !important to 16px.
More like trying to find out what works and what doesn't. One of the first big wind farms in the US was in the Altamont Pass which turns out to be a golden eagle nesting site and the result has been a serious problem with a lot of endangered birds killed. This piece appears to point out that context matters and not building large wind farms in raptor gathering and nesting areas is a way to reduce conflicts.

Next up, do high pressure chemical reaction vessels belong in day cares?
Ah, relativism.

Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.

I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
Yeah in most cases the men earn more because they’re more driven towards their careers and how much they earn.
I don't actually even remotely believe that he is a foreign government asset, but I don't think that's a good argument: giving Starlink to Ukraine is exactly one of the things that a Russian asset would do.
there goes my fontawesome pro license keys stolen from other people's public repos lol
Don't insult Edison and Feynman.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution defines free speech as protection from government interference in free expression. Twitter is a corporation, free speech laws don’t apply. It can ban anyone it likes. This is perfectly legal.
Barcelona gets a lot of love despite most of it being a very regular grid of city blocks.
I think it became politics when he became an agent of a foreign government.
Elon Musk is much like Henry Ford.

"In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.[76] A year and a half later, Ford began publishing a series of articles in the paper under his own name, claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was affecting America.[77] The series ran in 91 issues. Every Ford dealership nationwide was required carry the paper and distribute it to its customers.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Antisemitism_and_Th...

I think Musk bought Twitter to serve as his own platform, to spread his ideas and to suppress those of others.
Humans aren't the product of a commercial entity