skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For posterity's sake, I want to clarify what is going on here.

What's been happening, over the last five years, is that American society has become more trigger-happy in deducing "accurate" moral conclusions from following online media outlets.

I outlined some of this in cjohnson.io/2014/context, although I didn't appreciate the full power of this conclusion at the time, and so the essay mostly falls short to explain the entirety of what's happening currently.

In a nutshell: The Web has broken down barriers between contexts that used to live in harmony, ignorant of each other. Now, as the incompatibility of these contexts come into full focus, society has no choice but to accept the fluidity of context in the information age, or tear itself apart at the seams.

All that was needed to precipitate the decline of Facebook (oh yes, Facebook is going down, short now while supplies last) was some combination of words and contexts that fully elucidate the power of online advertising / data aggregation to have real impact upon people's lives. Put in terms that the "average person" can understand, the impact of this story will be devastating. I feel so bad for the Facebook PR team -- they're simply out of their league here.

The reason this scandal will be the one we read about in the history books is because it provides the chain link between two separate, but very powerful contexts: 1, the context of Nazi-esque social experimentation, and 2, the run-of-the-mill SaaS-style marketing that has come to characterize, well, pretty much every large startup in the valley.

We've reached a point where nobody knows what is going to happen next. Best of luck, people.
And have few, if any, life achievements to 'lose'. Be it career, wealth, family - whatever.
My app: http://glasstesla.com
I know a tool named WEAVI. You can share your systematic content there. But you need to upload your content yourself. I use it to organize my work stuff and it seems to work well. http://weavi.com/@/1
Posting articles about how Go sucks because it lacks generics and operator overloading has become the "I'm going to be different and grow a moustache" of the programming set.

Go is a tool in your kit like any other language. You can't blame the architects for not providing an end all be all solution for every person's needs 100% of the time.
It's easy to say that Facebook should apologize and implement an opt-in for research, but the problem is, what's the difference between a research experiment and an A/B test?
> Yeah, and it's obvious (and sad) they ignored the last twenty years of PL research and progress.

More than thirty years (at the time it was released), the first language with "modern" generics was ML in 1973.
[iPhone] WroldCup Soccer wallpaper and lock screen app, available on App Store.
You're missing the fact that this can be sold (at an outrageous markup) to large enterprises and government agencies because it looks secure/private.

Beyond that, it provides literally nothing that you can't install for free on any Android device. I could make you an equally "secure" or "private" device for $300 and an hour's time.
I remember some years ago, I needed to quickly prototype a proof of concept php project, and the first thing I did was find a django templating library for php; simply because I was lazy to learn back Smarty's syntax.
It's not a matter of it's a culture fit or not, it's a matter of showing that you care about the job.

We wear whatever the hell we want to at the office, but if I conduct an interview and the interviewee comes wearing jeans and a T-Shirt with holes, I problem will end the interview short and thank him for his time. If he doesn't care about this job enough to even make an attempt at dressing up then why waste our time.

Same with swearing. If you can't show to us that you care about this job enough to use professional language for an hour then I probably won't consider you past the first round. It's not whether we care about swearing, it's about proving to us you really want this job.
It seems no article can positively describe a city, without mentioning that it's also a tech cluster. Is there a city that doesn't claim to be a tech cluster? We need to recalibrate that term.
This is actually good news for Bitcoin. It's showing strong signs of mainstream adoption.
For some applications. But once you start venturing into the realms that Rust is targeting, having user defined generic data structures is very important.
That's a good point about the distinction between studying the website and studying people, but I'm not sure that's really the line that was crossed. If the study had asked "Does this newsfeed algorithm make people sad?" instead of "Do positive posts from friends make people sad?", would that then be ethical? It's still manipulating people the same way, and I think people would still find it creepy. What if it was the exact same algorithm, but instead they asked "Does this make people click more ads?", is it now an ethical A/B test just because the intent is different?
All I was doing was correcting the OP. You can't ask why it was approved if you think it wasn't. The reason why Facebook isn't apologizing is because they do this kind of research all the time in the form of A/B tests. It opens a can of worms for them to suggest they did something wrong.
I agree! I'd put unethical behavior like distortion and lying in a different category than Facebook's, but I agree. I was trying to kill the parallel between Facebook intentionally manipulating user emotions for science, and Budweiser intentionally manipulating viewer emotions for beer sales. Video games work here too: Amnesia scares the unmentionables out of me, but I'm ok with that, because I know that's the whole point.

Another missing component here is user control. I can turn off the commercial and stop playing the game. I'm currently working (in a minor capacity) on the National Children's Study, and our participants can walk away at any time. When the Facebook subjects on the negative side started feeling slightly more sad, they had no idea why, and no clue how to stop it.
Risk taking and enlisting in armies or expeditions or whatever is different to being fearful and crazy (which is what the article is saying).

I prefer the pg explanation - the reason we have messed up teenagers is they don't have any life direction or things to do.

I was speaking to a relative recently who just made it out of the teenage years. He is completely normal in every respect - doing well with his education, socially well adjusted, healthy, polite. But he had purpose and direction to his life very early on - learned to fly at age 16, got a part time job at 17, had specific interests that he pursued. He mostly ignored trying to fit into the social teenage life and this seems to have been a useful hack in getting around wasting time being an emotional wreck.

I think give any teen a direction - even if it is front-line infantry - and they don't develop the neurotic self obsession that is common.

Perhaps the reasons that young adults are enlisted in armies and for other risky activitys is precisely because they lack the experience to judge risk well, and because societies have found providing them regimented direction is better than leaving them idle?
I don't know how seriously to take this when IETF keeps letting this happen:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/nsa-employee-will-co...
>advertising, marketing, etc.

I have no problem claiming that this is usually unethical.
GCHQ, NSA ‘infiltrate’ social media to spread disinformation, with slide concerning psychology aspect of social network, including facebook :

http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-socia...

The Intercept article concerning JTRIG actions on social networks :

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

This study would fit pretty well in documenting possible manipulations.
(Open Source Mobile Communications – Baseband)
Perhaps it could be summed up as "Attempting to negatively influence a visitor's mental state without their knowledge or consent IS NOT COOL."
I was invited to apply to Project Loon, which I did and unfortunately I never hear back from them. I wish I had.
PHP – An Annoying Tryst
Here we go again, and still not a single executive is in prison for financial misdeeds the last few years.
The problem with accepting a metered rate is that it is completely divorced from the reality of the costs associated with providing your service. With utilities like gas, electricity, and water, there is a clear marginal cost for every additional unit you consume. This is not true for a unit of 'internet' from your ISP. Their operating costs are sunk and inflexible. Your next bit does not 'cost' them anything to send, so why should you pay for it as if it did?
IRS chief scorched as 'liar'
Yeah, but you don't have to deal with it every single day. Metro offers pretty horrendous bus service especially considering their cost per passenger one of the highest in the country. Recently voters thwacked a measure seeking more funding for Metro and one of the main reasons I think (among others like aversion to car tab expenses) was anger at mismanagement.
The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats – Nick Hanauer
Specifically, the word safe, when referring to type systems means "memory safe". Meaning the compiler or runtime either prevents bad memory accesses by construction or ensures dynamic checks are in place that throw an exception or halt execution in case a bad memory access was about to occur. It means the program isn't accessing uninitialized memory and isn't vulnerable to buffer overflows etc. It doesn't mean your program won't ever crash.

I agree it's better to avoid null dereference errors by not putting null in your language, but by the normal meaning of safe here, go is safe.
I sincerely hope you're not making the case that testing a hypothesis for a scientific paper is not a valid reason to perform such an experiment, but improving a website is.
I would be very wary about promoting Cargo as a 'cabal equivalent'. :P
So much advertising could be said to negatively influence a person's mental state. These are not simple questions with simple answers.
I already have many apps to track my daily life, like how many steps today, how long I used my phone today, how much money I spent today. But the real problem is what I should do next according to these numbers.
Subway service would do wonders but knowing Seattle it will never happen.
Would it be OK to just try to positively influence a visitor's mental state? What about negatively influencing your opinion about something? What about making you feel scared a particular event might happen to you? What about making you feel like you need a pick-me-up?

...What about enticing the maximum number of people to click on your buttons for the maximum amount of time, with no purpose but capturing their eyeballs?
It seemed like not feasible when I heard about it. The way they have approached every obstacle along with extensive testing - it's commendable.
I agree, seriously impressive with only 6 companies dead after 4 years. Especially with the ones later in the list -- the big ones naturally would die slowly even if they do.
I don't think it's bad, but to me(and only to me), disappointing. I'm a long time mozilla fan...heck a Netscape fan really. Go was a pleasure to learn, there were no 'gotchas' initially...just a small, easy to reason about language. Rust...with its arrows, angle brackets, pattern matching, etc. seemed just so complex to fit in my brain.
I'd love to be proven wrong and try again, but the docs aren't the best. And I know Rust isn't 'released' yet. But if you are defending it, I feel like it should be at a very learnable state. Do you have plans for a 'tour', for a play by play like Go offers that can bring others up to speed?
Further(and this is really reaching while I got you)... my favorite part is cross compilation and being able to deploy a single binary anywhere. I tried to compile something in rustc once, but when I moved it to an older box, it failed to run. Will rust offer such stable static compilation in the future?
No mention of the baseband source code. Unless everything running on the phone is open source, there cannot be a guarantee of privacy.
In your last paragraph, you've actually provided a good example of why opportunistic encryption is dangerous. Instead of deploying proper HTTPS, you're thinking that opportunistic encryption is good enough for you, that it is a valid replacement for HTTPS.
At the end of the day, the best system will be some web-of-trust referential system.

But for so many things, you can't even trust your friends for advice, because they're also in no position to objectively assess their experience. (ie: they'll think their physician is a good one if they're pleasant, and a bad one if they're unpleasant, even if the latter makes excellent treatment decisions and the former doesn't).
Interesting that this seems to happen in UK - exactly where this idea came from. It's almost like some politicians read about it a while back and thought "hey, that would actually be pretty nice, if we could do that to the population". And then went on and pushed for CCTV cameras, and more powers for GCHQ. Same with US and the 1984 book, I guess.
> Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.

One of the main objections I'm seeing from people (in my bubble) isn't that Facebook did this, but that Cornell, UCSF, and PNAS participated in this. Facebook can do this, and while it's unethical it's not illegal. Same goes for manipulative people in your everyday life (let me not tell you about the horrific human being of a girlfriend I once had). The point is that science and the people who purport to carry it out should be held to higher and rigorous ethical standards. If those standards are not met, those people should be excluded from science and their findings ignored. They should not be awarded serious consideration in a journal such as PNAS. That is what is happening here as far as I can see, and while a bit dramatic fashion I think it is correct.

Also, if I may toss my personal interpretation of the research into this... ethics aside, the study is extremely weak, and I honestly don't see how it can be published in such a "good" journal. The effect size was < 0.0001. They hand-wavingly try to explain that this is still significant given the sample size. I'm personally not convinced, at all. Sounds like they needed a positive conclusion out of the study and so they came up with a reason for one. If this landed on my desk for review I would have reject on that alone.
Customer engagement is an issue that causes sleepless nights to so many entrepreneurs. There is no fullproof way that works for all the customers so the only way out is to conduct a trial of various strategies and then evaluate which works for your customer base.

Here is a New Free WordPress plugin 'ICEGRAM' that helps to solve the issue of Customer Engagement. It provides 4 tools that have proven beneficial for increasing customer activity on a website and they are : Popups, Messengers, Notifications, Header/Footer messages.

I would suggest try them out and see what works best for your audience..

You could have a detailed look at Icegram at
http://www.icegram.com/
> Remember Windows 3.1 or old Mac OS with it's cooperative multitasking where you had to explicitly yield or risk freezing up the entire computer? It's basically the same thing reinvented with a nicer brand.

A thread deadlock can still freeze up your entire process if it held the wrong mutex. Multiple processes for hardware concurrency in a web server context makes way more sense. Want hardware concurrency? Just spin up multiple processes. You're still taking advantage of preemptive multitasking, while getting all the benefits of not worrying about it within a single process's context.

> We came up with preemptive multitasking for a reason: because it's more robust and efficient.

For coarse tasks, sure. Throw a few thousand OS threads at a problem and you've exhausted your entire 32-bit address space on stacks before doing anything useful. It will not perform well in a 64-bit address space, although at least it won't crash. Probably.

Traditionally the answer has been to turn the task into a state machine, callback spaghetti, or whatever else. I find these answers to be quite lacking vs e.g. .NET's user-space async stuff, which I can use alongside threads if I so desire (as I frequently do.)

> Threads are dangerous, but basically you can avoid the danger for the most part if you avoid sharing objects across threads

This defeats the entire point of using threads instead of processes.

I challenge you to name a single advantage that threads have over processes beyond ease of sharing data. I imagine that such an advantage exists, but I cannot think of one myself.
Agile Tool Eylean Introduces a Free Personal Edition
My mistake, I was confusing .vbproj/.csproj-files with .sln files.
I think it is really great that Google is trying this, I don't want to be too pessimistic either as they seem to always defy the odds, but one of the problems with any type of high altitude platform whether it is LEO, Geosynchronous balloons or otherwise is that they cover a huge area, just by nature, which limits the capacity. Terrestrial cellular technologies get around this issue by being low to the ground so that the RF energy is dissipated and you are able to re-use the frequencies with the next cell over. With such high altitudes that is just not feasible. So I think this approach will always have limited capacity. Also, the fact that it is moving will be a challenge since both LTE and WiFi use OFDMA which is very sensitive to Center frequency offset that can be caused by the Doppler shift as the balloon moves. At 60kft, the uplink is going to be a challenge since most handsets transmit at 200mw max so it will be difficult to achieve high data rates in both directions. There are a number of other technical challenges that are ahead of them as well, but I am very impressed with their perseverance. I hope they are successful.
Most of those are quite different things, and obviously so if you think about them.

"Do customers prefer the green button or the blue button" is harmless. Psychological testing is NOT harmless and NOT something that anyone with a website can or should do. That is medical research - and as such is strictly controlled precisely because of the real risks and genuine human cost that it can have if conducted inexpertly.
A/B tests look for user response to stimulus or change. This study certainly did nothing more. The ethics of a deliberate action can certainly turn on its purpose, but I strongly doubt this is such a case.
How is it disconnected from the costs of providing the service? This could only be true if all connections were built to support the maximum possible bandwidth all costumers are theoretically capable of. Because otherwise, the price you're charged is a mix-calculation - it's the price that's required to deliver the promised number of bits during a given timeframe.
This sounds strikingly similar to my experience! Though my imperative language experience was mostly with dynamic and/or scripting languages aside from C#.
That's not how capitalism works. You share the upside, you share the downside too.
> Git works fine in VS. Use Git Extensions.
I don't know, but I think Git Extensions is superseded by the built-in Git support in VS2013. And it's very limiting if you want to do anything except the basic add, commit, pull, push stuff.
Wholly different thing.

Let's draw an analogy here. Let's say that Google decided to conduct an experiment on its Glass users, and that for a period of a week, Google decided to see if it could alter the mental state of its customers by using Glass to delete or diminish positive social interactions. Let's assume this research was conducted without any kind of consent or knowledge of the customers being experimented on. What's your immediate reaction to that? Still cool? Still harmless and just like advertising and A/B testing? Or, creepy and dangerous?

Like it or not, Facebook does have a special responsibility here. It is, quite literally, the lens through which people see their world.
Incapsula indeed is great in preventing DDoS attacks as the article states. We are very happy with the results of using Incapsula.
> "Do customers prefer the green button or the blue button" is harmless.

That is a psychological test.
From a quick look around, it looks like the best bet on asynchronous forward secrecy that doesn't rely on a (highly) trusted server (one that eg: shares a secret with every sender and receiver, kerberos-style) is something along the lines of "The Text Secure Protocol"[1].

No reason why this couldn't be bolted on top of email (send the actual message as an attachment like with pgp/mime). It would probably create a new set of metadata (requests to the recipients "half-key" service/server (locating which could be delegated to SRV records or something similar, with domain derived from the email address) -- but I'm not aware of any other schemes for generating ephemeral keys in a reasonable manner compatible with (semi)asynchronous communications.

It does seem like "true" off-line message composition wouldn't be possible (the email client (or client service) needs to go online in order to encrypt/pack up the final message. This means that drafts/messages "in transit" would be possible to recover from the senders device in the case of eg: several mails being written on a flight w/o net access, and a search/seizure before mails could be encrypted to the receiver).

All in all, this sounds like a tricky problem... Anyone know of any recent bright ideas in the field of PFS for asynchronous messaging?

[1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/asynchronous-security/
Internet's Own Boy, free CC-licensed download on Internet Archive
It seems like they should send you a notification to your phone and say 'ready to download - go?'
But then the problem is lack of competition, not metered usage. Lack of competition also make the net neutrality issue worse, so that would be the right thing to tackle.
Flights to palma de mallorca
Fuck Your Comfort Zone
From the US, and I also use "dub dub dub" (picked it up from my networking professor…), I've also used "hup-ta" to refer to "http://". ("hup-tis" is https://) It sounds ridiculous, but it flows a lot better than "ache tee tee pee colon slash slash".

(my co-workers understand this, and I think it's growing on a few. One still resists.)
>For fear of disagree downvotes: I would say that many of the qualms brought up in this article are problems that are encountered fighting the language.

If that's so, it's because it's a language that also fights lots of things a modern programmers wants to do/have.
I strongly disagree, but fair enough, if you're consistent. I'm curious, what is your ethical reasoning behind that? Do you oppose markets, or just communication from producers to consumers in markets?
There is no difference between tinkering with an algorithm with the intention to negatively influence people's emotions and tinkering with an algorithm to make it work better?
What is the difference between reactive programming and plain old closures?
> "... any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect."

So all modern day advertising then, that attempts to create a connection with the viewer/reader (as opposed to presenting bare facts).

I agree that there was a process problem from the point of view of a research study but had this just been an A/B test for engagement levels, we might never have known what Facebook did.
Thanks for the reminder.

For those who understand why that's important, what do you think about CM11 on a Samsung Galaxy Player (no GSM), using wifi VPN to a cheap phone/hotspot which does have GSM baseband, e.g. Firefox phone? Or two Firefox phones, if Android apps aren't important?
FreeTuxTV Database
There isn't. But there is a difference between intentional deception and testing technical functionality in the interest of the user.