skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a big supporter of total transparency for a while now. I probably have a hundred posts and comments about this very topic on HN and Reddit alone. My experience is that most people won't even consider the idea. Those who don't just assume it's trolling usually ask the same question: "Post your name, address, email address, phone number, social security number, credit card number, passwords here." and they believe it constitutes a valid argument. That's laughable.

Privacy only rewards liers and cheaters, and generally unreliable people. It leads to a world where kids tell their teachers what they want to hear, where politicians tell the population what they want to hear, where job candidates tell the interviewer what he wants to hear. You can't cheat, lie, manipulate and generate bullshit? Sorry, but that's an handicap in today's society.

We live in a world where it's expected of people to keep secrets and conceal the truth. It's your job to keep your house keys safe, keep your password safe. Wear clothes, makeup, wigs, get plastic surgeries if you need to. Never talk about your flaws, only share successes. You can't ask for help publicly, that would reveal you're imperfect. Keep it in, live in the closet. Oh, and be a white male.

Don't forget, one picture of you being drunk or smoking a joint, and your political carrier is over. I mean, the absence of such a picture would convince anyone that such a thing never happened.

The correlation between reality and what's publicly available is so ridiculously thin, that nobody really knows what truth is. And that's a bit scary.

I see people avoid using smartphones because "NSA". I see people browsing behind 7 proxies. I see people wasting considerable amount of time setting up encryption on everything they touch. Better delete my Facebook account right?

We will never win this race. It's unsustainable to try to keep that much information private. Technology favors entropy. It's time to embrace transparency.
So I'm allowed to hold Klan meetings in your house, as long as I don't make fun of any overweight minorities?

Because that's what the admins have basically said, by their actions.
The surging cost of U.S. college tuition has an unlikely culprit: the generosity of the government’s student-aid program

Unlikely?? Are you kidding me? Did we learn nothing from the 2008 housing bubble?
You don't say. This seems readily apparent to me.
Nor was anyone forced to listen. I find the default subs pretty low quality, so I stopped subscribing to them years ago. So the only things I read about were the books, video games and programming languages I like. If you had a different experience, then I sympathise with you, but don't go reading a thread filled with utter crap and then claim that someone forced you to listen.
Screen readers a JavaScript get along just fine if a site is coded well. A SPA can be perfectly accessible. The Section 508 refresh is well underway and will essentially be WCAG 2.0 AA [1]

[1]: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/
there is no /r/all for irc or newsgroups.
Honest question - What are you trying to prove by not enabling JS by default?
I think the overwhelming majority of our society will agree that the mentioned behaviour was misogynistic. That makes it a fairly objective statement. You can still disagree with it (in the same way people disagree with other objective statements, like vaccines and autism), but that doesn't make it subjective.
That's the unfortunate reality of being a leader. It would be nice if it weren't so but the world is very far from nice.
Of course culture plays a role, as does education level of one's parents, access to opportunity such as good health care and higher education, the role of the criminal justice system in your community, the stress of dealing with basic material needs, etc, etc. Point being the cards are stacked against you if you are born into poverty, and those who escape it are basically the exceptions that prove the rule. So if we were sane, we'd focus our attention on leveling the playing field so as to lower the barrier to entry into the middle class, and not focus attention on blaming poor people for having poor values.
> really uncomfortable

I know what you mean. I logged into /r/funny one day and someone had used the "b" word. I was just really concerned and uncomfortable with how things were going. What did you end up doing?
Looks like some really weird progress has been made. NSFW I think? https://www.reddit.com/r/deepdream/comments/3cesna/with_opti...
As I've said in another subthread, Reddit is not a single community, but rather numerous communities. All users are free to listen to what they like, and to not listen (or even block) what they don't like. It's rather like Usenet, with a Reddit account being equivalent to a news server account.
If she weren't a woman, I would be tempted to say it's almost . . .

It's almost like she just sucked at her job and the public backlash and getting fired were both predictable consequences of that fact.
You might be interested in The Circle by Dave Eggers.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18302455-the-circle
They don't accept the "it's just a joke" excuse from their targets, why should we accept it from them?
You do realize that private keys only make sense as a security mechanism when kept secret, right? This system was never meant to work in a transparent environment, and using that as an argument against that proposed environment is flawed.

Should we not colonize Mars because airplanes don't work there?
But the moderation is part of what keeps it a fairly enjoyable experience still IMO.
Many people have been stating the root cause of this bubble for over a decade. Discussion and debate in the US is dead, as the left will not engage in anything that could alter their voter base, and the incentives provided to them.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Are Fighting for Cheaper Internet
I don't think I was very clear because this example is backwards. Maybe I should say we don't pay people less because they live in a flyover state. Engineers in sf do produce value that justifies a high salary. In many cases engineers outside sf can produce as much value.
> I saw more racism on reddit in a couple few weeks (while the police shootings were in the news) than I've seen in the rest of my life combined.

Welcome to reality outside the Silicon Valley distortion bubble--Reddit's userbase is not confined to the Mandarins of technology.
Shouting "encryption" isn't a whole lot better really. You can use "military grade encryption" all you want, but if the server it is stored on has the keys there's extremely little point except the feel-good vibes.
Sustainability Scale 2015 recap
Nginx.com – your sticky-menu is janky
No, she intended to post something in an admin sub and didn't. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...

And they've officially denied shadowbanning anyone in that thread.
Certainly not unaware just definitely not interested.
Let's say she sucked at her job. Let the org fire her. These actions were the result of thought that they needed to heed public opinion.

As if officers need to walk on eggshells. What should matter ate results rather than dictated by the winds of public opinion.

I wish the board, management, etc. in these situations would who resolve and say, no, sorry, this is our choice, we stand by it. But no, we see them capitulate to public opinion.

Sometimes that opinion does coincide with"the right thing to do" but let the company execute the right thing. Don't let the mob become your upper management.
Spot on, most software gets disapproved simply for being open source or liberally licensed. Although recently I've found that it's easier to get open source software on my computer if I can prove that it already exists somewhere else on our network (i.e. we use Redhat servers which come with Python pre-installed after I pointed that out getting Python on my personal box wasn't much of an issue)
I found that quite rational and civil, which is more I can say for any other discussion I have ever seen about this subject matter.

> never post articles in their own right, only weaponised comments to win internet points.

On balance I think things are fairly equal, honestly women might be slightly better off. There is a very loud minority angrily decrying people who post pro-male articles and such, and the news and media are not interested in it unless it is to point out that he was a MRA killer from 4chan.

That being said, I have become apathetic to these tropic debates (women in tech, gamergate, feminism v antifeminsim, etc) and now just largely support free speech and freedom of expression. This has the potential to make many people upset, and a select few targets of extreme harassment. On balance, however I think it is the most powerful tool in our society.

Your civil comment was quite a nice departure from my regular observations, cheers.
I think arguments can be made on either side pretty convincingly.

For me personally, the ecosystem matters most. So the choice comes down to Gems vs NPM. NPM tends to have what I need the vast majority of the time, and gets better every day; so I prefer Node.

Here's an interesting comparison of the ecosystems: http://www.modulecounts.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ
Oracle is using an ugly 'nuclear option' to boost cloud sales
Too bad it's only actionable if you steal data. Losing data has zero penalty outside of the occasional exercise of HR remedies.
Many people have been saying for a long time, on "the left", that the fact the government guarantees repayment of loans even if the borrower declares bankruptcy is a classic case of actual moral hazard (wherein improper guarantees to make a lender whole no matter what lead to irresponsible lending, since there are no negative consequences for the lender). Which in turn gets us to where we are now: since the lenders know they can lend essentially any amount and get guaranteed repayment, there's no pressure from lack of lending to keep tuition down.
Reddits stated policy was to remove harassment (and harrassing subs). So fph harrassed users and broke that policy. Coontown, while also racist and imo worse, stays in its box, doesn't brigade, doesn't target specific people, and generally just says racist stuff about news articles and posts memes.
People who use Star Trek as a template for a post-scarcity, post-capitalist economy need to realize that universe was built out of plywood, cell-tape and bullshit. It doesn't actually work because it's window dressing. Magic boxes make all the stuff and people are nice and smart and just better because future reasons, and so humans can always be presented as morally better than the aliens, even the aliens who are far, far advanced in every other conceivable way.

I'm a Star Trek fan, but there is nothing to be learned about a post-scarcity economy, whether it could even exist, or how it might actually affect society from a show which presents Wesley Crusher as the archetype of human evolution.

You might as well ask what the elves in the Lord of the Rings can teach us about the science of longevity. Star Trek has a lot to offer in terms of science fiction and speculation, and was ahead of its time in terms of how seriously television took the genre, and has inspired a lot of technological innovation. But it never took human character study or its own utopian premise seriously. If you actually care about these things, look elsewhere for insight. Star Trek has nothing for you but noble savages, thinly veiled racist caricatures masquerading as aliens, technobabble and nonsense.
Eleven Useful Books for First-Time Tech Founders
I certainly believe you can learn to do this. Yet, any cases where it starts in childhood and without people pushing it would seem to indicate an innate ability. Where did the kid learn compulsive, remorseless violence?

I'll add that people believe that we can start with many initial states from the palette of what we see in people. Our genetics push us in a certain direction from the get go. The traits of a psychopath can't be among them? It... always... has to be learned? It would be a strange exception to make without evidence.
> Aside: Do JS linters actually enforce a no-semicolon policy in real projects?

Yes, they do. See https://github.com/feross/standard/ as a preconfigured example.

> (on the advice of "JavaScript: The Good Parts")

To paraphrase The Dude: yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, Crockford's opinion, man; whether you want to use them or not, there's tooling to support you either way.
> Where psychopaths differ from non-psychopaths is not in how they treat the outgroup, but in how they treat the ingroup.

That distinction makes sense. My real point was that many of the descriptions I've read of the symptoms or the definition of psychopathy do not make any such distinction (granted, many of these were in the press, not the most authoritative sources).
> targets

> we

> them

Gah.
Is disputing her failure a serious position? Regardless of whether or not they are the community reddit wants the company angered its moderators enough to trigger something that ended up being in the news and very visible even to those that use reddit without ever viewing comments.
In other news, gravity might be causing those apples to fall down.
Funny how you're getting downvoted for stating the obvious.
When trying to solve a Machine Learning problem, it's often not hard to set up an algorithm that does better than pure chance. As they imply in the video, and from my own (admittedly rather limited) experience, the hard part is selecting the correct algorithm for the job and tuning the parameters just right. Although this is mitigated by so-called "great estimators" like Neural Networks, achieving the highest accuracy requires both a Machine Learning background and a decent knowledge of the problem space (i.e. domain knowledge). Is over-fitting likely to be an issue? Is there a class imbalance? Are the classes undergoing concept drift? How costly are false positives and false negatives?

This is simply another example of a trend that has been driving computers, and technology in general, since at least the industrial revolution: abstraction. Although abstracting away the complex to present an easy-to-use and universally accessible interface has been going on since before computers were even invented, this specific instance strikes me as radically different. Microsoft could be enabling billions of people around the world to deploy their own personal pseudo-AIs. Trying to decide what stocks to invest in? Deploy an AI to crunch the numbers. Not sure whether that girl in your class likes you? Ask an AI to assess the situation. Want to confirm if a country has nuclear weapons? Analyse the media with an AI.

On the negative side I worry that too much abstraction could be wholly misleading. After all, there are still many people who take everything said in the media or on the internet at face value. What if the oracle is wrong in a life-or-death situation? What if it's right in a malicious application? In this age of big data and non-privacy, just how scary are the potential abuse cases for a project like this? Moreover, will these pseudo-AIs just become another source of lying statistics due to flawed assumptions and implementation?

At the same time I look forward to increased adoption of computer decision making. Implemented correctly, a computer algorithm comes closer to true impartiality than most humans ever could. They do not get tired or distracted. For example, I cannot wait for the day when cars are driven by computers.

I can speculate about the ethical and physical ramifications of personal AIs until the sun blows up, but I think what's more important to consider is what comes a few steps after this in the "evolution of Machine Learning".

What do we do when we reach the singularity?

We're getting closer and closer every year. I think it's time we move past having theoretical discussions about it and actually start implementing some preventive measures. Let's not be as unprepared for and passive towards this issue as we were towards climate change. EMP bombs anyone?
What I want to know if if she resigned and was immediately re-hired at another cushy high-paying government job. In other words a transition with no financial consequences whatsoever. The correct consequence is that this woman ought to be kicked out on her ass, lose her pension and go out there in the open market to find a non-government job matching her degree of incompetence.

To a large extent firings or layoffs in government amount to shuffling people around rather than what most would conclude from such a headline.

How many additional OPM's and Healtcare.gov's do we have to witness before people revolt and demand excellence out of government?

Today we seem to be content with the idea that government operates at precisely the opposite end of the scale, a place where a range of behaviors from sucking at your job to lying and criminal behavior seem to be considered virtues. And what's worst, there are no consequences for being utterly incompetent, lying or acting criminally?

The breach wasn't the problem. The problem is how fucked government is at nearly every level. That's what needs fixing.
What about duty of thinking ?

I'm often weirded by the freedom of speech argument in non critical contexts. These persons life aren't at risk because they can't express opinions, isn't that what is meant by FoS ? not just a free card to be able to let yourself loose in public.

I have no solution, but far too often FoS ends up a noisy non-discussions.

ps: I'll add that I was somehow afraid to express my views on Freedom of Speech. Funny.
I say we consider defining it by what most innately do with minimal coaching. Every kid experiences being wronged or hurt to some degree. A certain amount of that is unrealistic expectations and learning to tell the difference. A subset of it that most share is what we consider unethical acts. That our most primitive minds have a way to derive that suggests, at least for humans, there's a baseline that's somewhat objective.

That's the nature part. There's exceptions to it clearly. Then, nature and nurture work together from there with nurture having more an impact. You gave good examples of that.
Actually, since I follow /r/teslamotors, I've seen a couple of projects that involve hacking the internal network on the Tesla and hacking the giant center console touch screen's computer to do things.

Tesla doesn't really lock it down any more than they need to for safety and sanity reasons, as far as I can tell.
It was trained on Imagenet. 30-40% of Imagenet is just distinguishing different breeds of dogs. And the remainder is mostly other types of animals and random objects.
The only people that still consider this unlikely, or otherwise try to hide from the obvious government inflation cause, are those with a vested stake in the status quo. That includes an awful lot of people, from university employees, to general educators, to most people on the left politically, to the US Government that prints $50 billion a year in profit from the debt scheme, to anyone connected to the college book industry, to anyone working in student loans in the private sector - millions of people have their livelihoods directly tied to perpetual government education cost inflation.
As I understand it, the founding fathers cast it more as "freedom to listen" rather than freedom of speech.

And it's certainly understandable that Reddit has no wish to be associated with certain speech, but that comes with troubling implications as well. For example, do they not then appear to support whatever they do not ban if we know that whatever sufficiently offends them gets the ban hammer?

For another example, take Google removing Confederate flags. I personally hate that damned flag and would be perfectly happy to join others in burning one to express my feelings about it, but I'm loathe to go around removing them. Please understand that I'm perfectly happy if a few get taken down where they appear that some governmental branch was endorsing it.

But at the same time, that's not quite the same as when Google goes about removing them. Sure, they are free to do as they wish, I have to wonder why Google doesn't do the same for Nazi symbols? Surely they don't support Nazis, but it's hard to make a case for not giving the Nazis the same treatment. They're at least as evil, right? So what explanations are left to us for the disparity? That Nazis don't offend googlers as much? That doesn't seem like a likely reason, but just what's left?

And in the end, where does that leave us? The problem is, I don't think that train of thought has an end, and that's what makes me uneasy. After we remove everything offensive, what's left? It's not like we'll have things that don't offend anybody, so at some point it becomes a matter of choosing which people are okay to offend and which people are not okay to offend.

In the end, I just want to get along with everyone. I don't like the thought of living in a society where everything becomes a matter of whether you are one of Us or one of Them and that's where we appear to be heading.
Centipede and cockroach is the best.
>We will never win this race. It's unsustainable to try to keep that much information private. Technology favors entropy. It's time to embrace transparency.

How much transparency are you advocating for?

Privacy isn't just about protecting secrets. For instance, it can be inferred that married couples have sex in their bedrooms. That's not a secret. But if you ask them if you can plant a camera in their bedroom for the purposes of recording their sex lives, they would most certainly reject.

Are you advocating for transparency for facts, or transparency on everything?
Sense – Automatic cardio and strength exercises tracker for iPhone
Although Go is more popular than ever, I'm not sure the following observations are good signs. Something about them makes me uncomfortable.

"The decision process was consensus driven."

"The first Go program was the prime sieve."

"In July 2008, the project became more serious."
I see a lot of comments like yours claiming that the hate was only because she's a minority. I get the feeling such people find it unacceptable to dislike a woman or a black/Asian person regardless of what they did.

I disliked her for

* Firing Victoria, who took AMAs to the next level. I enjoyed them a ton.

* Firing an employee for having leukemia - http://redd.it/3c0idl

* Using corporate weasel words instead of having the guts to be honest - "We're banning behaviour, not ideas"

* Treating the community with disdain and contempt, while not understanding how reddit works at all. She derided her detractors as being a very tiny minority without realising that the most active people are the ones creating and moderating the content that helps reddit thrive. If these people are unhappy with her and leave, then the passive majority (such as myself) will follow them to wherever they go.

But no, I'm probably a misogynist and a racist who hates Ellen Pao because she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit, amirite?