> "The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way."
> "Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention."
---
> "What are we supposed to do with this submission?"
The same could be said of arstechnica, HN, news and most of media. They are selling "customers" to their advertisers. Also, not sure where Tim Cook has any room to talk. By most measures, Apple is just as bad or worse than facebook. They are in bed with china exploiting slave labor, using advertisement to peddle overpriced junk to the uneducated masses and of course using tax loopholes to avoid paying taxing.
Microsoft used to say something similar as well. But when they realized that they could make much more money off customer data, they went converted to an ad-centered model with their OS.
The only reason Apple is acting high and mighty is because they are able to rob their customers by charging ridiculously high priced products.
For some reason I'd not considered HN compromised, but considering the nature of Ycombinator and their investments, it's probably safe to assume that all my activity here is 'out in the open'.
All my comments and writing style, all my alts, and all my opinions are compromised, and it's more a matter of 'when' than 'if' as to the leaking of this data to entities that I emphatically do not want to know all this information.
And linking this information to my person is probably easier than it already seems in my occasional thought experiments.
> For some reason I'd not considered HN compromised, but considering the nature of Ycombinator and their investments, it's probably safe to assume that all my activity here is 'out in the open'.
If you aren't paying for it, you are the product. It's the model that google popularized in the early 2000s. I'm really puzzled ( though I have my theories ) on why FB is being targeted for something everyone does.
> And linking this information to my person is probably easier than it already seems in my occasional thought experiments.
Given enough data points it shouldn't be that hard. Browser fingerprinting, IP address ( even if you have dynamic IP ) and enough raw data, it should be a cakewalk. Throw in browsing pattern analysis, writing analysis, click analysis, etc and they could tie much of everything together.
“using advertisement to peddle overpriced junk to the uneducated masses” using advertising to sell products? like every single company ever? also that is their point, they sell a physical product (what you bitterly call junk) that’s it, unlike Facebook that deliverily hides or obfuscates the fact that its customers are really the product, and before you start saying that they never lied because it is in their T&C, tell that to eldery people who simply join to see the photos of their grandchildren, they can easily simply chose not to buy an Apple product because of the price tag is visible at plain sight, but the price for Facebook use is not so easy visible.
> Unlike Facebook that deliverily hides or obfuscates the fact that its customers are really the product
How did they hide it? It was their business model. The one they copied from google.
> but the price for Facebook use is not so easy visible.
Are you saying that facebook forced the grandparents to use facebook?
I'm not a fan of either facebook or Apple. My dislike of apple goes back. But I taken aback by the anti-fb posturing justaposed by the pro-google and pro-apple lobby here.
I'm not saying that facebook is good. I'm saying apple isn't good either.
It's so striking how an innocuous comment in every anti-fb thread is met with downvotes and attacks.
I agree with you. Facebook is terrible. That's why I don't use it and never have. But I also don't use apple products because apple is terrible. Is that okay?
Write C# code in vim or visual studio code ( not visual studio ). Use the csc.exe on the commmand line. I use powershell but this requires you importing the environment variables from the vs dev bat file. This way you have to write everything yourself and build/link everything yourself.
Also, use ildasm to look at the MSIL.
And move on from there. Other steps to mastering a language requires having built one yourself or at least a compiler for a language. Then you have to know other languages to compare it with. Function, procedural, imperative, declarative, object oriented, etc. Also, does mastering a managed language like C# mean that you have to understand MS IL? The CLR? Etc?
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "mastering" a language.
My advice is to not go overboard with "mastering a language". It's far more important that you learn a technology/libraries/tools/etc if you want a job. If you are trying to get a job as a developer, it's better you learn about ASP.NET, SQL Server, IIS, etc rather than mastering C#.
Also, will the deletions be logical or physical. Will they be shallow or deep? Keep in mind that there are many types of "deletion".
Logical deletions would be just marking the user/comment as deleted ( updating a column in a table ) while keeping the data internally. Physical deletions would mean they remove the data on their servers.
Then the next question is whether the deletions are shallow ( superficial ) or deep ( complete ). For example, they can just do a shallow delete of the account/user on their front-end servers. But that leaves back-end servers, disaster recovery servers, staging servers, storage tape long term backups and also log backups.
Even if data is deleted on all live servers, database and log backups stored on tape and sent off to storage facilities still have your data.
Deleting your account/comment isn't as simple as people generally think.
> Am I the only person that has a healthy relationship with social media?
You are confusing a propaganda campaign against social media with actual news. Also keep in mind that the author of the Op-Ed was pushing a book he was writing.
Billions of people have a healthy relationship with social media. Just like billions of people have a healthy relationship with alcohol, food, working out, tv, sports, cars, etc. But it's funny how every day we are bombarded by the news media on social media ( ironically enough ) about how evil facebook and social media is.
OP's post is from November 2016. Why do you think it was posted on HN? Billions of dollars being spent on "cambridge analytics" style firms to put pressure on facebook, google and social media in general. So expect to see a lot of social media bashing as the elites try to reign in social media.
That's all it is. Once zuckerburg bends the knee like most social media entities have, the media and the will back off. Just like they did with reddit and google/youtube.
Why would the elites try to reign in social media? If I were an "elite" I'd want everyone to be on social media, except me. I'd want them revealing all the intimate details of their life, so I can better manipulate them with targted advertising.
You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects. It's called a news cycle. People write stories about things people are talking about. All year, Social Media has been in the spotlight for privacy blunders and news that nation states spread propoganda with bots. So people like Cal Newport are talking about it.
Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning? That's how news works, for better or worse.
> Why would the elites try to reign in social media?
To better control it?
> I'd want them revealing all the intimate details of their life, so I can better manipulate them with targted advertising.
Yes. As long as they control the targeting and advertising.
> You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the recent uptick in articles about social media's negative effects.
It's not a conspiracy. It's reality. It's what happened with every communication medium. Print, Radio, Film, TV and now the internet. To believe otherwise is the real conspiracy.
> It's called a news cycle.
It doesn't span years.
> Remember when lead was discovered in Flint, MI's water supply? And then there was an uptick in stories about lead poisoning?
Crazy how quickly that downed down huh?
That the elites want to control the means of communication is standard policy for thousands of years. And it spans all nations. The chinese elite, russian elite, saudi elite, the european elites, etc all want to control communication. Our elites aren't different. Societies, like humans, have similar organs.
"When trained to paint celebrity faces, the agent is capable of capturing the main traits of the face, such as shape, tone and hair style, much like a street artist would when painting a portrait with a limited number of brush strokes:"
That's interesting. Do we know how artists draw? Is it as "algorithmic" as the article lays it out? I don't draw so I always assumed it was more intuitive and personal rather than a "step by step" process.
It is eye-opening, even among fellow manga artists, to see how different sometimes their processes are.
Some may start with a definite sketch, others may go straight to ink with only the barest suggestion of a layout. Sometimes they struggle with expressions and may whiteout and re-ink (up to seven times in one of the videos.)
Some artists start inking with the eyes, some may start with an outline of the face. And so on.
There are a variety of methods. Some people will teach you formulaic approaches to drawing people/faces, and instruct you to always lay out the 'proper' measurements that most people fit, then just add detail. More traditional methods teach you to draw what you see, but focusing on the structural lines and forms of the person, while merging it with knowledge of anatomy, perspective, and lighting. And other methods are purely 'draw what you see', without additional context, trusting accurate copying to paper to look correct.
What any specific artist uses will vary greatly. But it usually falls into one of those three camps.
I think its more of, if you want to depict something with the minimal number of strokes, you really have no option but to look for the key, defining traits of the object. In that fashion, both the AI and the artist must operate similarly, simply due to the limitations implied by the task
But depicting those traits is another matter. You can render a chin meeting the hair in all sorts of ways; but your choices are limited to your aesthetic preferences, and your ability to draw that form.
Drawing is a highly mechanical process; choosing what/how to draw is a curated one.
I think there is a bit of both. If an artist learned on their own, it may be more intuition (or, step-by-step, but they don't realize it because they don't think about the individual steps). But if you take a drawing class you will learn a lot of steps that you can reproduce.
A good striking example, do a video search for "two point perspective drawing", and look at some of the tutorials / demonstrations that come up.
Intuitive and methodical drawing aren't mutually exclusive. You can derive a method from intuition. Skilled draughtsmanship is somehow technical but will always lack something when confined to purely methodical rendering. Most people who draw cannot exactly explain how they do it. And yet it is a completely learnable skill—albeit somewhat difficult to teach.
Is this an advertisement? Because it reads like one.
Postgresql and most mature database systems already have topN/offset/paging solutions.
Also, what's the point of aggregating JSONB data? If you need to calculate topN, why not normalize the data properly and index the data? Then top N will be blazing fast without needing an extension?
If the data set is extremely large then you can maintain an internal "Top N" table that gets calculated when data is added/removed. It all depends on the workload, but inserts/updates/deletions may be slightly slower, but reads of topN will be constant speed.
This is an entirely new PostgreSQL extension. Within the post we talk about group by, order by work fine for smaller datasets but for larger datasets the amount of time to compute and roll things up is not feasible. TopN or TopK is a very common algorithm for approximate counts of top items when you have large enough datasets.
> It would be enough for me if it declined into the confused and nonelastic state Microsoft was in around the times of Vista. That was enough for Android to appear and take over, forcing a paradigm shift.
What? Android and Vista are on two different spaces. You are comparing mobileOS to a desktop OS?
Android didn't compete with microsoft. It competed with apple.
Android might have been trying to compete with Apple, but for a decade before the iPhone, Windows CE was the de-facto choice on mobile devices where you actually wanted to accomplish something. I'd be more tempted to say that _both_ of them were trying to compete with Microsoft in the mobile space.
Yes, there was Palm and PSION before that, both of which I used heavily, but Windows CE had a massive marketplace for applications and seemed to coincide with WiFi and the web really taking off. This feels very odd to say, but mobile Internet Explorer was impressive - and even supported flash!
They cater to the same need, which is computing. I once heard that majority of this planet only browses Internet using a smartphone - if that's the case, Microsoft lost.
