Ask HN: Why does my online dating blog not show up on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I've submitted things from it before, only to find that later they display only to me, not to other users. See? Nothing here, right? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305427<p>The site is at http://onlinedatingmatchmaker.com and it has quality content on it. Is there a filter that bans sites with "onlinedating" in the URL? <comment><AUTHOR> For those who insinuate that the posts are getting flagged, here is data from my Analytics for the past two months, for visitors referred from Hacker News (from random links in comments on other submissions):

Visits: 109

Pages/Visit: _3.18_

Bounce Rate: _40.37%_

Average Time on Site: _3:48_

HN readers seem to like the site just fine. HN appears to have a filter that makes articles from this site dead upon submission.

</comment><comment><USER2> There's something there, edit your profile and change showdead to yes.

It probably got flagged as spam due to the spammy name of the URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was thinking...so HN just completely blocks URLs based upon keywords in them? I wonder what other quality content gets blocked? What if iwillteachyoutoberich.com were blocked?

<comment><USER2> I don't know if they do keyword blocking, but there is a lot of manual spam filtering via the 'flag' link.

Usually I check the profile of the user who submitted it to see how long they've been active and what their karma is before hitting 'flag'.

<comment><AUTHOR> They must. Every time I've submitted something from this site, it has instantaneously not been visible. Just did a test, and had the same result.

It's a shame because there are some articles that I think other HN readers would enjoy - not to mention the stuff I have in the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> well outside of a ask hn to review your site.. i would consider this spam. It depends on how you are submitting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Additionally, I am disappointed that HNers have given upvotes to that comment. If you would actually look at the content of the article, you would find that it is well-researched, quality writing. This article was covered by several popular sites, including Jezebel.com.

<comment><USER4> Okay well, I bothered to ask google about the article mentioned, it's at:

[http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/lie-online-dating- prof...](http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/lie-online-dating-profile/#)

if anyone cares.

I don't know what the reason it gets deaded is, but it is really heavy with the online site promotion at the top, and I can see how someone would think it would be linkbait.

Compare that to the okcupid blog:

<http://blog.okcupid.com/>

Which conveys the impression it is a proper blog, rather than a massive advertising exercise.

<comment><USER5> It has an in-your-face give-me-your-email-before-you-read-further lightbox thing, which as well as being annoying, reeks of shadiness. I might have flagged it, if I'd seen it before it got deaded.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did that show up right away? It should have a 20 second delay on it. Again, not any different from iwillteachyoutoberich.com, which (deservingly) shows up on HN from time to time.

<comment><USER5> It showed up while I was reading. I wasn't counting seconds.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/01/slack-raises-200m-at-3-8b-valuation-for-business-messaging <comment><USER2> I'm honestly astounded that so many high profile corporations are willing to use slack without an on-premise version.

Slack is the only SaaS that has access to, and STORES PERMANENTLY, every important private message, group message, document, commit, internal URLs, .... of your company.

At some point in the future, slack _will_ get hacked. Every sufficiently popular product does. It's only a matter of time. And when it does, the data hosted by slack will be an absolute treasure trove for competitive intelligence, "insider" trading, hacking, and a variety of other bad, bad things.

Not to mention, an arbitrary number of employees at slack can read the internal communications of any company using their product. I'm sure slack has some "security" measures in place to prevent this, but it would only take one rogue employee with the keys to the kingdom to snoop on any data imaginable. This seems incredibly dangerous to me...

<comment><USER3> I'm sort of astounded at the demand for these products. Instant messaging/chat/constant interruptions is an antipattern in my book. I don't use Slack or have any other instant messaging running on my desktop. I used to, but found it highly annoying. I just use email, and check it a few times a day. What is the need to suck on this firehose of instant information about all kinds of mundane events?

<comment><USER4> I think this is highly dependent on culture and the type of work you're doing. Is the software you're doing organized such that you can effectively lock yourself away for an entire day and just solve problems? If so, you're probably not going to see much value from Slack, if any.

But what if you _do_ need to collaborate on pieces constantly? Bouncing emails back and forth isn't the best. If you don't have an office environment that's conducive to collaborating like that, slack is also a boon here. Doubly so if members of the team are distributed. What if you've got issues with your email where there's a ton of it, and 90% of it is only mildly important? If lots of the people sending out that email instead just sent chats to a channel that you turn off notifications for, you won't see notifications for it and your inbox is cleaner.

Of course it can be disastrous, with channels turning into nothing but a bunch of GIF sharing and other stupid shit. The onus is on the team to keep work channels clean and focused, and have appropriate channels for goofy stuff that people will naturally tend to participate in.

Note that I'm not saying whether or not this ultimately allows work to happen more efficiently. I honestly can't tell if using Slack makes things easier in the long run, but I certainly prefer using it over email if I can.

<comment><USER5> > Bouncing emails back and forth isn't the best.

Seems to work just fine for the linux kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love Slack but I fell like they are making the same mistake as Dropbox have done.

They have taken a great business and is pumping it up way beyond it's natural growth trajectory and is ignoring what I consider the most important advice for 99% of businesses": Be patient for growth not for profit as Clayton Christensen is saying.

<comment><USER7> I guess all the other huge venture-funded tech companies made the same mistake?

<comment><USER8> Several of them did? Etsy and twitter come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do people feel about Quip as a competitor to Slack?

[https://quip.com](https://quip.com)

I was sceptical, but Quip's combination of chat and group-editable documents feels actually much better for dev teams than Slack, which ends up very unstructured.

(I have no association with Quip at all, but recently had the chance to use it in a Slack-like context.)

<comment><USER10> I've been using Quip for a few months now, it's awesome. Can't really describe it as a Slack competitor because it really has all the core features of Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Google drive-like documents and slack combined. The text editor is extremately pleasant(even when sometimes gets a little crazy, hopefully they fix it soob) which is such a huge accomplishment since, at least on OSX, the app is super smooth, doesn't consume lots of resources and really feels OSX native.

<comment><USER11> I LOVE the text editor. My only gripe with quip is that the folder layout changes frequently, is unintuitive, and I can never find documents I wrote.

<comment><USER10> Agree, but it's still better than the old navigation.

Quip is the Evernote killer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slack's one of the many things we use and don't pay for because the free version does exactly everything we need. Asana, NewRelic... a bunch of things are the same way. I worry some day they'll all dump the free plans and we won't be able to afford whatever pricing they come up with. It's not like we can't pay anything, but have so far found no need for the paid plans. I kinda sorta feel like a free loader. So I guess they have a good number of paying customers? At least with that valuation, I'd hope so.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever considered switching to Hipchat ?

<comment><USER14> Hipchat's downtime is atrocious.

<comment><USER15> People keep saying that, but I can't remember the last time Hipchat was down.

<comment><USER16> Its literally been down 3 times in the last week

[https://status.hipchat.com/](https://status.hipchat.com/)

<comment><USER15> Weird, maybe their infrastructure doesn't scale well and only goes down when the US is at work? Sadly there's no time stamps on their status page, so I can't tell.

It could be similar to people complaining that Reddit or Imgur is down or unstable, but that mostly happens to Americans. So Europeans get the benefit of an overbuilt infrastructure, because the companies try to scale to the load generated by Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For the "irc is just as good as Slack, you should just use irc" crowd, Slack's mobile clients are pretty good. Ever tried to get a non techie person to use irc on a mobile device? Ever used _irc_ on a mobile device? The experience is terrible.

Slack's clients also have persistence, as in shows the most recent history of communication.

Not everyone uses screen/tmux with irc (though they should).

<comment><USER18> I hate this argument. Yeah, IRC is open and there are tons of clients for it, but Slack is the only one that I've used that a) retains history without you having to think about it, and b) is actually really really REALLY nice to use.

That said, if all you need is simple team communication, IRC works great

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow this is a disaster waiting to happen. They will never generate enough profits to support this type of funding.

<comment><USER20> You don't think they can be as successful as Atlassian?

<comment><USER21> Can a $10m/year chat app be as successful as a $320m/year enterprise software company when they have to justify a nearly identical valuation?

No.

<comment><USER20> My point was that I think Slack stands a pretty good chance of growing into a company that makes about as much money as Atlassian.

<comment><USER21> So by the time they do that they'll only have, what, a two trillion dollar valuation?

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

Is investing at Slack today at a 3.8B valuation a good investment? Maybe, maybe not. But it doesn't seem _crazy_ to me. That's all I'm saying. They already make a lot of money, they're growing fast, and they're in a potentially very large market.

Only time will tell how far they get.

<comment><USER22> > they're in a potentially very large market.

They're in a shrinking market. It's not like they "discovered" chat. They slapped a good interface over IRC and centralized everything on _their_ servers. Everyone and their dog is now writing chat apps, including _existing_ big enterprise companies. So while slack got a large initial boost from developer-driven teams, other companies with existing large userbases are now catching up (and _fast_ ).

Slack is one part decent app five parts hype. It's not worth anywhere near 3.8B, and it now has _immense_ shoes to fill because it apparently thinks it's worth that much.

<comment><USER23> Assuming the latest numbers from TC are correct, they're at annual reoccurring revenues of somewhere between from 70M-140M (depending on average per seat revenue). In the past 12 months they've gone from 100,000+ paid seats to over 800,000+ paid seats. The investors are valuing (and expecting) future growth.

For comparison: Atlassian is estimating $440+ revenue for their fiscal year, and has a market cap of $5.5B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any word on if they had any employee liquidity in the round?

</comment><comment><USER25> If you are in ASEAN, let use other solution by [https://antbuddy.com](https://antbuddy.com) or a solution for FREE slack at [https://slack.antbuddy.com](https://slack.antbuddy.com)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm a great fan of Slack. Large portion of revenue for an b2b app like Slack will come from big corporations and businesses with more than 200 employees.

Microsoft/Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft- Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket.

Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.

</comment><comment><USER27> One area they could improve (besides the obvious one being video chat) is integration with other bug trackers. The Jira plugin is quite pathetic. Granted, Atlassian owns hipchat AND jira, but hipchat's jira integration is excellent. The slack plugin for jira is pretty terrible and is why $employer went with hipchat sadly.

<comment><USER28> Yup. I've been doing custom integrations because of this. We have several alerting systems, and catching items getting added to (and leaving) a queue is an important one that I've added, along with other integrations with internal systems that exist where I work.

One nice thing about slack is that writing these integrations are very, very simple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was a big Slack skeptic when my employer decided to roll it out. But just a few weeks in, it has cut my skype usage by 90% and has resulted in a lot more communication with colleagues than skype.

I think Slack is on its way to really challenging apps like skype and gotomeeting for the enterprise use-cases.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am still looking for more security enabled in it. We can't go over to it yet as a company.

<comment><USER31> What security features are you looking for? It's like any other SaaS, isn't it?

<comment><USER30> One of the issues is that it is a SaaS, currently per certain regs, we can only use skype as our cloud chat, and even then only when it is one on one.

<comment><USER32> Which regulations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Note: not an April Fools joke.

<comment><USER34> I think that's a matter of perspective isn't it? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Now if only they had an on-premies solution.

<comment><USER36> This is something that they _must_ be working on, as they are leaving a lot of money on the table from big companies.

Presumably this was part of the pitch (build on-premise version, hire the good salespeople from MS and Oracle, profit).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why does anyone thinks that a centralized chat service is a good idea? I especially don't get why open source projects move to a platform they cannot even control or commit to.

It makes no sense.

<comment><USER38> Because it's easy for everyone to use, even non-technical people. And it requires no maintenance, so the people running the project aren't spending time doing things that are not running the project.

<comment><USER37> I agree, it's just sad to see several areas of the market move towards centralized closed source solutions. It's as though a new generation of developers don't even know what open source is, including the dangers these "easier" solutions bring to the table and how they shape the future.

<comment><USER38> So why isn't the open source community moving towards an open source, all in one solution like this? To just ignore the popularity of Slack, and insist that everyone just use IRC and handle the other stuff themselves is just foolish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I loved quora response about the valuation [https://www.quora.com/How-is- Slacks-rumored-2-76-billion-val...](https://www.quora.com/How-is-Slacks- rumored-2-76-billion-valuation-calculated/answer/Patrick- Mathieson?srid=3PV&share=39dba0a2#)

<comment><USER40> It's particularly interesting that Slack's CEO upvoted that answer - I wonder if that's because the answer was accurate or he was just amused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This proves that people are not sane these days! $3.8B for a fancy version of Yahoo! Messenger, wow!

</comment><comment><USER42> Wondering if any of the current/ex-employees were allowed to liquidate their holding?

</comment><comment><USER43> >insane 3.5X user growth.

Is that that insane for a successful startup? I think that comes out at 2.4%/week which is a bit lower than YC tends to aim for.

<comment><USER44> Depends on stage and market penetration. It's usually an S-curve.

It says they're at 2.7M active users, which they frame as a lot for an enterprise app, so that probably means 10-100K companies - that seems huge for a company growing 3.5X user growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can anybody explain this valuation?

<comment><USER46> Without seeing their financials I'm not sure if I am qualified to explain their valuation.

That said, if I had the money and was invited to participate in this round I would have. More so than any other software I have seen, Slack has organic buy-in from everybody outside I.T. Once introduced is spreads like wildfire throughout any company I have heard about. Unlike much (most) software introduced to them Slack has an easy to see value for them, has almost no setup barriers, and is usable with little to no training.

All of the objections in this discussion are from an I.T. perspective ("you can just use self-hosted IRC for free") or a compliance perspective (having worked many years in the financial services industry I understand that there are compliance requirements but those are always written by lawyers and often their understanding of the security tradeoffs between self-hosted, with company employed security professionals, and the cloud, with vendor employed security professionals, are dubious at best).

I sometimes feel that programmers would write Excel from scratch in order to add two plus two.

<comment><USER47> But where is their moat? It seems like these sort of apps come and go with fashion. In my company some people use Slack but there's also a mix of various other solutions from Jabber to HipChat to IRC. Can't say that Slack is spreading like wildfire in our fairly large company... It is getting some use, people say it's ok, and that's about that...

<comment><USER48> Their moat is the developer ecosystem and apps on the Slack platform.

But it's also the fact that while it's easy to get started, the value and dependence on Slack increases rapidly by your team's investment in using it.

Slack takes no time at all to do an initial team setup so you can just get started and as mentioned nothing needs to be learned to dive right in. Users are rewarded for discovering new things and further rewarded by cool points for sharing the tricks and secrets they uncover with others.

The ability to search and find a file or a key part of a conversation that happened a year ago faster than you could an email. This feature only gets better the more your conversations happen in Slack — you'll never lose anything again.

In terms of features, many of the best customizations involve apps working with Slackbot and Zapier. Setting up these custom features takes time and tweaking to get them exactly perfect — switching costs you won't want to deal with a year from now once they've become part of your routine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Just more evidence the media, that for months has been sounding the alarm that Web 2.0 had burst, is almost always useless and wrong. Tech media no exception. I guess it's not burst. The Nasdaq stock index is up 15% from the lows in Fed. We're seeing a flight to quality, not a bubble burst, which is a subtly that is lost on most journalists.

</comment><comment><USER50> My guess (wishful thinking): They need money to make and maintain an on- premise version.

<comment><USER51> Considering they're (supposedly) profitable, have hundreds of employees, and it doesn't cost $200m to do this -- doubtful.

It's highly unlikely we'll ever see an on-prem Slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is a ubiquitous business model that will succeed where evernote failed.</comment>


How the Frontpage of the Internet Effects Traffic a Month after Launch - <AUTHOR> http://thatshirtwascash.com/blogs/news/15602155-how-the-frontpage-of-the-internet-effects-overall-traffic

<comment><USER2> Sorry to be "that guy," but this should be "Affects" and not "Effects."

<comment><AUTHOR> It's cool. I changed it on the post. Thanks</comment></comment>


Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/reinforcement-learning-with-prediction-based-rewards/ <comment><USER2> I like the idea of having the agent be attracted to the unpredictable, but I guess there should be something to ensure that unpredictability doesn't dominate which action is selected. For an interesting/funny example check their two videos: "Agent in a maze without a noisy TV" and "Agent in a maze with a noisy TV"

<comment><USER3> How about an approach where the agent's reward is not the predictability itself but the first derivative of it. This way the agent will be attracted to the parts of environment where it can improve and will avoid white-noise parts since its model of the world doesn't generalize on these.

Juergen Schmidhuber (the author of original LSTM paper) had a very similar idea, [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/driven2009.pdf](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/driven2009.pdf)

"This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve. It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally someone beat Montezuma's Revenge without imitating human demonstrations! Very cool. I wonder why the algorithm then fails so hard on Pitfall? I would expect them to be similar problems.

<comment><USER5> Looks like AI winter update needs another update

[https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/10/29/ai-winter- update/](https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/10/29/ai-winter-update/)

<comment><USER6> All right, you led me into an interesting rabit-hole there, I saw this AI winter page, and after reading a bit , the guy( Filip Piekniewski) said: "...the only problem really worth solving in AI is the Moravec's paradox, which is exactly the opposite of what DeepMind or OpenAI are doing...". Then I dont know what the guy thinks about what is the exact meaning of the said paradox, but in my ignorance I went to check Wikipedia, and they gave me:"Moravec's paradox is the discovery...that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low- level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources" Well, this sounded pretty obvious, if you accept "high-level reasoning" as meaning...well...lets see what Wikipedia says a few lines later, quoting Moravec himself: "As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers,...". So, I can see the same contradiction in both, in the Wikipedia's definition and in Moravecs statement, in my opinion and i think the common sense opinion,"intelligence tests" sounds very broad or very narrow, but anyway useless to make a point about the point, even more when "playing checkers" is in the same sentence, the common sense is that from playing checkers to the "high-level reasoning" used by Wikipedias definition (makes me laugh, sorry for the sincerity), there is an ocean of distance. The amount of memory required to do real "what-i-call" high-level reasoning can be huge only to store the heuristics algorithms execution codes, not to mention all the "concepts" of "things" and their possible ways of "interaction" and all the interactions and their possible subjects-"things" , and the probable mechanisms that we have no idea are in place, probably driven by the most primitive reaction-reasoning mechanisms, who in heavens knows...just my-an opinin after biting the bait : ) , in form of a light comment. Cheers.

<comment><USER6>
      Just to add a bit about the point of the "AI winter reality check" X "Stephen Hawkings hype", I think both are right and wrong at the same time: I do believe that the analisis of the human reasoning and its simulation in computers can be achieved with much less computing power than that needed by most insects sensorial systems(so in this sense agree with Moravec, but...). The computing power can accelerate learning in a system, but its a question of time and nothing more, it doesnt matter really if you take a week or a year to "set-train-load" a reasoning human level AI, the achievement would be amazing anyway. So is the mistake, in my opinion, of all the wave-of-hype's direction: neural nets is just for acceleration and generation of datasets(what you say!? yes, generation, thats what they are really for, totally contrarilly to the world's opinion : ) !!! ) and , obviously for the "lesser utility" of  sensorial system autonomous programming, that is what they are using it for right now, but it have nothing to do with "Reasoning Intelligence", that would be, in ma humble opinion, lets say, a programm that could take part and give some insigthful contribution in the famous talk between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore.[1] That said, I do belive a non-neural net "real deal" AI is just around the corner, not that far, really, and here maybe I do tend a bit to the "Hawkings-hype" people, but completely differently from them, I do believe it has nothing to do with neural nets(that are just tools), and are...lets say: "non-neural networks heuristic based".

<comment><USER7> Your text is unreadable on mobile. Can you remove the code tag?

<comment><USER6> Sorry, It was not the intention to put the code tag, I tried to edit it to remove the scroll bar, but I couldnt, have to learn more about this, first timer.

<comment><USER8> I think the code tag shows up when you indent a line of text. Check if there's any spaces at the start of your message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was literally only a few days ago that Google/DeepMind posted about a new approach to curiosity: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/10/curiosity-and- procrastinat...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/10/curiosity-and- procrastination-in.html)

That blog post also mentions the noisy TV problem.

I am not skilled enough to describe how these approaches differ.

<comment><USER10> From the google one:

> The environment also contains a TV for which the agent has the remote > control. There is a limited number of channels (each with a distinct > show)... even if the order of shows appearing on the screen is random and > unpredictable, all those shows are already in memory!

So in google's "Curiosity and Procrastination in Reinforcement Learning" they could not handle a TV with pure noise (snow) as it could not remember all that noise.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact the TV wasn't pure noise. Why would the agent not be able to determine that every noisy frame was one step away from every other?

<comment><USER10> The google paper uses memory. You cant remember a never ending set of 2D random noise, there are limitless variations.

<comment><USER9> They don't remember _all_ the previous scenes, just ones which are "novel" enough.

 _But how do we decide whether the agent is seeing the same thing as an existing memory? Checking for an exact match could be meaningless: in a realistic environment, the agent rarely sees exactly the same thing twice. For example, even if the agent returned to exactly the same room, it would still see this room under a different angle compared to its memories.

Instead of checking for an exact match in memory, we use a deep neural network that is trained to measure how similar two experiences are._

<comment><USER10> Ok. Though it still depends on limited number of tv shows.

If there is an unlimited number of shows and the agent walks right up to it, I think its still trapped.

<comment><USER11> Aren't we all. [http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Interdimensional_Cable](http://rickandmorty.wikia.com/wiki/Interdimensional_Cable)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm becoming more and more convinced that reinforcement learning is equivalent to AGI, we just haven't finished optimizing it yet.

<comment><USER13> "AGI" is not well defined however RL is more like Freudian perspective on human mind which has long fell out of favor in psychology. For example, one of the opular classical view assumed that all of our behaviors are driven by ultimate quest of survival and reproduction. But then how do you explain suicides or soldiers going in certain death combats? How do you explain people who never want to have child? How do you explain artist giving up big money Wall Street job for simple life of doing some obscure art? How do you explain people sitting on the beach to just do nothing?

Here are some interesting comment on the topic:

Is Global Reinforcement Learning (RL) a Fantasy?

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEgGp7gaogAQjqgRi/is- global-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QEgGp7gaogAQjqgRi/is-global- reinforcement-learning-rl-a-fantasy)

<comment><USER12> We're optimized for the survival of our genes, not ourselves. Sometimes that means sacrificing ourselves, or not having children, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love how this post gets like 20 points and the one about decensoring hentai yesteday was like 200

</comment><comment><USER15> Happy to see more work based on prediction. I've been of the opinion that predictive rewards should largely bypass the hand-tuned rewards we have been using for reinforcement learning so far, or at least speed up learning by providing a much richer signal to use for training.

</comment><comment><USER16> > We also noticed significant improvements in performance of RND every time we > discovered and fixed a bug [...]. Getting such details right was a > significant part of achieving high performance even with algorithms > conceptually similar to prior work.

Details.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a really interesting method that mimics human behavior on boredom and achieves fantastic results in RL.

However, it's pretty disappointing that OpenAI, a non-profit organization that claims to want to distribute AI as evenly as possible, to not release the source code of their research to make their findings reproducible by others. This paper is an example, but also other high profile work, such as their DoTA bot.

Edit: My mistake, this paper was open sourced, see below comment.

<comment><USER18> But they did release the code.. [https://github.com/openai/random-network- distillation](https://github.com/openai/random-network-distillation)

<comment><USER19> Note also there are many other repositories available in [https://github.com/openai](https://github.com/openai) from various papers & projects, such as [https://github.com/openai/baselines](https://github.com/openai/baselines).</comment></comment></comment>


How to Enable DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-enable-dns-over-https-doh-in-firefox/ <comment><USER3> Or, you can use [https://github.com/dimkr/nss- tls](https://github.com/dimkr/nss-tls) \- everything that uses gethostbyname(), addrinfo(), etc', including Firefox with network.trr.mode set to DNS, will use DoH

<comment><USER4> Another option that may work, suggested by pmoriarty in another thread : [https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt- proxy](https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy) which is a DNS proxy server that could locally transform classic DNS to DNS-over-HTTPS by using iptables to redirect DNS traffic to it ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20370741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20370741))

<comment><USER5> I use this and it works great. Especially in combination with [https://github.com/jedisct1/bitbar-dnscrypt-proxy- switcher](https://github.com/jedisct1/bitbar-dnscrypt-proxy-switcher) (and its dependency Bitbar), which gives you a little icon in the taskbar to monitor and manage the dnscrypt settings. (mac os x)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this supported at the application level instead of the OS? So other tools like ping or nslookup can use it too.

<comment><USER7> This is my beef with (my understanding maybe incomplete, in which case I apologise) the implementation.

Internal DNS, split brain DNS aren't catered for without disabling support? I don't want my internal names leaking to the internet, nor necessarily are they the same for external resolvers. Now yes the latter is a hack, but it's one widely used still today.

The idea is laudable. But it feels hostile. I can disable support, but for how long?

<comment><USER6> I guess it would be possible to run my own local DNS server that connects to these DoH servers. Does any DNS server support DoH? This could also allow the user to override domains using their /etc/hosts file in case DoH on Firefox doesn't support it.

<comment><USER8> I use pihole + dnscrypt-proxy 2.*

A fair number of resolvers support DoH and dnscrypt-proxy also supports DoT. It's fairly feature rich, you can configure a hosts file and then some.

[0] [https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt- proxy](https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-proxy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article got the trr.mode key slightly wrong

0 - Default (will be one of the below options, right now it happens to be 5)

1 - Race regular DNS and DoH, use whichever one responds first

2 - Try DoH, use regular DNS if DoH fails

3 - Use DoH, regular DNS is disabled entirely

4 - <USER2>

5 - DoH is fully disabled, always use regular DNS

<comment><USER10> I recall reading on a Mozilla blog that 0 is 'default'; right now TRR is disabled but eventually it will be enabled by default. If you want to disable it you should explicitly set it to 5, so that a future update does not enable it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I enabled DNS over HTTPs in the recent past, and was very happy with it. Until I came to test a staging-version of a website and discovered that updating `/etc/hosts` to change the IP of the given name no longer worked.

It took me an embarassingly long time to realise I was still visiting the production site.

<comment><USER12> Using the hosts file to visit a staging environment is a gross practice anyway. Just make the domain configurable in your code and either but the IP directly or make some subdomain (or better yet, separate domain) redirect to it.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't always work. There are migration scenarios where you have to use the correct domain to be able to test everything properly.

<comment><USER12> I'm not convinced that's the same situation or if what you're describing is necessary in the majority of cases. Using the "correct" domain shouldn't be the norm - it should be an exceptional circumstance. As demonstrated in the above comment, it's easy to accidentally hit the production environment at which point you may be convinced that everything is alright and ship a broken change to production.

<comment><USER14> In theory I agree with your stance.

OTOH, in the real world, almost all websites that I've got to migrate are somewhat hardcoded for one domain (I've got this side project were I do websites hosting, good recurring money, little work).

Going for /etc/hosts is the only pragmatic choice here.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, you're right, I'm all for pragmatism when it's just a small site not in active development. I just didn't want people getting the idea that this is a good practice. It's a hack, and a dangerous one at that, but hacks can be okay depending on the circumstance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My Pi-hole is set up to do encrypted DNS. Advantage: every device on my home network automatically benefits from this.

<comment><USER16> So instead of getting spied, blocked, tampered, etc. by your ISP you are getting spied by Cloudflare? We didn't solve the problem, just shifted it..

<comment><USER9> Cloudflare has a list of _all_ data they collect from firefox DoH here: [https://developers.cloudflare.com/22.214.171.124/commitment-to- priv...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/184.108.40.206/commitment-to- privacy/privacy-policy/firefox/)

<comment><USER17> Before CF was CF, they were a group of blackhats running honeypots. I was part of that community. It turned out, building a distributed CDN had potential to make money. And here we are. They built a great CDN. I would use them over Akamai any day. They have very talented hackers. That said, consolidating all DNS lookups to one central company guarantees they will have non stop pressure (if not already) to give warrant-less access to the data. This is very valuable data.

I never take privacy statements on a website seriously. A company can say one thing and do another. HN crowd knows this better than anyone.

<comment><USER16> source?

<comment><USER17> For what, the honeypots? I have no idea of such an article exists. I was one of their members and ran several honeypots and made use of several of my domains. It was started on freenode's IRC network, or at least that is how I learned about it and joined in. There are probably IRC logs on archive servers out there somewhere.

<comment><USER16> Interesting story, thanks for sharing it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Opera comes with a free VPN (which does collect as much data as it can), and I think, Firefox is primed to move in that direction, as well. Given how they already have a partnership for DoH, they might extend it for Warp, which might be great if they do it in a privacy-oriented way and do right by their users. Esp, as more and more govts censor the Internet and ISPs turn into trackers the need for Firefox to be the thorn in the neck of powers-that-be is ever more important.

<comment><USER19> If Firefox included a built-in VPN, they could increase their market share substantially. As long as they keep privacy a priority, they can give Chrome solid competition.

<comment><USER20> > As long as they keep privacy a priority,

This whole DNS over HTTP disaster makes it pretty clear to me as an end user that it's not though. I wouldn't trust a free VPN further than I can throw it, no matter who offered.

<comment><USER18> > This whole DNS over HTTP disaster makes it pretty clear to me as an end user > that it's not though.

True. We've got DoT, which is a very viable alternative. Supported at OS level by Android. And there's DnsCrypt with clients on all major platforms.

> I wouldn't trust a free VPN further than I can throw it, no matter who > offered.

Valid point.

Though, the present situation is that one pays the ISPs and yet they traffic shape, surveil, censor their users. I fear, after a point, VPNs might be the only way to access censor-free Internet across the globe.

<comment><USER20> While I personally trust my ISP more than some random US based entity, that's of course true. The thing with VPN alternatives for me is that the VPN landscape today is already weirdly organized, opaque and would have no real incentive for a free tier.

Short of hosting their own, which consumers will not do, I don't see a scenario where VPN providers end up in a position that's more trustful than your average (Western world) ISP is today tbh.

<comment><USER21> I don't think any ISP can really be trusted, in most countries, since they are subject to arbitrary government demands. In Australia, for example, that includes data retention, censorship, and assistance with any kind of spying that may be demanded.

<comment><USER20> Sure, valid as well. If VPNs get relevant enough to matter to nation state actors none of that really exclusively applies to ISPs anymore though, I feel like we're in a cozy transitioning stage there. They'd either get blocked (see feeble attempts in China) or get the same treatment. Either through similar legislation or technology level interference as we've seen before with the Tor network. At that point it's a game of choosing the nation state control you're most comfortable with in terms of oversight, governmental interference, consumer protection, and business incentive. That'll likely still be my European based ISP over a US VPN to be quite honest, given (theoretically) better consumer protection legislation and generally less equipped/capable surveillance apparatus.

Don't get me wrong, VPNs e.g. for access control or untrusted networks are great use cases in my book. I just don't like the snake-oil vibe surrounding VPNs that make it out to be a great way to secure everyday networking for consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hesitate to rain on a positive parade, but..

Keep in mind when enabling features ahead of widespread release in software, that obvious and/or non-obvious things are _more_ likely to break when you do so than if you wait until it's enabled for you.

This goes double for users on the Release channel of software rather than the Beta/Nightly/Canary/Whatever channel, since it takes weeks or months to fix problems.

I'm not saying "don't", but I am saying "be prepared to encounter self- inflicted issues". The tendency is to blame the issues and the frustration of tracking down their cause on the software developer. Keep notes about what you enable, so you can try disabling it and see if that fixes it. Report bugs you find, and don't panic if they're known and/or unsolved.

<comment> o-__-o such as expecting an application (not OS) based DNS resolver to react to /etc/hosts changes...

<comment><USER22> Yes. But. That's very specific and assumes they'll only ever query one or the other, which might not necessarily be true for *.local and localhost (I haven't researched or tested).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> PSA Firefox Nightly is very stable (with occasional breakage on some websites). It has the latest features, including a convenient checkbox for DoH:

[https://i.imgur.com/NhifLq5.png](https://i.imgur.com/NhifLq5.png)

<comment><USER24> I don't know how I've improved the situation going from Chrome to Firefox and then to Firefox Nightly:

I wish Mozilla put efforts toward preserving settings and not reinstalling search providers one has purposefully removed. I understand that by using Nightly I cannot expect what a general user expects, but this problem exists in all browsers. I consider it user-hostile behavior that more emphasis isn't taken to preserve settings. Oh a new update? Clearly you want us to sync everything instead of just the few things you selected. Let's revert it all to defaults.

I also understand how settings are stored (the backend format) might change between minor or major versions. Sometimes factory defaults need to be reinstated - but it should be very fucking clear (with a notification) that the user should go review settings that have changed/reverted. And this cannot be a banner that shows every time an update applies. Give the user some transparency.

On Chrome when I ask it to preserve my previous session it preserves just that session's browsing history. This history is forgotten if I make a point to close all tabs and end the session. On Firefox I must save all history be to 'restore the current session'. Wish we had more control over this.

You can't disable Firefox from checking for updates (I wish this could be left to package managers on some systems). I understand but I don't want to be nagged. You can make Firefox ask you, but it will check nonetheless.

Why the fuck would I want "Recommmend features as I browse?" or "Recommend extensions as I browse?" I hate being advertised to.

"Warn you about unwanted and uncommon software" \- who is making this determination? Who is Firefox talking to about what I download?

I wish I could sync settings, open tabs, addresses, history, etc - to an simple archive on close or periodically. No online service to sync against with another account I have to worry about.

Sucks that in hotels Firefox determines if there's a captive portal in effect by querying a Mozilla-hosted site (detectportal.firefox.com).

Blah.

<comment><USER25> > You can't disable Firefox from checking for updates (I wish this could be > left to package managers on some systems).

You typically can... not sure about your platform, but I use policies.json on Windows to disable update checks.

<comment><USER24> That does not sound very user-friendly... but well within the realm of a package manager installing a distro's custom policies.json

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how long it'll be before Firefox comes with it enabled by default. It seems that they're going to do it regardless of the loss of control implications to end users.

<comment><USER27> FWIW, there's a standard being developed to allow network admins to maintain control over DNS on their networks, even after this is enabled.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That's neat/interesting; any chance you could point me in the right direction to hear more? I'm curious how they'll make it respect that setting from the "local" network and not from ex. an ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I saw somewhere that this can be enabled in Chrome from chrome://flags/, but I can't seem to find it in mine, v75 on Mac. Was it removed from recent versions?

<comment><USER29> A chromium project called Bromite exposes this flag[0], but I don't think it's ever been available on Desktop versions of Chrome (probably due to the likelihood of Schools, Enterprises, etc. getting mad if a user uses it to circumvent DNS blocks).

As per a comment by Eric [unknown surname] at Microsoft here[1], you can enable it on desktop chrome by adding the following to your chrome launch options:

        --enable-features="dns-over-https<DoHTrial" --force-fieldtrials="DoHTrial/Group1" --force-fieldtrial-params="DoHTrial.Group1:server/https%3A%2F%2F22.214.171.124%2Fdns-query/method/POST

This can easily be done persistently via Windows, but I'm not sure what it would take on Mac. The official Chromium guide for starting with launch options[2] only recommends opening terminal every time, which would mean it can't be easily ran on each launch with the shortcut/dock icon.

0: [https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Enabling-DNS-over- HT...](https://github.com/bromite/bromite/wiki/Enabling-DNS-over-HTTPS)

1: [https://crbug.com/799753#c8](https://crbug.com/799753#c8)

2: [https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/run-chromium- wit...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/run-chromium-with-flags)

<comment><USER28> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is there any way to enable DoH by default but exclude certain domains that are managed by a local DNS server? (eg. intranet domains?)

<comment><USER31> In Firefox? Yes. Set the "network.trr.excluded-domains" pref in about:config to a comma-separated list of the things you want to exclude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A heroic, but misguided effort.

DNS should be provided by the OS, and not reimplemented in every application running on top of it.

<comment><USER33> While true, the OS will contain less and less functionality. Which is funny because on one hand we want to have less dependencies, and on the other hand we have microservices for everything.

Developers going the sysop direction of services Sysops going the developer way of statically linking

<comment><USER32> > While true, the OS will contain less and less functionality.

That's a bold claim, and I see no data to back it up.

If anything, OSes only tend to get bigger with time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> After that ISP award thing came out it finally convinced me to look into DoH and give it a go. So I ended up setting up a Pi Hole this weekend running a local DoH-to-DNS proxy and then changing the DNS settings on my router to point to the Pi Hole. This also means my hosts file continues to work if I need it, and all* the programs running on my PC are transparently going through DoH without them being any the wiser.

The setup was a little bit fiddly to get going, but I'm now super happy with it. As a sidenote, it was interesting to see how effective uBlock Origin already was because I thought the Pi Hole's blacklists weren't working at first!

*I imagine I'm not catching every single one of the DNS lookups on my network, but I bet it's now a large percentage of them.

</comment><comment><USER35> TLTR: Question: To what do I set network.trr.bootstrapAddress for [https://doh.appliedprivacy.net/query](https://doh.appliedprivacy.net/query)?

I am confused. The guide tell me to set:

network.trr.uri

But Foundation for Applied Privacy sounds nice and I want to force DNS over HTTPS. The site specifically tells me to use the the Firfeox setting page [https://appliedprivacy.net/services/dns/](https://appliedprivacy.net/services/dns/) but that sets network.trr.custom_uri not network.trr.uri so whats the diffrence? And it also tells that I have to set the network.trr.bootstrapAddress but does not tell you to what in case I missed something.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 I tried to do it on Firefox Mobile (Android) through about:config but it didn't seem to work. Any idea why, without using an app like Intra?

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if it is ever possible to move to a protocol like MinimalLT - [https://cr.yp.to/tcpip/minimalt-20131031.pdf](https://cr.yp.to/tcpip/minimalt-20131031.pdf) and solve the privacy aspects in a fundamental low-level protocol usable for all types of packet transfers.

</comment><comment><USER37> Using stable Firefox 67.0.4 64-bit and this is right there on the options page in General/Network settings. Truth to be told, it will set network.trr.mode to 2, which falls back to normal DNS if anything is wrong, but nonetheless it's there.

</comment><comment><USER38> I understand how DOH can help prevent DNS spoofing, but I really don't understand the privacy claims. Are not outbound connections, http or https, known by the ISP? Or is the assumption that the world is all behind a proxy like cloudfare?

</comment><comment><USER39> Could something like pieHole intercept all DNS and send it over a VPN or something, while providing a local DNS cache? Seems unnecessary to wait for all software to support it nativity.

 _Edit:_ Apparently they already thought of this and it's a feature!

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it's kind of strange that they are planning to enable DOH by default;

Your ISP can see all connections/ip addresses you connect to regardless of whether you use your ISP's DNS servers or not. So, in the end by using DOH in Firefox (= Cloudflare's DNS by default) you're just sharing your internet history with _yet another_ third party.

This may be beneficial for some people where ISP's mess with DNS resolving, but for many other people it's actually a regression in privacy (especially if you live in a country that has higher privacy standards/laws than the US.)

<comment><USER41> An IP address is not always as telling as the DNS name of what you're connecting to. E.g. I may be connecting to a CDN like CloudFlare for content over HTTPS and my ISP will have no idea what I'm doing. But if I used the DNS name that refers to that content it would likely be more obvious in many cases.

<comment><USER42> ISPs can sniff the hostname from the HTTPS Server Name Indicator (SNI) headers because they are transmitted in clear.

The next step will be to deploy the TLS 1.3 Encrypted Server Name Indicator (ESNI)[1].

[1]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls- esni-03](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni-03)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is it supposed to speed up load times ? I assumed it would slow it down but I'm actually noticing a improvement in page load time.

</comment><comment><USER44> Very cool feature, but adblocking on system side is tricky. Blocking by hosts possible only with your own personal server.

</comment><comment><USER45> How can I check if I got the settings right? Is there any web app or command or something?

<comment><USER46> Yes there is: [https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted- sni/](https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Thanks to DNS over HTTPS now I can access illegal¹ web sites such as Wikipedia.

Also enable ESNI in Firefox.

¹ [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey)

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm guessing this is impossible to use with a pi hole?

</comment><comment><USER49> Why over HTTPS vs TLS?

<comment><USER50> Approximately: because browsers already have good HTTP parsers built in, and that seems safer than trying a new fast binary parser.

<comment><USER51> Is performance really such a big concern here? How slowly can one possibly parse binary DNS responses in a native language?

<comment><USER33> Also, why a complete http stack? Before we know it we need to send JSON packets to the cpu to do some multiplication</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brilliant Visions: Peyote Among the Aesthetes - <AUTHOR> https://publicdomainreview.org/2019/07/25/brilliant-visions-peyote-among-the-aesthetes/ <comment><USER2> There's a lot of emphasis on the visions people have on peyote in this article, but it never touches on the emotional effects it has, where it is similar chemically to MDMA and causes people to be highly empathetic towards others and nature in general. You could say peyote has the ability to make people ecophilic/biophilic.

At least from my experience with it, it opened up a world of emotions, some traumatic, some ecstatic, and at times listening to music made me feel the music in a very vivid way, as if the instruments were channeling through every cell in my body and made me feel intensely ecstatic and emotionally involved with the song, often inducing literal tears of joy.

<comment><USER3> The author references the point you are making: he isn't reporting on mescaline, but on the experiences reported by early western users. He too points out that they were largely responsive to the visual aspects of the drug, and theorizes why.</comment></comment>


As Sparrow fades away, few contend for the Mac mail crown - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/17/3247680/sparrow-fades-where-are-mac-mail-apps

<comment><USER2> I hate they left Airmail out of this article. I switched to it from Sparrow about a week ago and haven't been very pleased so far. It kinda feels like what Sparrow may have eventually become.</comment>


Reddit now tracks all outbound link clicks by default, existing users opted in - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4rl5to/outbound_clicks_rollout_complete/ <comment><USER2> I'm stunned they weren't already doing this. It takes all of 30 seconds [1] to track this and is /incredibly/ useful, especially on a site that's used largely for outbound links. I have outbound link tracking set up for every client and personal website. Same with email address clicks, button clicks, file downloads, etc.

Did anyone really think websites weren't doing this? This is incredibly innocuous compared to other things.

[1] [http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/google-tag-manager- tuto...](http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/google-tag-manager-tutorial- part-1-tracking-outbound-links-gtm-version-2)

<comment><USER3> Given that they always had the occasional, well, quite frequent actually, "all our servers are busy" problem, while having a monetization problem (meaning investing in infrastructure isn't something decided lightly), I find it perfectly reasonable. Or do _you_ have a concrete - and I mean _concrete_ monetization plan for that data? Not just an "idea", it should be as real as the cost of creating and maintaining the additional server(s) for tracking (even more) stuff, and also why it's more important than finally solving their "busy servers" problem. _Everything_ sounds easy from a high-level management perspective. Until you actually have to _do it_ and can't just wave hundreds of "details" aside.

<comment><USER4> I'm fairly certain most of Reddit's server problems came from database R/W operations. If you look at some of the metrics they've put out recently you'll see things like "queued upvotes/comments/messages" suggesting that they now heavily queue them. They also cache SUPER aggressively, very noticeable on large threads like those for sporting events where you can refresh a page and not see any updates for several minutes.

I think this is a talent problem and not a "throw servers at it" problem.

EDIT:

As much as I like bashing Reddit I feel like I need to mention something. Reddit is the UNDISPUTED best news source for large, breaking, news stories. Reddit's live threads are curated and crowd sourced feeds containing information from police scanners, News outlets, twitter feeds, and a variety of other sources. It's value is in its ability to display conflicting information instantly such that the viewer can get the clearest picture possible. This thread of today's Dallas shooting is a prime example [1].

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/live/x7xfgo3k9jp7](https://www.reddit.com/live/x7xfgo3k9jp7)

<comment><USER5> Reddit also gets it wrong. They blamed a completely unrelated person (who had killed himself) for the Boston bombing, which is now a meme ("We did it Reddit!"), and even today a photo of a black man in army camo and holding an M16 was falsely claimed to be a shooter.

<comment><USER6> That photo today was published by the Dallas PD, it wasn't a reddit thing.

[https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo...](https://twitter.com/DallasPD/status/751262719584575488/photo/1)

Besides, you're mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat.

<comment><USER7> > mixing up reddit the platform/company and reddit the commentariat

The sane way to use Reddit is to log in, unsubscribe from everything that's by default, and add only things you are very interested in. Also go into your Settings and turn off all the suggested subreddits (and the outbound click tracking, surely).

Do that, and you can browse your niche technology news and computer game and magical-girl-anime subreddits in peace -- otherwise it's just a losing fight against clickbait popularity contests and flash mobs for justice.

<comment><USER3> And _do_ subscribe to /r/cats to get your daily dose of cat.

[http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/f1yeHVO.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, by the current state of things, I'll have to visit the privacy settings in every single social network I'm using on a monthly basis just to make sure that they haven't pushed something I didn't agree on by subscribing to their service? Great!

<comment><USER9> It's probably in the privacy policy / terms of service that you don't read when signing up (no one does...). It's actually nice of Reddit to announce these sorts of changes and not just say "we updated our privacy policy"

<comment><USER10> Smart not nice.

Reddit has a large community of technology savvy users what looks better "We started doing X that some of you may not like" vs "We updated our privacy policy"..few days later "They started doing X, burn them!".

I wish more companies would be smart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully they can use this to substantially improve their algorithm. (Voting without clicking, click to vote interval, click duration) Lots of reddit's problems are due to algorithmic flaws that they just didn't have the data to correct.

<comment><USER12> Most of Reddit's problems are due to "double-dipping" what upvotes/downvotes mean. It is both used for like/dislike AND for marking things as spam/troll/off-topic/unconstructive.

So you get these incredibly articulate replies which move the conversation forward but people "dislike" so wind up hidden with -5. Which is treated no differently to pure trolling and nonsense.

I can name another website with that same issue...

A like/dislike system is fine. But you need three buttons, like/dislike, and "bad." No amount of dislikes should ever make a comment hidden or punish the account, that's what "bad" or "flag" should be for.

Heck even the karma total on Reddit encourages an echo chamber, effectively reinforcing the idea that downvotes are "bad" and you have less "worth" with less of them.

<comment><USER13> The problem with any negative feedback system is that people will always use it for stuff they personally don't like. It doesn't matter what you call it, people will abuse it.

<comment><USER12> You could easily design around that.

With like/dislike and flag, you could restrict them from replying or voting on replies which they flagged. Meaning they cannot argue with someone they just flagged, if they want to argue all they can do is "dislike" (which is how dislike SHOULD be used).

<comment><USER14> This is towards what Slashdot does (did? haven't been there in a while). When you're given moderation points, you can only use them in a discussion you don't take part in. If you reply in a discussion that you'd moderated, your moderation is undone.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I've always quite liked that idea. Combined with marking things in different ways (funny vs informative, for example) I thought it worked pretty well.

There will always be issues with anything like voting, but it's an interesting approach.

HN also stops you from downvoting someone who replies to you, I think, which is another good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Their warrant canary is gone, they've banned tons of subs that were barely controversial, and they added a way to block people you don't like making it an echo chamber.

I'd say I want to hack on a federated Reddit clone, but looking at the state of federated social networking, I already feel it'd be dead in the water.

Having to opt-out of tracking feels like another nail in the coffin.

<comment><USER17> The world is a museum of echo chambers. You can't escape it, it's in our nature. People _want_ confirmation bias.

<comment><USER18> Look no further than Brexit and /r/unitedkingdom for a perfect example of this. You would _not_ think that half the UK population voted to leave the EU based on the rhetoric in that sub. The pro-remain echo is deafening.

<comment><USER19> Sample of UK population that posts on Reddit may not be representative of UK electorate (and also about 37.5% of those in the UK electorate voted to leave the EU).

But I take your point about echo-chambers. That is one of the reasons I lurk and post here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I first noticed this yesterday when nothing was loading. Turned out "out.reddit.com" was down, thus breaking every single link.

That got turned off immediately.

</comment><comment><USER21> They are or have been experimenting with forced registration to view content too - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11955938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11955938)

<comment><USER12> Eww.

Pinterest does something similar, which is why I blocked it in Google Personal Blocklist. The best way of encouraging people to join your site is to show them what you have to offer, it isn't to put up a wall and make them jump through hoops.

Part of Reddit's early success was due to how accessible the content was and how easy they made it to sign up (e.g. three fields, no email address required). That is not something they should throw by the wayside for short term metrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised they weren't doing this already.

<comment><USER23> > "At one point I just ask him, 'how's the data science team at Reddit?' And > [Ohanian] said, 'what data science team?'" Weiner recounts to me.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-cto-marty-weiner- on...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-cto-marty-weiner-on-building- a-home-for-the-internets-wildest-community/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like a stealth edit of the privacy policy. The policy [0] in place prior to Jan 1 of this year doesn't mention it. The "announcement" [1] of the new policy also didn't recognize the change.

Also, you apparently cannot (yet) delete [2] the data reddit already surreptitiously collected.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/help/privacypolicy?v=33a67dd2-e2c6-11...](https://www.reddit.com/help/privacypolicy?v=33a67dd2-e2c6-11e4-807a-22000b248ffc)

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3tlcil/we_ar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3tlcil/we_are_updating_our_privacy_policy_effective_jan/)

[2] [https://m.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4rl5to/outbound_cl...](https://m.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/4rl5to/outbound_clicks_rollout_complete/d524dpl)

<comment><USER25> There's definitely something a bit shady about this, given that existing accounts have been silently opted in and as a long-time Redditor and someone who does actually scan privacy policies before signing up for things I still had no idea about it until seeing this story on HN.

It's not as if Reddit is the only major site doing this kind of thing (hello, search engines) but that doesn't make it any less creepy, IMHO.

<comment><USER24> It is all kinds of shady. The policy says that if material changes are made to the policy, special notice, including sending notifications, will be made. As I noted, even the policy change announcement does not include a mention of this material change.

Why is this feature being prioritized and snuck in, while the most significant announcement from their last raise (that users will receive 10% of the raise) seems to have been all but forgotten?

It really puts this interview with Steve in some context: [https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=13m50s](https://youtu.be/uSVqoW1rz6w?t=13m50s)

<comment><USER24> Really? No one can counter this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How would you guys feel if we tracked outbound clicks on HN? I've always assumed people would hate it, but on the other hand users frequently ask things like how many people vote for a story without clicking on it, and it _would_ gratify curiosity (the name of the game here) to know things like that.

Edit: I suppose it's a dumb question because the answers can only be one- sided.

<comment><USER27> To quote you _The mandate of the site is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity", and it seems pretty clear that both the curiosity and gratification here are more voyeuristic than intellectual_

Would it gratify intellectual or voyeuristic curiosity?

<comment><USER26> When I wrote that I did not have website analytics in mind.

I'm glad someone noticed it, though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't seem to be a good decision for Reddit to only post this to r/changelog and not post it in r/announcements.

Even if it's overall an innocuous thing, I find it shady that an opt-out tracking system is not announced publicly to Reddit. Were they trying to hide it until someone found it? Seems it would have been smarter for them to control the message around this option than let their users do so.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah I found this out the hard way when my content blocker stopped letting me click on anything in Reddit. It's actually pretty shady.

<comment><USER30> What are you using? I'm using NoScript, but had to allow reddit.com and redditstatic.com, otherwise "reply" and "edit" buttons do not work. HN works just fine without JS. I find it odd that before allowing redditstatic, NoScript offers to block googleanalytics.com, but after allowing there isn't that option anymore, as if it was somehow being loaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just another reason to delete your reddit account with regularity. I've lost count of how many accounts I've been through now.

<comment><USER32> Really?

1\. Why do you think deleting and creating a new account helps? The data isn't account-bound, it's aggregate.

2\. Do you realize there's an option in the account settings to disable it? Deleting your account only serves to reset that option.

3\. If you're against reddit's behaviour, why do you continue using the site?

It's funny, your post feels pretty representative of what I've come to realize is "privacy extremism". In the name of privacy, refusing to tolerate or even _understand_ what websites, companies etc are doing. It's counterproductive to your own cause. I mean, even if you thought you were doing yourself a favour deleting your own accounts, you're a fool if you think it's not possible to associate your old accounts to your new ones.

<comment><USER31> Frankly, I don't care what you think is ideal user behaviour. Users on reddit are by-and-large such feral pieces of garbage that deleting one's account and starting over every couple of months is a necessity anyway.

Once the trolls there start stalking you simply for making comments, you'll understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can the page figure that with a JavaScript "watcher" or do the links have to be "physically" intercepted and redirected?

<comment><USER2> Very simple with js, or 0 lines of code with google tag manager. [http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/google-tag-manager- tuto...](http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/google-tag-manager-tutorial- part-1-tracking-outbound-links-gtm-version-2)

<comment><USER34> Thankfully google tag manager is one of the first things to be blocked at my router, right after GA.

This kind of unethical behavior is going to bite the industry in the long run. Get informed consent first.

<comment><USER2> That is really interesting and something I've never heard of. But, do you really think any (>1%) of users will ever care? I understand adblocking (and block all ads myself), but I fully support a site's decision to track with ga and gtm.

<comment><USER34> > users will ever care?

Then make them care.

> track with ga and gtm

That is a _far_ bigger problem than advertising. I'm fine with sites that track the pages they serve, because that is local only. The problem is when these per-site events are _aggregated_ into a single database.

If someone has the event log of _every website you visit_ , not only do they have your entire reading list, they also have a very accurate picture of your pattern-of-life. Google can probably estimate e.g. when you sleep or the length of your commute simply from the _timestamps_ of the GA events they can correlate to your account.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of- life_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern-of-life_analysis)

<comment><USER2> Worst case scenario, Google, FB, and the US Gov have access to that kind of data. Google/FB both say they don't record that, or destroy/change it before giving advertisers access to it.

I see your point, but realistically I don't think any organization could/would ever do this. Outside of NSA vs. Snowden type cases, but I guess that is where it really counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope to see all those complaining over on Voat ([https://voat.co/](https://voat.co/)) tomorrow. The programming subverse definitely needs more activity.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't mean to be snarky but I guess I am genuinely 'out of the loop' as they say: What user base is reddit trying to attract atm ?

</comment><comment><USER37> Change it in [https://www.reddit.com/prefs/](https://www.reddit.com/prefs/)

</comment><comment><USER38> the thing i hate isn't that there's tracking, but that it now takes an extra redirect to click on anything.

Also don't like tracking in general for privacy reasons, but it's a minor concern next to performance.

</comment><comment><USER39> Something I find bizarre about the current mobile reddit website is notifications at the bottom of the screen which must be dismissed, that include "you have been disconnected from the internet" and "you have been reconnected to the internet", as a consequence of Wifi changes.

You are just a damn website! I do want every website considering itself so important that it needs to subsume duties of the OS and present them with its own branding.

<comment><USER12> I don't follow. The banner is based on if the JavaScript on the page can communicate with the Reddit server so things like upvote/downvote/save/hide will be correctly stored.

<comment><USER39> Show an error if/when the user tries to initiate an action. It's ludicrous to have to tap to dismiss "you have been reconnected to the internet" popovers on (potentially multiple) websites.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you discriminate science and pop-science reads? - <AUTHOR> I like to read science, psychology and philosophy topics. But everytime I read the discussions here regarding a book in those fields, there is almost always someone claiming that it is just pop science and pushing you to "really read and learn deeper" instead of learning from that book. This is not really an issue, as it's true that sometimes I was able to learn more from other sources. But again, there is not always enough time or even willpower to step into a rabbit hole to learn something "deeply enough".
So my questions are: How do you decide that something is just "pop-science"? Where do you draw the line? For example, sometimes I only want to learn about an area well enough, say quantum physics for example; I don't really want to dig deep into all the text, but I was unable to read just a few articles without wondering if they are just "pop-science" or even worse, wrong knowledge. Is there any way that works for you when you approach new territories like that?
P.S. English is not my first language so I hope what I wrote is clear enough. <comment><USER2> It's not that simple. Language may be an issue here.

There are people who study how we know stuff. After all the way you "know" that chairs hold you up is different from the way you "know" string theory explains the birth of the universe. Or that language evolved before tool usage. People use "know" and "science" to describe both, but they're different kinds of knowledge.

This is why no matter what the topic (almost), somebody can call it pop science. A lot of what people get angry about is just non-science reporters covering scientists who might exaggerate a bit. I can see where it gets them angry, but I am not sure that it is anything purposefully-bad going on.

So let's define pop-science as things that have broad audience appeal but little in the way of advancing the underlying conversation.

Once we define it like that, anything appearing in a popular forum that strikes up controversy? Most likely it's fluff. Every now and then, about 1 time in 100, there's really something interesting going on. Usually it's just non-scientists enjoying playing mental Star Trek and scientists scoffing at the terrible reporting.

Likewise, any book that tells me things I want to hear, or supports some larger overall narrative about how large groups of people feel about the world, is pop science. You see these a lot in the softer fields where "science" is much more a matter of opinion than anything else.

Hope that helps.

By the way, pop-science can be fun! You just have to know what you're consuming.</comment>


Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production - <AUTHOR> https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-production/ <comment><USER2> It's always interesting to see Hayek's words, followed by a timestamp. Similar, although less recent at nearly 25 years ago, is this Peter Thiel video discussing the illusion of multiculturalism in 1996 [https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722](https://youtu.be/qTPOBEdc7OI?t=722).

The degree to which _radically_ far left ideology is taught in university is one of the most prevalent contributors to the current political schism. America has been primarily liberal since its inception, but there has been this slow creep of an entirely new, wholly incompatible, and entirely illiberal moral/economic framework.

The modern product of the American university is generally skeptical of anything resembling a meritocracy, instead believing that the major forces that will dictate the outcomes one will receive are mostly divorced from their actions, and instead to be determined by the factions they belong to. Most notably, one's racial and gender identity are brought to the foreground as bar none _the_ primary contributors to the outcomes an individual will encounter. Not too far behind is the usual suspect of economic class, where "boomers" and "landlords" are the new bourgeois, and debt-laden millennial college graduate is the proletariat class. The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value associated with their actions is so immense, that the idea that someone with a CS degree having a vastly greater market value than an individual with a degree in Critical Race theory is simply met with derision akin to "but muh STEM."

<comment><USER3> > The degree to which people are skeptical of markets and a market value > associated with their actions is so immense

Similarly, the degree to which market advocates, themselves, exhibit skepticism about the market mechanism vis-a-vis their own intellectual products is so immense, in fact, that the idea that ideas achieving widespread adoption within the marketplace of ideas do, indeed, have vastly greater value than those with inferior adoption is simply met with comparably-inarticulate derision.

<comment><USER4> Ideas aren't a great place to push free market ideals; especially because so many ideas are basically anti-freedom and anti-market. How often does anyone come up with "let people sort it out themselves, bearing the costs and consequences" as a new idea? When it is suggested it is rare to see someone championing it with enthusiasm and to wide acclaim. Compare that to the "Lets order people to [activity]" style ideas that are common and suggested in many forms.

Using market forces to measure the value of an idea is not clever. Ideas that are to be put into practice should be assessed primarily by whether they are grounded in evidence or not, and secondarily by whether people are willing to cope with the consequences of the idea going wrong.

An idea being popular or gaining popularity does not make it a valuable idea (or indeed a good idea). That stands in stark contrast to economic forces which measure resource creation and destruction with a cruel accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > In short, literally none of this stuff is actually new. Indeed, as Oliver > Traldi has pointed out, the entire contemporary debate around 'free speech' > and 'political correctness' bears an uncanny likeness to 1990s controversies > on these same topics. Perhaps George Santayana was right when he declared > that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Um, how far ago does the author think the 90s are? Yes, many of the same arguments from the 90s are happening now. It's not because people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's because a large number of people were alive in the 90s and now and are having the same debate still.

<comment><USER6> There are a lot of "regular people" out there interested in these issues who were too young to have been involved in the '90s. Maybe the tone is off but I certainly appreciated the history lesson.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't disagree with the piece, but it is quite biased.

The institutionalization of non-scientific (that is, there is no clear criteria of what constitutes the truth in knowledge) "crap" is much more wider phenomenon, and not just some aberration of "the left". Nor is it confined to universities.

Here are other examples:

\- Neoclassical economics, especially the macroeconomics. (It's ironic they quote Hayek, who significantly contributed to its rise.) If you want a similar article with this example, look at Steve Keen's Debunking Economics.

\- String theory in physics. This example shows that it doesn't have to be related to politics and society at all.

\- Various project management methodologies, lately the Scrum and Agile craze.

The truth is probably that in many institutions, there is some atrophied department that mostly lost its useful function in favor of defending some internal dogma.

</comment><comment><USER8> That is an awful lot of words for "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy". Put aside the possibility that the reason elites disagree is because they know something that the author doesn't. Even if one disagrees with a prevailing philosophy or even if it is objectively wrong but the idea catches on doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.

That a rant from the 70s sounds like one today says more about the source than it does the target really - given ongoing processes one would expect the complaints to differ more substantially as the changes either "succeed" and are embraced as the norm or "fail" and are discredited. I use quotes because it is a matter of perception more than if they are actually good ideas.

To be frank it seems to be pure projection of the "eauality feels like oppression to the privledged" sort.

<comment><USER9> Here is another statement which you can characterize as "people who don't agree with me are part of a vast conspiracy."

> Republicans have been making concerted efforts to stack US courts with > conservative judges.

Accusing someone of promoting a conspiracy theory is to accuse someone of making creating an unfalsifiable story, which does not seem to be the case in either my example statement or the original post. Specifically, there are no claims that "evidence to the contrary is fabricated" or "lack of key evidence is due to deliberate suppression." Now it may be the case that the author would respond in this way when presented with contrary evidence, or when pressed for some key supporting evidence, but as it stands there is no cause to levy the "mere conspiracy theory" charge at the author.

<comment><USER10> I'm not an American so I'm not directly involved in the US political process, but my question is why shouldn't US Republicans appoint conservative judges? Why is this seen as a conspiracy? Isn't this the reason why they were elected? Should they appoint liberal judges? But then what type of judges should the Democrats appoint? And in today's political climate it doesn't look like there's truly a "neutral" judge, so to speak, one is either liberal or conservative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone provide the tl;dr on this?

<comment><USER12> The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never understood where the criticism was for American Universities having a somewhat more "Leftist" culture among social sciences is coming from. Once you learn how to speak the "leftist" language, it's extremely easy to get high grades. Read and understand a Foucault and De Beuvoir work, coast on easy A's through these "grievance" studies courses. I did 1/10th the amount of work for a graduate level gender studies course as I did in a graduate level programming class.

I certainly don't like the idea of not knowing the political orientation of a professor before I write an essay (as it is eminently important for my grade, no matter how impartial one pretends to be), and a radical left cannon means that I can write like I'm Marx and get a free pass into the Academy. The people on HN who don't like this simply don't know how to play the game.

<comment><USER14> Or perhaps people have standards that make them dislike some harmful things that benefit themselves personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, _publish or perish_ , etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".

</comment><comment><USER16> The rise of social justice is the evolution of our society from red/orange through high orange to a green society on the Spiral Dynamics model of psychological / spiritual evolution.

We're seeing the limits and the ugliness of unhealthy/low orange in the environment, politics, culture, et al.

The transition to green will be painful and violently resisted by orange/red portions of our society, but it is necessary for our survival and for rescuing the ecology of the Earth from the excesses of unbridled stage orange capitalism.

I'm so curious what our economic systems and culture will look like in stage green, but it'll likely not happen in my lifetime, which I just have to accept ...

<comment><USER17> Did you recently get laid off from the TSA? The only purpose your "threat level" categorization of social issues serves is to marginalize viewpoints you disagree with under the brush stroke of "progress at any cost." There are conservative values that are deeply necessary for a free society to function and that afford people the privilege* of criticizing their freedoms in the first place. (*well actually a right but rejecting civil rights in favor of 'wokeness' is so hot right now)

<comment><USER18> Hey, please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It lowers discussion quality, evokes worse from others, and discredits your argument.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Using Markov Chains to Generate Test Input - <AUTHOR> http://www.electric-cloud.com/blog/2009/09/15/using-markov-chains-to-generate-test-input/

<comment><USER2> Markov chains are a fun programming project. One of my early web projects was an independent reinvention of the Markov chain:

[http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/software- tool-f...](http://experimentgarden.blogspot.com/2009/11/software-tool-for-low- order.html)

This is what happens when you are a self taught programmer who learned mostly from basic coding primers rather than from the internet. I ended up independently reinventing a lot of code and algorithms, including a basic Markov chain implementation such as the one described here.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to see how something like this could be integrated into Quickcheck. However, it is not clear to me how you would use it to generate _erroneous_ input. In the example he gives the training relies on a sample of correct makefiles. Would it not be useful to also have a separate network that produce makefiles that should probably cause an error?

<comment><USER4> It really depends on what units of data your chain (in this case, an n-gram model) is dealing with. You can increase or decrease the granularity and modeling depth to get different kind of erroneous data using the same training data.

For example, given the same corpus, if you have an n-gram model of english characters, obviously some[1] of the words will be erroneous. But if that model is over words, none of the words will be erroneous, but the grammar will still be broken in some cases. Extend that to an n-gram over collections of grammatical phrases where the words, grammar might be correct, but it may have a nonsensical meaning in some cases, etc.

[1] Obviously "some" is dependent on the amount and diversity of the training data, model detail, etc.</comment></comment>


Comcast customer surprised to learn new router is also public hotspot - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/comcast-customer-surprised-to-learn-new-router-is-also-public-hotspot/ <comment><USER2> From the HN submission guidelines: _Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter._

...especially given that the original story was posted on HN only a few minutes before. Please don't recycle blogspam.</comment>


Sublime vs. Atom – who will win the editor's war? - <AUTHOR> Which one do you prefer and why? <comment><USER2> Sublime is closed source, eh? Atom has my vote all day everyday regardless if it is inferior. If I had to pick an editor and it is between 2 where one is closed source, proprietary software, and the other is open source software, then the latter gets my vote _every single time_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just like every 'war' in this industry (language, editor, framework) I say.. who cares. This post is just meant to stoke up some flame war for kharma. Your account is only article submissions, MOST of which are to projects and articles of yours, no comments. I don't normally berate people, but please don't use HN to farm arbitrary points.

Feel free to prove me wrong though. Why are you interested in this? Given that you don't really comment on things I'm a bit skeptical of you having...any reason other than points, but happy to be proven wrong when I accuse someone of farming.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neither, I think that despite the momentum behind Atom, and the open source nature, that there seems to be a never-ending supply of new text editors over the years. I think you just need to choose VIM or Emacs and be done with it. People have been using either of those for 30 years, ask yourself if you think the time you invest in learning Atom/Sublime will be worth anything in 30 years?

</comment><comment><USER5> Sublime for most things, but Atom does have a few nice features: better markdown preview, drop down menu for things like autocompletion and snippets, nicer color syntax overall (same theme looks better on Atom, I think), a single file for all snippets (I personally think it makes it easier to manage). Main problem with Atom is speed, but there were also a few poor choices such as the package installation interface.

Actually, I gave up trying to find the perfect editor a long time ago, and now just use different ones for whatever they might do better: emacs for org-mode and ESS, vim for editing on servers, sublime 2 for a few plugins that won't work on 3, but sublime 3 is my home base. That being said, sublime looks like a ghost project, hone update/year is just not enough.

</comment><comment><USER6> VS Code and Atom are nice but I keep coming back to Sublime for speed. VS Code destroys Atom in that department but Sublime beats them both and with the number of files I open in a day that counts for a lot.

Edit: Wanted to add that VS Code can't open multiple projects either.. huge issue.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sublime.

I've been using a combination of Sublime and Emacs for the last 6 years but decided to give Atom a try. Talk about a resource hog. It was noticeably decreasing my battery life and I'm not sure they will ever escape that given it is based on Chromium.

</comment><comment><USER8> A better question might be who will win the hyperbole war. Or the war on apostrophe usage.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find Sublime better than Atom, but honestly VS Code is really starting to win me over. The price and licensing difference and between the two also makes it easier for me to recommend VS Code to people.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find Atom to be preferable in many ways, however, more often than not tend to use SublimeText3 instead.

I find Sublime to be cumbersome to customize, however it is definitely significantly less detrimental on either Windows, Linux or Mac in terms of battery/memory and CPU needs.

My only complaint about Atom is I cannot seem to get text wrapping to work the way I have it working in Sublime. This is my primary reason to not use Atom more often.

</comment><comment><USER11> I uses Sublime haven't used Atom and have not plans to move away from Sublime because it is light wight and easy to use

</comment><comment> atom-x +1 for mattkrea's comments. Sublime still wins, hands down, with it's ability to open many files, as well as large files, without slowing down.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sublime much better

</comment><comment><USER13> notepad++ will win.</comment>


New iOS flaw makes devices susceptible to covert keylogging, researchers say - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/02/new-ios-flaw-makes-devices-susceptible-to-covert-keylogging-researchers-say/ <comment><USER2> "New" for the public -- probably already packaged and sold as a high-priced exploit. Apple needs to get their shit together.</comment>


Putting Deep Learning into Production - <AUTHOR> http://conf.startup.ml/ <comment><USER2> Two topics I have not seen addressed often are Version control/release management and monitoring. Do you know of any discussions of these for production learning systems?

also, i read "prediction latency" as "predation latency" and thought that was much more interesting. :)</comment>


Flickr hits 6 billion total photos, Facebook does that every 2 months - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/08/05/flickr-hits-6-billion-total-photos-but-facebook-does-that-every-2-months/

<comment><USER2> _> >In comparison, Facebook counted 10 billion uploads by October 2008, around four years after it launched, surpassing 60 billion uploads in February 2011._

I am not sure why Flickr keeps getting compared to Facebook when talking about number of uploaded photos. I find Flickr user's restraint in what they upload (on top of the fact that uploads are limited unless you pay) really doesn't allow for this comparison to be made.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's like saying "Hollywood hits 1 million films; YouTube does this in 3 minutes."

Facebook allows photo uploads; Flickr is a photography site. A world of difference.</comment></comment>


You are terrible at predicting the future of technology and your own behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/why-would-anybody-buy-an-apple-watch/379969/ <comment><USER2> Spot on. I had a friend _announce_ to everyone just yesterday that he won't be buying the iPhone 6 and that Apple was past its prime. I just kind of chuckled to myself. I don't know how many times I've heard that but it started back in the 80s. I've learned to never think I can predict what people will do when it comes to Apple products. When the iPad came out I kind of shrugged and thought it wouldn't do as well as they thought. Within 6 months I was in NYC working on iPad apps and the thing was selling like ice water on a hot summer day.

Something I learned in poker: Don't project your own thoughts onto others if you want to predict their actions. It's a method that will never succeed.</comment>