skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Question out of curiosity - do you read all the HN threads and spot things like this, or do you have a script that finds the most common transgressions? ("I refuse to comment" is also a valid answer.)
So, the rebels won the Civil War?
Nand2Tetris: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
First and foremost one has to know the domain, what are the things that tend to go wrong. And this is platform specific knowledge.

I mean, you're testing a web app? Disable JavaScript in the browser.

Testing an Android app? Rotate the phone to change screen orientation, especially when there's a background operation going on - that's a typical spot for bugs, but no amount of general manual testing know-how will tell you that. And so on
As someone who is ostensibly a planner, I'll agree that these examples seem like more short-run tactical neighborhood improvements. And that's no bad thing! But, I think you're right that these platforms are yet to provide a venue for resolving the sticky problems of planning that

- require long-term coordination

- require cross jurisdictional cooperation

- have broad disagreement on the desired ends or means

- require the kind of funding / financing heretofore only available to / applied by governments

But, I think this is the right direction! I'd love to see plans themselves developed in a more open source / open science kind of way. In my experience, most plans are some mix of carefully wordsmithed rhetoric combined with insufficient analysis that could bear a lot more scrutiny--all packaged up into a crisp looking document produced in InDesign with lots of inspirational photos taken from the area. Why not, for example, start with a jupyter notebook in github, and let people fork / issue pull requests?
> One disadvantage of 'unlimited' vacation policies are that expectations are oftentimes unclear, and many people end up taking far less vacation time than they otherwise would or could.

That's why I advocate for minimum vacation. It sets a clear standard of how much vacation is expected but doesn't make you carefully dole out vacation days.
I don't think it'd be a particularly popular decision to use tax dollars to pay for a murderer to have a funeral celebration and burial. Maybe that's callous but I'd guess that's the way it is in the US.

As far as I know it's up to relatives or loved ones to bury their deceased and its up to them to arrange a funeral, plot of land, headstone, etc which runs in the thousands of dollars. If there is no one willing or able to pay then I'd assume the state essentially disposes of the body by cremation.
Business's are amoral entities, designed with just a single charter: to increase the bottom line for it's majority stakeholders. Nothing about that is inherently democratic or good for their customers, for the environment, for the nation that company occupies, for anyone not in the company, or even for any one of their bottom tier employees by default. Any adoption of altruistic practices are either part of the companies branding and therefor good for business, or are core beliefs held by the majority stakeholders and are adopted by force. This also works for adoption of not so altruistic practices as well, and we shouldn't leave it up to chance.

If anything, corporate structure creates a multiplier effect on the influence of single humans or small groups of humans thereby corrupting the one-person one-vote intent of democracy. While I agree with the philosophical kernel of the Supreme Court's citizens united ruling that money is free speech, just like many things, at large scale, it has unintended side effects that need to be thwarted by campaign finance reform so that some people don't have MORE free speech then others.
The 2013 and newer Leafs have a variety of options for this. The default "automatic" mode behavior is to lock the plug when charging then unlock when charging is complete. Not totally sure if you can unlock the charger.
Can many people really say that IT is being used effectively in most organisations ?

Almost every one I have worked in use haphazard methods, unnecessary manual input and duplication of input, outdated forecasting, bad choice of software tools (e.g. spreadsheet heavy) ... the list goes on of small day to day things that add up.

There was a recent story about 90% of people not even knowing about Ctrl-F to search documents.

Think about all the times you've had images sent in Word documents or crappy artwork you've had to re-create by hand because the only copy of the logo was a 400px jpg.

Multiply the time wasted on those things by a few hundred million.

Now tell me there's no productivity to find, and we haven't even got on to your actual business processes.
That's what we call "book smarts." People who can regurgitate trivia to show proof of intelligence, but can't actually think their way out of a paper bag.
IMO very few people who could become good engineers would choose to do so with basic income available that essentially lets them live a so-called "life of the mind." Just an opinion, of course.
>Obviously improving things even a little is better than not improving them at all.

That is not at all obvious. It's particularly not obvious when you benefit from the marginal improvement, thereby creating a damn good reason to not improve the problem any more than marginally.
As someone who lives in one or more terminals during the day, in my opinion, "the future of UI is text" is misleading: it is the past, present AND future.
Oh jeez, there goes the neighbourhood :)
I've also heard this line of reasoning referred to as "the soft bigotry of lowered expectations", due to its implication that not all groups of people can be held to the same standards of behavior as society as a whole.
Lockheed will probably lap ITER within the next few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have.

The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.
Welcome to America, land of the freedom to work yourself to death
It could be used to create a competing system. ICANN would never allow this. If someone tried to put this together, I think they would quickly find their access to the data revoked.
You are either incredibly misinformed or you are an out-and-out liar.

For instance, a drug charge of any kind, even just a misdemeanor for paraphernalia precludes any Federal Student loans from being offered. My younger brother was arrested with a pipe containing some cannabis residue and was unable after that point to receive any Federally subsidized student loans.

Some 20,000 inmates in US prisons are currently incarcerated for cannabis possession and trafficking.

There was a young man of 19 years of age down here in Texas that was arrested after he was ratted out by some teenage customers who were themselves arrested and flipped on their dealer to save themselves. He was arrested with cannabis and cannabis oil along with a pan of brownies he had made with the oil. The Williamson County prosecutor sought to treat the entire volume of brownies as drugs and the defendant was facing LIFE in prison over some cannabis brownies.

So yeah, you either need to inform yourself better or you need to stop lying.
Part of the issue here is classifying non-linear ideas in linear terms (i.e. Bubble or no Bubble). What we regard as the tech industry is an integration of countless individual markets, each moving at their own relative pace. A collapse in something like the app-game market wouldn't necessarily dictate a collapse in AI.
Well yes, but I am thinking on a more meta scale... or do we believe there is an endless supply of hard problems? At some point, assuming we continue, will we not have figured it all out?
If there was a tagging feature in HN, similar to reddit enhancement suite, I would tag you as a racist.

To everyone else responding to him: I would recommend not to. Pseudo-intellectual justifications for the debasement of innocents deserve no attention.
Sovereignty means that you have a monopoly on using force within your borders. When you infringe on the interests of foreigners, the foreign sovereign might have objections, and I don't understand how this fact is inconsistent with your sovereignty.

Whether your infringement upon the foreigners' interest is good or bad is an entirely separate question, all I'm saying is that sovereignty does not grant you the ability to automatically get away with it and I don't understand why this word became so fashionable in this context recently (a similar example is defaulting on sovereign debt.)
Reverse engineering the IDSecure/Matica XID580ie/XID9300 card printer
If you are allowed to redefine any word you want and completely remove it from its common usage and any vestiges of its actual meaning then you are certainly free to say something like "it's not clear to me than an ethnic group that is not part of the 'majority establishment' can be 'racist'" -- you're just saying nothing more than "I'd like to redefine racism as something that can only be done by white people". Which is fine, you just need to make it clear when you use the word that you don't mean actual racism, you mean your new definition of "white-only" racism, or you need to use a different word if you don't want people to be confused. What's wrong with using 'systemic oppression' to describe systemic oppression (or even just oppression if you want something shorter) and 'racism' for actual racism?

It seems very extreme the mental contortions that are required to say to a white kid in an inner city school that when other students beat him up for being white they aren't being racist. Or when a hispanic person uses the n-word to describe a black person they aren't being racist.

Then once we've agreed on the definition of words we can argue whether or not there's any context in which white people can experience systemic oppression in the US (I think probably not but perhaps there's an argument to be made)
> There's absolutely no inherent reason that roads have to be paid for by a tax on their usage.

Well there's the inherent reason that it's a requirement for proper resources allocation in a capitalistic framework (although the requirement is less tax on their usage and more tax on their consumption/wear)
I suggest you watch the talk either way. It's well-paced, witty and above all extremely fascinating. It centers around both the things that we previously thought were unique to humanity(but discoveries have shown we're not), as well as the ways in which we are unique("why are humans unique in a way no other species is?").
A few years back there was plenty of text based interfaces like gnome-do. IIRC there is a web cli extension for firefox that is based on RDF intents which allows to command website using text.
Last night I mentioned the idea of a dedicated product manager to our CEO, who responded that the CTO will ultimately be responsible for that area. It's interesting, but I'm not convinced the roles and skillsets are adequately aligned.
What's happening today is technological (and socio-technological) change at a great pace. However in order to call it progress most people would require it to be good for us, the people.

That's where the article's concluding question becomes relevant: "How reliant are you on the narrative of progress for your sanity and understanding of our world and its future?"

The answer is that to a thoughtful observer much of the aforementioned change is not of the good kind anymore. People are increasingly disenfranchised in the new techno-social environent; the recent upswell of talk about the robopocalypse etc. is just a projection of trends long underway.

So we end up with feel-good "progressivism" as a prosthetic replacement of actual progress.
Anything like Partyline for Bitbucket? :)
Its important to understand the word majority has two different meanings. There is the mathematical majority which we are all familiar with on here but majority used in these cases is not referring to the mathematical definition of majority but the sociological definition of majority which is the group that holds [the majority of] the social power. In sociological contexts the word majority never refers to population size.
Russian government does censor the internet. There is a blacklist maintained by Roskomnadzor; it, for instance, blacklists certain Wikipedia pages, along with certain opposition and other "extremist" web sites. Russia lacks a China-style single-choke-point firewall; ISPs have to enforce it.

If you have a chance to watch any Russian TV, you can't avoid noticing how propaganda-heavy it is, and how all the propaganda is in favor of the government (in the US, at least, the latter is not the case).

Also, being a businessman of any importance and not following the party line does not work. Not all cases are as dramatic as Khodorkovsky's, who happened to own one of the largest oils and gas companies, but legal harassment of business for political non-conformance continues, or continued while such non-conformance lasted, or, at least, was publicly visible.

This is milder than China, and way milder and more sane than than the Soviet regime was; there's no doubt about it. Also, the sharp rise in living standards of 2000s, fueled by oil prices, is still remembered and has not completely deteriorated. So Putin does enjoy some genuine citizens' support. It's still not something that citizens, acting freely and with consideration, have chosen, kind of like the Swiss do in their referenda.
> Sarcasm aside, I look forward to the day when our political bodies become composed of a higher percentage of such minded individuals, as software wealth translates into political power, who might inject some reality into the process.

If that isn't sarcastic, you're in for serious disappointment if you think SEs are any less human than anybody else.
So if some people support good ideas for simplistic reasons why is that such an interesting topic of discussion? I'm sure there are plenty of people who support mutually-beneficial exploitation for stupid reasons, too.

Yet the author chooses to present the situation as a group of people who want nothing other than to make the world a better place, while stupid hordes get in their way. I can assure you that that's not the true state of affairs, either.

Moreover, why is it good to assume that those who disagree with you do so because they're stupid? Maybe they're not, and maybe they accidentally made a good argument. In any case, trying to understand the merits of the arguments would only enrich you. But the author -- who clearly considers himself to be among the smart ones -- never bothers to look up the literature on this very topic (or, at least, he doesn't cite any), namely mutually advantageous exploitation, opting instead to base it on a much simpler philosophical argument, without consideration for the nuanced discussion of this very issue. So we can assume -- as he and you do -- that his position is driven by nothing more than simplistic arguments.
Reality show star for president isn't looking all that impossible, so we're probably halfway there.
Well, you did mention a number of organizations that are strongly associated with conspiracy theories of various sorts.

I upvoted your post because I agree that the freedoms we are offered is limited to a set of options deemed acceptable by un-elected and un-representative authorities.
Yes, but it is much easier to do them responsibly if you have other rewarding activities to look forward to.

I, for example, spent almost six months high a couple of years ago and loved it. I stopped because the hippies I was working for ran out of money. I was about an inch away from homelessness before I managed to get a job as a software developer. I was sober at work, but I'd get fucked up as soon as I got home, later with friends, &c. Now that I'm working on my own startup my drug usage has declined even more. I still get high when I have the chance, but I have other highly stimulating activities to spend my time on now.

I wouldn't recommend my life choices to anyone else, but there are ways to responsibly partake of excess.
Cameron V Corbyn – Presenting V Protesting
The westerners aren't as scary as the developing nations are, actually. We're starting to care about our energy sources, (sometimes) pushing for clean alternatives. Compare with the rest of the world, in the process of rising from poverty. They need cheap energy, and they will need even more. What will they turn to? Coal, probably. And who are we, the rich west, to deny them access to things we treat as basic human rights - like wash machines or hot showers?

It would be in our best interest as a civilization to help them build solar and nuclear infrastructure, to skip the fossil fuels. But the way things look right now, I don't see it happening.
Historical note: it needs to be remembered that the allies did a great disservice to Poland after the war. The war was ostensibly started over Poland, the allies promised to liberate it, and in the end it was given out as spoils of the conflict.
IMO those very few people would benefit tremendously from a less diluted workplace. Such that they may actually seek it out were it not for the forces that drive them away. The modern startup is essentially this. It just takes a VC to make it a reality. We're a few technical iterations from essentially deprecating everyone else. We ought to start talking about this. A "life of the mind" in a world with seamless VR and other escapes could actually be wildly more productive than our current life in the world. We should just start trying to make people more comfortable. The engineering mindset seems inherently rare. I suspect distributions converge such that it simply CANNOT be pervasive in a population. What then? We're making everyone else redundant to a degree that we don't even need the entire engineering-capable subset. Honestly I think the money is and will-be potent enough to attract the capable.

Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.
Yeah I can see that. I was just surprised that you are allowed to keep the urn at home.

In my country if you no one is willing or able to pay for the burial of the ashes or the body the state pays but can get back the money from heirs and relatives. You are not allowed to not bury the ashes.
How do you reconcile this with the declining popularity of desktop and laptop computers, and the increase of smartphones, tablets, and other keyboardless touchscreen devices? I haven't noticed an increase in keyboarding skills either, which are absolutely essential to use a CLI well.

I wish CLIs would become more popular amongst the general population, but it seems GUIs (which are also becoming "flatter" and less discoverable, ironically enough) have taken over completely for almost everyone.
There's no coercion - True is just an alias for 1, and False for 0. True <pow> False is just an ugly way of writing 1 <pow> 0.
Buffer overflow.
Worked for me with scriptblock (ytimg unblocked).
1) argue that non-power uses will love the text-based interfaces
2) support your claim with a bunch of examples from software development workflows.

Sigh.
Not true at all. Out side of progressive areas like major coastal cities posession of marijuana can in some cases be a felony offense. Contrary to what you have stated, people ARE arrested regularly for simple possession of the drug, almost always meaning very limited life prospects in the future.
I you look at the demo site again, I made the chunk size and delay user-configurable, and I'm displaying the current running code.
Related: “Eroom’s Law”[1], coined in this Nature paper: http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/full/nrd3681.html which states that the cost of discovering a new drug has been increasing exponentially for 60 years.

Obligatory log graph: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/wp-content/uploads/site...

Some discussion at the “In The Pipeline” blog:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/08/ero...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/14/the...
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/03/12/the...

[1] You may now groan.
LENR, too, which the US Navy and NASA seem to be considering:

http://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEE...
One of the huge limitations for text based interfaces is the same as the elephant in the room for people starting programming, especially when they start dealing with others libraries/modules: It's not easily discoverable if you don't know what to look for - there's no intuition. A GUI, at least one that's reasonably well-designed, you can play around in and learn fairly quickly.

Having seen the pain of many users even when trying to dig down through a GUI they're unfamiliar with, I think that while text based interface are often more powerful there's a long way to go before they're more popular.
One could relatively easily make a prankster device for screwing with the chargers. That said they are somewhat more than just a dumb extension cord and they require a bit of negotiation (and I assume constant communication) with the car to keep the juice flowing.

The chargers available in our area lock into the charging stations to keep people from messing with them when they are not in use as well.
I would never argue against science but the following is a true anecdote:

A friend of mine was up all night smoking pot and drinking alcohol. She had a University exam the next day that involved writing essays.

She picked herself up, went to the exam and passed. She did so well that she got an award for the best peformance that year.

True story.
Voice recognition? So you might say, the future of UI is saying what you want to happen, either by typing it or speaking it outloud.
Medically, we now have drugs that break up blood clots and give heart attack patients a fighting chance if they get to the hospital fast enough. Same thing with some stroke victims. Today people who would have died from anaphylactic shock from peanut allergies or bee stings can carry around an Epi pen and a couple of Benadryl tablets and have a great chance of surviving an attack[1]. When I was a boy scout, I was taught the sequence of CPR was ABC- Airway, Breathing, Circulation. They very recently changed it to CAB, and there were quite a few other things that we've learned along the way that changed how it works. I understand that the CPR program is changing again at the end of this year.

Of course, these change are small and not on the scale of nuclear fission. But there have been tons of significant medical changes in the last 40 years that increase quality of life and let people live who otherwise would die. And I'm not even getting into the changes I consider even more significant medically, or in AI. Things computers are doing today weren't even imagined a generation ago.

[1] Epi pens started going out to the public in the 80's. If you have a serious allergy that could lead to your airway closing up, and don't yet have an Epi pen, go see your doctor and get some. People still needlessly die from that stuff all the time, and it can be prevented.
A corporation cannot kill me or put in a cage and call it legal.
That's true in a strictly literal sense, but we really want the demand-destroying effects of a per-mile tax on private automobiles so as to incentivize a modal shift to other transit options.

From that perspective, there's nothing better than raising taxes proportional to road mile or road hour.