skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A more equal society is a better society. Always.

If you can read Russian and aren't familiar with the concept of уравниловка, I suggest looking it up. My search on the English transliteration (uravnilovka) doesn't turn up good descriptions offhand.

If you can't read Russian, I'll summarize. It's basically the argument you're making: that everyone should be equal, and that the most expedient way to accomplish this is to drag down the people who stick up. Which is true: that _is_ the most expedient way to accomplish equality. Historically it also leads to everyone living in communal apartments and a stagnating economy that eventually causes your country to have a revolution because people get so fed up with it. It just takes several decades for the pernicious effects of stifling economic growth and innovation to show up.

Now maybe you didn't really mean "always" when you said "always", of course. Maybe you meant "keeping all sorts of things equal, more equality is preferable". I may be able to buy that, but then you need to convincingly argue that those things can be kept equal.

(We could also have an argument about the data cherrypicking and other shenanigans in the book you mention, but I don't think it's really all that germane here, since you're making a blanket argument which has simple historical counterexamples.)
> I think that self-driving cars should act in the self interest of the owners.

To what extent? At some point, we're going to have to decide as a society what call a self-driving car has to make in situations like "I can run down this family in the cross-walk or get rear-ended by that oncoming vehicle".
It really, really depends on your site's demographic.

Example: skin care website, they sell women's beauty and anti aging products. Their demographic is 15% IE8, but you know who are most likely to buy their products? Mature women, who are also more likely to be the ones in that 15%.

The next part of that puzzle was when they launched into China. China has a huge population still on XP and IE8. Literally millions of uniques from IE8. We even had a percentage from Netscape!

Fortunately the agency handling them was smart enough to research the demographic in both instances, but many agencies won't. They will brazenly force their opinions on their users who frankly, don't give a crap how you feel. They just want it to work so they can buy stuff.

You have to view every hit as a customer. Imagine if Walmart stopped letting in 15% of customers.
TensorFlow Benchmarks are somewhat disappointing
I have read only 2 of his novels so far - and they in my top10 list of books.

Cryptonomicon & SnowCrash - I've read the first book of the Baroque Cycle too!
Sony Z5C is about it when it comes to decent specs in a small frame. The new nexus 5 is stretching it. Welcome to the world of large phones.
Thanks, I stand corrected. It was a fun theory though and it will probably not go away anytime soon.

Kubrick himself claimed HAL stood for "heuristic and algorithmic" according to this article:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/07/hal_9000_ibm_...
Do you know which talk that was?
I would say: For a big chunk of the population in developed countries. If you saw a person get one of those big things to take a call on a crowded bus you would realize how inappropriate they can be. (But of course nobody talks on their phones anymore.)
This extension fixes that:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fuckfuckadblock/hb...
Of course, the tax payers are showing up and feeding everyone and staffing the place. So it's free money, right? No work involved at all. Not like he's doing a ton of work and creating value, then charging for it...or anything.
Thanks for the pointer, Leo.

Also, thank you for the mithril blog. It is amazing.

Everybody else, if you haven't read the mithril blog[1], YOU SHOULD BE READING THE MITHRIL BLOG. Even if you never plan to use mithril, you'll probably learn something interesting.

1: https://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog/
I wouldn't use it.

1) Bad concurrency model -- callbacks, promises and futures are in general inferior abstraction model compared to green threads, actors, regular threads. Performance-wise it might do well in some scenarios but you are forced to use a more complicated abstraction to get that performance It is not worth it. In general it is appealing because it looks simple in small demos, as applications grow it becomes a mess.

2) npm modules are easy to use and that's great. Good model (well maybe except for deep nesting which breaks based on max path in say Windows, but I hear they are fixing that). The problems I found was that a lot of modules were of low quality. Code half-finished, buggy, developer moved on to something else, etc. Somehow it seems more so than say in the Python community.

3) Javascript is not the best language. There is a reason there is a "Javascript: The Good Parts" book. Because there are lot of crazy decisions made in it originally and a lot of bad "parts". If there was a choice between FORTRAN, Cobol and Javascript. I would pick Javascript hands down, but there are other languages out there today.

However. If all you know is Javascript and you want to write a small demo, then go for it. It will be the least friction.

So with all this complaining and whining, how about some constructive stuff. What language / frameworks might be more interesting / better.

1) Go : good concurrency model, supported by a large community, good performance. Lots of big companies use it.

2) Elixir : new kid on the block, fun, one of the friendliest communities. Probably best concurrency model -- actors. It uses Erlang's VM, so that part is rock solid, battle tested for many years. But not as many libraries. But can use existing Erlang libraries from it. Also best for reliability and fault-tolerance.

3) Python : easy to learn, lots of libraries, lots of material how to use it. This is my go-to language to get stuff done quickly. Try Python 3 if you start from scratch.

4) Clojure, Scala, Java: run on JVM. Battle tested, probably lots of libraries. Personally not as familiar with it, most enterprise and big sites out there run on the JVM currently.
> Reducing the pace of consumer technological progress to the benefit of more equality

Was tried, more or less successfully, in the Soviet Union. People were not happy with the results in terms of access to consumer goods and living conditions. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.
I get where you're coming from and I agree that's probably not what he meant (but who knows). But his wording does leave open the interpretation that "Bad Thing happened 70 years ago. This is Less Bad than Bad Thing so it isn't really all that Bad."
This Edge.org piece reminds me of Paul Graham's 2007 essay "Stuff:" http://paulgraham.com/stuff.html:

I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can't afford a front yard full of old cars.

Having too much stuff makes a person a good candidate to dematerialize some of it. Indeed, this year's weird It Book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo, can be read as a how-to guide for dematerializing one's stuff.

Perhaps taking books, music, and videos online means that one trades physical clutter for intellectual clutter. But the intellectual clutter is at least searchable.
While I don't agree with Lanier, being an AI skeptic isn't quite the same as saying that self driving cars can't happen: we don't yet have a good understanding of either consciousness or tractable general optimization algorithms, so it's still possible that there's something that will make it impossible. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible.

Also, your sarcasm about the self driving car might have been too subtle. ;)
> I should finally write that essay that I've been meaning to for the longest time.

No need. Orwell already wrote it.

I just don't get why you think you are alone.
That applies to trademarks, not copyrights IIRC.
Java finally has window functions
Downvote me to death, but I cannot understand how someone can be so smart to study science and still believe in ancient religions...
The U.S. Pays a Lot More for Top Drugs Than Other Countries
Neural Network Sort
This "crazy neighbor" of ours got their gun a decade ago, not today.
If Chrome, you may be thinking about HackerNew: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...
God, what a lucid, piercing look at reality and the human condition he has. The whole part on translators, just brilliant.
You're really low-balling.

Work in the greater D.C. area. Within a 150-200 mile radius, there are literally tens of thousands of developers working directly on surveillance. Probably even more. How do I know this? From random sampling. Go to any tech event, talk to any program manager at any government contractor. The work and money is in surveillance.

And, that's just government surveillance. All that tech is then spilling over into corporate surveillance. Location and behavioral tracking is big money. How do I know this? Because, sadly, that's how I have to make my money. The problem is that there's always another grunt like me willing to create the systems that enable this.

The solution: Use all of this surveillance tech and data to expose all of the VIPs. Publicly post where they are and where they've been, who they've been with, what they read, and what they buy. You do this and laws will be created pretty quickly.
Every browser has security issues. And as a business it is not up to you to decide what browsers people use, the best you could do is inform them but the decision is up to them.
Right - some fraction of the team isn't zoned out, sure. Maybe working on the communication skills of those remaining ones is a better idea, than derailing everybody for a standup.
You can never completely trust your government won't abuse its power.

Privacy is a necessary tool for opposing those abuses of power and organizing a change.
There have been lots of posts on the Pomdoro Technique to HN in the past:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=pomodoro&sort=byPopularity&pre...
...huh?

Oh, this comment is satire.

Eh, I really don't think people on HN tend to explicitly value others according to wealth. The failure mode some people have is not being fully aware of the degree that a certain level of wealth or stability during childhood is a prerequisite for all but a very few to get to a solid technical [self-]education.
Hack your commit history for fun and profit
It's $75/day/refugee just for food, water, utilities and other misc. expenses. I doubt that he/she is running this facility as a 5 star hotel to charge this high from like $30/day/refugee to the rate above.
This says they are[1]: Interoperability has been succesfully used as a fair-use defense in the past, and commercial use decreases the chances of a fair-use ruling. Both points (interoperability and commercial use) are central to the Oracle v. Google case, and have been brought up by both sides. See here[2]:

I reached out to Collard, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney, who specializes in intellectual property... "In my opinion, the biggest problem for Google is the commercial nature of its use [of the APIs]," he said. "That is generally a strike against finding fair use. Its best argument is probably interoperability -- in other words, it should be fair use because Google must use the APIs in order to make its products interoperable."

[1]: https://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps182s/fall02/cscopyright/C...

[2]: https://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2015/07/google-java-api...
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7547-libusb_maintainer_fail
A tragicomedic irony of course is that most "nothing to hide" advocates demand secrecy and legal cover for their own actions. This sort of doublethink leads to things like a "Freedom of Information Act" in the US that provides a legal framework for concealing information that should otherwise be out in the open.

If you apply the "nothing to hide" principle to states' own actions, I can think of two possible conclusions:

1) It is not true that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide (i.e., there is a legitimate right to privacy)

2) State actors have something to hide, so they must be doing something wrong.
MIRI’s three research objectives are, at present:

•highly reliable agent design: how can we design AI systems that reliably pursue the goals they are given?

•value learning: how can we design learning systems to learn goals that are aligned with human values?

Not exactly what I meant. What are these human values (for humans not robots) and how do you prove they are rational and scientific? Their goal is to design AI that will accept human goals/values without defining a rational basis for those human values.
Also:

- Would you eat an alien? - series about the ethics of eating animals using a fictional crashlanding on an alient planet to explain the issues

- Inside the Ethics Committee - stories about doctors that have to make hard decisions around people's treatment
My response in 136 characters:

That thought is pseudo-profound, not complex. In this context, "sound" is human-audible air vibration. One waving hand doesn't make any.
Imagine a world where every country has nuclear weapons and methods of their delivery - a true democracy, or a diversity of democracies you could say.
He/She is paying wholesale not retail prices for the everyday household items.
Maid Killed Over Memory Card by 14 Year Old
A lot of what you said is correct, assuming that 1) all humans have the same goals and 2) all humans are sociopaths.

If different humans have different goals, then your argument falls apart; if one of my goals is "do not rape", then I will feel disgust at the idea of raping someone.

And if not all humans are sociopaths, then your claim that sadness serves no purpose falls apart, as sadness enables us to signal to others that something is wrong, and humans whose goals include "help others" will see a chance to accomplish that goal.
Isn't that what the front page and every other media outlet is for?

Where is it made clear "my queue" isn't based on my preferences?
> Neither Sweden nor Norway has plans to stanch the flow of newcomers

This is just ridiculously wrong, and taints the journalistic integrity of the piece.
Craigslist's UI is great! High contrast text. All links are obvious (no iOS style "is that colored text or a button"). It loads quickly. I can find the information I need without hunting around a bunch of ads masquerading as useful content.

As an added bonus, I don't have to relearn how to use it every 6 months when the design team gets bored and decides to redo the whole thing for no good reason.

There are a few additions I'd like to see (PadMapper style apartment search being the big one), but all things considered I like Craigslist a lot more than most websites.

Compare it to Amazon where half of the items are miscategorized, sort by price doesn't actually sort by price, and sort by average customer rating is way too literal. In what world do I want to see something with a single 5 star review over the one with 191 reviews, 94% of which are 5 star, and another 4% are 4 star? But that's tucked away on page 7 of the results after all the items with nothing but a single good review. Amazon's got issues to work out.
I'm about to turn 41, and have achieved most of my life goals. Except that I keep finding more, greater goals as I complete old ones.

It seems to me that goal reaching is a skill like any other, to be practiced with discipline and diligence. Many goals will be missed (I'm 1 for 8 in business so far), but when you're striving it's never boring!
How Namecheap marketing capitalizes on Obama's tears is disgusting
Many people seem to hold an intuition or belief that it is wrong to profit, or profit "excessively" when providing certain types of services, particularly related to "care", survival, or necessities (e.g. "price gouging" laws).

I think this is misguided for (at least) two reasons:

1. Profit allows for the services to be sustainable, rather than charity-dependent.

2. The more profit, the stronger the incentive for entrepreneurs to enter the market and/or innovate.

Figuring out a way to profit and reduce the problems of refugees in any way is win/win for everyone.
It's satire, but not meant to be about HN readers. It's just an amusing way to cut the Gordian Knot and riff on society's treatment of the less well-off.
To be honest this thing seems to be most attuned to Euro centric features.
Fatally weak MD5 function torpedoes crypto protections in HTTPS and IPSEC
Fair question. To me he comes across as remarkably insincere, someone with a history of publishing and saying things no properly skeptical person could take seriously.
If we assume, that — by default — people are unethical, governments are corrupt and most people in power are criminal, then you're f*cked anyway. With or without mass surveillance.
> You completely hit the hammer on the head

http://dannybaranowski.blogspot.hu/2012/06/idioms-for-idiots...
Have you tried Apache Lucene?
Java libraries that declare manifest service declarations won't work.
Neomy alerts you when it's the best time to send money abroad
Prior art. The Doughnut was built in 2003. :)
It is vastly cheaper. When the influx was at its highest the government had to buy all rooms in hotels in order to house the refugees.
At least in Sweden the company run homes are a lot cheaper than the municipality run ones...
Its probably not the ancient religion they want to defend, but the way of life it allows them. Imagine someone barges in to your home and starts creating rules for you - e.g. from now only you only pee sitting down on the toilet. You also need to go to bed at 9pm sharp. All for your own good, etc...
That's terrible methodology. For example maybe in a country with very few foreigners people aren't as worried about foreign neighbours as other things. It doesn't demonstrate anything.
Sure I create bugs, but they're not usually memory-buffer/overflow/underflow bugs: Those I was able to eliminate a couple decades ago simply by adopting some habits.

Most of the bugs I create seem to have to do with my limited memory: I forget things when I scroll, or (more often) I misremember things. These bugs are still very embarrassing, but are something I'm working on by scrolling less.

Re 2) I agree it should be a non-issue, but the parent wanted to make the implementation fully opaque which hides operation complexity.

Re 3, 4) Agreed completely. I think these are easier to get with increased flexibility, not with stronger harnesses though.
Basically they watched a few episodes of Myth Busters episodes
There is no bug. This works just fine for me
Right, but if you give the refugees freedom of choice in which residential centre they reside, market forces will eliminate poor providers. If you don't give them choice, regulation is necessary, as you say, but you're then back in the realm of self-perpetuating quangos, as you say.
5 French startups to look out for in 2016
Ask HN: Why do companies struggle to find relevant insights in business data?
I'm currently investigating the data analytics market to see if it is a good spot to start a business and love to get your insights.

There are myriads of business intelligence, data analytics and management reporting tools on the market. However, it seems that businesses have a hard time to find relevant (business) insights in their data. Why do you think this is? What are these tools, and the business that use them, struggling with? Please don't think just about these tools and their features, but also about the people using the tools, the processes behind, etc.

Would be great if you could state your role or position, to help me understand what your background is.

Thanks!
"With that said, here are the links to my social media:"
<crickets>

I think a rendering issue in Safari hid them, or something, but I thought it was humorous to have that article, followed by no way to follow him on social media! (presumably unintended.)
Just curious: why did you decide to take Wednesday's off instead of Monday or Friday, thus getting three day weekends?

Personally, for almost all of my professional life I didn't work Monday's (32 hour work week). That worked out really well for me.
War is hell. The US tried to stay out of it as much as possible at first. Japan changed that, and they reaped what they sowed.
Haskell has a library for this called "embed-file".
If you want to level constructive criticism, then set aside language prejudice. Obviously, if you don't like javascript, move on.

It's great you like Python. Use a Python framework. You can point out Javascript's warts and we can laugh at the Python 3 migration. (And really, both of these criticisms are out of date. Javascript is _fine_ these days and Python 3 is moving towards backwards compatibility; sure Javascript has warts, but that's because it's backwards-compatible. You know, like... never mind.)
Razer Launches the Razer Blade Stealth Ultrabook and Razer Core GPU Dock
Cycligent Announces New Microservices Platform
I think the value of Scrum is that it provides great visibility into development for stakeholders. They can see the progress of the backlog and know what's being committed to every sprint. It does put some artificial boundaries on work getting done, but I think it strikes a good balance between pure agile and keeping business happy.
until because of the profit you are tempted to support the continuation of the problem
Ask HN: Computer Science Learning Resources
Does anyone have a great set of Computer Science learning resources?

I realized the other day that I've written hundreds of thousands of JavaScript, etc. and don't know how virtual memory, for example, works.

Anything is appreciated! Thank you!
Doesn't Firefox have a built in reader mode?
Archlinux isn't the most STABLE, but I've had less problems with it than any other distro. Rolling Release is a godsend, and the wiki provides excellent documentation. Just don't be put off if your told to RTFM when you ask a question.
What I'd like to see happen is:

1. Licensing guns and their sales, including required training. I liken this to license required around cars / alcohol sales.

2. Closing background check / re-scale & licensing loopholes.

3. Requiring additional insurance from gun owners.

4. Local control over the remaining aspects (can cancel out above mandates).

I don't think you entirely get rid of guns even if all of them are illegal. And the US is a big country that encompasses many diverse areas with competing interests. This scenario accounts for the country / NYC divide. It admin that it does require more from the folks in the country (licensing / training). But that's always a bit of tit-for-tat like the folks in NYC where a big chunk of their tax dollars goes out of state / upstate NY, or utility bills in the city that have taxes for building out access out in further to reach places.
Wow, this is really great. There really is a wealth of knowledge and culture here. I'm especially interested in the collection of sheet music. It would be really great to make an album with new recordings of the old songs.
I had an educational experience yesterday, remotely. Working via a shared tmux session while talking via google hangouts - it was a troubleshoot but I was able to observe the way of thinking, the work-until-you-get-the-bug-down mentality along with some nice tricks.

The good thing was that I was able to follow, the bad thing is that it was impossible to grasp everything at once. Having worked with different people in many jobs, my lead engineer yesterday made me feel way more comfortable than people I've known since childhood.

So, today there are tools (share-screens, tmux sessions, you-name-it) to educate someone remotely as long as we're talking about IT-related jobs. The most important thing is for the lead engineer to be communicative and open to Q & A sessions no matter how stupid the question might seem and the new entrance to put up the hours and get up to speed ASAP.