skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm really glad somebody has written this. I think it makes essential points and does it with undisputable examples and a sense of humor. Bravo.

I agree with the javascript examples; I had an even worse experience trying to set up a LAMP stack back as a teenager. It was a perfect storm of new problems and vague errors (which .conf file on my hard drive represents what's running on port 80? Did I screw up permissions? Is there something wrong in my php.ini? Did I install php as a module or a library? All I get is a timeout...). Today I know all the exact commands to debug the setup, but I wasted so many hours back then blindly struggling with something that could have been explained in minutes by more experienced people / software.
Show HN: Metascreen, free digital signage that doesn't suck
Couldn't agree more. We make a very complicated product that accomplishes a very complicated task. There are 100% use cases where an app should 'just work' and where documentation isn't necessary.

Of course, there are cases where deep configuration is required and including all necessary information in the UI is hopelessly impossible. For these cases - documentation is king.
I hate the "open source way". Projects should include 100% of dependencies. Don't make me waste hours chasing down one dependency after another. My own project has it's own build pipeline. Don't force your crappy system into mine.
The entire premise of this article is that tools like NVM are "apps", which is interesting for me. I do not think of software like NVM or node as 'apps', as much as I think of them as 'tools'. And for me, the entire point of a tool is that contrary to point 4, you are expected to read the manual before using them. A tool has little in the way of safeguards, and it doesn't presume to know what you want. It does what it was designed to do, and you are expected to understand what it does and doesn't do.

For example, the problems had with NVM are nearly all explained by reading the README[0] which on my laptop is ~6 screens of medium size text. If perused, it would explain how to install versions of node, how to enable different version, and how to set default global versions.

Now, the question is "why is it the case that tools aren't expected to be as simple to use as apps?" I believe the answer is because anticipating and guiding a user through learning that tool takes a ton of time and energy, much more time and energy than your average open source developer has. Additionally, it's incredibly easy to break things like automation of command line tools in an effort to cleverly anticipate and guide a user.

Most importantly, I'd like to remind everyone that this is open source software and you are more than welcome to attempt to change it. For example, NVM is a ~2000 line bash script; making some of the simpler changes you bring up (such as improved help messages and suggestions) is well within the grasp of a single person with an afternoon.

I don't mean to dismiss the author's points: the software mentioned is frequently frustrating to use, and can be extremely unhelpful. I've struggled with nearly all the same ones brought up in this post. However, it's not as though these where tools designed by Apple for the everyman; they where built by engineers under time pressures with an intended audience of other engineers, and if you think they should be different you are welcome to bring that change.

[0] - https://github.com/creationix/nvm
My mum has always said that babies are boring. Not uneventful, but boring.

For the first few months all they do is eat shit and sleep. Literally.
1. Do you believe solving AI will come from a big company where the employees solving it would have little ownership of the company?

2. Currently, there is no solid test for Artificial General Intelligence. How much of a priority is it to create one?

-------------------------------------------------------

Answering my own questions:

1. No, the incentive is just not there.

2. Currently, this is my main goal related to Artificial General Intelligence. One should know how far or near they are from creating Artificial General Intelligence.
I don't think it was malicious on Google's side, though it's still definitely interesting enough to be on the homepage, as it's a situation where both parties had to deal with hard technical constraints.
You're talking about goals and motive; I don't know why. I took issue with the behavior, the specific act of editing the title, in a way that contrasts the actual articles title.
>Self-driving cars drastically reduce the total number of cars necessary

The fact that the cars drive themselves really changes nothing. Car pooling reduces the total number of cars necessary. Public transportation reduces the total number of cars necessary. You might try to argue that car pooling will increase as a result of the change, but I don't think that is a given. You'd need to explain away surge pricing to convince me otherwise.

But certainly, if you'd like to sell me your Tesla shares now at half price and get to safety, I'll be a friend and take them off your hands for you :)
Okay. May I write you an email to establish the connection? I intended to contact OpenAI later this month, but now that we're talking...
Ask HN: Can anyone suggest a good RSS newsreader with a set of tech news feeds?
I'm such an HN junky that I run out of things to read.

Maybe a good newsreader set up for tech feeds will feed my info junky hunger.

Can anyone suggest a good one that is web based?
Appointment Reminder deployment, i.e. deploying one of the SAAS websites Patrick owns
Stocks are actually way too complex things for the average person to understand, otherwise there would have been no need for Moody's or S&P ratings, just the Amazon/Ebay ratings would have done the job!

However, the "average intellectual" person is evolving and getting tech savvy at an unprecedented rate globally. I am willing to bet that a stock rating system similar to ratings on Amazon/Ebay is not that far in future.
What a disgusting site - just clicking on the scrollbar (to get to the rest of the article) triggers a new-pane ad for WowMusix, FilmOn, etc.

"Ethical hacking", my a$$.

The submitter submits only for this site, too.
Feel free to get in touch: gdb@openai.com!
How did they tie their fate to Yahoo? I thought allowing Yahoo to buy the default search engine spot in Firefox was as far as the relationship between the two went.
This looks like it should be easier to install. But I hope this rant and any contempt was constructed after the fact. If not, google a fucking guide when you hit the first snag and save yourself some time and grief.

None of those errors are particularly cryptic and neither is that help for nvm. Don't be impatient
JB Hi-Fi Competition Gift Card Scam – MailShark
Being frustrated is also normal. It's a natural part of the learning process.

I think the author's point is software that isn't frustrating beats software that is frustrating. He provides multiple good examples of bad error messages in actual software and how to improve them.

I'll admit coffee machine metaphor isn't a great metaphor, because his blog post is actually advocating configurability, but with a UI optimized for beginners and intelligent defaults (like a microwave with a popcorn button). I wouldn't get distracted by the metaphor.
Given the crazy rate at which house prices are climbing and income is not, I'm surprised this is even a thing.
The Industrialist's Dilemma
But that wouldn't be important if people didn't want/need faster computers.

See the "circular argument" argument above.
Interesting. I found that my custom-domain Fastmail address went from spam to the inbox in GMail the moment both SPF and DKIM were set up correctly.
Couple points your comment made me think of,

In some cases bad documentation can be worse then no documentation at all. If you find yourself here, improve your app and your documentation.

In some cases too much documentation can be a hindrance as it becomes hard to find specific pieces of information that cover > 90% of use cases. Consider simplifying and improving your documentation if you are here.

Finally, documentation without context is usually really bad. If your maintaining a popular web framework understand that many of your users may be beginners and write documentation accordingly. If your software caters to a super small niche of "experienced" users you should write it for them as well.

TLDR; don't stop writing documentation, write better documentation.

But honestly, as a software developer, if documentation wasn't the bane of my existence, something else would fill the void. And I'm scared of what that something else might be.
I've been working on this project for a while. Free tier (single display) will be free forever so please use it and provide any feedback you have.

USE CASES

Use it to show real-time traffic or social media feeds in your office lobby.

Great for bars and restaurants to show their specials and menus.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Front end UI: AngularJS 1.4-1.5 - Hosted on AWS S3.

Back end API: Loopback (Nodejs) - Hosted on AWS EB.

Database: MongoDB - Hosted on AWS through compose.io.

Sockets: Socket.io - Hosted on AWS EB.

Image resizing: AWS Lambda - Native AWS App.
Since that paper, there's been some convergence in this area. Explicitly typed function parameters and inferred local variables now seem to be the way things are going. Go and Rust take that route. It's been retrofitted to C++, with "auto". Python seems to be headed that way, although the proposal is to have type declarations that are not checked for backwards compatibility reasons, which creates its own problems.
Actually, I didn't see those. I'll read them.
Let's say there are on average 10 "viable" presidential candidates per election cycle every 4 years. Over a 40 year time-frame (You can be elected president during approximately 40 years of your life, from your late thirties to your late seventies), there are total 400 viable presidential candidates.

If 99.99999% of Americans have 0% chance of becoming president, that means you're saying only 3180 Americans have greater-than-zero chance of becoming president.

I suggest it is a little more than that. Millions of Americans, aged 10 and under, have the potential to work towards becoming first a mayor of their small city, then a mayor of a big city, and then finally have a small positive chance of becoming president. If you have greater than zero chance of becoming a person who has a greater than zero chance of becoming president, then you have a greater than zero chance of becoming president, period.

I suggest the number of such people is surely greater than 3180.
I almost couldn't disagree with this article more regarding Babel. Babel can't get away from configuration because Babel has no idea what your target environment is.

Are you targeting Edge 13 or Chrome 49? Great you only need to compile out a few features. Are you targeting IE 8? Well, better compile everything. Unless Babel is to assume the whole world is uniformly stuck at ES5, it simply can't pick a good default.
So where does this leave complex, professional-level applications?

Sure, a home user doesn't want that high-end coffee machine. But a professional Maker Of Coffee does; that's a tiny cut-down example of what you'll find in pretty much any coffee shop you visit, being used to crank out at least a dozen different drinks multiple times a day.

Or compare a kid's first toolbox to a fully-equipped carpenter's workshop full of power tools. Those power tools can rip through raw materials a lot faster than hand-powered ones, and can also rip through your flesh if you're not careful; they come with manuals, there are safety precautions you need to learn to use them.

That said it is certainly nice to:

- have all the configuration switches for your app in one place (a story: I've been using Adobe Illustrator regularly since 2000; it wasn't until like 2010 that I accidentally double-clicked on the pencil tool and found out that it has settings that don't live in the main 'preferences' window. Its defaults are IMHO terrible and made it a useless joke of a tool; once I'd found that it has settings it suddenly became the way I draw 90% of the shapes that make up my art.)

- have sensible defaults (see above parenthetical story)

- make your app easy to get running, which a hell of a lot of programmer tools certainly are not.
> There is value in providing good defaults, but users will and should be encouraged to go beyond them. That's what the documentation is for.

While the original article does not state this directly, it is implied that he's talking about programs where you have to read the manual to be able to use even its most basic functionality. Right now, I want to get a job done. Exploring can come later when I've got time for it.

> Being frustrated is also normal. It's a natural part of the learning process.

It's part of the learning process when you're breaking ground. It's not appropriate when you're trodding the well-worn path. If your users have to resort to SO questions just to do common case things, you've failed them.

> I don't think it justifies turning everything into unconfigurable featureless appliances or not writing documentation.

He is recommending neither.
That's a ridiculous conversation, on your part. What defaults should Babel choose? What if I disagree?
I'd like to know too, but specifically for health tech news.
Thank you for teaching me "superstimulus". That word pretty much captures my concerns with linkbait and the like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
So I tried to buy my crack license from the State of N. Carolina – Not a Joke
It's at the 1 hour and 17 minute mark. But - check out the Interview with Joe Poppi towards the beginning. (10 minutes in)

Not the usual ycombinator.org post - but I thought you might find it interesting:
https://soundcloud.com/bitcoinuncensored/e23-powerball-technical-analysis-011016

Here's the actual law: http://www.dor.state.nc.us/taxes/usub/substance.html
Looking at the picture, the fact that the top of the watch doesn't connect to the strap makes it useless for me.
> "Stupid" implies that they make bad choices after being fully informed, which is often unproven.

I don't think this is a particularly universal definition. Willful ignorance that negatively impacts your own understanding of the world has always seemed to me to be very reasonably defined as stupidity.
That whole point of Babel 6's design is that it can't know what "set" of script to compile to. The user necessarily has to know where they want their code to run.
When an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill.

If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous.

If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets —

He is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize divides him.

He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting–

And the need to win drains him of power.

From the poet zhuang zhou. I also have friends who have extreme insecurities brought on by bullying and family issues and have a strong drive to succeed, and I can agree that I don't envy having these issues, because as focused as they are, they also mentally suffer with every setback and constantly battle anxieties as they chase their goals.
We're betting on Swift
I've seen a few articles on it recently, and know of at least one couple in my social network that does separate beds.

It seems like my grandparents' generation slept in separate beds a lot, my parents' generation swung to the single bed model, and in my generation single bed is still more common but awareness of sleep issues is leading to some people starting to try out separate beds again.
> seriously? so you read a piece whose thesis is "talk rationally and empathetically with people that hold different points of views" and your next thought was "okay, zombies and evil commie nazi aliens, yeah"

Not the parent commenter but in what way is using a mildly humorous hypothetical even remotely contrary to either rationality or empathy...?
Staying out of silos and rabbit holes would probably mean avoiding bootstrap, github and the like. Totally agree on building clean, responsive sites though.
Test movies
"Roman Holiday Trailer (1953)" https://youtu.be/pKtYv6cU8VE
"Tokyo Story Trailer (1953)" https://youtu.be/-PsCZ1D_Brg
"Metropolis Trailer (1927)" https://youtu.be/RAvtbcmusY8
These Devices Are Trying to Secure the Internet of (Hackable) Things
Apowersoft Phone Manager 2.3.0 Crack with Serial Keys
That article title should be taken out and shot.
All your ideas are nice, but you obviously have never programmed a thing that other people use. These results don't happen because they were supposed to happen. It's just what did happen.

E.g. you hit an exception that should have never popped up. Does it read badly? Oh well of course it does, because nobody who could have written it more clearly knew it was even possible to pop up in this instance. He might have even tested your scenario, but his system package xyz wasn't in version 13.4.12 as yours, but in 13.4.12b, so in his context it worked. You can minimize these things, but you can't completely make them go away. Even make them go away most of the time is often too expensive. You can of course also choose to invest $500k every year into Babel to increase their testing, but I certainly wouldn't, just to make a few exceptions more readable.

And in fact, if you tracked down from all the context variables why it failed in your context, you will actually find out that you can track down the change to an issue and a developer and you can discuss with them how in that case a better exception can be printed, how the code may need to be changed to consider the context you are providing etc.

Nothing of this is done better when reading usability guidelines. Just as well as you and me people mostly know what is good and what is bad. They don't need teaching in that.

The thing that can be really done is always try harder in your code (when was the last time you looked into the docs/source of a lib function you use and catch the exceptions that function can throw, handle some of them and raise more readable exceptions for the once you can't handle?). Secondly, when you hit such a situation you can spend the time to track down the error to its core, write a good issue about it, discuss with the responsible devs what to do and help implement the solution (have you looked at the underlying library functions, caught their exceptions... oh, you know what I mean, right? People often don't do that part). Last but not least when one has done that often enough to be good at it, to spend time and energy to help some noobs to do the same (and teach them how to read the underlying library functions).
Facebook wins war of comments: 80% support Free Basics
Toward the end of my college career I fell in love with my LiveScribe. You might hear an aside in a lecture about X, and you could simply write X in your notebook. Later on, you could search your notes for X, and if you were wondering what exactly was said about X, you can tap on that note to hear what was happening in the lecture at that point in time.

Later on, Y might be brought up in relation to X. Write Y in the notebook, and draw a line to X, and so on.

I am not much of a note taker nowadays, but I highly recommend trying out the LiveScribe. I am considering buying a new one just to see how things have progressed.
ES6 is Over-Engineering JavaScript
This is a good overview of the research work and personality of Dr. Ioannidis. He looks forward to improvements in the process of science, as this interview transcript reports:

"Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the direction science is going in?

"John Ioannidis: I am optimistic. I think that science is making progress. There’s no doubt about that. It’s just an issue of how much and how quickly."

Not mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, but likely to be of interest to many readers of Hacker News, is the site PubPeer[1] where you can search by topic for discussions among researchers (some named, some anonymous) about scientific papers that may have problems. Some papers have been retracted after PubPeer discussion revealed problems with the underlying data for study results.

[1] https://pubpeer.com/

http://retractionwatch.com/2015/08/31/pubpeer-founders-revea...
Strategic Advantages of Mobile CRM
Actually it is quite confusing for me as I am a moderate and liberals see me as a conservative and conservatives see me as a liberal and I get blasted by both sides for being dumb because I don't have 100% of their views.

I am for social programs so conservatives think me a liberal.

I am for freedom of religion and gun rights so liberals think me conservative.

However there can be like 30 different political viewpoints besides liberal and conservative. It is not a black and white issue but shades of grey and colors as well. The political charts they use are misleading and based on questions they ask I am either on the left or the right and never the same place.

I'm for basic income because people lose their jobs when websites automate stuff and AI programs and robots take over jobs. People need something to live on in order to get an education to qualify for a better job. You see new jobs are created but require a different skill set than the jobs that are eliminated. People used to learn how a typewriter worked and would have a room of 100 people typing letters and memos all day until the Word Processor and Laser Printer came into play and put them out of work. My own father had worked for AT&T with 1ESS Switches they had tried to convert to computers using Unix and he lost his job when AT&T was broken up, nobody else used the 1ESS they used IBM AS/400 systems instead or the PC and he wasn't trained in it. He struggled with finding jobs to make ends meet. Working as a janitor or working on factory machines for a pasta company. We went from being middle class to poor or lower middle class.

Anyway I never consider the other person I debate with on the other side of the screen is stupid or dumb. I figure they were educated in a different way than I was, grew up different, have a different view on life than I do.

The problem is citing sources to back up your claims, the Internet has websites that will support almost any claim. For even website I cite the other person can cite a website that says the opposite. Even more they can say the other website supports a contrary view to theirs so it must be biased, and thus discarded.

In college I had an Astronomy class, and the Professor argued with the book, and countered every theory with his own personal theory. The universe is not expanding, he would claim, Hubble is wrong about red shifts. Instead of a Big Bang, he claimed the universe always existed, etc. It as hard for me to learn from such a person. I was lucky to get a C from his class because I had to take notes on his personal theories to get test answers correct and not use the book to study.

At times I get voted down here because I write a comment that people disagree with. Then sometimes it gets voted back up by people who agree with me.
What do you mean? Babel 5 and before included everything out of the box. You just told it the stage you wanted and your done.
My first question is, how much of this is provable, and how much is conjecture?
It’s not that the paper itself is verbose. You’re expected to write a book in a paper. You’re supposed to give a full story, with beginning, middle, and end, with villains and heroes, with a successful invasion, a dynasty change, a civil war, and a period of peace, with the beginning of a colonization prospects. I had a perfectly fine study that had only electrophysiology. Suddenly, it had to include molecular biology. And pharmacogenomics. And epigenetics. And behavior… with administration of anxiolitic drugs. WTF?..
Is anyone else irked by the questions about AGI? It's a bunch of fluff put forward by hacks. We're a long way off.