skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With regards to submissions we can always flag that which isn't suited for the site. With the upcoming elections sure to contentious there will be many stories masquerading themselves but in essence they are nothing more than political attack pieces.

We have already seen a few posted. They start out with an interesting headline about a technology everyone is interested in and then suddenly go straight to politics with attacks against one candidate or another without calling out the other side.

As for down vote costing, all for it with a caveat. If a post is universally down voted then the cost is refunded.
There are 3 days left to submit public comments to the USTR on the labor impacts of TPP, http://www.flushthetpp.org/your-chance-to-officially-tell-th...

"According to the Federal Register, the Office of the US Trade Representative announced on Dec. 28 that it “is seeking public comments on the impact of the TPP Agreement on U.S. employment, including labor markets.” The open comment period extends until January 13, 2016. It is critical that as many people as possible write to them about this ...

Sample comment ... As a consumer I have been dismayed at the rising rate of cheap imports that are made by poorly compensated and often abused workers. The products are often shoddy. I would rather pay fair wages to American workers for products that will endure. In so doing I believe we not only lift up our own people and our own communities, but we lift up the rest of the world by no longer being a party to predatory labor practices abroad ..."
Landsat data has a field which gives cloud cover percent for the image. Do you know how that derive that number?
Quote time :)

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. --Malcom Muggeridge
Interesting. By more expensive on average, would this mean pursuing personal interests, with the price being the opportunity cost of hours of labor that could have been exchanged for salary?

If so, this resonates with me. I would add that there's another component to this equation that I found personally valuable: challenge. The challenges that I have faced in professional roles (some unpleasant) have often forced me to grow. During long periods spent away from work, I often came to miss that.
Honest question: Do you really believe this is what's going to happen?
I agree. I got websocket server and client apps running in modern c++ in just a few days of tinkering in my free time. It took no longer than when setting up servers in Clojure, which is quite a productive language as well.
Ask HN: I want to make all emails public internally, is there an app for this?
Stripe has public emails internally. I like the philosophy, but would prefer a prebuilt solution if there is one available?
In England the need for data protection laws was partly driven by employers keeping blacklists of "agitators". This was mostly construction industry keeping a list of union members who were engaged in legal union activity, often around safety. (UK construction at the time was pretty risky, one of the most dangerous industries in the country.)

Those employees had no choice whether their names were added to this black list. There was no appeal. No due process.

And when a company abuses it's data gathering and mining powers it's unhelpful to blame the user.
Email's greatest advantage is that it is a distributed system. No silos involved. If I want to run my own system, I can. The current hipster tech crowd seems to forget the very definition of the term Internet (network of networks). As such, the systems designed at its origin were design to work in a distributed fashion.

Email is not dead. Email is just plumbing. Want a different experience with it, use better software layered on top.
Which leads to the question: Then why did all this evolve to the chaos it is right now, if annoying users actually doesn't work? Short-term benefits while it was new?
They are both valid debates, not opposed:

- is Uber too capitalistic (not in my opinion, the only unethical thing quoted in the article are their actions against Lyft)

- are the current economic practice sustainable in a worker less society (in my opinion, no, but that doesn't mean we throw the current system away, there is still a need for workers, it is changing at an accelerating pace, we need to adapt and ease into a new system)
I'm not saying they are not to blame, just that more work should be done in teaching the end user that they cannot trust everything they are told, much like in real life.
This is neat. We've deployed a 98+% accuracy satellite & aerial cloud detection solution for many years, so I would have the following suggestions:

-Why use AlexNet and not VGG (or Googlenet)?

-Make sure to train on clouds vs desert. There are a lot of instances where their spectral signatures are very close, depending on the satellite.

-Make sure to train on clouds vs snow. They are even more close.

-Dark clouds. This might not show up much unless you're working with the satellite vendor, but there are cloud formations where shadows of clouds project onto other clouds. Very difficult to deal with and NN may be well suited to it.

I would say since it's absolutely possible to get higher accuracy using older methods on this exact satellite constellation, there is definitely room for improvement. Just switching to VGG might even do the trick. But this is a great first step!
I am not easily offended by ads, but there are a few techniques that can infuriate me. The overlay with near impossible close option which usually is a X so small you spend valuable time hunting it down or just going back to the previous site. The second of course are automatic playing videos accompanied by obnoxious sound or volume.

Really they need to move to a standard side bar or bottom bar and have everyone get on board or just be blocked.
What is the Craigslist of Germany?
>Don't want Facebook to use your personal data to sell you ads? Don't put it on Facebook.

The problem is that simply using Facebook gives them tons of personal information. They know who your friends are, who you talk to, what articles interest you from what you click, what websites you visit from the embedded Like buttons, and on and on. And this is without adding a single bit of explicit information about yourself to your profile. Facebook probably already knows what school you went to anyway, based on your friends.
> Your analogy is incorrect because when it comes to social systems, how people bet actually changes the outcome, at least in the long run.

That stipulation doesn't make the analogy incorrect. It's analogously an argument that we should bet on the team likely to lose tomorrow because more people betting on them will make them more likely to win next year. That is not a successful betting strategy even if it's true. It's just charity. And there is nothing wrong with charity, but then why use such a convoluted mechanism? If charity is what you want then just give your money to the blue team.

> In general, the problem is not the math but our interpretation of the result. All the result says is that if we change nothing, this is the likely outcome.

Which is what we need to know unless we're specifically trying to change something. And if we can find some particular unjustified bias in the algorithm then we are, and then we know what to do because we can adjust the algorithm. But if we can't find any such thing to adjust, if the algorithm is unbiased and accurate so far as we can tell, then what is it we're supposed to be trying to change?

Just looking at e.g. the racial composition of the output doesn't actually tell you if anything is wrong. It could be (and often will be) that the algorithm is measuring other things that are correlated with race.
I think the interesting/compelling point is that there actually IS downvoting on hackernews.
Perhaps you mean link time? If you're spending a lot of time compiling you are probably suffering from other problems.
Most of C++'s issues with compilation come from needing to re-compile entire .cpp files because of a change in a depending .h file. If you properly forward your class declarations instead of including a header in a .h file, don't do template meta meta magic, and think about physical design a bit, your compilation time should be under control.

What I mean by physical design is, if a particular function is prone to be edited constantly, keep that function definition in it's own .cpp file.

of course I'll agree that in this day and age, we shouldn't worry about those sorts of things.
501. I reached it this week. Too low (1000 would be more reasonable), anyway I don't plan to use it.
I really like this line: "Also data typing is just a subset of tagging. Or rephrased a type is a very poorly implemented limited single tag."
If this resonates with you and you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to see Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
If they raised the minimum wage 10% (not double, let's be realistic), it would raise McDonalds' incentive to eliminate a small percentage of staff.

Look at how supermarkets now have self-checkout. 4 self-checkout stations going with one employee monitoring, and customers don't mind using them. In fact many customers prefer them because they help them get out of the store more quickly. There's no reason to think that McDonalds won't eventually try to eliminate some of the staff that takes orders. It's just a question of when they'll be incentivized enough to try it.
Thats the problem though. You seem to imply that it's just a matter of changing the skills of the workforce.

But thats not the discussion thats worth having I think, cause the real issue is whether that's even possible anymore.

I don't know if anything can be too capitalistic, but since uber is trying to get around normal legislation (taking the best from defining their drivers as freelancers and treating them as employers)
Landsat7 is trivial to do this, it has a thermal infrared sensor which is definitely not present on the RapidEye constellation.
I am drawing connections to the books 1984 and Anthem.

Now that I think about, the connections are too strong almost like the story was copied event for event from there.
Yeah we have a 500 gallon LP tank and use that for (on demand) hot water, backup generator and cooking, but our primary source of heat is in floor electric radiant (floors are concrete slab). We also use a mini split system to compliment the in floor heat and to provide cooling in the summer. And of course we have a wood stove as well. Unfortunately we are in a narrow valley and don't get enough sun to make solar a viable option.
That may be true for McDonald's, but most employers are small businesses with less than 50 employees whose profit margins are already small. Making it harder for small businesses to succeed hinders economic mobility and increases the wealth gap. If you enact public policy while thinking only of how it will affect the megacorps, then all you'll be left with are megacorps.
A baroque nightmare !
Some opposition is how I would not describe almost a crusade against it :) QT got quite more liberal later.
That's interesting that a BIOS upgrade can fix this. Maybe the BIOS is able to disable an instruction set like AVX?
Behind+the+Scenes+of+Your+Super+Soup+Origin
How old are you? I ask because it sounds like she's using you for something to do while she works on landing some rich, handsome guy she wants, and you are still naive kid. Ask her to stop dating anyone else and see what happens.

By the way, $200 for a bottle of real Champagne in a restaurant while pricey is not anything to crazy. And yeah, some of the best places in town to eat are expensive. Not all, of course but some. So if you were her, would you rather the option to eat at any of the best places or only the ones you could afford? Would you rather drink sparkling wine if you drank or real Champagne? Money and good looks are not everything, but when all else is equal they certainly do matter.
LinkedIn is like 15 years old. I was getting spam from them back in college.
Greetings, brother Cynic!
Nothing fancy - a ŠKODA Yeti (NB it's "park assist" rather than complete autopark).
Questions for Telecom Engineers/techs
For all of the telecom engineers and techs out there; do any of you currently work as an independent contractor?
If the answer is no, do you have the time or bandwidth (no pun intended) to potentially take on work as an independent contractor?

I am building out talent pools of independent contractors on WorkMarket.com for a few of my customers and if you answered yes, I would like to brainstorm with you further on what the talent pools will look like and how we can get you more work. My initial idea is that the talent pools will be broken down by technology generation, OEM, region, and type of work. Open to other ideas and feedback as well.
>Imagine the minimum wage were doubled, do you think McDonald's would respond by laying off half their staff?

No, but a person will definitely think twice before starting a new McDonald's franchise. A small restaurant owner who had been eyeing a second location will think twice about opening up another restaurant.

The incentives will also shift towards higher automation (not necessarily a good or bad thing in and of itself) of tasks as much as possible instead of hiring humans.

Companies don't work like this: "We have X amount of work to do, no matter what it costs". It's more along the lines of whether a project is a net positive (say through a net present value analysis) and if it isn't, then the whole project is scrapped.
I wonder if it might be a good idea to disable the vote buttons until they've been in the viewable area for a minute or so, to allow for more time to think. Has that been tried anywhere?
That's a lot of code.
>We need to make people read manuals again

If you've ever read a technical manual, you're probably in the 1% of the population. People don't even read two-lines popups, and you expect them to read complicated manuals?

What you really need is adaptive interfaces that grow in complexity as requirements expand, reliably detecting the newbie / power user / hacker progression. That's what works best. Hackers ridicule UIs that bury stuff under "Advanced" modes, but they're actually the best approach.

Doing three (or four, or five) times the work, though, is no fun for developers, so we go from "you're a dumb user, be happy with limited options" to "you're a clever user, surely you can read a 1000-pages bible before launching a command", because building multiple interfaces for the same routines is boring.
This talk from the 32c3 just two weeks ago looks at exactly that problem. They have "chicken bits" (not sure if that's the technical term :)) which can turn off certain features, and they can patch microcode.

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7171-when_hardware_must_just_wor...

Software design and testing is hard, but what happens when each bug fix can cost months of delay and millions of dollars? In this talk we’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges in the design of a very complex, yet critical piece of hardware: the modern x86 CPU.
You still need quite a lot of time to reach it, I've reached it in maybe 7 months or something, it's another level compared to reddit.
Non-scientists would be surprised how often this happens in science. Take a really hard question and some scientist will do their best to come up with an estimate. That part is fine.

The problem is when other scientists do literature searches, find the "answer" then base their entire work off of it. Every scientist after that does the same thing and suddenly a wild-ass-guess becomes fact.

A great example is in epidemeology. I work in biotech and many of our forecasts are based on epi data. I remember one time when someone questioned a numbered, so our epi team did some work. The number was the only estimate available, but it turned out to come from a paper from the 1700's that looked at the prevalence of this disease in orphan children in some small Frech town. We would have been better off just guessing.

This happens a lot.
Show HN: WalkBack, hotkeys for multi-column scrolling in Tweetdeck (Chrome ext.)
My take:

Correctness is a static mathematical property of the source code.

Safety is a mechanical property of a program executing on hardware.

Correctness is absolute. Either it is a proof [or possible proof] or not.

Safety is relative. For a web application, it may mean handling javascript injection attempts. For a spacecraft it may mean handling random bit flips caused by cosmic radiation.

Caveat: I'm not dogmatic about any of this. I'm not trying to handle all corner cases. And fundamentally, I believe words mean what we mean when we use them; that meaning isn't fixed by external sources. I'm just answering the question to a degree somewhat commensurate with the effort put into asking it.
I don't quite understand what you mean.
What is the interesting point about that? That the author didn't notice it while looking at the site, and had to be told afterwards? That some of the arguments don't work/still work? I'm not sure what you want to say (if you want to say something, and not just see what others say)
> How would Seth feel if I make the same amount of money as him just by sitting at home (obviously an extreme scenario from one aspect)?

That's the entire point of the article. He's saying your compensation for doing nothing at home should have no effect on how happy he is. It certainly doesn't change the actual buying-power of his income in any noticeable way.
It sounds like you're describing Flow (as defined by the book [1]; not popular culture.)

For me that does indeed seem to be the most common denominator of 'proper' happiness.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow
You can downvote comments, which is nice, but not stories/posts. That might be a different threshold?
Of course, the mantra that Life is more fun when you don't compare is exactly what well-paid people would want other people to live by. There's an element of self-service in this attitude when you're well-paid yourself.
They are also breaking CAN SPAM by sending deceptive emails. It is pretty cut and dry that the email claims X, but that feature is no where to be found - at least based on what is written.

Tagged.com did a very similar thing to get users to sign up, and they had to pay over $1 million in fines back in 2009. This in itself may not be a big disincentive for many companies, but the consequences if it is done after a settlement are.
I tend to fall on this same side of "people should be responsible for their actions" and, yes, it would be great if easy-to-understand education was readily available re: protecting one's privacy in the digital age. But I shouldn't have to become a part-time lawyer just to use Facebook (for example) to post baby updates. Who has time to keep up with all the little tricks these companies pull? I think the middle ground is 1) apps/sites need to be way more explicit and direct with the intentions they have for your information and 2) the every day user of apps/sites needs to start acknowledging his role in protecting his own assets.
This has always been my take on the privacy issue as well as the related advertising issue. People freely connect to and send data to companies servers and then get mad that the company has and uses the data? What? People send requests to servers saying "send me whatever it is you have sitting in this location" then get mad when the company dared have a link to an advertisement sitting on their own damn server? What? You're the one that asked for it! You didn't even have to do anything with it! You could be running an ad blocker, left the ad link as a link, and consumed the content you want which the company still sent you simply because you asked for it! How cool is that? Free fucking data from someone's computer when they don't even know or have business with you.

But no! Apparently if you blindly connect to other people's servers, send them all of your personal details, ask them to send you effectively whatever they feel like, and then you executive that code indiscriminately, it's on them! Fucking ridiculous.
Clinical trial of fecal transplant to treat obesity
If it's frustrating to someone working at that company, why wouldn't they feel frustrated working any other place knowing that those people at their former company are still making relatively more than they should? In fact, it seems as though they would read the news every day and become inconsolably frustrated.
Show HN: Historical stock price viewer
Get Ready for the Future – JavaScript Scene
U.S., Colombian sunken treasure dispute may soon play out at sea
The story side of Legend of Grimrock 2 is pretty good, I think, and the story side of things worked pretty well for me, although it's always going to be more of a set of related puzzles kind of story I guess.
(It's a bit like the Dark Souls games, maybe, where a bit of story helps to make it interesting, but keeping this kind of minimal and keeping the story out of the way of the actual experience is also important.)

Just got reminded about the following, also, from the comments below the article:
http://dungeonkingdom.com/
(In Steam early access currently, looking pretty good also, but didn't play it yet.)
Only thing I can think of that is somewhat related is the fact that in deeper comments on HN it takes a while for the direct reply-link to show up, so you have to go via the permalink to respond immediately.
UIKit for the Mac
I think it's a significant hidden feature which affects the shape of the community and also how the rewards of making it to the first page are allocated. There's essentially a class of hn users with more power.
When we live in a world where prices are set based on how much people can pay, it makes sense to try to get ahead of everyone else. This applies to housing. I can't afford to live where I want because there are a lot of people making way more money than me that are in line ahead of me. Why shouldn't I try to get ahead of them?
I just noticed this for the first time. There are so many little subtle things about hacker news.
But the problem is that discrimination is a function of perception, and that is 9/10ths of reality.

What the company was trying to do was correct a perceived culture wrong that some people were compensated less because their job was perceived as less important.

The reality is that those "less important" jobs frequently actually keep businesses running smoothly. Only a smoothly running business can afford to invest in strategy, thus smooth operation should be as important as strategy.

That (^) right there is another "perception" and is increasingly the one reasonable people are adopting EXACTLY because of what Seth notes:

"It's possible to create dignity and be successful at the same time."
This is old (2009) and wrong (there is downvoting). Flagging.
When Are We Going to Run Out of Metals? (2011)
ASIO header-only implementation is also available without Boost, fyi, as a standalone library; the same one that's in boost, but used without boost.
Related Origins of LittleLogs: http://blog.hellocode.co/post/littlelogs/