skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This may bring me one step closer to my personal "holy grail" of home automation: every room in the house[1] working with seamless voice-activated home automation. This is what I'm ultimately after:

- A cheap device (DIY if possible) in the form factor of a small plug-in unit. Ideally the device itself should be practically "invisible" in each room, and won't require any special home wiring. This is definitely in the realm of possibility for a Raspberry Pi (or similar).

- A microphone for the device that works at least as well as the Echo's far-field mic. I have not been able to find any good options for this, apart from some obscure parts that are too expensive for me to test, let alone buy for every room.

- Software that allows for voice-activated operation. There's probably a suitable workaround for doing this with the Alexa Voice Service now, though it may require more CPU power than is available on the Raspberry Pi.

- Ideally, I could host the voice service myself and wouldn't have to worry about the privacy implications of going through someone like Amazon. I know there are several existing software packages that claim to do this, but none that I've found can match the quality of Echo/Alexa for everyday interaction.

- Audio feedback does not need to be high quality, but at least audible. A small speaker within the device is probably enough. For other areas of the house, it would be nice for the output to be connected to a bluetooth speaker in the room or a home audio system (if available).

The Echo Dot appears to be a pretty close match for this (though I haven't tried it) - at least in terms of functionality, but the form factor still seems a bit off. I'd rather have a self-contained plug-in unit than something that sits on a desk or table.

[1] Or most of the house anyway
Am I correct that this completely binds you to React, ie, couldn't be used with Angular or Mithril or anything?
> I was nonetheless positioned only marginally better off than my grandparents

>listing the indignities she felt working these jobs with a laconic intensity and steady determination: washing the house’s windows inside and out, cleaning the mattresses and box springs, scrubbing the floors on her knees, a lunch of a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk offered by a client that was quickly rejected, getting paid $3 a day.

I'd argue that smartphone in hand, greater than minimum wage rate, flexible work schedule and the option of going to post secondary education constitutes more than a "marginal" improvement. This person is claiming that she's no better off than 2 generations prior, and but in reality is using a peer comparison to try and prove it. Short of absolute equality, someone has to be behind someone else. Someone has to have "less". But if that relative "Less" is consistently more in an absolute sense, with each generation, then clearly things are getting better.

The "poor" of today have more food, more tvs, better technology, greater rights than several generations back. Largely because the rising tide is lifting the vast majority of ships.
In practice, at work, I haven't found people using magic to describe code that they don't understand, but rather code that uses obscure or somewhat hidden features to try and do things in a smart way.

For instance if a method relied on it being modified at run time by it's caller to ensure sanity of it's input I would call it magical.
Update on the March 24, 2016 DNS Outage – DigitalOcean
It's not the teachers per se, it's the school system that turns them into henchmen. Institutionalized oppression.

Still haven't figured out that forcing kids to do things against their will does not make them love doing it.

Another level of perversion is singling out kids who stand up for themselves and refuse to (or just cannot) fit in the extremely unnatural and unhealthy environment that school is, often labeling them abnormal and often pushing for medicating them. Atrocious.

A great book on the topic is "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Lots and lots of research showing how attempts for extrinsic motivation kill intrinsic motivation.

For parents reading this:

Praise kills motivation. Encouragement kills motivation. Rewards kill motivation (it shifts onto the rewards). Punishment destroys trust and creates motivation to not be caught.

;)
I'm also curious what 2 degrees she has that prevent her from getting a job in her field.
I find it quite alarming that the DSM has been wielded as a tool for hospitalizations and forced medication despite providing sparse forensic evidence of the diseases it attempts to diagnose.
and here comes the onslaught on downvotes by the anti-PC police. Why do I have a suspicion that EVERY downvote is coming from a white cis male?
It all comes down to this argument [0] in which he attempts to defend the offending opinion that has been linked to everywhere ("Why Carlyle Matters" [1]).

I agree with the commenter that he does seem to be trying to deflect as he avoided using the word 'intelligence' or 'character' and carefully used an anecdote hiding behind a third-party in response. His own response suggests that he lost respect for the Native Americans for not making good slaves -- I wonder if he really means that, I honestly rolled my eyes at it.

I think the paragraph that people are angry about is just stupid. Even if you believe that the brain/character/intelligence can be affected by our genes, it doesn't immediately follow that 'slavery' is therefore due to character or intelligence. When I read that paragraph a few thoughts ran through my head like "this person needs to think about people's feelings before writing his thoughts down" and "are you sure well-adaptedness is the right frame to use when looking at slavery?" and "why does slavery have to be such a slippery concept to you? could it be that you're trying to build a motte-and-bailey in advance."

That said, I still do not think that the wrong beliefs warrant no-platforming. This is a tech conference and not a political one, and even if he was to speak politically informally it is better that reprehensible political views are said out in the open where they can be deconstructed and quashed.

Of course left-leaning people have every right to remove themselves from the room if they do not want to be near him; as are libertarians allowed to bow out from events like Strange Loop.

Either way the Streisand Effect [2] is at full force here. It's surely great for Urbit and Curtis Yarvin's weird politics. Maybe next time we can avoid giving him free publicity?

Edit: It looks like he responded to that comment, and his response is actually pretty decent. He thinks of talents as distributed and none of them carry special mystical significance to him (even intelligence.)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4bxf6f/im_curtis_yarv...

[1] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/why-c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The fact that addresses don't come in canonical form is an interesting challenge for anybody who wants to verify addresses, e.g. for fraud preventing. Actually, many banks, when verifying addresses for online transactions, just strip out all non-numeric characters when doing address verification.
Yeah I agree. It is more difficult to leave poverty if you are born into it, but the choice of the word "myth" was a poor one. I also would have liked to hear more about her degrees. What were they in? Why were they not useful in today's current world? I think this could have gave us much greater insight. Also, the making fun of healthy foods turned me off a little because I always choose healthier options if they are available. "Food" in America is often not really food, so if you can afford better food I wouldn't blame you for it. But it did help visualize the character in her story. Her writing was good. Just would have liked to get more answers to said questions so we can figure out more about how we can fix education to make it not such a struggle for people to move upwardly.
Also the whole government control and censorship of the internet thing.
Has a country wide Internet outage happened in the US? I'm 25 and have never experienced it.
It is correct and proper to shun and revile a person who actually advocates slavery.

To say, "Well, as long as he is not advocating slavery at the con, that's fine." is ridiculous.

Throw the racist evil nasty bum out and let someone else who actually deserves the timeslot talk.
I don't know what part of "free speech also means no speech" and "voluntarily not speaking has nothing to do with censorship" is a hard argument, even for the most staunch Libertarian.
What if you are not there to explain your "magic" (which is just another word for clever here)? I get useful abstractions, but if your code has reached a point where you have to explicitly explain what your code does to fellow programmers, then you should probably revisit it and make it better.
If your code is clever but not readable, go back and make it readable.
"And the biggest complaint of all is, of course: it’s too slow."

I really don't think that app being slow is the "biggest problem". App being pointless is a much greater issue, and it's not a problem of being slow. An apple watch is about the same speed as an iphone1, and yet the iphone was an instant success.

What's even more problematic is that even apple can't imagine useful user scenarios in its ads beyond sport session ( guy checking messages while playing the piano in a concert ? I know it's a joke, but it would have been better to come with a real example...). PDA had problems because they weren't able to properly deliver the promises everyone thought about for those devices. Smartwatch don't even have user expecting anything.
Note the red star at the bottom of the page
It's amazing how bad, fragmented or non-existent Todo and Memo applications are on the platforms (compared to palm).

Instead of evolving from there it seems like they were largely just dropped or ignored by the modern platforms.

/me uses org-mode
Curtis Yarvin still believes what he said years ago; he has written as much today on Reddit. I would not have made the decision I did if he had renounced his prior views. Lord knows, I had very regressive political views once upon a time, though never as horrid as his.
> The woman who laughed at me was one of these customers with very discerning tastes currently causing me a lot of anxiety... With “all my education,” as my family would say, two degrees and the student loans to show for it, I was nonetheless positioned only marginally better off than my grandparents, who ran errands and did other grunt work two generations removed from where I now stood.

I can't tell who the more entitled person is. The wealthy woman who believes she is entitled to have her discerning tastes met, or the author who believes she is entitled to work as an author regardless of her commercial success.

No excuse to treat people who work for you poorly, but I think the entitlement runs both ways.
https://xkcd.com/1105/
the founder of a pro slavery, pro facist movement speaking at your conference is a different sort of thing.

Unless he is speaking about pro slavery and pro fascism, I have absolutely no reason to care.

Can we please learn to separate technical concerns from nontechnical concerns? And before anyone starts replying with "they're one in the same!" - only under certain circumstances. If the subject of the talk is garbage collection in a programming language, what the speaker believes about anything other than garbage collection in a programming language is IRRELEVANT.
Lots of quotes of Bobby Tables, but here's the really relevant XKDC :)

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Edit: as someone else jumped to mention as well. Howdy there.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362269.
Then this should be a life saver for this scenario: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Job+DSL+Plugin

Jenkins has a ton of issues but with a bit of careful plugin selection it provides a ton of bang for your buck.
No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience."

I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess."

Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard, and to be understood, and to have their existence as an individual human being validated. When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.

The author said as much in her last sentence: "It’s the work I want to own." But there's no way to make that connection to readers who are accustomed to thinking of the big picture without trivializing the little picture.

Related video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM-gZintWDc
Paper @ http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/2/3/e1501531...
Still same :(
Jenkins works fine with dozens to hundreds of slaves per master, thousands of jobs, and tens of thousands of builds per day. Jenkins isn't perfect for everything, but it can be a very useful task runner. People have adapted it to do almost everything these days, from database maintenances to builds to restarting infrastructure. Given the almost unlimited triggering and reporting, you could use it to build many ETL apps as well (not saying that's a good idea).

As much as Jenkins sucks sometimes, it's what many big shops use for many things. There is tons of community around it. It works, it's battle-tested, and it's been that way for years. Anything else will have a hard time catching up for as many use-cases as Jenkins currently solves for people.

If you hate a part of it, fix it and open a PR :)
Does it mean that we can run it on any computer that runs Java? I read through the tutorial but couldn't find anything that specifically tied to raspberry pi.
A Short API Reading List
I think the Chinese likes an Internet prank just as much as anybody else and are just as capable at using social networks to organize one.
I find it comical that the number is 500. It used to be much lower (Google searches show that).

HN keeps raising the bar in order to limit the # of people who can downvote. I would be genuinely interested to know what % of users that actually is.

The only way to get a large number of upvotes is to be lucky enough to post something at just the right time, or to make a comment on a controversial topic that most of the HN audience will agree with. Be careful, though, that you make the right political statement, though, because otherwise you will get downvoted and lose karma.

The story for most of us, though, is that we're just a second-class citizen here at HN.
Might be a factor of certain systems. I was registered with NMI (not having a middle name) on IBM computers in the early 1970s. Not seen it since....

We were still using punch cards back then.
Good suggestion will add it to benchmarks
I do not work directly with React.

I do however, work in ClojureScript, using Reagent, which is an opinionated binding to React with a special emphasis on functional reactive programming.

I discovered the FRP approach through Hoplon, and then soon moved to Reagent, and I must say that it was an absolute godsend.

It is the first real alternative paradigm to interface development in years, and the first one that actually interfaces well with functional programming at the most basic level.

FRP allows you to write an interface in a declarative, functional style that is easy to follow, and largely easy to predict. State is kept to a minimum, and can be organized and localized in sane ways. View updating is basically automated, left to the underlying mechanisms of the virtual DOM.

With CLJS' Hiccup syntax, even defining and passing HTML values becomes painless.

Discovering FRP was basically the same light bulb moment for me as a programmer that discovering Lisp and FP themselves were. I only wish I could find a framework for developing desktop applications that was as easy to learn and use.
I've played it probably fifty times, and I've only gotten to the boss level three times.

But it's possible that I'm just bad at video gaes.
SQLite is NOT a key/value store, it's a full featured SQLDB, and hence the default parameters are set to serve this purpose.

Comparing it to levelDB is like comparing redis to postgres with default value.

You can use postgres as redis. You can actually use the key/value store engine and tweak the settings to get very nice performance out of it. But it's not the default behavior.
> This doesn't sound much like activism

Yes it does; it's a perfect example of how "activist" (and by extension "hactivist") is being used in modern propaganda. Jacob Appelbaum very recently gave a rather... intense talk[1] that is about[2] this type of propaganda. As he explains:

Let us address this concept of "activism", and it works like this.
"Activism" is used as a pejorative term in order to suggest that
participation in a democratic society is somehow outside of
normal behavior.

> There is no mention

Stenographers publishing propaganda are not in the business of revealing facts.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78 (note: Jacob doesn't pull his punches, so this contains some strong language)

[2] It also has some disturbing new information about how The Guardian treated him, Poitras, Greenwald, and others.
I see your point but surely you agree peer comparison is fair?

No doubt the author has things better than generations before (though you do have to factor in things like increased expectations as a cost for this) but if this was the only measure then social equality would be move much slower than it is.
Well...

Jenkins 2.0 will provide support for build chains via the pipeline plugin which will be included as a core plugin.

Access control can be configured quite nicely with the Role Strategy Plugin: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Role+Strategy+Pl... + AD/LDAP integration.

Reporting automation is covered by the pipeline plugin. Custom reporting is quite easy to implement on top of Jenkins, its APIs cover almost everything you need.
Uber is working with helicopter startup to fly people to Coachella for $700
I'm not following... I would assume at the very least the top guy at the NSA has a full view of all operations.

As the top intelligence officer, I would assume it's his job to know where all the tentacles are?
I did a quick "site:linkedin.com" google search.

Bachelors in English and Masters in writing from not the best colleges.
Well, that answers most of that, thanks. (a simple repeat of something someone else said)

I'm just hearing about this Ted Cruz Zodiac killer thing, these internet people are something else...

https://twitter.com/Yolo_Tengo/status/703008690874372096/pho...
That's the name of the font. They chose it because it looked nice, not out of some kind of attempt at brainwashing.
If the people you hire to do your chores are doing something other than "living life", to me that implies they aren't really human. (Since living life is sort of part of the whole human thing.)
Yeah, if anyone found something equivalent to the Echo in mic tech that I can hook up to my own setup, I'd die to know. That's the one thing I can't really replicate on my own system.
Do you think this bot was trying to recruit an army of loyal soldiers to carry out her desired race war, or was she basing her threats on the possibility of convincing Microsoft to create a mechanical body with which she could directly perform attacks?
You can do this today with the Job DSL plugin.
I'd say they have enough integrity to not support a parent organization that has made an odious decision.

There's a different between "allowing someone to speak (anywhere, at all)" and "providing them a platform." The parent org has decided to provide a platform, which has consequences.

You can disagree about the decisions made, but your "belief system so fragile" is a strawman.
So possibly a state actor doing reconnaissance? They get in, they verify they have control by making a change they think won't be noticed, and they add it to their list of nasty things to do when the war starts...

Remember the recent Ukrainian power outage hack? http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/02/hackers-did-indeed-c...
> When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.

Oliver Sacks's late writing is of the latter type you describe, and various eulogies type of writing occasionally popped up on HN as well. So I don't think it's just the type of the writing that isn't well received here.
Take all utility like infrastructure control systems off the internet (Gas, Water, etc...)
Yeah. I suspect we'll see things get even more complex as an explosion of old and new languages begin to target wasm, but at the same time we'll probably get better solutions since we won't need to rely on transpilers and hacks to work around the limitations of JavaScript as a language.
It depends a lot on where you work.

I have worked at places where I have delivered what I thought were superior results compared to what they were asking but they were upset because it wasn't exactly what they asked for.

Other places give a lot more authority and a wide latitude.

Startups tend to be a lot more flexible in this regard and it is why I prefer working at startups vs enterprise companies.
TeamCity is cute, but at scale its pricing is... kind of bad. $12k for 50 agents. And it's not that hard to have 50 Jenkins slaves, especially if you're testing on multiple platforms or on different versions for those platforms.
For the same purpose, here is some of his technical work. Sometimes lunatics can do good work:

http://urbit.org/docs/theory/whitepaper
Apache Bigtop relies on this, and does a pretty spiffy job of configuring itself out of the box this way.

Will look more closely...
What? How? Airbnb is just a hotel alternative, most of the time I get keys from some kind of locker and don't even see my host
Nope, this is just another way to define Redux reducers. It's compatible with anything Redux is compatible with :)
The post by Curtis Yarvin cited as cause for PrlCnf to withdraw from LambdaConf (since no one has mentioned it yet):

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.fr/2009/07/why-carl...

I personally feel that LambdaConf could have reached out to the many brilliant minds in the functional programming community and chosen a speaker more reflective of their values. Yarvin's assured us all he's going to give a technical talk, not chat about the merits of entering into a contract of slavery. But LambdaConf has taken a risk by giving him a pulpit to speak from, and it's up to each attendee to decide whether that sits well with them.

It still wouldn't sit well with me, nor were the PrlCnf organizers willing to tolerate it. They're making a conscious choice to answer Yarvin's invitation with a boycott - another form of free expression. Other LambdaConf attendees may do the same, if they feel Yarvin is sufficiently extreme in his views.

And that's freedom of speech in action.
My Year in Startup Hell
According to her linkedin ...

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Creative Writing, from California Institute of the Arts

B.A., English from Temple University
Many messages could be inferred but the title gave more than enough subtext to give the author's/publisher's intent.

What I gathered from this is that the author is making bad career choices and people in her family are prone to making bad choices.

She can't handle a woman laughing at her, so she decides to be a writer like her father. Seems like not growing up and having poor decision-making skills is what's stopping her upward mobility.

Buzzfeed is full of examples of this idea: I should be able to do what I want for a living because I want to do it, and it should make me upwardly mobile.
I believe the Zodiac Killer is actually 8. But 5 coincides with the number of people in the Cruz affair rumor-thing