skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression is that Russia (Putin) feels threatened by NATO. That may not be the threat of invasion. It might be just the threat of being no longer the dominant power in the neighborhood, and therefore unable to push people around.

But I think Russia may in fact fear invasion. Germany went from "no threat" to "building up their military but having a treaty with Russia" to "invading Russia" in nine years. If that invasion had been launched from the eastern Ukraine instead of from the middle of Poland, it very plausibly could have broken Russia.

Russia doesn't have half of Poland as a buffer anymore. It doesn't even have (most of) Ukraine. I think that Russia is extremely over-sensitive - even paranoid - given the current circumstances. But circumstances change, sometimes rather rapidly. Given history (not just Germany, but also France), Russia has some grounds for fearing Europe.

"But Europe is different now!" True... until it's not.

Look, I'm not defending Putin. But he's not totally nuts to be worried.
After you've switched it on, it displays the splash screen at every boot, with a warning message and instructions to press space to make the warning go away:

http://blog.codestarter.org/content/images/2014/12/tumblr_in...
Just lengthy article on why software should be portable. Just doesn't contain the word "portable". And also whole HN comments page doesn't contain the word "portable".
36 here, and a well-paid programmer too; still gaming occasionally although it's times less compared to in the past. I suspect you're not in the majority, having in mind the statistics about adoption of user-level OSes. :P
Guess until then imagemagick + command line primitive can do the business (convert video to a series of images w/ IM, process with primitive, recreate the video from processed images w/ IM).
Approval Voting is problematic, especially in a multicultural electorate, for situations where there is not a concrete definition of the meaning of the approval threshould, because different people interpret "approve" differently (it's basically asking the to impose a binary threshold on a continuous-but-not-consistently-quantifiable value), so it suffers problems from inconsistency in input data. The impact of any individe all voter is small enough and hard enough to viscerally percieve that there is no strong feedback method to, over time, align understandings of "approval" so the meaning is consistent across ballots.

Approval Voting is not problematic for situations where you don't need ballot secrecy and approving is, e.g., a binding commitment to participate if the approved option is selected (or where non-approval is a binding opt-out), or where some other consistent concrete consequence of approval exists.

A similar problem exists with most numerical rating (as opposed to ordinal ranking) methods, and to other ranking methods with smiller number of rankings than alternatives, and, perhaps, to a much lesser extent, to ranking systems that allow (but don't require) equal rankings.

Because most analyses silently assume a consistent the mapping from an internal utility function to ballot marking, this is frequently overlooked.
That only proves that Linux is used for critical stuff where people require a specific knowledge. It's not for everyone.
The plan is to 'move on' from the internet and its novelties and use it like just another educational tool when you need to.
https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify

Shpotify, a command-line interface to Spotify on a Mac. :)
Well, yes and no. My thinking is that for the climate it does not matter if you burn the fossile fuel in a car or in a power plant. At one point all the fossile fuel will have been burnt one way or the other and the same amount of CO2 will have been blown in the atmosphere. I am sure humanity will not stop consuming fossile fuels before they are exhausted unless it becomes economically unattractive to do so...
So far I've failed to grok the many arguments for and against this drive's "impossibility". I'd love to find an ELI5 for it.

I think at this point, I'm resigned to waiting for an emdrive cubesat to just prove it once and for all: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22678/em-dri...
> I have no idea why git-pisect with a single job is a little faster than git-bisect, but I'm not complaining!

Hmm, I would take this opportunity to measure this case in more detail because it should be the same. Did git-pisect run exactly the same test cases as git-bisect? What's the distribution of the runtime look like for your test case -- it looks like it should be stable but what might cause it to be unstable?

Without knowing the answers it causes one to question the subsequent metrics.
The election was close. Several states had margins of victory of right around 1%. I didn't look too closely but less than 500,000 votes is enough to flip the winner in a couple of states and swing the whole election. Considering you've got ~ 120 million votes that seems pretty close to me.

Edit: Looks like 147,029 votes is enough to flip Wisconsin and Florida and give Clinton the Electoral College.
Letter to my younger self
A New Electricity Source – Your Sweat? (2013)
The electoral college is a bastardized form of it's original intent which has been around for a very long time.

In the original intent of the Representative Republic designed by the founders, your state would pick it's Electoral College and then they would pick any president. You didn't actually vote for one candidate.

The issue I have with people who argue the EC needs to stay is that they don't realize we're no longer in a representative republic because we took the power from the EC to pick a candidate.

Otherwise the EC could effectively pick Jill Stein if they felt like it, even though trump won the EC state count. But we don't let them do that any more.
This One Netflix Integration Needs to Happen
General Electric Buys Vancouver Startup Bit Stew for $153M
> since infinite products can converge to 0 even if all the terms are positive.

Eh? Can someone explain? Is that because you are multiplying a huge amount of numbers << 1?
Originally, it was more meant to concentrate power. The Electoral College was the Founding Fathers' solution to the "problem" that slave states would have been at a huge disadvantage in a popular vote, by virtue of a much smaller percentage of their populations being allowed to vote in the first place. "One person, one vote" didn't work for them. So instead, they came up with a system where a few people got to effectively vote as if they spoke for everyone else in their state, including the swaths of the population who were disenfranchised.

The way in which it functions has indeed changed a bit in the wake of a few constitutional amendments. But make no mistake: It was intended to work the way it worked 200-odd years ago, not the way it works now. The popular explanation, which tries to justify how it works now and projects that justification onto its original designers, is a retcon.
Yeah all that is great until you realize the people who control the filters are biased and, for example, allow a hashtag like #killallwhites to exist. Where's the diversity councils and the racism SWAT teams for that?
Ask HN: Thoughts about our video streaming debating app?
We are developing a video streaming debating platform in form of a website and we are wondering whether anyone likes it or not before going further with it.

The website let's you:

- Challenge a friend or a random stranger.

- Find spectators by advertising your debating room's link.

- Watch live and recorded debates.

- Vote for the side you are.

- Chat and comment on live/recorded debates.

What we care now:

1. Would you find this app useful or useless? why?

2. Would you initiate debate and/or spectate?

3. What else do you like this app to do?
Despite its baity title, this looks like a relatively substantive article, so we won't penalize it unless the thread goes haywire.

As for the title, we've attempted to replace it with representative language from the article (see third paragraph). If someone can find a more accurate and neutral phrase from the article to serve as the title, we can change it again.

Edit: and since the claim is obviously contentious, we've appended a question mark to it. That is standard moderation practice btw.
Can you give an example of the too-clever writing and underlying smugness?

I haven't felt that way, but I have only read "Story of your life" and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", so my sample size is pretty small.
It makes a difference because power plants are more efficient, and once electrical charging infrastructure is in place, changes to the input power source is easier.
Well, I am not in his mind. But everytime he mentioned "making the world more connected" he did look and argumented as he meant it from an ideological point of view.

Whether he really has purpose or is it just marketing speak to justify a dumb pipe, one could only speculate about that..
Throwback HN: Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website
Oh, definitely. I've spent vastly less time on coding side projects since coding became a full-time job. Not that I don't still enjoy coding; I do. It's just that by the time I get home in the evening I'm pretty much coded out. Which kind of sucks, because I haven't found anything anywhere near as absorbing to replace it as a hobby.

See also: http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/find-the-thing-youre-most-p...
If you'd been watching the supercharger build-out, you'd see that Tesla started by making it possible to drive through SC on I-85 and I-95, and now they're filling in. I suspect there are a lot more Tesla owners in Atlanta and Research Triangle Park than SC... lots of well-paid engineers in Greenville work for BMW and drive BMWs.
In fairness, we know Facebook is physically possible. Not so reactionless drives. If a Facebook is unlikely, a reactionless drive is spectacularly so.

If they are possible, the question of where all the aliens are becomes much more acute. If it's actually cheap to accelerate mass around the universe we ought to be crawling with visitors.
Facebook, Google Take Steps to Confront Fake News
I think your view reflects a misunderstanding of how NASA works. The vast majority of the research done at NASA is done by small teams working on shoestring budgets.

Where do you get the idea that they did all of this research on their own time?
A lot of subreddits (r/politics for example) have tags like "Misleading title". Maybe something like that?

Many of my friends sincerely believe the fake news they have read on these sites, because nothing suggests that it might be fake. It's so sad. When I ask them for sources for "facts" like "Obama is a Muslim", they send me a list of news articles that "proves it". Fact checking sites are "the corrupt media" and "liberal bias".

btw, these aren't uninformed people. They watch the news, debate with friends and vote. It's the sincerity that they believe the news with that's so depressing.
Compose.io is owned by IBM. I had a chance to meet both the Compose team and a few people from IBM at the DataLayer conference. They are passionate and smart.

Compose is in a sweet spot right now. They run with the speed of a startup, but have access to IBM's massive resources. Really the best of both worlds.
Interesting, never occurred to me that react-router could be the problem, I will investigate that. But this other post [1] didn't use React at all and made API requests to GitHub with the same problem.

[1] http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Twitter rolls out long-awaited anti-harrassment tools
Where do retired hard drives go? Do you have in house recycling or contract it out?
Even better C3.js + react-c3js

http://c3js.org/examples.html

https://github.com/bcbcarl/react-c3js
I don't think the issue is fake news. I think the issue is that there is nearly 0 crossover between the two political spheres. I haven't seen any posts about violence against Trump voters on election day (there was a surprising amount) on Facebook, and I haven't seen any posts about the uptick in hate crime on /pol/.

The problem is that social media has created 2 different countries that live next to each other.
I'm curious, if a bigger publication like say CNN or Washington Post publishes a "false" article, would it be punished/banned, just like a random blog post would? Or would they receive "more weight" because they are "reputable publications"?

If so, then this solution would not work either (if we actually care about the truth). Most of the big publications have become propaganda machines for one party or the other, so the "reputable" thing has gone out of the window a long time ago. They should be treated the same way a random blog post would be when it comes to facts.

Right now, Google, at least, gives way more ranking power to these "reputable" publications in Google News than it gives random blog posts. So I hope they don't just slightly update the existing algorithm to add the fact-checking thing.
There is no hard limit on the number of questions you can ask. If you are getting downvoted or banned you are probably asking low quality questions that are frustrating for the volunteers that answer questions on stackoverflow.

This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
How about integrating fact checking sites into their news feed, displayed prominently?
Glassdoor is as much an advertising/marketing site as it is anything else. It isn't that anonymous and I've seen a lot of evidence that companies can bury/delete bad reviews.
If you want to decrease the spread of misinformation, or if you are at Facebook, Google, etc. and want your org to support this but it isn't doing enough — we are actively working on this (and have been since before the election) and would love to get in touch. We believe an impartial 3rd party can help with a few core problems in this domain.

One way to think about this is that some forms of communication amplify confirmation bias (and other cognitive biases). As we develop new forms of communication, we may need to compensate for these biases in new ways. Our motivation is to incentivize better public discourse.

You can reach us here (feel free to just put in your preferred encrypted communication channel...) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSclhq7zrUKI3nxJFiYw...
Ooh, thanks. I thought I'd read everything he's put out, but I missed that one.
Create Save Prompt

https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Create%20Save%20Prompt

Allows you to quickly save a new file to a location in Sublime Text's input bar by pressing CMD+S, instead of opening the OS dialog which takes a lot longer (especially on OSX).
Dan Carlin is fun to listen to but he is pretty narrative driven and loves certain aspect and themes. If people want to listen to something podcast like, that is more detailed and accurate, I would highly suggest The Great Courses on this subject. Here are the ones that I think are relevant:

- The Persian Empire

- History of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective

- Greek and Persian Wars

- Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Empire

- Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age

Link: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/ or http://www.thegreatcourses.com/
Lumen Electronic Jewelry
How to get an iPhone for free. Hacking News
http://www.betthebill.com/

It's a simple website that randomly picks someone to pay for the entire bill when eating as a group. But unlike credit card roulette, your odds of paying are proportional to your meal's cost, so your expected value is fair.

I know it's simple, but it was my first foray into javascript and d3 and angular. I am proud of how it turned out.
Recently started making http://www.git-browser.com - browse repos by thumbnail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12958156
New Android SDK for Feature Toggles
There's a HuffPo article going around that is exactly that. The largest provider of fake news and clickbait, blaming fake news and clickbait. Not going to link to it, that would make me part of the problem.
While the pricing is compelling, most customers want at least 98℅ of the reliability that industry giants offer. Maybe the community can comment on whether packet.Net is reliable enough to trust your business with?
Could someone like Zuck ever run for president or be elected?
I'm too late to edit my own comment, so I reply:

Haidt's video "keynote at American Psychology Assn" is a very good succinct presentation too. synopsis: how left wing people need to be a little more open minded wrt right wing people.
My company, Database Labs, runs Postgres as a service in Google Cloud -- https://www.databaselabs.io/pricing/#google-cloud
The Trouble with Teaching Computers to Think for Themselves
> No it wasn't and you're extraordinarily ill-informed

> For those who didn't learn and understand this at age 10 or so

If you're going to provide corrections, please do so neutrally and without snark. Otherwise you degrade the discourse just like the non-factual comments do.
Isn't there a way to not be a censor, but also encourage truth? Some things are factually true and others are factually false. We have huge numbers of fact checkers out there, maybe there's a way to give that work a little more prominence?

Facebook is about bringing people together, figuring out a way for the community to have a real discussion from a common set of facts is a really important way of bringing people together.
A few years ago, you could have said the same for Seagate. Even worse, actually. Certain models had over 10% failure rate. Some WD models almost had HGST levels of relibility.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update...
Doing Five Research Problems Before Lunch
No, absolutely not benign.

Our democracy will function better if our populace is well informed about basic facts.

It's very possible both political parties propagate some of the same lies, or suppress the same inconvenient truths, because those facts don't reflect well on either party's policies.
Facebook supports NGOs with release of emerging markets population data
Another difficult problem is that people can create very strong opinions about things faster than they can gather all of the relevant information, even if the media does do a good job. The black lives matter movement made "hands up don't shoot" their rally cry and stayed with it even after we found out later that narrative wasn't true.
Could you provide some more links (maybe podcast) for this.
I made a localization extension for WPF which can take any source of data and turns it into a switchable localization, which is not possible with stock WPF.

https://github.com/SeriousM/WPFLocalizationExtension

I'm pretty proud of it any many users use this extensions, from private to commercial.
It's free and open source and I never charged for it (sadly).
WPF is now dying and my work will eventually die as well...
The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei
This is absolutely awesome! I would have loved to do it for the company I work for, but...I'm not comfortable with giving access to a private repo.

That said, did do it for an open-source project I wrote, and it's great!
How is asking for permission to use off the record statements in an article creating fake news?
I'd gladly rewatch it, but is it really so hard to imagine that a surprising plot is worth being unspoiled?

You're trying awfully hard to dislike a movie you haven't seen.
Surprised that no one has mentioned Telegram https://telegram.org/ so far:

Encryption, fantastic stickers, photo editor, tons of interesting channels, probably the best bots platform out there.

+ all mobile platforms and desktop version (as well as web based)

You can also find it's code on github.
I have been the CTO of several very successful startup exits and I agree with everything in this post. Well said.
Not that I know of, hence why my first comment said "we need to put theory into practice". The concept and design is sound, but paranoia has been putting a huge damper on modern reactor R&D.
Most of those sites are extremely biased. If you think that's a good idea it's because the bias leans towards what you agree with.
+1 can't wait to get my friends and family back from their social media and infotainment addictions. The internet has so much potential to help human society.
Did you know that we provide the complete set of questions and answers (from all sites, including Stack Overflow)?

No need to crawl anything.

You can find it on the internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
I wonder how many programmers came up through the mod scene? Bethesda RPGs, especially Morrowind and Oblivion, had very lively modding ecosystems. The Skyrim mod community seems less active, relative to # of installs.
I think the "demographic death of the GOP" is much overstated. Much the same way Irish and Italians were absorbed into whiteness, Latinos and Asians will also be absorbed. In fact, it is already well under way. The white people party will continue.
We're in a representative republic because elected representatives decide policy (either directly or by appointing other people who do so) -- that's the representative part -- and because we don't have a monarchy -- that's the Republic part.

The formulas for allocating representatives and the exact details of the process by which some of them are chosen has changed over time, but its still a representative republic.
> students

Your question has been asked and answered, probably several times. You're getting banned because you refuse to learn about and use the search function.

Flooding SO with beginner questions lowers the usefulness for everyone.
This isn't a new problem, but more of a missed opportunity. I've spent the last 15 or so years in in incredibly liberal cities and so in real life I don't get exposed to differing opinions very often. The internet just reflects that.
I'll see from your reports that you're migrating 1000s of 2TB drives to 8TB drives - what is actually happening to your old 2TB drives?

Guess you are not throwing those away so what are you doing with them.
1,884 Startup Founders Say This 1 Thing Is More Important Than Making Money
This argument is seemingly related to Gregory Chaitin's views on noncomputability and nondefinability. Chaitin observes that almost all real numbers cannot be referred to, or singled out, by any mathematical method available to us -- for example because definable numbers using a language or notation must have the cardinality of the natural numbers, but we know from Cantor that the cardinality of the reals should be larger.

Chaitin simply thought this was an impressive fact about the reals and the limitations of mathematics -- a way in which mathematics contains randomness and that many or most facts are "true for no particular reason". This author instead seems to conclude for a related reason that the reals don't exist because we have (and could have) no usable technique to distinguish most real numbers from one another. His complaint in this video is a Chaitin-like observation that we have no way to distinguish real number A from real number B in a finite amount of time or with a finite amount of reasoning or information, and an un-Chaitin-like conclusion that maybe we then have no reason to believe that these numbers exist and are distinct from each other.

Edit: and he emphasizes later that if we believe in the reals, numbers must exist that we can't actually do arithmetic with (which I would suggest is sometimes for the Chaitinesque reason that we can't name or define them, or other times for the weaker Chaitinesque reason that we can't calculate their values), so he seems to ask what good such numbers are to us or what reason we could have to believe that they are real.
Agreed. I don't know why everyone is fixated on the fake news thing. The real news has multiple valid interpretations, but Facebook only puts the one in front of us that we're most likely to agree with.
Alzheimer’s disease found to be a diabetic disorder of the brain