skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Based on Agnolia, these are the most popular stories from the past week on HN that might be construed as "political":

#17 Tell HN: Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for a week https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

#23 Canadian journalist's detention at US border raises press freedom alarms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092330

#29
Help Us Keep the Archive Free, Accessible, and Private https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13065599

#37
Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103611

#49
War Is a Racket by General Smedley D. Butler (1933) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068641

#59
FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074285
"Colleges and employers interested in predicting the success of applicants would do better to look at a student’s grades, which measure personality traits, like grit and attention to detail, more effectively than IQ and SAT tests"

High grades are a great predictor of high parent involvement and a knack for succeeding in a rigid education system. They might as well say colleges predicting long-term success should look at economic status of applicants.
I'm not a mod, but I wouldn't flag your comment. Mentioning faith-based alternatives for human interaction may not be 100% on-topic, but it isn't political or divisive.

Now, if you had recommended one faith/sect over others for a superior experience of human interaction, then maybe you'd have a problem.
I'm in that boat too. I've turned off Twitter and have with rare exception stayed away from news sites. Headphones go on whenever I hear a political discussion near me.

Not sure I can keep this up for 4 years, but I'll give it a go.
Articles like this show because people are given the title Engineers.
FOSS Tetris in 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64
Well those warehouse jobs won't exist either...
Designing Aync Event Systems with AWS IoT and Serverless Application Model (SAM)
You're basically describing the old idea of 'tag everything with RFID' for the checkoutless grocery store. It didn't really catch on because it's a fairly expensive way to attack the problem given the small margins on most items and would require that EVERY manufacturer implement the tags or for the stores/distribution system to add tags to non compliant items which would also be fairly expensive.

So to get around needing to tag everything you can throw computer vision and machine learning at the problem to determine where the person is grabbing an item from and combined with well organized shelves you now know what they just grabbed off the shelves.
And so what would you do if you had a migraine? It's not like you can adjust the pressure by staying inside- it equilibrates.
Not sure why you got downvoted. Any thread from a paywalled site has people asking why it's okay to post paywalled content, or how to get around the paywall, even though that was announced in a similar thread.
You could have made these criticisms without the hugely inflammatory language.
Can you carve out an exception for economic / startup relevant legislation please? As a UK based startup, I would really value HN support navigating Brexit and VATMOSS changes.
what's the monetization strategy?
I could easily demonstrate to you that Y2K would be a problem were you to ignore it. It also came with a hard deadline. You could dick around saying, "2% of computer scientists don't think Y2K is real", but come January 1, 2000, you could have been cleaning up a disaster while the rest of the world went on about their day. The disaster would be localized, so no one would care even if your business went under as a result. But you could still fix your code after reality set in, it would just cost you a lot both in expense to fix and lost business.

In contrast to climate change, where we're still arguing about the details. We don't have a hard deadline, and even if we did, it would occur (most likely) after we're all dead. So we get to kick the can down the road a little longer. Should disaster actually strike, I don't think we get the opportunity to do the equivalent of putting four digit years after the fact.

So not a direct comparison, IOW.
> I'm working on a device that mounts to a baseball cap

Maybe a red one: MAGA. ;)
> The problem is that, generally by law, you can either pay them $0, or minimum wage, but not in-between.

I don't think that's true; if wage and hour laws apply, you must pay minimum wage ($0 is not an option). If the relationship isn't covered by wage and hour laws, you can pay them negative amounts (charge for training), $0, or pay a positive amount above or below the minimum wage (though in the latter case it will have to be framed as something other than pay for work, such as a stipend of some kind.)
FWIW, I enjoy well articulated dissenting opinions, as well as experiences brought from sources external to a community's shared experience. It's instructive as well as frequently enlightening. That said, I do also appreciate tribal familiarity and the "relaxed state" that comes from friends who think alike.
Playing devil's advocate here, what if those people didn't have to work these menial jobs and instead could just do art or hang out playing games with each other all day?
It's the social structure that says you need to work to survive, that while it's served us really well, will lead to a lot of hardship when the labor of people is not worth what they need to survive.
Um... you mean 's/world/worldview/'
I hope all of the bleeding-heart armchair economists in this thread see your post. They've clearly never worked these jobs they claim to value so much.
Yes. I'll add a note to the site about that. Installing the staticland command-line tool is `npm install -g staticland`
The metaphor is good and the approach and description is actually great. The challenge is that this issue doesn't only happen in the political domain, it can happen in the philosophical and intellectual domains too via the cultural competition (AKA cultural war)
Perhaps the upvote/downvote could be removed from political stories and in its place, an "abuse" flag could be substituted?
Yeah, I'm still on the fence about medication but I will tell you this for sure. The medication has made the difference between it being more manageable. I won't say it cures all the behaviours, but it takes the edge off. When used with other tools, like learning to discuss and manage her feelings with a therapist, it's made her temper and behaviour on the whole much more bearable.
I actually had the opposite: it seemed to work OK until it suddenly stopped receiving video entirely. (though oddly I could see the input being sent when I looked at the computer it was running on) 2.4ghz was actually much more successful for me, though it ended up having hitches every so often. And when you're trying to play Dark Souls or a rhythm game, you don't want hitches. I spent the time to get everything hooked up via ethernet and I don't see any more issues, even at the high quality setting for streaming.

Though maybe my experience is affected by the router I have. (which is in AP mode and I have a custom firewall)
I had always seen HN as a place where people curious about technology, culture and society share article links and comment about them. The moderation is what makes it work. I really do not see why censorship (or detox if you prefer) on political matters should be necessary.
if HN really needs this, it might even mean that its audience needs to be educated. And if that is the case it might mean the level you get in here is deemed to decline.
It's a good explanation of why calloc still exists and is useful. Otherwise it would have been dropped from the standard like cfree was.
Best to change your design to leverage a long-lived
resource if possible.

On the flip side, if your critical metric is latency
then these tricks [...] are exactly what you try to avoid

If you keep the buffer alive as long as possible with a slab allocator, or just smart/good memory management strategy. How you acquire the buffer will ultimately be trivial, likely dwarfed your other startup tasks (reading config, opening sockets, etc.)
So it's good I got that black friday deal?
Yay, I fully endorse this policy and hope that it gets extended forever.

Would you always try to car discussions in a baseball forum?

They are both valid topics. But there is a reason why forums specialize on particular topics.
Technology and politics go hand in hand

This just reads like a cop-out to me, in the same way that large media orgs have been parroting the "it's impossible to be truly unbiased" line as if it were an excuse to throw up their hands and stop trying altogether.

Not that I'm saying you're being disingenuous here, mind, it just reads like defeatism. "All tech is politics so it's pointless to try delineating them". This mentality gets worse and worse as you go down the main thread...

Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking down the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

Those topics aren't even tangentially political in nature.
Tricky thing about politics is that - as dang explained - triggers specific reactions in all of us, in a self-amplifying way. So while I often do comment on political topics, I also like this experiment very much. Politics will never disappear from HN completely, but what I desire is for the occasional political discussion on HN to be of high quality - both civil and insightful. So I 100% support this experiment.
Spurious Splines
I live in Northwest Washington, D.C. I am a technologist, a government contractor, and an HN member for many years under various accounts since 2008.

I respectfully disagree.

Yesterday someone motivated by the "Pizzagate" story, spread and enabled by the social media systems we designed, fired multiple shots from a semi-automatic weapon into a crowded restaurant near my home.

My partner and I passed the crime scene shortly thereafter on our way back to our apartment.

The new National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, endorsed the totally false rumors that led to this shooting. He will soon be empowered by the full force of the nation's intelligence agencies.

I want you to very carefully consider the implications of what he could do with access to that power, and the potential result of blocking discussion of such issues, particularly at this moment in time.
>Need more features, a private, managed server, or advanced integration with existing systems? You have two options:

>Hire us to set up an internal static site deployment system that fits your use case.

>Use the open source code to host a staticland server yourself. github.com/staticland
France also has a rate ~4x higher than the US, and even Norway has a rate double that of the US. I do wonder how much of this is difference is legitimate differences between countries and how much is a difference in categorization. Are the French really 20x as likely to die of malnutrition as the neighboring Germans?
I've been attending a lot of AI/Data Science conferences lately, and it's incredible to me how this is not a major part of any conversation about AI and automation.

A talk I recently attended by a data scientist from Amazon had him gloating about how many jobs he could eliminate.

Ironically, the only speaker who brought it up as a major social problem we'll have to tackle is someone from Uber. His solution was less than satisfactory, but at least he recognized the issue.

I don't want to pretend we live in a world of algorithms without consequence.
To offer a counter point. In the three cities I've lived in in the US this is not the case. The vast majority of people do not know anyone that works at their local grocery store.

From my perspective it's annoying. I need to go in to a crowded market get all my stuff. Once I've done that I either need to wait in line for an automatic check out station (because there are not enough), or wait in line for a cashier which takes forever especially if someone decides to pay with cash.

For me this potentially gets me out of the store faster so I can do things I actually want to do. I honestly wish I did know the people but that's not really how it works and so this is exciting for me
In general enterprise SSDs are not using SAS, they are either NVME or SATA. For example, intel's datacenter range https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/au/en/solid-state-driv... has no SAS drives.
I mostly agree. Take the parent's argument and replace grocery store clerk with gas station pump attendant.

"I know all the people who work in these gas stations. The attendant at the pump always whistles a quiet song while he pumps my gas. He knows my son and is always nice and friendly."

Yet, besides the completely weird laws in New Jersey and Oregon, society has moved on and people now pump their own gas.

I understand the parent's post point to some degree. I don't want a cold a sterile society where no one never interacts with anyone any longer. However, I also get stuck in grocery store lines all the time. It would be a net win for me to skip these lines all together even if the places I shop at become a little more impersonal.

At least in the United States, places have continued to staff less and less cashiers and have relied more and more on self-checkout. So, for many of these stores, it isn't like I'm missing out on any real connection. This just seems like a way less stressful self-checkout.

Apple lets you check yourself out using their app at the Apple Store but I rarely do this because I feel like I'm shoplifting or that people are watching me suspiciously. I'm curious if I would have that same reaction to these stores or not. I'm guessing not, because it is the only way to pay.
"Uber breaks labour laws" maybe okay.

"Uber breaks labour laws, and that's why we need Clinton" not okay

"Uber breaks labour laws, and that's why we need Trump" not okay.
It could but it looks like it might require the shelves to be well organized and relatively static. It also can't really deal with fresh produce and other unpackaged goods or by weight items.
Similar at supermarkets in Australia, one staff member could be watching over about 12 self checkouts. They still offer regular registers for people with a lot of stuff and people that don't like self checkout.

The machines are good enough now that I almost never get stuck, although some people are a lot more prone to needing staff assistance to complete checkout.
I am more of a lurker than a poster. I just read comments on the sites.

I really believe that people on either side of the political spectrum should at the very least listen to the view points espoused by the other side so that they can get out of their own echo chambers.

Its a real eye opener to know that there are more than one opinion/point of view on a topic.

Here I go again....finger in ear..."la la la la..."
I have had the feeling that HN has been surreptiously invaded by a troll army, specifically tasked with corrupting the ongoing discovery of consensus.
'Harmful' might be a more appropriate description than 'useless'. Losing the last of tiny interactions throws is deeper and deeper into filter bubbles and echo chambers.

But I am guilty of sacrificing them for convenience myself, e.g. I tend to avoid the cheese counter at the supermarket in favor of prepackaged stuff from self-serve shelves. Removing final checkout is just more of the same.

At least Amazon seem to be trying to the robomarket with a permanent all-seeing-AI installation instead of the not too unrecent consensus prediction of RFID on every single bar of gum and on every piece of fruit. Much better to talk about social implications than about technicalities in RFID surveillance.
Why is it the customer's responsibility to figure out and comply with the rules of your (nonstandard) system to avoid getting charged for something they don't intend to buy and didn't in fact use or take out of the store?

There are all kinds of reasons why that is unreasonable:

* different stores might have systems with different rules and policies, causing confusion;

* people may not remember where to return the item;

* the magic machine-learning system might glitch and not recognize the item was replaced, and you probably won't notice since there's little feedback from the "virtual cart" since you're not interacting with it directly;

* another glitch could put another customer's item in your "virtual cart", so you have nothing to return;

* etc.

Systems like this should fail in customer-friendly ways, and "item returned to the wrong place" is a kind of failure.
Ask HN: How to protect your company during acquisition talks?
Aside from Mutual NDAs, what ways do you have to protect your company during acquisition talks?

Backstory: We've built a pretty slick product that people love, makes the market more efficient and we're the first movers with solid brand recognition.

We've got experience selling websites, but this project is quite different. We're about three years old and still have a huge growth curve ahead of us... but there are a lot of new entrants into our space by larger more established companies in our space.

Several of these companies have devoted significant resources to emulating us and 3 have now sent the "are you for sale?" emails.

We've replied to all of them saying now isn't the right timing, but 2 of the companies have hinted that they can offer our desired exit price or more.

How do we best protect ourselves if we decide to move forward with talks? Especially, considering that our potential acquirers are already our competitors.
What happens if something incredibly important happens during this week in politics, is it simply not up for discussion at all? For example, what happens if a world leader is assassinated or a conflict breaks out?
Every Blog Takes a Village
Bitcoin is the same. Instant verification of authorization, but then it takes 10+ minutes to settle the account.
I have no complaints. This is where I come more and more often because I am so fed up with endless political bickering on Facebook, Twitter, and, well, pretty much every other place I go that has some sort of comment section or forum. It's frustrating. For me, this is the last bastion of rational discussion.
Counterpoint: this article (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5a12/80f783e4ce6ba31b821f4d...)...

TL;DR: Experts have a poor track record for predicting AI development, they aren't particularly qualitatively different in their predictions from non-experts, and "15-25 years" has been a staple prediction for decades now.
I am running tech site with 10k users on which i made surveys about politics with possibility to comment by users. I've stopped because there were so many conflicts, such bad emotions, then users moved their personal conflicts to other discussions on forum. After stopping the political surveys everything is a lot more stable and people are nicer to each other, without any biases, they discuss about software, hardware etc.
This was very good decision, will it work for HN? Probably yes, it worked for us.
Also, tries means it's trivial to do detect routing ambiguities, so your routing table doesn't necessarily have to be built up front, or in any particular order. This is particularly powerful when you're developing an application with a team distributed both over space and time.
Alibaba sellers will list almost anything for $0.01 each, though, regardless of actual selling price.
A white-label slide deck
I think this is a fantastic idea -- it seems the trend today is to inject politics into absolutely everything. In the past, the prevailing wisdom was to avoid political and religious topics in the workplace and technical spheres (conferences, message boards like HN, etc.). Focus on the tech and just the tech and you'll be surprised how much nastiness is naturally eliminated from this board.
The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional.

Ideology is present everywhere. It's built in to the ways we relate to each other, to our employers, to the public and private institutions and technologies we interact with all the time, and especially the way we work and conceive of work. Ideology is often tacit, baked into our assumptions even in "non-political" areas.

Squelching political discussion won't cause us all to transcend ideology, it'll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone's unstated assumptions.

This is a bad idea and a little dystopian (the world is upside down, but think happy thoughts, folks! Here's a TED talk!)

Not to mention I didn't really see a huge problem on the site, so in a time when politics and ideology are on everyone's minds for good reason, it seems you've chosen to solve a non-problem with censorship.
I think it is reasonable to avoid political subjects that are off topic. Which is difficult, I know, because on-topic for HN is literally 'Anything that good hackers would find interesting.'

Perhaps, for politics, it would be good to try to limit political discussion to things that affect the technology world broadly, and startups specifically?

In the past, topics like those have been discussed here quite productively. Since the U.S. election, I've noticed posts getting flagged that seemed like they were worthy of discussion. I'm not sure if the flagging was ideologically motivated, or if it just happened because of election fatigue.

Even though I don't live in the U.S., I still like to see these discussions happen because the impacts of things that happen tend to have repercussions throughout the tech world.

Maybe limiting comments on political topics to people with 500+ or karma would make reasonable discussion more likely? It's not insanely difficult to react that level in a month or two if you're making thoughtful contributions to the community.
> Especially, considering that our potential acquirers are already our competitors.

This is often the case.

Have you talked to an M&A lawyer yet?
I'd rather there be some kind of isolation of political discussion rather than an outright ban for a week.

Maybe just have a permanent/rotating "politics/culture/society" thread for people to share whatever?
I imagine that the first test pilot will be a computer. Submarines are really nicely simple systems, which is why it is possible for a bunch of amateurs to build one.
sorry for the delay :) - its really hard to do active a/b tests in the early days - often I tell founders that feedback cycle then has to rely of direct interaction with customers alone. Which I think is a good habit for all startups to keep even when they can get quantitive data.
A consulting group for startups
If one comes up this week, sure. Otherwise I doubt you need to worry.

(It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.)
> Not all, or even most tech talk is political related. I'm just looking dowen the front page right now.. a new Golang web framework, Elixir and Ruby IPC, OpenAI, new SSDs..

And these are the articles that matter the least to me. I come here to discuss applied technology, not theory. How can technology improve quality of life? How are we going to deal with automation replacing the need for jobs? How are startups and their culture effecting both their employees and society as a whole (I'm looking at you AirBnB and Uber).

To each their own. I don't believe it's a cop out, but that's my opinion. You can have your threads and I can have mine without any interference. That's my problem. There's no need to censor politics threads if you simply skip them because you have no interest.
20x the rate in Germany. It's very hard to believe this data is consistent across nations.