skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of us unwashed masses [1] loathe political drivel and totally support [2] this move.

1 I only refer to myself as part of the unwashed masses because: A) I am not actually a programmer B) I am incredibly poor and C) I literally do not bathe frequently due to said extreme poverty as I am homeless. ;-)

2 Evidence of total support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108692
The migration path wasn't explained at all.

This is fine, if there would be a nice documentation for new version. There wasn't, except for some scattered blog posts.

This is fine, if new version offered some exciting new features or simplified thing a lot. But no, everything became significantly more complicated.

This is fine, if Babel was a production library packed into final build, and modularity is necessary to save precious bytes from web-transmitted JS. But no, it is a development tool. Nobody cares about its size or one-size-fits-all.

I just don't understand. What is the use case that required such a big sacrifice?
I got off Reddit completely about 2 months ago for the same reason. I have no problem with the density of political discussion on this site...probably because it's not Reddit. Sure some people get emotional...but I'm not seeing the baseless accusations and snark always seen on Reddit.

I think we should entertain this experiment of Dang's for the time being.
What's done is done, and there wasn't much to be learned from the exchange anyway.

I don't agree. I think it's worth reading and trying to understand the perspectives of the participants. I wouldn't guess that any of them feel embarrassed by their comments. Instead, I get the feeling that everyone feels like they did what they must and the outcome matched their expectations based on the world they each perceive. I think it's instructive to review the episode and consider whether a different approach might have been able to reach a better result.
It makes all the difference. Major player moving away from America to China such as Peter Thiel or any other big well known VC's is significant because it suggests that Chinese market conditions are more favorable or a sizable opportunity and favorable living conditions are present in China to convince high net worth individuals to shift their life style and culture completely.

It's an entirely different situation for those who are familiar with Chinese culture and speak the language going back to China to do business. It's another for non-Chinese individuals of high net-worth to uproot their American life for a foreign one.

If some remote time in the future, when Trump's offsprings send their offspring to Beijing University instead of Harvard, then we would know the tide has turned-this new China offers more or less the same benefits and comfort America provides to it's elite.

Obviously, it's a one way street right now, in our direction.
Interestingly, I don't think this is actually a "discrete logic" kind of problem—i.e. it's not the kind of problem where (doing the moral equivalent of) tagging everything and having an expert system/business rules engine (as instantiated in a moderation staff) do something according to the tags is the optimal way to go about things.

The thing about political discussion—the identifying feature of it, which is the same thing that makes it such a problem—is that it sucks people into it. There can be four productive subthreads of a discussion all peacefully chatting, and then a political subthread gets started and from then on, all the comments end up on the political tangent subthread and discussion of the original non-tangential topic is forgotten.

This is a structural pattern to how posts happen—the kind of thing you can identify with linear regression on time series of post metadata. Politics is almost literally a "black hole": it has greater "mass" than other subjects, sucking commenters away from their original intent toward political subthreads. If you model subthreads as having that sort of "gravitational force", you can predict the ones with the highest "pull" will be political in nature. (Well, that, or a subthread indulging HN's fun habit of primary sources showing up to make comments on stories about them. But those subthreads likely have very low "controversy" metrics [in the Reddit ranking algorithm sense], which can be used to filter those out from political consideration.)
I see they have pretty tricky exchange controls, that restricts how you can bring money in and out of Thailand...

http://www.doingbusinessthailand.com/blog-thailand/doing-bus...
Are they really, though? If you've put in the effort to learn Vim's command system (big if there), then they provide mostly the same things:

- heavily centered around document editing
- encourage plugins over embedded features
- very good regex find/replace
- very good at editing massive files (the main failing of most other editors)

They both have syntax highlighting for most languages. I admit that some features of N++ need plugins in vim, of course, like spellcheck. I generally do use them for pretty interchangable situations.
This book really helped me address problem behavior:

https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Stories-Challenging-Behaviour...

When you can sing a couple and the kid puts away their shoes, it makes it feel like magic.
> heavy slant towards a sort of techno-utopian quasi-libertarianism

Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining a service in which HN users who make opposing claims about its "heavy slant" are introduced to each other.
That's the number on the link, rounding up US population, and down the death rate.

A single hospital misclassifying deaths could double it and maybe not even raise an alarm.
The article is actually misleading.

It says that Oct. was 4x as much precip. than normal, and Nov. was less than average... then says that for the TWO months together, it's 200% above average. But the data is a spike in one month, then more drought-like conditions in the next.

So...
s/naive/native/
like I said, because of a lot of reason (some personal, some unfortunate incidents), I've been looking for the above solution for over 5 years and have found none so far. :(

Sadly it's never the technology, it's the laws that are the issue (and I can see why they are necessary too, so it's just in limbo)
I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do.

I'd like to point out that this site is called "Hacker News", not "Technical and Business News". While there is no single "hacker political stance", there are ethical principles embraced by the community that can be applied usefully to policy questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_ethics

As many have pointed out, it's really the subjective content of this site (here in the comments) that has the most value.
Wow, so many stories?

All your issues have been excellent so far. Thanks!
Kapitza is agreeing with me, although he/she might not realize it.

Climate sensitivity is just shorthand for the question of how harmful global warming is going to be. The concept concedes the correctness of the simple model I outline.

As it should, because basic physics would have to be wrong for the simple model to be wrong.
Why isn't this exactly like playing "Nearer My God to Thee" on the deck of the Titanic? The ship is sinking and we're going to talk not about the water rushing in through the hole in the hull, but about ...gardening?

By all means let's have a civilized conversation but we're in a political crisis and "we" as "hackers" need to help fix it, not wish it wasn't so.
Living in New York and nearly being run down by "professional" drivers daily... tomorrow sounds good. Taxis too, please.

Oooh, will that stop the incessant and generally illegal HONKHONKHONKHOOOOONK too? Yes please!
Is it OK to call it PCM now?
It's not clear to me what is politics.

For instance, I just came across this interesting article from The Brookings Institution: "Another Clinton-Trump divide: High-output America vs low-output America" [1].

It's a look at how the election broke down by county. Clinton won 472 counties, Trump won 2584. The counties Clinton won produce 64% of the country's GDP, with Trump's counties producing 36%. With the exceptions of the Phoenix, Fort Worth, and a big chunk of Long Island, Clinton won all the counties that have large economies.

They have a neat visualization of all the counties by size of contribution to GDP and who won them.

The discuss how this big a divide is "unprecedented in the era of modern economic statistics".

The article itself is not taking any political position. It is just providing a way to perhaps get some insight into how the election came out the way it did.

Would this article count as politics and so be subject to this week's ban? Or is it an interesting look at data that happens to be data about a political event?

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/11/29/another...
Anyone on HN knows anything about Geometric Intelligence beyond what was written in the article?
The thing is, the people who are being racist, misogynist, fascist, etc. are also being political. And so their posts will get flagged too.

I think the idea is, basically, that rather than "calling out" these things and getting into a big argument about them each and every time they happen, you just (indicate to the mods that you want to) blow them out of the sky.
There are no carts, just bags. This doesn't appear to be a replacement for traditional grocery stores but rather corner stores or bodegas, so there isn't a need for them.
But why anybody even need a modular build tool? It's not like it is packed into final build, we don't need to shave off bytes. One size fits all works perfectly here. What is the killer use case for modularity?
I had acute pain in my right hand last year - went to a doctor, wore a brace, now use wrist pads, and it went away.

So I second the advice of seeing a doctor.

The week with the brace was awful, but, as other posters mention, it's the point :) .

I do live in a country where I can have a week off for medical reasons and still get paid though.
It's super important to some people, but I go for the default unnatural skin tone these days.
Also, designing a FPGA board is 'half' of the job, putting a verilog or VHDL code is a totally different thing.

The DDR3 routing, the BGA chip, everything on this board 'screams' very hard work, probably not by a single person ( i have to admin I checked the FPGA/board part only )
Probably - I don't know the procedure. I do know most people consider debit to be a less secure (for the consumer) form of payment than credit or cash though.
It is designed for remote management of a computer. Take your best shot, do you think it has network support?
Also, it doesn't need for the computer to be powered on. One of the advertised features is remote HDD wipe, in case your laptop is stolen.
To toe the line between censorship and curation is an incredibly difficult task and I think, as a civilization, it's a fundamental problem. The thought and care and effort that's going into this problem right now is deeply important and I'm grateful towards those who take it seriously, and it's clear that dang (and other HN moderators) are of this class of people.

So my only piece of (hopefully) constructive criticism is that I think there's a prima facie less biased stance to take with an announcement like this. It might go like:

Dear HN,

HN, as a public discussion forum, is a dynamical system that's always "attempting" to spiral out of control. Hence, we have moderators. Our moderators can only inject so much stabilizing energy into HN, and we've noticed that many or most political discussions are more energized than we can handle. So, we're going to see what HN looks like from a moderator's POV when we disable political discussions.

I guess this too sounds a little alarming, but my point is that I think there could be a way to talk about the issue at hand in terms of pure magnitudes instead of using language that says anything qualitative about different types of discussions. Something about the idea that "we have certain values, these discussions aren't aligned with our values, these discussions don't belong here" is a little off-putting.

All that said, it's not at all ridiculous to test whether or not banning political debate may in fact make HN a more robust and effective knowledge hub. Hopefully this experiment will yield interesting results.
I understand the motives behind this decision but after deliberating for the last two hours I have to say I think it's a bad decision.

HN should stand up for values it believes in, not just tech as if it exists in a vacuum. If HN believes in diversity and LGBT rights, it should stand up for it. If HN believes in corporate deregulation and dismantling of the EPA, it should stand up for it.

The idea that HN is neutral on all these issues is just false. HN is the people who run it. They have views and a vision for the site. What kind of site do they want it to be? Stand up for that vision. People who don't like it can go elsewhere.

Reddit and Twitter and other sites have made a huge mistake in the past allowing racism and hate to fester in their midst. They should have thrown those people off years ago. They have other sites to go to.

Anyway, that's my view. It's time for people to stand up for what they believe in.
That entirely depends on the requirement priority for the user experience being based on agnostic fact, not opinion.

But as we know, some parties prefer more stringer voter identification at the expense of supression, and vice versa.
Yeah. I'm actually asking the question as one of my friends mentioned we should offer a full self hosted option for enterprise.

I don't know if we want to go that direction though. Plus I wasn't even sure who is actually self hosting these days. Kind of reminds me of the Silicon Valley show with the "box" in the data center dilemma.
The very niche "I want to argue politics, but only with other hackers" site!
I say make this permanent. A couple of years ago, politics was mostly verboten here, at least unofficially. It's been a slow, steady transition to the current state where political stories have become so prominent.

None of that is to say that politics isn't important, or that I don't enjoy discussing the subject. It just isn't mainly why I come to HN, and I honestly feel a little dirty every time I get drawn into a political discussion here.
Oculus Medium
Here's a couple of problems.

1) Many things are political on some level. Consider encryption, the future of technology, automation, global trade. What counts as political?

2) Not discussing things that are deemed "political" is itself a political act - you're basically saying, "we don't need to talk about these things that are actively causing harm." Often times, this is a show of support for the status quo - it's the privileged who get to say what conversations can and cannot be had, and they rarely say, 'let us stop talking about this subject that deeply affects us'. They say that about things that don't matter to them, because they're worried about civility.

3) Some people are actually actively fighting for their very right to exist, politically and in the physical world. Consider the current administration's (especially the VP) stance toward LGBTQIA people, or toward abortion, or consider the active physical harm perpetrated on the bodies of non-white people by institutions and corporations. If you're upset because people are getting their feelings hurt, consider the people whose actual bodies are being hurt, whom you are now potentially silencing.

Sure, maybe hackernews should be a place where people post stuff like "Show HN: Version 1.2 of my parsing state machine" and nothing else. Maybe we yearn for the yester-days of freshmeat or whatever.

I don't operate under the assumption that HN is a free space or a space for me in particular or demand the right to say anything I want on its platform. I did appreciate its relative openness and the general quality of its commentariat. But this experiment has radically altered my opinion of HN as an online space. I'm going to re-evaluate that, I guess.

This really does feel like someone grumpily saying, "keep it down, kids, we're trying to eat dinner here!"
A big part of today's media environment is mediated through tech's most popular and/or biggest companies (Facebook and Google, Reddit, probably to a smaller degree Apple), with the internal choices of tech's last big success (Facebook) having likely strongly influenced the last election.

I disagree strongly with suppression. You break it, you own it. the point of view of most younger and not so young people is nowadays mediated through tech via social media. Here is the place where it is most important to have a debate about that.

If you want to moderate it differently from other subjects, add a different set of tags or karma reservoir so that it doesn't spill over from it. I think it's important to keep the political stories on the front page, especially as this election's outcome will create incredible changes.
> If this is the first of a series of "experiments" I wonder which other "conflicts" might "cause harm here" - Identity Discussions? Health care in the US?

Aren't those just subset off politics?
Why would a project maintainer be expected to write "exceptional" documentation, have a clear scope for something they might still be exploring, give visual architecture explanations, etc etc and we can't expect developers to deal with frustration like an actual human?
If you have a SFH try this out. Way better than zillow. https://www.housecanary.com/
A prototype is a great way to get the conversation started. Most people don't even know why Vault should be considered, let alone why it's better than K8s secrets (which in their world works fine).
I know a lot of people here. I know their genders, I know their races, in some cases I know their sexual orientations. Because they have talked about personal experiences here. But the world is fundamentally and inescapably political and this policy will, full-stop, be used as a bat to silence those people and prevent them from sharing their personal experiences when those experiences threaten the white-empowering, male-empowering status quo. There is no world in which it won't be.

Consider an article about discrimination in the hiring practices of startups. Is that "political" under this policy? My guess it is. And so out come the flags and the status quo is reinforced by the thunderous claim that it's Just Not A Problem--because, whether or not flags mean "this is bad and obviously unimportant" to 'dang, that's what they mean to the audience. And so, incrementally, the culture here gets worse. And worse. And worse.
I'm glad you didn't announce this last week. Then it would have been AWS articles only!
Not only do I completely agree, this used to be the policy here, long long ago. Around the time that Aaron Swartz was gaining influence and the Snowden leak happened, it suddenly became a political free-for-all around here and a lot of highly political people showed up and started commenting.

I don't agree that everything is political, unlike most of the protesters above. We have sister sites like lobste.rs that have even less politics than we do and seem to have some useful dialog.

I have always missed the less political atmosphere we used to have and am really glad to see this "cleanse." I hope it helps reinstate some of our culture, even if it is temporary.
So this gets a list of keys from the server A via the SCAN command, gets their value via DUMP, and sequentially runs RESTORE on server B to load the value?

If so then there's zero transactional consistency between the keys themselves. If each key is independent then that's not really an issue, but if you have multiple keys that make sense only in context of each other, it'd be possible to get values for each that corresponding to different moments in time (each reflecting when the DUMP command was invoked for that particular key).

I get that this is meant to work around limitations in AWS's Redis offering (namely the lack of BGSAVE, direct access to RDB, or SLAVEOF) but I'd suggesting highlighting that inconsistency at the top of the docs.
> Death due to lack of certain nutrients isn't that uncommon.

Citation? My understanding is that study after study has generally shown little impact from vitamin supplementation except in specific cases where subjects show obvious signs of deficiency (e.g. iron deficiency in pregnant women).

> VDD related deaths are quite common especially in cardiac cases

I'm assuming this is "vitamin D deficiency". I'd against ask for a citation. I couldn't find anything supporting this claim. Seems to be a risk factor but that's very different than being caused by the deficiency.

We’re still a few years away from clinical trials that explore the possible link between taking vitamin D supplements to achieve higher vitamin D levels, and lower cardiovascular risk.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/heart_vascular_institute/clin...
The problem with the JS learning curve is the HUGE amount of StackOverflow and blog posts that are insanely outdated, with no way for the casual reader to check if the question or the answers are actually usable on a modern version.

I believe that this, combined with complex, incomplete or outright missing documentation (hello Webpack, though the situation has improved since a couple of months) is something that holds the JS community back very hard - also because people complain all the time to framework authors "the example I c&p d from stackoverflow doesn't work" and answering these complaints takes nerve and time.

The PHP community suffers from the same fate, btw - remember mysql_*? People still find it in the top 10 Google results for some questions.

The only environments that have managed to resist this problem are Win32 and the userspace part of the Linux Kernel. In a lot of cases one is able to even open a VC6 project in a modern Visual Studio, have it converted and building - or at least just having to mess with the VC build process, but thanks to a hell of #ifdef's, the Win32 code still builds - and runs! For what it's worth, I can run Windows 95-era EarthSiege 2 on a 64-bit processor and the only things broken are the joystick input (by disassembly I believe the responsible code suffers from a bad version check on a struct) and some timer that binds a specific movement to the framerate and naturally overspeeds as a modern system can easily hit 100 FPS.

Same holds true for the Linux kernel, it's amazing that a statically compiled game like UT2004 still runs on a modern day Linux system.

In contrast, JavaScript - "npm install <whatever>", as many tutorials describe, is likely to already give an incompatible (with the instructions) package when the book finally gets printed. I have the feeling that like with libraries, major versions should always be backwards-compatible for their subversions, and have different NAMES for their major versions, e.g. "npm install angularjs1" vs "npm install angularjs2".
Still, technologically minded liberals/libertarians, for all their differences, are not the only viewpoints, and even if there's disagreement along that axis it can still lead to a bubble. I doubt you'd see many people on HN advocating for a fundamentally Christian America, for instance.