skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm seeing a lot of people say this is a bad idea. I completely disagree. (...) Hacker news is a news aggregation medium for "Hacker News."

I'm not sure yet whether I think this is a good or bad idea, though this I'll say: HN is not just a news aggregation medium. If in the beginning it were, it is no longer. It is now much more defined by the people on here. Like reddit, the story pages give the majority of screen real estate to comments. It's not a stretch to say people on here drop by, to a greater extent, for the discussions, ideas, and tips - and to a lesser extent, to be exposed to a story or link that they might not have eventually found elsewhere.
You're both right, of course. Also, there are apps for that...
Politics are deeply engrained in the fabric of HN. Just a few examples that come immediately to mind:

* Peter Thiel's support of Trump.
* Mass Surveillance Laws.
* Net Neutrality.

Are we going to simply avoid any and all potentially controversial subjects?
OK, up 6%. That's not "skyrocketing".

If 3D storage isn't working, why this HN article today?[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107550
This is essentially true, and I'm sad that someone is so caught up in the hype that they'd downvote a simple description of the actual state of the field.

What we have right now is a boom in AI engineering, with AI research fairly neglected because it doesn't produce the same kind of hype.

Here's a Twitter thread [1] where NLP researchers describe people who work on machine translation as 'depressed', because they spend their time tweaking neural net parameters to get tiny improvements over the best techniques of last decade, with no opportunity to understand what causes an improvement.

[1] https://twitter.com/haldaume3/status/805055952789573635
I empathize with your view, but I very much disagree with you.

1) It's an experiment, there should never be any disagreement with an experiment unless the experiment itself can cause harm to someone/something. The results of this experiment should be evaluated closely, and if they make new guidelines for HN I'm fully onboard. But it's an experiment.

2) The person who shot the gun did not read HN, I may be wrong but I feel this is a fair assumption. I'm not saying no one here could shoot a gun in public, but they wouldn't come here as anything but a complete troll and shoot a gun based on some crap story like that. If I'm wrong in this then the experiment is terrible and stop it now. But I very much doubt it.

3) The issue is that news in general has degraded. This degradation of journalism has led to many of the issues we experience today. If experimenting on HN can lead to some sort of anecdotal evidence that Politics = bad for communities I'm all for it. I believe part of the issue is pointed to in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4 24 Hours news is the issue. 24 Hours politics is the issue. Taking a purge is a great idea.

4) HN should not be where you get your news about politics.
Are you aware of Scite? "Notepad++ is SciTE on steroids."[1] It's available on OS X, not that I've ever used it on the platform.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sketchupruby/vt7DpvQNcDY/Vsp...
This seems like yet another symptom of a culture that doesn't see the value of emotional states and thus tries to prevent triggers to such states. I think perhaps a system of encouraging rational thought and healing the underlying issues would be more effective. Also, politics is about how resources are allocated in society -- that means everything has a political implication for the most part. Politics doesn't have to be war. If hacker news is a garden, then politics is how we decide who gets to enjoy the fruits of the garden and who doesn't.

I see a need for an upgrade in political discourse, yet I'm not convinced eliminating conversations entirely is the answer.
I'm adding flow meters to my keggerator so I can detect when someone pours themselves a beer from one of the taps.

The plan is to have a camera take a photo, do some facial recognition to see if its either one of my flatmates or myself, then optionally post the pic to #beertheif on twitter or start playing some music based on the chosen beer.
> If your values can't handle a basic criticism then your values are terrible.

I don't think you should judge the merit of moral values by how well their proponents deal with being shouted at on the internet.
I completely confused this with magic leap and was surprised.

This sounds pretty neat.
What exactly defines a story as political?

Some recent topics I can think of... Facebook + fake news is about technology and user behavior, and also very political. Government use of surveillance technology is both technological and political in nature. Role of social media in elections has technological, sociological, politic aspects to it that can be discussed.

To me, being "political" is both what you're talking about, and how you're talking about it.

I enjoy reading what the HN audience has to say about the above examples. I'd be disappointed if they're considered too political and off limits going forward.

Interested to see how this experiment goes.
Making a technical video for a general audience is real challenge. This video succeeds in that regard.

The audio cuts are likely because he had a deadline that didn't allow him to completely re-record the audio. I appreciate he inserted clips that added clarity despite knowing that he'd get negative comments for that effort.

Thanks for creating this video and sharing.
Absolutely agree. I'm a "scratching my own itch" founder, and building a product based on years of doing the job of my target users. "Scientific method" isn't terribly useful for me as I build the initial product.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily know what this technology is going to mean to end users. They're going to find problems to solve that I didn't even imagine. As we're closing in on a beta, I'm doing demo/interviews as often as I can (a couple of times a week at this point), and seeing where their minds run. As William Gibson said, the street finds its own uses for things.

Once we get the product in the hands of real customers, it'll be far easier to start taking measurements and figuring out what to work on from there. But for now, intuition is the only tool I have.
that both sides are somehow equally at fault. That is most definitely NOT the case

I've seen uncivil behavior well-represented here on HN from across the political spectrum(s).
If you define politics as including everything, then everything is political. That doesn't make it a useful definition, though.

I just saw a story about Paul Allen resurrecting a CDC 6500 supercomputer. Yes, that took place in an environment where politics shapes the capitalist foundation of our society, and that's where Paul Allen got the money to be able to do that. It takes an extreme stretch to call that a political story, though...
Different answer depending on whether you have a product built or not. Also different if you have a consumer product. My best personal experience with customer research is for live consumer products. In that case we would recruit potential customers off of craigslist (offering $50 for an hour of their time). We would bring them into the office and sit them at the table. The entire team (small) would be in the room. We would give them a scenario and ask them to complete a task in our app in front of us. For example, you saw a really good video on Facebook made with this app and now you want to download that same app and make a video for yourself. Then we would ask them to complete that task asking us any questions they had and sharing their inner monolog out loud. Some questions we would answer but most we would ask them to figure it out. It was very important that everyone involved with building and designing the product was in the room experiencing the user test live. We would take notes on issues the customer faced and conduct about 5 interviews in an afternoon. Anything that came up 4-5 times we would attempt to fix. We would rince and repeat monthly.
Yes, I generally think that the conversations here stay on the relevant technical topic and treat political explanations as just more evidence into an investigation instead of the end-goal. I don't want a board focused on politics, I certainly don't find this kind of civil discussion in reddit.

I also don't think that the hacker spirit responds well to barriers of thought and discussion.

It's just an anecdote, but I know my views have been greatly affected in part by hacker news. I was once a staunch libertarian, but reading a lot about universal basic income and other approaches people have offered to income inequality and social issues, while talking about the technology trends first and foremost, have convinced me to broaden my beliefs.

There is something about having a stated goal outside of political points scoring that helps everyone see themselves as part of the same team. I've always felt hacker news is largely about understanding things related to technology - trends, weird bugs, how startups work, etc. With that as our main focus we can defer to each other and learn from each other. When the main force is to debate the other side there is no room for concessions or finding common ground.

What I want in a community, is for people of all different views and backgrounds to think about a topic with the end goal of solving some problem. Hacker news isn't perfect there but it's close.
There's no non-political solution to a social problem. It's a contradiction in terms. "Non-political" just means "aligned with the political status quo".

The idea that major social ills can be solved with no governmental intervention is itself very political.
One of my physics major friends uses a Chromebook (and a shitty Windows laptop he prefers not to deal with). I set up a DigitalOcean droplet for him to run Jupyter. One of the big problems is that it's not safe for him to share Jupyter notebooks by URL, since anyone to whom he discloses the web UI password gets remote code execution (exec and friends work).

A professionally maintained, sufficiently sandboxed Jupyter environment could be awesome for people who want to work on and share Jupyter notebooks, but not be responsible for servers.
Politics isn't some isolated thing. Politics is about everything we do and say. A techie elite deciding what they do isn't political, or worse, beyond politics, is part of what got us to this point in the first place.

> HN is a garden, politics is war by other means

Denial, denial, denial. This is like the arms dealers selling to both sides in third world conflict and claiming they are ethically above the killing.

You claim intellectual curiosity, but you peddle intellectual dishonesty.

Thank you, btw. I left HN months ago, and today come back to see exactly the pathetic hypocrisy that turned me off in the first place. Shit like this makes me be ashamed to be part of the tech community.

Sure, let's hide from the real world and pretend it isn't happening.
That was the TechReport website. Here's a link: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experim...
As I understand it, Banqiao Dam was primarily intended as a flood defence scheme. Even if China had abandoned hydroelectric power they'd still have had to construct the dam for that reason. If they'd used nuclear power (which I don't think existed back then) instead, you'd still have had all the deaths from the dam failure plus however many people they managed to kill from applying the same inadequate construction standards and mismanagement to nuclear power plants.
I'm so thrilled that Harry Noller got this prize. he was my undergrad advisor and I learned biochem from him. His work on ribosomes has been great, and the fact he didn't get the Nobel (his competitor) did was always a sore point in the community.
This is one of the reasons why YC pushes people to launch MVPs so quickly - the speed of learning is much faster when the product is in customer's hands.
We haven't, just our general council. To be honest, we aren't packaged to sell yet... and in general we're not even convinced we should sell. My fear is that this will be a timesink and a fishing expedition.
Hashicorp Nomad[0] is surprisingly simple yet powerful. It fits quite nicely between Swarm and Kubernetes/Mesos, as this project mentions.

I'm not sure that it can run on the Raspberry Pi, but it is definitely worth a try.

[0] https://www.nomadproject.io
I think "at the moment, politics is considerably less likely to be discussed in a respectful manner" is a very defensible point, though...
I agree, but I was quite surprised to see it being mentioned alongside some quite uneducated, brutal, bash-only communities. I always had the feeling that in any discussion on HN something new to learn pops up.

Besides that as an active OSS contributor I fully understand and support the author's points.
> I don't believe bad faith as being the same as having ulterior motive

I was very specific to outline an additional condition which I think makes all the difference, which is that you were presented with the reason for the action. Assuming an ulterior motive when you've already been given an explicit motive is assuming they are acting in bad faith, and that that they've provided a reason that does not match reality.
Bond guy, James bond guy.
anthony bourdain was in rome telling an apolitical friend how america had embraced "fascism" by electing a leader who "promised to make america great again". she quickly reminded him that the last leader we elected did the exact same thing.
Top notch engineers behind this one!!
Home automation with old industrial hardware: an Allen Bradley SLC 503.

I read and write data to the SLC with a python script on a RaspberryPI, which also serves up an interface to the SLC and historical data using Flask and MySQL. I've got the thermostat, a door switch, and a few lights hooked up.

I VPN in when I'm on the road just to keep tabs on things. I've never enjoyed how 'closed' commercial home automation is, and this was the result.
I'm still scratching my head and wondering what Zestimates mean for rentals.

For example, I'm giving serious thoughts to moving to SoCal, and I see a place that looks pretty nice... it's listed as being $2000/month, but then when I go to the listing it says Zestimate $2650/month. What's up with that?
A lot of that is anecdotes, like the harassment reports. You assume that all men are automatically welcomed into the high ranks of science, which is untrue. But they can't spin a story of "they rejected me because I was a man".

The toys might simply reflect preferences, why would companies be interested in pushing gender stereotypes? Yes, maybe more boys got a home computer for Christmas than girls - but how many girls had that home computer on their wish list?

Entering fields were nobody looks like you: maybe the women from Harvard is more similar to the man from Harvard than another man from community college, though? It's feminist theory to claim the difference between men and women is such a huge separator.

Some studies have some merit, like the response rate according to names, but it is not really enough to chalk it all up to discrimination.

As for the 80%, no it is not random chance - men and women are different.

My not-validated theory to explain it: maths is hard, let's go shopping! (Translation: women have other options).
And the censorship cancer grows.
> That seems to be the essence of his entire essay. He wants people to be nicer. Yes, criticism is often necessary and often motivates progress, but the criticism should be nicer.

This. Especially when he is giving an example of "feedback, not complaining", those points are mostly rephrasing some aggressive sentences into nicer one.
Google's translation technology and much of the stuff in Google Now was built by the DeepMind (and Google Brain) groups.
Let me guess, you guys have 16GB and SSDs.
Ask HN: How did you learn concurrency?
I've been trying to pick up Elixir and the actor-based concurrency model with it, but I just can't seem to get my head around it.

What articles, books, talks, lectures, etc. did you use to understand different concurrency models?
I don't understand how race, gender, and class in particular can possibly be separated out from tech any more so than software patents. A community that has been so obsessed with disrupting any and all aspects of life can't ethically refuse to discuss the consequences of doing so.
Looks just like Surge.sh with free SSL.
That sounds like a standard <insert derogatory opposing political term here> opinion and it is wrong because you are a <insert mean adverb && previous political term>.

Seriously though, political discourse is good, but badgering is poor behavior. Just because someone disagrees, isn't a reason to down vote.
Interesting world view, and not one that I share.

Politics is about how resources are allocated in society and can often be a very effective solution to problems.
I heard about all that business when it happened a while back. To be honest I think it was a total over-reaction by Github.

I'm of the opinion that using the word "retard" in a github repo is stupid and unprofessional, and makes your project look far worse, but why, seriously, why couldn't github leave free-market dynamics to let this kind of stuff to die?

Shut I man's mouth, and they'll only try harder to speak. Ignore them and they'll have to focus on why people aren't paying attention.
Right, but it's not typically tied directly to your online account (as far as I know!)

Retailers are definitely pushing in that direction with things like Bluetooth LE beacons that talk to your phone. Plus store loyalty cards and the like, which have been around for decades. But those schemes have mostly been opt-out, apart from those weird stores that require membership cards.
A Flying Car.
Anyone with CAD, CFD, aerodynamics skills wanna help?
It's the Internet. Opting out is the easiest thing in the world to do by going to a different web site.
Sorry but you are wrong. You are making classic mistake of viewing ancient texts in light of recent findings and theories.

Let me share some examples

In Varahavatar, Earth was submerged into ocean. You realise that ancients for a long time had idea of Earth as flat. How do you expect them to make concrete theories about universe? Not until Ramayana does reference to Earth as a ball appears. But even that text (which is relatively new) has Sun circling the Earth. Ancient texts are great and give us glimpse into creative capacity of human mind. But let's not try to pass them as scientific
I know an engineer from Iran. He's a great guy, not particularly religious at all. Pretty much a totally normal guy. I asked him about politics in Iran. He said when he was going to school for engineering in Iran where he grew up, his friends all made a pact to completely ignore and stay out of politics. He said it with a smile on his face and absolutely no regret.
They seem to have "solved" the problem with a large blacklist of terms and topics. If you mention any of the things that got Tay into trouble the Zo will simply say that she is uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation and stop replying if you repeat it. They have also removed some features such as face recognition in photos (all photo features have been removed actually) since I assume it is harder to blacklist photos of hitler and concentration camps than it is to blacklist words.
5-Level Paging and 5-Level EPT [pdf]
Glad you like it! We make money through affiliate deals with the retailers we list.
I do think you should clarify what you mean by politics.

Clearly you don't mean stories touched by politics like uber tracking users or everything tech would be offtopic. Clearly you do mean stories about Trump. Somewhere in the middle a line has to be drawn.
As a "data scientist" myself and more importantly as a human being, I witness the same behaviour almost every day and it baffles me.

Yes, what we do can have consequences. We need to think about that!

I have friends working for weapons manufacturers. They don't gloat about building stuff that can blow children up!!! Why the hell should we be absolved from any moral consequences for our acts?

I am not equating elimating jobs and kill children, but I would prefer if our industry abstained from any thought on the consequences of its trades.

I once had to choose between working for a weapons manufacturers for a very nice salary. I chose not to work for them. But I thoroughly thought about it and I don't blame my friends for making a different choice. I politically object to that choice, but it does not mean I am some sort of white knight...and it does not mean that sometimes in the future, if presented with another opportunity, I wouldn't make a different choice...
>, no, that's not the same thing at all.

Are you being literal? I wasn't saying that "repeated" meant lexical equality:

string.compare("more positive", "optimistic") == TRUE

Instead, I meant this:

semantic_intent("more positive", "optimistic") == TRUE

It's naive to think GavinMcG's "solution" of disapproving others negativity hasn't already been done thousands of times before across other disciplines and other forums including Linux/Lisp/C++/PHP/physics/autism/etc. Yes, nice communities do exist (often because of heavy-handed moderation/censorship) but that's orthogonal to the inevitable formation of other uncensored communities that freely share negative criticisms. Therefore, the reasons that motivated JK's original post will always exist.
Most common "full gauge" in central Europe is 1435 mm, some eastern-european countries (including Russia) use 1520 mm -> 85mm ~ 3.3 inches difference. Spain has 1668 mm as well -> 232 mm ~ 9 inch difference.

Except the obvious "just move all cargo to a different train" solutions to the issue include swappable bogies and wheels that can be moved on the axle in a special device.

EDIT: wikipedia has a color-coded map! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rail_gauge_world.png
Since mass job displacement is a problem that gravely affects our society, the answer is a political one - even if the answer is "no government policy" The view that government shouldn't intervene in itself is a political view. There's no escape from political views unless you want to discuss mere theoretical algorithms that have no applications at all in real life.
That reductionist view of politics is part of the problem. Politics is the process of making decisions applying to all members of each group. It's essential and a part of what makes us human.