skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely support having a detox.

In the longer run, I think it is good to have some politics on the site. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum and has a huge amount of intersection with politics. In the past, it has been possible to have rational and nuanced conversations about political issues on HN.

In the recent election cycle, that's been destroyed. It seems to have emboldened people to derail threads with political mud-slinging and the crazies have come out of the woodwork.

To put it simply, I never thought HN would be the place where I was first told to leave the country or get killed. The fact that it was (and not Reddit) honestly depresses me, and I hope that a detox period will force the worst politics out of the forum.

----------

That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.

If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816
Aleppo Medics Struggle to Treat the Injured
Bunnie Huang could probably do so while watching a GoT episode.

Most programmers today are not electronics saavy, even electricity saavy. But it's not Quantum Mechanics.
This is the future of the world. Great innovation that we're excited to see. Whats not to love about this?
Keep Your Family Close and Your Roomba Closer
Hi adrienne :)

This is a fair point and valid data point for how people view it.

Only thing I'd say is, to me the reasoning seems related to a sentiment that's I've seen in a lot of places, that after all the nastiness that's built up through the course of the (very long as usual) US election cycle, it's time for everyone to cool off a bit. So my instinct isn't to tie it that much to anything about HN in particular. Now of course, the same point applies outside of HN - it gets a lot harder to treat Trump as a topic you can just stop talking about when you're more likely to be directly and immediately impacted. And then there's the idea that we shouldn't normalize him by treating him like a normal candidate where, after the election, even if your ideas lost, at least you know there's a modicum of competence and civic-mindedness at the helm… Still, despite all that, despite the fact that I attended a protest myself (just one so far), for me some of the sentiment of wanting to cool off still rings valid. Maybe it shouldn't - but then it's not like we can do anything to change the election result; we're all in this for the long haul…

There's also the fact that "politics" as described by dang covers a lot more than US electoral politics. But the reason for wanting to avoid it is still the influence of US electoral politics on those conversations.
I definitely can see that they will collect more. I imagine it would be similar to what they currently do online but now applying it to a physical store.
Should this post be flagged?
Also, EE is less forgiving, without tools I mean, if you try to hack your way recklessly byebye hardware. No backups.
Hunting Botnets with Internet-Wide Scanning and ZMap
"How far back does evolution go?"

Evolution is not an entirely objective thing, really, it's the arbitrary theoretical line we draw around our observation of bags of random things bouncing around in a random environment. There is no 'process' per sey, other than somewhat arbitrary means we wish to use to describe it.

So the answer is: 'evolution goes back as far as you want it to' - depending on how you chose to define it :)
This is one of the best comments I've read on HN recently. Thank you!
It's not the first time Google has rolled out features that enable abuse:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/12/goog...
Perhaps a Copy On Write scheme could work?
Sure they don't sell it, just like Google and FB don't sell their data to advertisers. They package it in a way where they can auction a derived data set (often via advertising) or charge subscription fees to access some version of it.

They don't have to give up the core data asset to be useful to insurance companies in this case. They just have to do something like give people a health score or something similar.
These cells are nanometer-scale. Having fractional charges is extremely subtle. It is significantly slower to read and write multiple bits, and it takes a lot fewer writes until it doesn't have enough precision to support that use.
Good point about TV. I'd happily subscribe to cable if it weren't for the fact that I'd be paying to have ads blared at me every 5 minutes.
I was mainly referring to the general case of people setting up cameras to film ice hazard roadways (especially in residential neighborhoods) for "entertainment" and do nothing to prevent or mitigate it.
It's pretty good, but sometimes boring. Do you have a few
"must-listen" episodes to recommend?
Functional versus Unit Organizations
Relevant HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
Any stats on the other applications?
Just wait for dynamic pricing!
Out of serious curiosity, what are these new apps that are using more and more RAM, at least for the last few cycles?

It seems like 8 GB has been the default amount for most consumer PCs for years now. This is in contrast to 15-20 years ago where PC manufacturers would really double ram every 2 years.
To some extent, but the bigger factor is that it also selects for obedient employees.

Your efficiency doesn't matter to most execs if they don't control it.
I'm running the 1.3.3 Win32 build (http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backu...). It is supposed to handle NTFS ACLs but I haven't looked at it in-depth because my, for my application, I don't need ACLs to be preserved.

I wouldn't think rdiff-backup on Win32 is suitable for an OS backup. I'm backing-up a particular application's directories only, so I can get away with using it.

The built-in Windows Backup's image-based backups are reasonable (at least in Windows 7, 8.1, and Server 2008 R2 and 2012/2012 R2-- I haven't tried it with other Windows versions). You get a VHD file (VHDX in Server 2012) that can be mounted, as you say, in Virtualbox, etc. I suppose it would be bootable, but I'd never thought to try that.

"Previous Versions" is a user friendly interface to Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) that takes periodic snapshots of a volume and presents them in a GUI. Data for "Previous Versions" is stored in the volume that's subject to snapshot.

Windows Backup also uses VSS snapshots to maintain multiple versions of the backup. These snapshots are stored on the backup destination, however. I think you may be conflating the "Previous Versions" feature's use of VSS with Windows Backup's use of VSS.

To access the VSS snapshot versions of the VHD(X) file directly that Windows Backup creates it's necessary to expose the shadow copies (using a variety of different methods-- "diskshadow.exe", or "mklink.exe" being the two most common). You can also use the GUI restore interface to restore files from a previous snapshot of the VHD(X) file.
I never used an adblocker until recently when Youtube started showing those fucking World of Tanks ads and ads for similar games from the same fucking company.

Many of you don't understand how that could be a huge nuissance, because your systems are powerful enough to shrug it off, but for my old system, those fucking ads would freeze up the UI of the page.

Even with my new system, many of the ads offered enough of a slowdown to the experience of using many sites on top of sometimes causing the system to crash completely that an adblocker became necessary.
When one's Windows produces audio noise programmatically
As a non-moderator, can you please stfu article author with your political piece prefixing the article. If your reaction to being linked to from HN is to push your own political agenda, you are no better - and possibly worse - than the moderators. Using your 15 minutes of fame to edit your article with a preface containing a dozen links unrelated to the article you were linked to for is disgusting. It's not appreciated to click through to an article about calloc, only to find unwarranted political garbage that nobody cares about.

I flagged the article for this. How ironic that were enough people do this, it would be taken as "HN censorship" rather than "normal users saying they are displeased with the manipulative editing of the submitted link".

Quoted for history:

>> Welcome Hacker News readers! Before we dive into the neat memory management esoterica, I want to briefly note that as engineers we have an ethical obligation in our work to consider the "safety, health, and welfare of the public", because if we don't, terrible things happen. This is a challenging responsibility that requires we all stay thoughtful and informed – but that's difficult if popular technical news aggregators choose to censor links and discussions about the societal implications of technology. I sympathize with their moderation challenges, but this idea of creating a politics-free safe space is the cowards' way out, quite literally choosing the "absence of tension" over "the presence of justice". I hope the HN moderators find a way to step up to the responsibility their position entails; in the mean time, you might consider also subscribing to to The Recompiler and Model View Culture, and checking out Safety Pin Box, techsolidarity.org, or Fund Club. Anyway, thanks for listening! We now return to our regularly scheduled calloc-related programming, and I hope you enjoy my essay. And if you like this, you might also enjoy Cory Benfield's related post.
EURUSD: Retains Recovery Threats with Eyes on More Strength
Otherwise known as Ideological Purity Week, The Week of the Great Politics Purge, Cultural Reeducation Week and Peace Week. A week for the Districts to come together and pay tribute to the Capitol!
I wish someone would port Origin to Safari. :(
GP suggested otherwise. Either way the bit about ethics was the point I'd prefer to discuss
There's no reason the OS can't use huge pages for a calloc. In fact, "give me some zeroed memory" tends to be the only interface exposed by the kernel, since security requires zeroing memory before handing it out to userspace anyway.
Gilad Bracha – Utopia and Dystopia: Smalltalk and the Wider World
As a contractor, I'm OK with companies that want me to work 100 hour weeks. If I get a 3-month contract, that year I'm only working 3 months.
I have a permanent solution to the "politics problem": require all comments be cryptographically signed, and give users the tools to rate the signing keys.
Seems like this would be a nightmare with a lot of languages' build cycles. Dropbox is already quite a CPU hog, and I'd imagine it'd be a nightmare to run something like a typical Maven build that was producing all sorts of target output that'd I not want synced. Most cloud storage apps don't make it easy to ignore subfolders.
Note: instead of dynamodb for the lookup mentioned at the bottom, maybe consider https://aws.amazon.com/athena/ for an s3 query
Omg, yeah, autoplay is annoying in itself, but then add on top of that autoplay which runs on a loop, where even if you pause the video, the video begins playing again after a certain while.

I've even had some sites do this where during the autoplay the site would autoscroll back to the location of the video and then not let you scroll away from the video until it was done playing. You'd be somewhat interested in the article, so you say "Fine, I'll watch the whole fucking ad" and then go back to reading only to have your fucking reading inter-fucking-rupted 15 fucking seconds later. FUCK!!! Seriously, fuck these web developers who do this absolute bullshit.
Hi, comex! :)

I definitely understand electoral politics fatigue. We're all having that. But 'dang explicitly said the intended scope of the ban/"detox" is wider than that, over in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614

"The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet."

So apparently literally anything about race, gender, or class (which are really important issues both in terms of the tech industry and in terms of who technology is for) are considered off-limits for the week. (And at least one relevant story - about big tech companies releasing diversity reports - has already been killed under the policy.) That is one reason I am taking this as such a clear signal of the values of the mods, rather than simply a reaction to election stuff. I could be wrong, of course, but i wanted to try to let you see what i - and many others, i think? - are seeing that concerns us.
Four questions for .XYZ about getting approved in China
Interesting. Is there an adblocker that blocks or prevents the most annoying parts of ads - sounds, animations, taking over chunks of the screen?

Maybe one that limits cross-domain traffic, so requests for more than, say, a megabyte get nixed?
See: the Content Blocer system on iOS. The interface is a rules specification, and the implementation is delegated to the OS/hardware manufacturer to save power and performance.
Ask HN: How would you spend $100 a month for a year on professional development?
If you have a budget of $1,200 for a year, how would you spend it to get the most out of it?
You can try umatrix. It will block all media stuff under the other category if you configure it that way. You can then whitelist what you want.
New MacBook Pro with Touch Bar suffers from serious battery issues
If you were ever wondering why Google started AMP, this is it. 5k+ LOC of inlined Javascript, 2.6MB of data and a 13 second load time.
> ... since the way things normally work is erring on the side of not flagging them, it's hard for me to see this week as very significant. That's actually why we're doing it this way: a week should be enough to learn something and not enough to be that big a deal, even in the worst case.

I hope you take it in good faith that I'm not saying this in anger or in any way except a desire to make this community something worth continuing to participate in: you've made it, and publicly trumpeted that you've made it, more risky and more difficult for someone to be something other than a straight white male here. (That's not one from me; I am paraphrasing a friend who has pulled the ripcord. She expressed to me that the alt-right movement here would use telling you this herself as a way to hurt her either personally or professionally or both, because that's the world she has to live in because of how tech works.) You're tacitly accepting that this helps to silence those folks because their lives are inherently and inescapably "political" due to the deviance from the straight-white-dude status quo represented in tech. That's why I formed those questions as I did. They're not "gotcha" questions. They are hard questions in the gray areas of what you're saying, where you are--I believe not with malice, but you are--giving people who wish those elements of your community would go away forever can under your own policies (and I did use the word intentionally, because "experiment" is much more innocuous than I think this effectively becomes) silence them. Because when you aren't a straight white dude, your life is "political" by the standards of the tech world.

People look to this place for a kind of cultural leadership in tech. (Whether or not you want them to or whether they should!) You're taking a stand on the issues of the marginalized and the underrepresented whether you want to or not. I would ask that you consider whether it's the stand you actually want to be taking. 'Cause, I mean...silence means status quo wins.
I'm not even kidding, I was thinking about this EXACT application / functionality yesterday and was thinking about making it.
Deep learning for predicting bone age on pediatric x-rays
Disagree, not because it isn't a good idea right now, but :

a) we should not abandon the general rules, unless under the most exceptional circumstances [ ie. unless these posts threaten to kill the HN site or render it unusable in the main, we should not adopt a special rule ]

b) its un-needed, in the sense we can choose to self impose this by not upvoting overly political stories/comments

c) HN is already practicing too much self-censorship - we need to tolerate some extremes / ugly points of view, in order to keep a healthy community where free speech is highly valued and where any subject can be discussed

d) imo HN is equally susceptible to hostile takeover by ugly "trumpism"'s as it is by political-correctness / overly tolerant relativism. It is for each of us to upvote/downvote/comment in order to fight against memes that might enslave this community and its freedoms.
What Can You Learn About Building Your Startup from Westworld?
I dunno. Facebook shapes epistemic closures for its users. The question of whether transgendered folks have the right to exist is one that gets a "no" in some of those groups.

I don't think that should be political, I don't think it should be red-versus-blue. But it is. Should that be banned?
> I see estimates from 1/10 to 10X the dam failure.

What? Banqiao Dam killed 171,000 people. There's zero reputable evidence (or even reasonable speculation) for nuclear accidents killing 1.7 million. Even Greenpeace caps out at 200k, and UN/WHO come in in the dozens-to-thousands range.
If people have a hard time googling that info OR angular devs can't communicate that info well, then problem lies elsewhere.

Besides, the one reason, of using a different name is, to convey that it is a different framework just like others.
Ask HN: What cyber security topic would you research if you had more time?
I'm interested in spending some of my free time working on side projects collecting and analyzing data regarding the Internet as a whole, particularly related to security. This post is to help broaden my horizons to find interesting topics on which to collect data.

Specifically, I'm fascinated by P2P networks, bitcoin, and botnets, and I wouldn't be opposed to starting out by mining existing public data sets (e.g. blockchain, crawling DHTs[0])

[0] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf
Well, yeah of course.
This is second hand info from 16 years ago, but my understanding is you can compile and link win32 source code against the wine headers/libraries to generate a "native" win32 application. I believe CorelDraw Office or WordPerfect Office or something like that did it for their linux "port".

You might still need to deal with gcc/msvc compatibility issues and the end product would only be slightly more native than running it via wine.
Appearance Does Matter but you have other tools
I agree, totally. The echo chambers are killing humanity, one small bubble at a time.
Do you see an issue with this?
That's one point of view. Another is that the people who speak the loudest about political issues have the most support and political power.
I'm laughing at how pedant this group is. Viewed under a microscope, sliced and diced a thousand ways and all possible repercussions and views are debated. It's just a week! We'll survive :)
For all that, it loads really fast and looks nice.
Here's some amazing relevant research with so many consequences that I keep coming back to:

Partial sleep in the context of augmentation of brain function

Abstract:

Inability to solve complex problems or errors in decision making is often attributed to poor brain processing, and raises the issue of brain augmentation. Investigation of neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex in the sleep-wake cycle offers insights into the mechanisms underlying the reduction in mental abilities for complex problem solving. Some cortical areas may transit into a sleep state while an organism is still awake. Such local sleep would reduce behavioral ability in the tasks for which the sleeping areas are crucial. The studies of this phenomenon have indicated that local sleep develops in high order cortical areas. This is why complex problem solving is mostly affected by local sleep, and prevention of local sleep might be a potential way of augmentation of brain function. For this approach to brain augmentation not to entail negative consequences for the organism, it is necessary to understand the functional role of sleep. Our studies have given an unexpected answer to this question. It was shown that cortical areas that process signals from extero- and proprioreceptors during wakefulness, switch to the processing of interoceptive information during sleep. It became clear that during sleep all “computational power” of the brain is directed to the restoration of the vital functions of internal organs. These results explain the logic behind the initiation of total and local sleep. Indeed, a mismatch between the current parameters of any visceral system and the genetically determined normal range would provide the feeling of tiredness, or sleep pressure. If an environmental situation allows falling asleep, the organism would transit to a normal total sleep in all cortical areas. However, if it is impossible to go to sleep immediately, partial sleep may develop in some cortical areas in the still behaviorally awake organism. This local sleep may reduce both the “intellectual power” and the restorative function of sleep for visceral organs.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4013465/

Fascinating stuff, imo. I've definitely felt the difference between partial sleep restedness and total sleep restedness, and the idea of sleep pressure seems to line up with my experience and with my idea of explorable, falsifiable models of phenomena. The idea that we dream while processing internal organ information is beautiful to me on multiple levels- maybe memory consolidation has a whole lot to do with pre-existing organ health! Maybe instead of the idea that we dream with only our heads, we dream with all of our organs- just imagine how differently Jung would interpret Pauli's dreams if he knew about this!
Thats not what he said. He was describing why you aim to drain reservoirs in concert with precipitation, to maximize ground water absorption by prolonging the drainage at a low rate.
Not much text is visible, but here is the picture I took there a few months ago: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/31080357160/

It is a vector display.
I'm going to steal something I saw in my social media feed a while ago: "I'd like people to move away from the notion that people need to be doing boring, tedious things in exchange for money".

And I can guarantee that there are zero businesses designed to create jobs. Businesses are designed to create value, jobs are a byproduct.

There are going to be fewer and fewer jobs in the future, and the sooner societies adjusts, the better. Keeping people in unsustainable jobs will only slow this transformation.

I'm biased, by the way, because I'm from a post-communist country - we've had the "jobs for everyone" thing, and it wasn't working very well.
It was probably walled in during a remodel and forgotten about....
Twitter suspends TempleOS
If this is true, it's terrible for the new Macbook Pro. One of the biggest advantage of Macbook series is the battery life and it surely will upset many users and potential buyers.
iPhone 7 – Romeo and Juliet
The problem with many political topics is that we already know the conversation and the outcome.

1. Present a new data analysis tool used by police

2. Comment about disproportionately affect minorities

3. Response with FBI data explaining it's because certain minorities commit more crime

4. (devolves into flame fest)

...
n. Complains marginalized people might not read the site

n+1. That's their personal choice

n+m. (more flame fest)

And hence why suggesting the content here stay technical instead of political is the best of several non-perfect choices.
Gorilla/mux: A powerful URL router and dispatcher for golang