skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand the sentiment here, but it sounds a little...wishful.

Our political climate is affecting all of us in many ways, and we need to process what's happening. We need to do that carefully and constructively. I want to know the subtle political aspects of many of the stories I read on HN.

That said, I'll play along for the week. I hope what comes out of this is a push to encourage critical thinking about the political aspects of important stories, not to push political conversation off of HN entirely.
Is there a way to quickly/easily migrate EC2 instances to LightSail??
Why are they allowed, period?

Is the community OK with turning HN into Reddit-lite - because that's clearly what's happening based on the topics that get upvoted.
>>> assumes that an industry has been identified already.

This is one of the key take aways from customer discovery - is your customer actively looking for a solution to the pain / problem you've identified. If your customer is actively looking for a solution than it is easy(ier) to identify and talk with them. If no one is looking for a solution then it may be that you haven't identified a real pain, you haven't identified the correct customer, or you are to early.

It's easy to say that you can't talk to customers because the industry hasn't been identified, but that is a bad statement and should be avoided.
Do you have real data showing that there has been an uptick in those two things (however you've defined them), or is it possible that the apparent uptick is caused by something else, like confirmation bias or your own weariness of recent political discussion/events?
That's true. The details of how the system will work have yet to be nailed down. And, in the short term, things are going to suck HARD. It's basically going to be us riding the edge of societal breakdown. People are going to lose their jobs without a safety net that protects them. There will be a lot of people out of work, the income gap will increase, and government programs are going to be stressed to the point of breaking. But, perhaps this is the idealist in me, I believe that we will figure it out before our economy, country, and society collapse.
I think this comment fails to recognize that nearly everything any of us do results in less human labor. It might be obvious in the case of supermarket checkouts but I've personally eliminated more than a few office jobs.

I think there are plenty of ways humans can improve the world that doesn't involve jobs but it's going to be a rough transition. Where there might be fewer cashiers, I hope there will eventually be more educators, scientists, artists, and caretakers.
I think it might be purely rfid based.
All major rfid vendors have theft prevention devices which can detect in real-time products crossing a given line.

Decathlon, the world largest sport goods retailer already use that technology.

They still have checkout lines but technically speaking they would be able to charge you when you leave the store.

Last time I spoke with them they were using Embisphere hardware, but any vendor, Checkpoint for instance, could be used to similar effects.

If all products are rfid tagged (which is entirely possible given the current price of metallic ink) then this store is at most state of the art.

If they actually use vision techniques then it is actually quite a feat. Current vision techniques used in retail are either too crude (when based on the store cctv cameras) or too costly (another French company, IVS, has demonstrated a self service buffet style automated checkout but AFAIK it is still prototype).

Disclaimer: I have links with investors in both Embisphere and IVS.
Self-checkout registers in Finland have about 1 employee per 6 machines. They work pretty well, I haven't had any issues after the first few months they were launched.
On climate change and how to speak with deniers
Are you trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist except for the most hardcore HN users?

Because I haven't lately noticed much of the phenomenon you're talking about. And in the first 3 pages I just skimmed over, I didn't see anything that was so political as to be flamewar fodder.

Are you sure you're not trying to solve a problem that your average user doesn't even have?
Well, yeah. Does anyone need an appraiser to tell them how much the house is worth? Don't you look at what is available and negotiate the price accordingly?
Different scales! One has third-world law enforcement issues, the other has first-world law enforcement issues.

Exactly what is the difference? Is it what you refer to below?

At any rate, the US doesn't put out so many laws (at least at the federal level) that it knows it can't enforce because enforcement would destroy the economy, while China has no problem doing that.

Funny, but the rhetoric from the political right in the US would have one believe this is happening. (There is undoubtedly some self interested bias at work there.) I did have some experience with export regulations when ordering a piece of industrial equipment from Guangdong province in China. (A knock off of a J-Cut laser cutter.) The Chinese company was surprisingly diligent in their technical support. However, they cheerfully agreed summarily then ignored my requests for the proper paperwork. The expediter I worked with on the US end explained that the US regulations that came up in response to 9-11 were basically unenforceable, so everyone exporting from China just ignored them.

Heck, China has an entire "constitution" that guarantees many rights unequivocally (freedom of speech, assembly, all the good stuff), which is then unilaterally ignored. Say what you want about the US, but the supreme court isn't that horrible or ineffective (yet).

The supreme court might work, but the US isn't perfect either. The US doesn't have "innocent until proven guity" enshrined directly in the constitution, though it's taken as being implied by other parts of the law. However, local governments do abrogate this principle on statistical grounds.

Yep. It is never black and white, just a very dark gray vs. a much lighter shade of gray.

I suspect the 5 downvotes were from people with rather black and white viewpoints.
>A lot of people believe, "everything happens for a reason," but people with practical experience don't need to believe that because they know everything happens for a reason: it's called "the cause."

Yes. It's all in the formulation. It's not for a reason, but because of a reason.

Using "for" is misleading and puts the horse before the cart: If you went to a café and met the love of your life, it's not "you went to that café for you to meet the love of your life", it's more "you met the love of your life because you went to that café".

I don't exclude the existence of things beyond the limits of my knowledge, though.
I think its a sad day that we can't attempt to be intellectually curious just because its politically related. This last election has prompted me to start reading more on both sides and has lead me to some other readings such as the constitution, economic theory, history, etc.

It is possible to talk about these topics from an academic perspective and it feels like banning it for a week is equivalent to putting your head in the sand and ignoring it because its too hard to have a conversation about it. This is exactly the behavior I was motivated to try and change in myself (stick to tech only, ignore other issues).

Yes, its very difficult to talk about some politics in thoughtful ways but I would hope a community like HN has the people needed to try and address some of the issues coming up. Be it technical (detecting fake news, biases, etc) or intellectual commentary.
I'm worried about how this will effect civictech, edtech, govtech story coverage which has been great in recent years on HN and are important for helping the community to be informed of how it's contributing and how individuals can contribute to addressing societal issues.
Can you please give specific examples of what "politics" entails, aside from the obvious (so we know where to draw the line)?

For example, as of writing, the #3 post is "	Silicon Valley’s Culture, Not Its Companies, Dominates in China (nytimes.com)". I would classify this as political, but others might not.

--EDIT-- I would also classify this front page post as (internally) political: "Dear JavaScript (medium.com)"
Is Trello the only company out there exercising such a program?
Poor little guy whom took a responsibility that was above is abilities.
Right, it's not possible to define "politics" precisely, and it would be a mistake to try. But there's nothing new in that; the HN guidelines have always mentioned politics without defining the term, and we get by.

We can clarify, though. 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. We're not so concerned about stories on other things that happen to have political aspects—like, say, software patents.
Those stories aren't going to be evicted from HN or anything like that. For this week, though, let's err on the side of flagging because it will make the experiment more interesting.
BigGraphite: scale graphite horizontally with Cassandra
Very fair points you bring up, particularly the examples. I share your optimism however
Is this some special narrow definition of "political", or is the expectation really that everything touching in any way upon government or public affairs of any country will be deemed off-topic and killed?

Because a very large share of HN stories and comments have political content in the dictionary definition (it's hard to address the societal impact of anything even in a descriptive way, much less to discuss views of the merits of such impacts, without such content.)
Who decides what's "political"? Are discussions of regulations surrounding Uber political? The ongoing Tesla/dealership feuds? Using machine learning to detect fake news? New immigration policy that impacts H1B tech workers? The impact of Brexit on tech companies? Restrictions on cryptography?

I'm split on this: On one hand, firm moderation and keeping things on-topic makes for a good forum for discussion. On the other, this could easily be used by YC as a tool to say, silence criticism of YC for not disavowing Peter Thiel. Either way, there need to be clearer guidelines around what's allowed and what's not.
I was only half joking. I do have the machine and about 20-30 tapes including Microsoft Basic, most of the old Interaction newsletters, and some misc. Oh, and my machine has an extra ROM that was created by a W. Hendrickson IIRC. I've been thinking of finding a good home for it for quite some time. You can use my HN ID at gmail to take this offline.
Things I've done to completely get rid of wrist pain:

- use a Kinesis Advantage keyboard: works, but it's like, the wrist is still weak, and you can't use laptops (or mice?).

- use a piano keyboard: play the piano regularly, and vigorously. This makes my problems go away _completely_. And then I stop playing, and... a few years later, I get the problem again. So I start playing regularly again, and the problem's gone again. By vigorously I mean playing etudes that push the limits of your muscular endurance. Somebody mentioned physical therapy, and I think this is an example of that.

Note that one symptom of my problems was a loss of grip strength.

I think that even for non-ergonomic keyboards, the choice of keyboard matters a lot -- some keyboards require less hand strain to reliably actuate the keys -- less precise movements. For example, the last two Vaio Z models were horrible, compared to, say, Thinkpads. And some cheapo office keyboard is worse than something with a clear actuation point (such as Cherry MX or Topre or a buckling spring keyboard). Basically, I think whatever key switch is easiest to use in cold weather is better than the others.
Interesting, I have noticed the change in discussion but a ban seems a swing too far in the other direction, but it also no go unfettered. I guess we'll see how it goes. I'd like to see what gets defined as being 'political'. To play devils advocate there are several YC backed companies that lobby and contribute to politicians.
is it a nuclear waste dumping ground? What's the mitigating factor?
What metrics are you planning on using to measure the results of this experiment?

I'm all for it, yay experiments!
This is a site for computer science and entrepreneurship, right? Over the past few months I've seen a lot of posts unrelated to those two topics and it seems like Reddit is very much bleeding into here, not just politics.

My opinion is that this place is great for two reasons: It's narrow focus on one topic, and a userbase that consists of experts in that one topic. When Hacker News strays from it's area of expertise I feel that Gell-Mann Amnesia is apparent and the quality of discussion much lower. Again not just for the politics but for other random news as well.
sbt uses Ivy, and pretty obviously too. It did recently switch to Maven Aether instead of Ivy for Maven repos.

IMO, Ivy is one of the worst parts of sbt. Take a build system with great ideas, like immutable state and parallel by default, and insert a complex single-threaded dependency resolution library.
It would be great if dang could clarify a bit; for example, what about news about legal developments (that most likely comes with a normative slant, like welcoming or regretting something that courts have done), leaks about government institutions, or opinion pieces about social issues that don't directly associate them with politicians or legislation?

A challenge that's come up around lots of controversies is the way that one side might think something is "political", while another side thinks it's not!
I think this is exactly how we got into this situation in the first place. Politics absolutely has a lot of effect on the other things that we talk about here. Trying to eliminate all talk of politics will see a huge void in the data needed to make intelligent decisions, IMO.

You've pointed out some good examples above, and while you can talk about those things without any politics, it's a very shallow-feeling conversation, IMO.

Still, it'll be interesting to see how this week goes.
We have pretty good static analysis tools now which warn the user of common mistakes at the code construction level. But at the architecture and design levels I don't think there is much that tools can do short of AGI.
Same here. I was working with gorilla/mux 2 min ago with some "legacy" code and saw this. Thought to myself "huh it might be some good new changes with gorilla/mux"
> Click the Like button on a Page that challenges your beliefs, interact with that information and you'll see more of it.

Yeah ... not gonna happen. I already use private browsing windows to read anything even remotely controversial. Not going to start building a publicly visible history of 'liking' things that could be seen negatively. Call me paranoid, but I can see that happening some day in a job interview or something similar. I love my freedom, and that includes being able to read whatever I want without being accused of wrongthink at some point in the future. Facebook isn't getting any data from me on that front.
You transformed a factual "The same sorts of things happen. (severity unspecified)" to "It's just as bad in the US as China!" Congrats on reading things into someone else's text and displaying your biases.
The solution to imperfect binary true/false decisions is to stop making binary decisions, and instead provide a probability and confidence interval (dressed in non-mathematician-friendly UI), with several references to verifications or refutations.
This is a great idea. I assumed that political discussion would die down a bit after the election, but it only seems to have escalated. Detox is the right word for what is needed.
Usually a buyer has already agreed to buy a house at a certain price. So if the appraisal comes back low, the seller doesn't lower the price. Instead the buyer just doesn't get a loan so they don't get to purchase the house they had their heart set on.
How does Amazon Go handle alcohol sales?
Confronting the Parasite Economy
>- libertarians have a strong sense of self and the self's prerogatives, and a correspondingly lower sense of attachment to others. They exhibit a high degree individualism, a low degree collectivism, and generally report feeling less bonding with others, less loving for others, and less feelings of a sense of common identity with others.

Politics completely aside, that sounds like a lonely, painful way to go through life. Shouldn't people with these inclinations find out ways to improve their relationships with others? I've never heard a libertarian self-identify as a misanthrope before, so I would think they want relationships with others.
Dear lord yes.

I've been off Facebook for most of the year, and have noticed how many people have dropped Facebook like a rock after the election.

I have to wonder if their stats are going to suffer as a result.
> Ok, have at this in the thread and if you have concerns we'll try to allay them.

Want to share your specific concerns?
The Power of Influence Marketing
I'd be interested to hear the pros/cons of API.ai vs LUIS
Ask HN: What is your best passive income?
I think the privacy implications for a shopper at Amazon Go are the same as a shopper who shops at Tesco with a credit card. The company can use your credit card to track exactly what you buy already and many people seem to be happy with that (even going so far as to sign up for loyalty cards).
I'm not really a fan of this move. I don't see it as an addiction that reduces its power over us by abstaining for a period of time. I also don't agree with applying system effects to individuals - while political discussion can appear to create a dulling or muting effect overall it doesn't mean that individual people aren't being positively influenced, in ways that might have even larger positive effects on the system over time. Similarly, preventing short term conflict might have negative longer term system effects over time.

The detox/immune-system metaphor seems really suspect in other words. You could just as easily argue that there is a "virus" (the changing political realities, new realities dawning on us), and that ignoring the "virus" or "symptoms" will make the adjustment that much more traumatic, the later we accept that it's happening. Or to switch the connotation, perhaps instead of a "virus", look at it as a "disruptive innovation" - where if we act as an entrenched incumbent, we will be disrupted as our competitors rewrite the rules, and we will be too far behind to pivot successfully.

Letting the community process the new inputs vigorously might seem more traumatic in the short term but it could also make us stronger overall.

This just seems counter to the principles that I appreciate at HN.
Also, any kind of workload that involves a sync for durability and correctness.

In enterprise drives the drive can return quickly even if it's in the buffer because there's enough charge in the capacitor to whiteout to NAND from RAM in the event of power failure (hard reboot or power loss).

The consumer drive absent the capacitor either has poor fsync performance or lies about syncs.

There are people who run consumer drives in data centers due to the low GB/$ cost of them or they have applications that are not sensitive for data loss or were engineered to deal with it (replication, journaling, etc..). You won't want to run your important database on such a drive.
This isn't to say people shouldn't ideally be nice to each other whenever possible. I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet. Whatever it is you put out there will potentially be seen by up to 6 billion people. So "every day" you log in and see "yet another" negative comment? Grow up! There's no nice way to say that.

There's going to be negative comments on the internet please please stop complaining about it. I've been hearing people complain about negative comments on the internet for years it is not going to stop. Find another way of dealing with it.
I develop Open-Source software for CNC simulation.

https://blog.buildbotics.com
> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage

That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently.

Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings. (All black people, your sister and the prostitutes, etc...)

> how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Well, I don't claim that but I think I could, because I see them grasping at straws and forwarding the same tired stories around as if they prove anything. With no effort to dig into the facts behind the case and its selection as news.

Exactly the same as the anti-racist knee-jerk I see which posts the same set of "Immigrants don't rape" refutation articles with the same lack of critical inspection.

> Given this level of suppressed information,

That is a problem. When our government lies to us it throws all semblance of civilian oversight right out the window and instantly becomes a dictatorship.
3+Tips+on+The+Fast+Way+to+Lose+Weight+|+Life+Weight
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.
Breakage on macOS, iOS, Android, is pretty rare. It's a bit more common on Windows but I'd still say it's rarish. On Linux distros it's just a matter of time before something breaks during an update, and rollback is not easy at all.
Notepad++ is pretty great for Windows.

On the Mac, BBEdit (paid) and TextWrangler (free, more or less a light version of BBEdit) are both fantastic. Some people like TextMate too.
This is amazing, I had set up a jupyter hub using some docker hacks to allow my students to access their own personal instance(running inside a new container) using github login. This might be a good low-cost alternative. Thanks Azure!
This is a most unfortunate framing. Politics is not toxic. It is the means by which our society discusses and makes big decisions. Perhaps s/Detox/Vacation/ could have worked?

Certain types of political discussion most certainly can be toxic. I'd support any effort to keep HN free of that. I'd also respect a choice to keep HN completely free of politics if you chose to go in that direction, though I'd rather see a more positive attempt to get the HN community more engaged with the serious political issues of our time.
How broadly are we defining "politics" here? Some topics I see here frequently...are these flaggable for the week?

Uber Contractor vs Employee, AirBnb vs Zoning Laws, Universal Basic Income, Privacy Issues