skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I see the point, and I can agree with the points made that HN shouldn't be a "battlefield" for person opinion, I cannot accept that we will concede politics to be a topic to be too difficult for discussion, difficult conversations are the most important ones to have.

In the view you've put forward, you say that politics is the problem, a topic that when discussed causes fights and it can damage the culture of HN. I disagree. If we don't know how to talk about politics with strangers, we stop trying to persuade each other, and we bottle up our disagreement, and we go online and yell at someone else, or we vote for the candidate who screams our view... because we don't know how else to express it, to find the nuance in it, and ask ourselves hard questions. We'd rather have an opinion than not stand for something. All of the flaming is a way of expressing it...

We can suppress the conversations on HN to focus only on specific science or technology, but on a technology website in this age, and right now that seems like we'd be the website equivalent of a child covering their ears when they don't want to hear something. Blockchain tech, cryto, AI, mesh networking, job loss from automation, cyberwar, Quantum C. Seems incorrect to suggest that technology and politics can be separated easily (especially at a big picture).

Of course this is the internet, people come here to troll and fight. But we as individuals can always walk away. We can douse the flames by not engaging in it ourselves. We can always handle a conversation with care, it's not the topic that is emotional, it's us. It isn't up to the community to stop people from talking about touchy subjects, so that we all get along, it's up to us to learn how to talk about these things better. On the net, just like in the world.

The experiment shouldn't be to stop political discourse, but encourage it. See where we go, go forth and be critical thinkers and talk about the hardest topics facing human civ right now. Lets see what happens. Maybe that is naive, but we gotta start somewhere. Discouraging the conversation isn't a start, its an end.
All of them with sources as credible as Bill Gates?
I realized this (well, "realized"... I knew it, but it became very creepy) the other day, when my phone popped up a notification while I was in a restaurant, saying "enjoying <restaurant name>? Why not take some photos for people to see?" or something like that.

I've lately been getting into the habit of turning location services off unless I actually need them on, and I would recommend it. It's a shame my phone gets my location behind my back without any indication by default.
Every new hire takes training.
I love that functional programming matters in the real world whereas immigration doesn't.

Never change, HN.

EDIT: bring back erlang day!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/in/photostr...
I haven't been using their 'Public Cloud' VMs very long so don't really have a strong opinion, so far it's seemed about as quick or sometimes quicker than DO. Too soon to speak for reliability. In the past, I've used their bare metal hosting which is very inexpensive (ranging from $90/mo - $1000 for 32G - 512GB), but you have to know what you're getting. Check the h/w they give you and if you find any issues with it, they'll replace it, but only if you notice and request it. The servers I've used were in Montreal. Thought I'd heard that they were planning on a datacentre in US East.
I have a really hard time billing more than about 30/week without feeling like i'm being taken advantage of in those situations. There are all kinds of non-billable activities that you do as an agency developer that need to be accounted for; hitting 40 billable hours means I did 50+ actual hours, minimum; oftentimes more.

I went out on my own again after a couple of W2 jobs and this time resolved to calibrate everything on the assumption of working 20 hours a week, including my rate. End result: I'm not overworked (not on my client work, anyway), I don't feel stressed about making my quota, and I have more money coming in than I ever did as an agency dev. I will probably take another W2 job at some point but after burning myself out several times on my own startup, compared to how I feel about my client work (nice and rosy feeling) I feel pretty confident that I won't let myself get pushed into it from an employer again.
It looks like it just caches the last known location which is pretty useless.
there are myriad other reasons files won't delete on Windows that are super annoying ("system file"? Etc)
The Lightness of Errol Flynn: In praise of the irresistible swashbuckler
I agree that on the face of it down voting for disagreement is frustrating, though I have a hard time squaring that with the understandable desire to up-vote for agreement. I think most people know when they're making a potentially contentious comment, and in that case (just like in real life), should take far more effort in crafting their comment to be incredibly fair and charitable (while acknowledging disagreement) to those who might disagree. For one it makes it much more likely for those who don't agree to read the comment charitably themselves, it's more likely to lead to constructive discussion and have the benefit of being more immune to down votes purely on disagreement.

Edit: Looks like the two of us have discussed this before :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12974834

And both times I've appreciated the civil discussion. Thanks for that!
How does it know your location when your phone is offline?
Ask HN: Anyone here started and grown an e-commerce site? How?What all did you do?
What you may not be taking into account, though, is that for some of us, "we're not going to allow 'politics' for a week" is being read in context with the years of previous moderation decisions and community signaling about who and what it cares about. And in that light, "we're not going to allow 'politics' for a week" is pretty obviously a decision that upholds the really toxic status quo of HN. (And that's leaving aside the fact that everything is political, because 'politics' includes - among other things - our fundamental assumptions about how the world works, and that's not something people leave behind when they're talking about technology or anything else.)
It doesn't, but it knows where it last saw you.
Oh wow. Hadn't not seen ANYTHING like that. A couple of threads right after the election, but that thread is just totally inappropriate for HN imo.

Thanks for the policy, although I honestly just thought this had always been the policy anyway.
Are you asking whether we would use such a system, or whether we know of one?

If it's the latter, I don't know of one, but it's certainly not impossible.

If it's the former...I've toyed with gamifying my todo lists, but found some drawbacks to the idea:

- It adds more time to an already demanding and tedious task

- It's hard to objectively award rewards to yourself

- Since there is no real 'competition', the points system becomes a bit meaningless when it operates in a vacuum

Generally, I find that completing a task (any task) and not having to worry about it anymore, is reward enough ;-)
There's code for it in Darwin's libmalloc, but it's not exposed as API.

reallocarray() has some difficulties as an interface, mostly inherited from realloc(). I'm a bigger fan of reallocarr(), but that's NetBSD only. We (the operating systems community) need to find a consensus here, but I'm not convinced that reallocarray() is that consensus yet.
I'm rather unsure why you would want to use TLC configured as 60% spare. Wouldn't the same amount of flash at two bits per cell be much faster and longer lasting?
For me, the more relevant political theorist when it comes to HN's governance is Plato.
I don't disagree with this, however, what is the best way to reach out to these decision makers? Is there a good template or a good way?
This might very well backfire on them. The buyers will want to buy at the lower price and the seller would want the higher price. Both parties end up being unhappy even if the end price was within the given band.
For things I'd like to have out in the open I use github.

For things I'd rather keep private I use bitbucket, who have free private repos.
Show HN: Bing Autosuggest in commandline
Pandas with the Rodeo ide is pretty much R.

R's advantage is singular and simple - its not that the language is better,.. but rather that it has existed in its niche for much longer, so it has a much larger set if libraries that exist in the stats space.

in other words, CRAN.
Like, i really do feel unwelcome here. And this "experiment" makes me feel more unwelcome - not because it's an experiment, i'm all in favor of those, but because i really don't think it is one. I think it's a pretty clear signal about what the moderators value, and how they think.
Step #1, observe generation migration from disk to flash, especially in the under $100 where minimum disk prices give a huge advantage to flash
Step #2 invest in production facilities that take 2 years to build
Step #3 watch the price/bit curve carefully to optimize your return on investment
Step #4 Have note7 ship by a million (with 32-128GB each)
Step #5 recall them all and throw them away
Step #6 recall the replacements
Step #7 have apple (finally) double the size (16-32GB) of the minimum size iphone 7
Step #8 have 1TB SSDs finally hit price points that enthusiasts and professionals would consider

So basically those investing 2 years ago... invested wisely. After all it's not like demand driving prices higher is bad for those who produce flash.
I mention it because the core storage technology is quite clearly phase change memory, it's the interconnect that is unique (especially the intergrated ovonic threshold switch). But for the longest time, Intel/Micron have not wanted to associated the technology with previous PCM technologies even going so far as to deny it is PCM in the initial release press conferences.
They should just say that! The marketing is deceptive:

> This new personal safety app lets you share your location with loved ones in everyday situations and when emergencies arise — even if your phone is offline or you can’t get to it.
The most sensible approach. Anyone can jump back and forth between the two without much problem since a lot of the syntax is so similar. It is better to have more tools in your arsenal than less.
I tried this out back in the day and still remember how painful it was listening to the floppy churn for 5 or 10 seconds every time I fired the joystick at a screen element and thinking I could have typed a 2- or 3-letter command and already be looking at my results. Nice POC, but very impractical.
Show HN: A store locator widget that instantly shows nearest stockists
Hmm, I suppose the paragraph before the one you quoted was the more problematic one. I apologize for downvoting, I should have been more careful.

Although it may have helped if you would have made it clear you didn't agree with the paragraph prior to the one you quoted.

Regarding Javascript itself, yeah it has some warts. But modern Javascript (ES6) is actually not too bad. IMO, it really isn't that much worse than Python or Ruby (which I've used a good amount).
I don't know much about this, but doesn't the second sentence on that wiki page say they are aiming for 580 MW at peak once the plant is done?
None of your three reasons are remotely related to truth or accuracy. That's my point - the racist blog choosing to focus on blacks killing whites is not publishing fake news. They're just journalists with a different criteria for importance than you prefer.

And again - I don't disagree with your criteria (1). Remember that a few years ago, the only people talking about the issue were Radly Balko and a few of his libertarian readers (e.g. me). But that doesn't mean that every journalist who had different priorities was publishing fake news.

...the police mistreat blacks disproportionally...

This is unclear. Again, read the Scott Alexander blog post I linked to which goes into the gory details.
I don't get much into the consumer side of things, so I haven't dealt with most of the brands mentioned in the article, but I have deployed 500+ Ubiquiti access points, some in a network with 5,000+ users, with mostly great results (just watch those bad firmware builds!).

As a rule of thumb, any time I see "mesh" I run far far away as it usually refers to a bunch of single-radio half-duplex access points and some sort of super "self-healing" magic. One second you get great speed, the next you have horrible speed. But most of the routers mentioned in the article are dual radio with a dedicated "backhaul" thus probably work much better than the mesh networks of the past.

On 24ghz I do have an 18km link running at 250mb/s FDX on a standard set of AF24, but the slightest atmopheric disturbance takes it out. Even my 3km link will drop in a heavy storm. I haven't even bothered with 60/80. I doubt they would make it across the street!
> In Canada, where I'm from, many of the US political topics would never come up; many European countries might feel even more strongly. As a Canadian, I find American political musings and arguments even less relevant and noisy.

From a British perspective, I find most of the political discussion on HN to be useful, although perhaps I just instinctively avoid some topics. There are a lot of global issues which are being discussed, whether that's climate change, transport, tech and data regulation, job automation, money in politics, licensing and intellectual property, electronic surveillance, global trade, etc.

These are all issues which are relevant to the technology community, as big social issues which are targets for innovation, as moral issues which we have to grapple with, or as concrete barriers which directly impinge on us. I'd say having a space for the technology community to discuss these things is a source of a fair amount of the value of this discussion board.

Having said that, political discussion does have to be subsidiary to technology discussion. Once political discussion gets over a certain level, you're just appealing to a general audience and the forum loses its distinctiveness.

So I sympathize with the moderators. You always have to draw a line in the sand, unfortunately attempting a total ban is going to be just as subjective as what goes on at the moment, which is moderators removing or flagging thread-by-thread (presumably to avoid general topics dominating, or to kill off those particular comment threads which have become toxic). I suggest they just keep on muddling through, and we just acknowledge the process is necessary but messy, and cut them some slack.
Basically, after reading this article, use uBlock instead of AdBlock. It works.
Hum. Didn't read the usernames.

Too much theory and not enough actionable advice.

You know what. I'm just gonna talk candidates 30 minutes about them, us, me, the company (just talk, not any sort of test). Then I'll ask it to write a program to print number from 1 to 10 (that will be the test). And finally flip a coin before I take a decision (that's the randomness).

I'm pretty sure it follows none of the good practises or advise out there. Yet I'm confident that this is a process that has a low risk of accepting bad hires and a low risk of filtering good hires. =)
sort of reminds me of this post from a few years back: http://aaronboodman-com-v1.blogspot.ca/2010/10/wherein-i-hel...
In Paul Allen's (auto?)biography he mentions that it was a group of mothers from the school that paid for the computer (or maybe the teletype terminal). I might be getting details mixed up, it's been a while since I've read his book.
as you seem to believe.

I didn't say that. I said they would be fired if they were rude. It's a selection process that favours nice people, it does not make people nice (whatever that means).
Just put them all on the same list and use negative points for the rewards. A spreadsheet would work perfectly.
Our Eight-Second Attention Span: The Future of News Media
I pay with a contactless card when I do my shopping, so the money transaction takes about a second. It's still too slow, because you have to put your stuff in the bag/backpack etc. (admittedly, this is the shop's fault - they don't have the separator so people can load stuff while the next person is being ringed up).

But in most countries, it's not that the shops can't make it faster, it's that they don't want to. They make the biggest margins on the impulse buy merchandise along the queue and people won't stop going there just because they have to wait 3 minutes.

>And of course, customers can prepare exact change or get their cards out and place it on the tray while the cashier is still ringing them up.

Good luck putting your card on the tray in poorer countries :D :D, good way to get it stolen.

>And, by the way, the money that would be sunk into Amazon's infrastructure and inevitable support services goes to keeping people in jobs.

Keeping people in jobs is of dubious value, especially since Amazon's infrastructure would create jobs too, it's not just money disappearing and things materializing out of thin air.
That… seems like probably a mistake, partly because of existing programs and also because it's not too clear what the correct behavior is there. Yes it's annoying, but I think it's also probably the least surprising behavior.
Built a store locator widget that can sit in the corner of a website (targeted towards businesses that sell their products in stores or have to do with multiple locations). Instantly shows visitors how close the nearest stockist is and lets them explore other nearby stockists. Made the locator responsive so that it looks and works awesome on mobile devices. Would love to get feedback :)
Siraj, Ima go ahead and say that your videos have a bit of cognitive friction.

You and your personality are fine, but the jump between the intro and the payoff is jarring.

You need to hold our hand a little more ... jus' sayin'.
Just curious - how much of the web are you actually able to browse? It seems the majority of sites I run into have some sort of dynamic interactivity done via JS.
Yes, we're starting with the transcription task. CNNs for local prediction are interesting, and we're also curious about capturing the temporal structure of music with something recurrent. It seems like a time series model that understands something about western music should help with music transcription just like language models help with speech transcription.

The style transfer stuff comes later and as you observe, we'll probably need some new ideas to make that work well. I haven't thought about this deeply yet, but my intuition is that maybe instrumental timbre is an audio analog of visual texture, so maybe a reasonably direct "port" of style-transfer to the audio domain would let us construct demos that, for example, rewrite a cello recording to sound like trombone.

Let us know when your dataset is complete! I love jazz.
And it's already the case on HN that political discussions are quickly flagged into oblivion, so I'm not sure how this current week will be any different.

I was pretty let down that HN did not do more to protect political discussions during the US election cycle and I really didn't see all that much vitriolic behavior in the first place. Even if there is bad behavior though, is that something that we need to be protected from at all times? Maybe it is better to let it happen, point it out when we see it, and then hopefully learn to discuss more civilly as a community in the future.
Hm, not exactly. This is the same model as JInterface, which is built and maintained by Ericcson and has been around for quite a while and targets the JVM. This is nicer than using ports as datatypes "just work". The whole runtime (Ruby or JVM) just appears as an erlang process, which you can send/receive messages to/from.

We use JInterface at work to leverage a bunch of stuff on the JVM that we already built. Integrating it with our Elixir project took less than a day and to be frank there's significantly less fucking around than there would have been had we deployed the JVM functionality as a microservice, and locality is preserved, which is nice.

JInterace (and i'm assuming Erlix because it's the same model) has been a really nice, low friction way to re-use a bunch of code that already works.
It's not a reward, I always let him watch buses on the iPad after the bath while I dry him off. He likes it and I don't see any problem with it. Just meant to give an example of a way that changing the framing works with a two year old (/anybody)
I browse on mobile with JS disabled and most news sites still work.
You're lucky. A more creepy way of getting enlightened is having Google Now tell you, "I see you're at work, and it's about your usual time to head home. Traffic is heavy on the usual route, though, so it might take 15 minutes longer than normal."

(This all without you ever telling which location is your work and which is home.)
8:30 AM - Rush into work to get on a screen-share with some customer that is based out of India or Saudi Arabia or Australia, trying to chase the time difference.

8:40 AM - Customer never joined conference call, grumble about the normal morning pre-work routine that's been disrupted for no reason.

9:00 AM - Make the mistake of checking email. Realize some customer has had a problem with our software. Details are sketchy at best. Compose an email asking for more information, log files, screenshots, a coherent description of the issue, anything.

10:00 AM - Boss rolls into work, starts checking his email. Torrent of emails sent out about status of half a dozen disparate projects and evaluations. Seizes upon possible customer issue, demands immediate all-hands meeting to discuss the problem, even though the customer has yet to provide any information.

10:30 AM - Pointless standup meeting.

11:00 AM - Customer with the problem proves themselves once more incapable of following directions, sends completely unrelated set of log files and screenshots. Still no description of what the problem was. Query for the correct information.

12:00 - Flee for lunch.

1:00 - Post-lunch coma.

1:30 - Try to actually knock out some tickets and get something done.

1:35 - Customer finally sends decent bug report with information that can be analyzed. Except they are running an ancient version and refuse to update. Pull down old version of software to cross-check logging information and reproduce issue. Realize issue was fixed a year and three point releases ago. Tell customer to upgrade, which will take three to six weeks to percolate through their lab, staging and finally production environments, amassing copious amounts of red tape along the way and requiring sign-off by no fewer than seven different groups. Prepare temporary work-around to quiet down the issue in the meantime. Get ambushed with three other issues that have been occurring for weeks but were never brought to attention.

4:00 - Free once more to try to squeak out some forward progress for the day. Get pulled into hall-way conversation about some terrible idea for a feature that somebody who was given a demo of the product idly asked for, and sales interpreted as a show-stopping, must-have, stop-the-sale, not-going-to-make-my-quota blocker.

4:55 - Fuggit, it's time to go home.

Not all days are like this, but when you get into a stretch of them, whoo boy.