skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone whose views don't align with a good chunk of HN readers (or don't align, period), I've grown to love reading about differing ideas through the eyes of others computing/tech enthusiasts. There's common ground to start from and most importantly, even if it turns out to be a viewpoint that deeply goes against my values I can still respect this fellow human because of their tech expertise.

I have to admit, it really irked me at first when I came here. How can all these people that like the same things as me, have ideas that are so ... "wrong?!" (just kidding, honest :) ) But then I learned to listen and realize that these opinions will be here whether I engage them or not.

Of course, I see subthreads that aren't very "objective in the way I want them to be". But I don't share your experience with downvotes. I try to refrain from trying to convince the person I'm directly replying to if their view is directly opposed to mine, that never works any way. I just state my own personal position and how it reflects. Sure I get the occasional downvote but that's almost always when I've let myself be confrontational about it. Also, there's a big difference between providing a link to some facts that a person might not know, and a very opinionated link (that may also have facts and numbers) that is arguing your point.

So yeah, while I support the experiment (it'll be interesting to see), I really hope they don't extend this to forever, but just occasionally after particularly turbulent US elections.

Finally:

> fair treatment to minority opinions

Come on what does that even mean? I don't know what your opinions are. You don't know what mine are (you can read my comment history but good luck). I have no idea what "fair treatment to minority opinions" should even mean. My opinions are minority opinions too (I'll change them if you don't believe me), but I know this; People that complain their opinions aren't getting fair treatment are very rarely worth listening to, regardless of position. I prefer a better signal-to-butthurt ratio.
If only he could also pay Signature Plastics to make keysets like this one cheaper: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=86143.0
The parent to my comment complains about HN being unfair to his political viewpoint and has a history of posting somewhat sympathetically about Trump. He seemed to assume that sympathizing with Trump or conservatives is the only way one could disagree with mainstream HN political views. "Unfair" is his term, I was making a point.
I read HN multiple times a day and I feel like I'd have to go out of my way to find a post that was political, or even a comment that was political. Yes people will go off about anything NIMBYism, housing markets, javascript saturation etc, but what are the numbers? How much politics is really going on here?

Admittedly I'm probably at the point where I don't even see it when it's right in front of me, but it would be interesting to here from the mods of people who frequent /new.
Amazon just opened a grocery store without a checkout line
Someone just purchased the DroneGun to protect an asset worth millions
An AOA (i.e. Angle Of Attack) indicator based on GPS and accelerometer data. Arduino-mounted.
I do not attack or blame the author, I say that the work (Babel6) is no good. This doesn't imply anything about the author.

You, on the other hand, attack _me_ personally. You don't even say "your words sound rude" — that I would understand.

Or there is no difference to you?
I get it, the spate of political discussion on HN is stressful as politics is people and the recent change in political climate means a musical chair of winners and losers of the process.

But I disagree about the approach -- what is politics anyways? Most polarizing these days: probably gender, race, and socioeconomic status, and the various parties cater to those human categories. We all inherently have these things that form the basis of our thoughts and how we see the world -- so I honestly don't think it's easy to separate.

If the cost of thoughtful conversations on politics is dealing with flame, then many of us are glad to pay the cost of doing business -- and I hope you'd find a majority of people here would behave similarly.
He's complaining about an open article written about Angular2, which he isn't even a contributor to. He's complaining about general community dislike about the direction Babel 6 took.

It's not like this was Linus trashing a contributor for writing shitty code in a pull request.

So far as I can see in the article, he's not complaining about a single instance of anyone actually criticising him directly.

No one really cares who worked on Babel 6, all they know is there was a change that disrupted their work flow. No one is being personally attacked when the users criticize a change.
>We have a golden period of forty-some days before a new administration comes to power that has shown every intent of using that information to deport people and create a national Muslim registry.

This is why I support a moratorium on politics here. This kind of assumption and hyperbole is really off-putting. I'm happy to debate these topics, but not here.

Now, that said, it's going to be a little murky. For example, I want to examine Ed Ou's detention at the US border. What if something breaks about Snowden or Assange? How about net neutrality?
It doesn't have to be strictly cheaper, as it also adds convenience. Not having to wait at the checkout will be worth something to customers, possibly quite a lot in the case of a shop targeting richer customers.
Security for the High-Risk User
It's more problematic in languages that encourage allocation since you have to work more to avoid it.

I've done game development in C++, C#, and JS, and I had to worry about memory management far more in JS than in C# or C++, simply because even something as innocent as adding two vec3s requires you come up with a space for the result first, if you want to avoid gc hitches.

C#'s struct types help here, but it still has plenty of its features increase GC pressure.
I find it interesting that they specify "3D vision from a first person viewpoint". Can somebody explain to me the significance of first person viewpoint vs 3rd person (or other)?
As long as it's only a week, I support it.

But your distinction is a good one regarding partisan politics, vs politics in general.

The tech community is already perceived as being out of touch, it's not going to help if we keep our head in the sand.
Machine Learnings #20: AI bots need to be funny or people get pissed
I am switching languages and frameworks quite often, always trying new stuff. So I don't have the time and patience to learn how to configure vim to work with all of them. For me it is mostly about navigation/searching/editing without leaving the home-row anyways, not so much about vim as the editor per-se.
Add OAUTH to your Alexa Smart Home skill in 10 mins
A trouble I have with HN is the casual assumption that a subject actually has an objective truth that can be debated. Often we just don't agree on the basics of what is actually important in a philosophical sense. So every fact is just a proxy for a particular world view. It is better to question the underlying assumptions than the facts themselves. We don't need to do this with technology or buisness because we already share the same sort of world view.

You see this kind of problem on debates about climate change. Once people learn about environment and ecology they tend to assume that humans have an unavoidable impact on the planet. Climate change "deniers" simply have a different intuition. All the science in the world is not going to change that. Which is why it is political, and not objective.

Really the entire point of politics is to debate things that lack definitive truth. Of course that is probably true of anything that is discussed on a forum to a lesser or greater extent. Otherwise the answer would already be on Wikipedia.
I think gaming companies are solving the problem of consumer entertainment and I think in that world a/b testing is super important.
Would a 50 year old supercomputer be still considered a supercomputer? I think not. It would probably not even be considered a computer. More akin to a calculator like the TI-series.
CEOs: Robotics, Automation and AI Will Make People ‘Largely Irrelevant’
We have been working on AI in one form or another for 50 years or more, I think it ought to be time for a serious debate about this.

Lisp date from 1958 and some would argue that rule-based programming is AI. Eliza is also more than 5O years old.

The ethics of AI have been extensively discussed for a very long time.

In essence, the debate taking place around AI is a heir of the 19th debate on automated looms.
Karel Čapek play, Robots, has been written in 1920 and it was already an ethical discussion of "autonomous machines"...

My first introduction to AI and its consequences and dilemna come from Isaac Asimov Foundation Cycle and that dates back to the 1950s.

AFAIK, the 3 Laws of Robotics invented by Asimov are actually used by philosophers & AI practitioners.

(I added and then removed references to the Golem, but...it could be argued as relevant to this discussion)

I am quite vehement in this discussion exactly because I am currently debating whethever or not I should release a new AI software I have designed. From a technical standpoint, I am quite proud of it, it is a nice piece of engineering. From a political standpoint, I feel that tool could be used for goals that I am not sure to agree with...
Totally check out the cantatas; many of us feel that the cantatas are the real heart of Bach's work. Bach was fundamentally a church musician.
> Because C is not the right tool for 95% of the jobs the coding bootcamp crowd will be asked to solve.

I'm curious about this point. Are the large majority of coding bootcamps teaching JavaScript and Ruby because of the number of jobs available in that market? Would anyone (hopefully, the bootcampers) benefit if there were a bootcamp teaching C?
Anything tech related on /r/politics gets deleted. So, yes, in this comparison it is more effective.
Standard HN comment, and also absolutely insane.

Have you met people with limited computer experience just getting 'into' it? Computers and code are literal magic to them. I mean people who's lives don't really entail a computer at all beyond social media.

I taught at a local bootcamp. It had less to do with code and more to do with getting people to think in abstractions within a specific domain.

If you can sit in a room for days on end juggling the uncertainty of learning something completely new, more power to you I guess. And that's like nobody. I consider myself decently intelligent and I almost went insane trying to teach myself something I had zero prior experience in. Literally wasted like 4 months due to uncertainty/following wrong info. Many moments of "oh, I didn't need to learn any of that actually". This is why bootcamps are amazing, you have experts roaming around that you can tap into at any second.

Somewhat ironically paying that $15k for the bootcamp would have saved me a lot of money in opportunity cost and sanity.

>C is a general-purpose programming language which features economy of
expression, modern control flow and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.

Just reading the first paragraph already opens a world of questions, and this is way before you even get to any Hello World stuff. Just telling a beginner "Hey you should read this C book" would open up questions like "What is C? You're telling me I have to learn an entire new language just to make that tiny thing? Screw that!" Have fun untangling yourself out of that one.

External motivators work, there's a reason we have entire academic institutions instead of a world of disconnected hermits.
I come here to talk and learn about tech and science, not banter about politics. I'm all for a politic-free HN.

Find just about any article on the hacker mindset and politics, aside from the desire for freedom, won't be anywhere near the top of the list. Nothing about Republicans, Democrats, race, etc.

Some examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28subculture%29
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
http://suntzu23.blogspot.com/2006/11/five-principles-of-hack...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html
A Waitrose I lived near had this system, and I think it must have been fairly successful because they put in a second wall of scanning devices shortly before I moved.
I do see what you're saying however, climate change is not a political topic in itself. It is a scientific topic that has to do with the world getting warmer.

The article was not "how to argue with people you disagree with" but how to connect with an audience who does not believe in a scientific consensus due to misinformation. In fact the point of the article had nothing to do with arguing (or political parties), but rather empathetically connecting with an opposing viewpoint.

This is exactly what I meant from my parent comment. Because a topic has been hijacked by political parties we can't bring it up? Climate change = science topic. It is a well documented phenomenon that 97% of the world's climate scientists agree on [1].

Being on either side of the political spectrum is irrelevant here, as at its core this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with science.

[1] http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Clearly you have built something that has some product market fit. Hope you find your path through the next few months without falling hard into burnout.
reallocarray(3) looks nifty, but until it's available on a wider, ideally more standard-driven basis than just OpenBSD and FreeBSD, it's likely to not see wide uptake.
Thank you, this is actually a great explanation.
I understand, and I know HN has the right to control speech in the forum it owns. So I will only write this in the thread where I have been invited to write it (and will note that I am a Libertarian so I of course did not vote for Trump): The major theme of the media and in many comment threads on many sites has been to decry the totalitarian, authoritarian nature of the coming Trump regime. I find it ironic that the response of HN is to implement thought control by suppressing an entire genre of thought. After all, once you rise above the level of bits and bytes, you are going to get into political speech.
But go ahead.
It's a free country.
Just not a free forum (here, that is).
I think you're missing the point of the discussion entirely. When you're more or less doing string splitting, using regex (regardless of performance) really is the wrong tool for the job. In this use case (url routing) a tree based data structure aka a trie or radix tree, are better suited.
Some users will down vote comments not because they disagree but because from experience they know that any resulting discussion will be unproductive. Rehashing the same discussion again and again is actively destructive to the community as a whole. It decreases the signal-to-noise ratio, tacitly approves of the negative contributions, and increases the likelihood that those that contribute positively will leave, and the community as a whole will be all the worse for it.
I get enough politics elsewhere. I'm looking forward to seeing how this experiment turns out.
Publicfast – platform with over 30k influencers for your product
They disappeared, presumably after the Second Department of the PLA had found out whatever they wanted to know.

Or determined that Hacker Dojo had very little to offer in the way of valuable intelligence. (In the geopolitical, not IQ sense.)
Well, this certainly trumps anything that Reddit is trying to do with out-right bans. They were like "Oh! BAM" A ban on /r/this and that. This election cycle felt like I was taking a lot of mesclin, ton of it too...

Anyway, I like the non-political week. Anyway... that's just my two pence...
To address the other points you raised; I personally found Babel 6 easier to use and understand than Babel 5. I suspect this is because I needed to configure Babel 5 anyway to meet my needs, so I was required to understand the configuration either way. Babel 6 made it much easier to understand what I was asking Babel to do; no magic, everything explicit.

With version 5, the default settings were a moving target (which I found confusing), and explicitly configuring it was more complex. Apparently the Babel team had great difficultly deciding what should be included by default as well.

Basically anybody that used Babel for something other than "6to5" had to jump through hoops to overwrite the defaults. Seeing as how the Babel team were trying to position it as a general purpose Javascript compiler, that was a problem for them.

So, maybe it's worse off for most people because of the change (because it doesn't work with zero configuration anymore), but plenty of people were better off because of it. The library became easier to maintain, and easier to use for a non-negligible number of users.
KMSpico 10.2.0 Activator for Windows and Office Activation
> Most of Hacker News contains shared experiences where identity level experiences are irrelevant.

I would suggest that maybe this isn't true for people who aren't you. And who aren't me. Many things, like getting a job as a software developer or talking to my boss--things I think you and I can probably agree are likely shared experiences?--feel very apolitical for me. And it is understandable that they feel that way: because I am the beneficiary of the biases extant in society. I get the breaks. It's "normal" for me to look around and see nobody having it easier than I do and when I fuck up (god, do I fuck up!), I am not othered so that my actions reflect on my race or gender, but on me specifically.

Such an "apolitical" world, such an "unbiased" world, may not exist for, say, women or African-Americans or trans folks. And sweeping that realization under the rug is, by itself, a political act in favor of the continuation of the incentives and the policies that create that situation that lets me be comfortable and "apolitical" and ensures that other folks cannot be either.

Nothing is apolitical: it just may work to your benefit. And it usually works to mine--I am fortunate to have the grace to understand just how lucky a dice roll I got, and that's why I can't be on-board with policies that want to prevent discussion of whether the dice are loaded or not.
Always looking on the bright side.
> here need to be clearer guidelines around what's allowed and what's not.

We're happy to clarify (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108614) but it's impossible to draw a precise line. Moderation is about a few core principles and a lot of case-by-case judgment calls, and it's inherently unsatisfying.

Whatever rules we have, though, we apply them less rather than more in cases where YC itself or a YC startup is at issue. That's one of the rules :)
That's my guess. RFID in the labels or packaging somewhere.

RFID radiation is no different than the radiation coming in and out of the phone in your pocket.
Nice! It looks like Nuukik is well positioned to take advantage of that new infrastructure!

It would be lovely if you developed an in-store navigation capability. It's so frustrating to run into a store to pickup something, and not be able to immediately find it.

The results of periodic scans should provide a decent point cloud that could be used to determine shelf/aisle geometry without a blueprint. Foursquare uses this sort of approach for its interior mapping process, but they can't tell me where to find the bean dip. There are multiple obvious ways to monetize that dataset including simply selling it to Foursquare.
I could not agree more. Well said.
Anec-data to your point: The two best companies I've worked for made their offers at the end of the interview day.
I'm not sure what the benefit of this is over the alexa voice service api:

https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-vo...

Does anyone know how this differs from alexa voice services? Does this allow you to get away from the stilted "example phrases" of the alexa api and just get a transcript? Judging from the inclusion of "intents" on the faq, it looks like the "example phrase" interface will still be required:

https://aws.amazon.com/lex/faqs/
I don't want to hang out in an echo chamber. I enjoy the diversity of opinions that I find among my coworkers and social media friends. However, neither my workplace nor Facebook feature the "downvote". Being downvoted for expressing an unpopular opinion here is the equivalent of being shoved out of a circle of friends. It doesn't feel good and I don't come here to feel like crap. I don't think I'm all that different than most HN readers when I say that I come here to escape from work or home life for a few minutes and learn about things. Exclusion because you're different has no place on a forum like this.
If you look at the article, you'll see that I wrote a full clone of Sublime Text's syntax highlighter before even opening a disassembler. I do in fact know how to do syntax highlighting.

And yes I read lots of Scintilla's code years ago.

I did a couple hours of disassembly reading purely out of curiosity and to find exactly the kind of hidden goodies that I ended up finding.
Today's workforce is in a state of flux
I don't think there are that many people deluded to the fact that a 4/5 year long CS course teaches you more than a boot camp.

But as many few people will dispute that you can get started writing production code much faster in the latter.

And what I will add, is that they'll be an average 80% as good as their fresh out of uni CS peers, if not more.
There are myriad ways the status quo can be at odds with people's values and desires. Sometimes the status quo remains so because we can't decide on the proper remedy or disagree on the proper remedy. Just because something is status quo does not mean critique is inherently controversial.
I was planning to delay the point when I get to know who the winner was on the elections... (I live in Europe) In work nobody speaks about politics. I don't read traditional news sites. I was just curious who will tell me first. Then I opened Hacker News...
We're in the middle of completely replacing our UI/UX. Last month we finally got our preferences in the right place (within the B icon instead of in a gear that floats on top of every page), and we're re-doing the onboarding. Now that we've figured out how to get things popping down from the B icon, we won't be taking up the full page anymore.

And just FYI, we don't bombard users with messages all the time—you saw the instructions and upgrade option, and there is only one other message we show this way, which is after the 30-day free trial expires. We know our UI sucks on this, which is why we don't use it to send messages or upsell all the time. Appreciate the feedback, and hope you'll try us again on Chrome, iOS, or Android (which is free, BTW).
Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lex/pricing/

>$0.004 per voice request, and $.00075 per text request.

I don't know what else to compare this to.
Blockchain and the New Tower of Babel
"'Teaching highly motivated students to code is actually not that hard.' — Dan Sofer"

This broadly matches my experience. The hiring and interviewing of bootcamp graduates I've done has made me thing it's really just an intense vetting process for junior developer candidates.

Which is valuable, but potentially could be replaced by something that costs less than $15k.
In a realtime system you can't use virtual memory because the access times are unpredictable.
Elementary Number Theory; Primes, Congruences, and Secrets- William Stein (2008) [pdf]
The Secret Behind Amazon Go: RFID
Just tested with some notebooks that tax my server and it was very responsive! Well done!