skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You didn't question if there was an ulterior motive, you asked what it was. That's begging the question[1]. It's similar (in type, if not extremity) to asking "Have you beat your wife again?" Note how the question presupposes the person has beat their wife already. Your statement presupposes there is an ulterior motive, rather than asking if there is one. There is a distinct difference in the statements "Is there an ulterior motive?" and "What is the ulterior motive?". You may not have intended this, which is why my first reply specifically addressed that it may have been unintentional.

> I was skeptical about the reason dang

As to this, I'm not sure I have the same skepticism you do in this regard. HN has a history of flagging overly political stories, as it can often be hard to keep discussion civil. There seems to be less flagging of these as the election gets close, as it's more relevant to everyone involved, but trying to cut back after the election is past seems appropriate to me.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
I hope this doesn't remove public pressure for a sensible water conservancy policy in the west.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108575
Another alternative in this space is an AWS Lambda-driven static site editor and publisher: https://github.com/sirceljm/LambdaBlogPlatform

(not affiliated but I know that the author put lot of thought in it)
Aha, the first thing I do in ST is turn off the minimap completely, so that explains that! Thanks!
Fascinating. Just reading about probabilistic data structures in general, and would like to know if there is an efficient general method for generating statistics about the FN rates. Are they related to ROC curves?
Big Data: Why You Should Be Considering Open Source
Good show, I say. Should have gone for a month though, not a week (can't please everyone, eh?)

About 15 years ago I was part of a general forum run by a kiwi, who was frustrated at US politics overtaking his site (which was the bulk of political talk there). He implemented a month-long ban on US politics... and the site got more peaceful and more interesting. The effect lasted afterwards, too, though the userbase was < 100.
High density chip fabrication processes are not commodiy services. Each foundry's process has its own design rules that your chip needs to take into account. And that's for logic. 3D NAND fabrication requires different materials and methods than logic fabrication, and each of the four manufacturers has their own design with its own manufacturing challenges. At least one or two of them have had to make significant adjustments in their fundamental memory cell design between their first announced prototypes and the shipping products that have layer counts high enough to offer competitive cost/GB.
Indeed - it has happened many times, and is happening now, precisely because the technocratic class wash their hands of politics and ethics, deferring responsibility infinitely upwards.

I'm of the unpopular opinion that we should each take responsibility for our own actions, and should not act on orders we consider ethically unacceptable. I could tell you stories about a great uncle who designed dams in Austria...
HN has long gone from being dedicated just to programming and tech news. Why is it just now that you want it to be so "on-topic"?

In turbulent times like these, with hate speech, racism and sexism out of the shadows and in it's highest, it is crucial to be having conversations.

Being silent, burying head in the sand - not much different than siding on the side of the oppressor.

Whatever news are posted here - is a reflection of a community. If politics are posted, that is what people read. Instead, concentrate your efforts to battle those who game your algorithms for rankings.
That's not pointless, those could be really good points! Maybe UBI is something we have to throw out for now, maybe it can be implemented in a way to get around those challenges.
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The ideal candidate will have strong troubleshooting skills with a background in Linux Systems Administration, experience supporting back-end services, and scripting/development skills for tooling and automation.

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It's kind of scary that million dollars' decisions (and in aggregate, probably billions) are made on the basis of solely "let's look what others are doing and then fudge it based on gut feeling until it looks kinda plausible" and that's supposed to be expert verdict. Not that I can offer any better idea :)
Start a human genomics project with a few lines of code
it seems to me that ocaml/(ocaml zealotry) > haskell/(haskell zealotry). This of course does not suggest that Ocaml>Haskell, only that one must probably apply some coefficients in favour of Ocaml given that it is extra-anglo-saxon domain and therefore probably suffers some marketing disadvantage.

Just a casual observation of the commento-sphere after a lay imperative programmer's cursory research of functional programming. This post, sample-of-one hugely notwithstanding, seems in the absence of counterpoints to suggest that, as potentially narrow as the benchmark may be, Ocaml has some very strong arguments against Haskell on the compiler implemenation front.

I can't help but wonder if this GC outperformance is the flipside of the coin of Ocaml's much maligned lack of multi-core capability.
Ask HN: If you were 5 again, what msg from your fav person would you like?
My little girl is turning 5 next week, and since she is 3 y/o, every year for her birthday I made a short clip as a present for her. I think it is better than any materialistic stuff since she will keep them and probably watch them from time to time.

If you had the chance to be 5 y/o again and someone very special for you would make a video for you, what message would you like to have from him/her? How does the video look?
Adventure was first released in 1976. Dungeons and Dragons was first published in 1974. Adventure is clearly influenced by D&D.
fair enough. I though I had it couched in enough padding (it's my opinion, after all) that nobody would take that bait. My hope was that someone would debate whether or not HN is a kingmaker, or that it actually influenced the Eich situation. It was not to argue over whether that action was right or wrong.
Exactly what I was hoping. Thanks for naming these things, names are what those of us without the academic baggage need to be able to investigate/study what we are talking about.
That's the thing. I have to build several prototypes first in order to see which will be less hassle. Initial idea was to have the machine handle chemicals and a contained disposal system. On the other hand I could do it with hollow 'jackets' (that's how we call it, grommet is probably the proper name).

I have to balance two ideas into a concept first and then prototype. Those two primary ideas are:

1) have end-user buy as basic things as possible in order to produce PCBs (not rely on my chain of supply / custom shit). This is in order for machine to be as usable as possible, no matter where you live and to keep costs for you down as possible.

2) Have the workflow as hassle-free as possible with the best possible result.

Sometimes, those two ideas are clashing. Ultimately, it would be a machine built out of commonly available parts. For most parts, at least. And, I would provide pre-built machines as convenience. BOM for protos is already at around 7k-10k Euros, and it will take some time to build and refine on what I'll see from protos. Ultimately, I want a sub 2k Euros machine ready, out of the box, experience for end user. Maybe even less if I opt for smaller FR4 boards. From everything I've pooled so far together, on paper, it's doable. I just need to find a bit of time. I already set some time and cash after May next year just for this (after I finish a TV series I'm working on - my day to day job).

In my opinion, I think an affordable desktop PCB factory could open a lot of possibilities for people. If you had a machine and only things you would need to buy are FR4 boards and some commonly available and cheap chemicals and have the machine 'print out' a pcb for you, maybe even with parts placed, and have the exhaust for fumes and disposing system safe and easy and cheap... We need this. I need this.
1. This experiment is directly harmful in that it is using living subjects, without ethics review.

2. The person who shot the gun was informed by Reddit, a company that had it's genesis here. The Y Combinator is a function that makes other functions.

The Internet is not like a blank canvas. The decisions we make about a platform, about news optimization, and about community structure affect our public discourse. If Twitter had set it's character limit at 280 characters, that would have had a profound effect on the marketplace of ideas in the public sphere.

3. The issue is that the particular forms of communication which enabled these thought-bubbles to exist were created by a handful of decisions by software developers.

4. HN is where I get my news about technology. Technology is a crucial area of political discussion, and right now the very basic freedoms of the internet are under direct threat from political forces.

Finally, how could anything be more crucial to technologists than discussion of those who will hold the reigns of the national security sector?
I just don't really see how associating it with an online account makes it much better or worse than the normal recording that'd done in stores everyday.
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site

When people talk about "the average HN reader", or the "prevailing slant", I'm always curious what they mean.

For me, it's always felt more like a back-and-forth struggle between radical liberals and hardline libertarians. That's always been the general nature of pretty much every tech-oriented forum historically (e.g. HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc). When Mike Judge was once asked about the core insight behind his "Silicon Valley" TV show, he cited his belief that the tech ethos is a conflict between liberal and libertarian values.

As a pragmatist who just likes to read about tech, I find both sides annoying.
I disagree.

Detox will not strengthen the immune system of HN.

Immunity is conferred when the 'garden' is threatened and unifies to counter a problem.

That problem? Inflammatory, unsubstantiated comments that cause people to upvote and downvote not based on the validity of the comment but whether it's favorable to their ideological values.

I believe people can have civilized discussions about politics in HN -- I've seen it before.
It's a definition that's ripe to be abused. It means topics can be censored and discussion silenced, not for breaking any specific rule, but by possessing too much of some subjective quality.
OK I'd go on and emphasize. 1) 1) 1) 1).

It is an experiment. That's a good thing. Let's talk about solving Fake News in a week. If they try to ban politics on HN in a week I'll get up in arms with you.

3) perpetuated by the users of software distributed by giant tech companies

To finish up: It is an experiment.
I have it hard time to believe that only 200 people die in the US due to malnutrition it's likely different classification.

Death due to lack of certain nutrients isn't that uncommon.

While VAD deaths in the US and the west are probably rare VDD related deaths are quite common especially in cardiac cases.

Same goes for many other things.

If you only count acute starvation then 200 cases per year might make sense but diet has a huge impact on mortality.
He's pointing out a pattern of human behavior, where we can have experts all agree on something, yet still be wrong.

When it comes to something as important as climate change, you'd hope we think about it long and hard from every angle.
Two other non-contact methods I've seen are direct mass measurement (probably ebay the scales, it'll be like $500 new) or the most innovative thing I've seen is flow rate meters watching the CO2 source. See you can measure flow rate of the beer but that can get weird with bubble formation and sterilization but CO2 is clean and biologically boring and single phase. You can buy a flow rate meter with digital output for immense expense but its easier to use an analog one with a webcam. Big fun!
The distinction isn't tech/notech. That's the most important thing to understand about this whole site!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I do think the purely political forum that a minority of users here seem to want, would best be served by a different site.
One is free and open, with many different software options and partnerships.

The other is free and open, but governed by a corporation, with a single software option and no partnerships.
If the community as a whole defines signal to be "Which bits are going to flip" and noise to be "How are folks going to put dinner on the table when we flip that bit?", I don't want to be part of that.

The "someone" I'm referring to here almost certainly, in reality, isn't one person. And the "entity" who did this certainly should lose their position -- it's a privilege we've granted them for far too long.
I've been through three major restructurings and as a 56 year old PM, I can tell you it's really tough to get a new PM gig - companies want millenials, not someone old enough to be their parent
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This camel in the sand approach clamors to roll back to a time when tech was not political.

But now tech is political, surveillance and the surveillance economy being built by SV companies is political, techologists working for the government building invasive surveillance systems is political, the betrayal of people by a technical elite is political, the censorship advocated by social media based out of sv is political, AI is political.

Ignoring this is like an arms supplier turning a blind eye to his weapons used to kill innocents choosing to focus on specifications. ie a world without morality. That's not protecting values or intellectual curiosity, its killing it.

The kind of forum HN has morphed into for lack of an alternative cannot be run by an organization with commercial interests. Then you get knee jerk arbitary decisions like this that begets a culture of passivity accepting what ever is handed down to you. I think the technical voice needs more robust expression and to speak as one with the rest of the population rather than seek isolation and alienation.
... nearly 200% above average for the first two months of the water year

Two months of twice normal precipitation is all it took to alleviate the drought? From the dire tone of all the news I read from California it seemed way worse than that.
It's too hard/expensive to make that kind of abstracted GUI that lets you make real software, and too hard to keep it updated as the environments/contexts change, as in your example of networking became important, and it wasn't part of hypercard, and would have taken a lot of time and skill to make it so in a useful way.

It's just too hard. You can make that kind of layer for a special special purpose domain (say, making simple games, or sound engineering, or what have you), but it's hard even to do that right, let alone a general purpose universal environment. Software is expensive enough to develop with quality the 'ordinary way', let alone trying to develop and maintain some kind of layer on top that let's people do it without.... without what? Without knowing what they're doing? At some point, if you are able to make it actually powerful enough, it's going to be just as 'hard' as anything else, isn't it?
Just the other week I finished reading Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner (whose novels are wonderful by the way), and in several of the essays collected there he writes about how the defining characteristic of the West is "aridity". He complains about how we have over-settled the land, how our presence is based on exploitation, the Gold Rush, mobility, and impermanence. He talks about how the green that irrigation provides can't last. "Thoughts in a Dry Land" was from 1991; these problems aren't new, and I doubt we'll ever "solve" them. And the population keeps growing. I hope the things you mention do indeed help!
Yeah, that would be awesome.
I share your optimism - the future of retail belongs to self-service with the checkout process integrated into the shopping cart. Grab and Go.

However, I don't think that end game is the first use case for an RFID solution - inventory monitoring/LP/loyalty can demonstrate ROI long before the checkout lines are removed. For those use cases, the unit price needs to be much cheaper, but an order of magnitude improvement might be right.
Haskell's type system is clearly political dialectic.
Does full time but fun count? We're building a network of automated food preparation and retail service locations based upon robotics, to initially launch in mainland China: http://8-food.com/

The idea is the consumer can buy from their phone and pick up customized meals. Currently we're iterating functional prototypes toward ready for manufacturing while tweaking our form factor and components and increasing our ingredient volume and breadth.

We'd consider bringing on additional founders with strong mechanical engineering (CAM/materials science/foodtech) experience.
I support political detox week in HN!! Great idea! I was just ready a story and someone got in a political jab and the comment thread was off to the races. I took refuge in HN to GET AWAY from the hateful and uncivilized ranting that other news sites tolerate. As cliche' as this might seem, it was once considered the height of politeness to leave your political and religious baggage on the front porch and not bring it to the dinner table!
I think there's a big difference between "why does ... exist" and "why does ... still exist". calloc() may be useful today for reasons completely different from why it existed in the first place. And the difference #2 is just an implementation-specific optimisation. There's nothing in the standard that forces calloc to use lazy allocation / virtual memory. Actually, it may be implemented on platforms which can't provide this.
> Python gets it right. Ruby gets it right. Julia gets it right. Most lisps get it right etc.

What. I ship Clojure all day, got CL in my past. Was a full time ruby dev. I got a list of ugh and eck for all of them. I can name 30 more issues with Python. Truth be told, I think Python is a rancid language and I think people who love it are basically eating barf pancakes every day and thanking people who look down on then for it. GVR doesn't do that bs "I don't get lambdas" garbage in the company of other language designers, that's for sure.

What you consider visual noise is arbitrary. It's like what color paper you prefer to note take on. Every language has issues. Python is riddled with syntactic noise and artifacts that you've normalized. Ruby's syntax is better, but still full of quirks and surprises. Don't even get me started on Scala.

"I am used to this" and "this is objectively better unless you are some academic" is a classic example of industry insecurity. You shouldn't avoid Haskell because you are irritated with a bit of syntax, you should avoid it because you can't ship or maintain the kind of deliverables you need to write.

> Most of us programmers are shallow and lazy and we should be proud of this and build tools that cater to our "virtues".

Pride is one of the ugliest sins of our industry, I agree. Too many developers refuse to accept that there might be progress in the industry outside of what they experienced in their first 2 years in the industry.
100M students worldwide will learn to code this week for Hour of Code
Indeed. There's an argument to be made that asking someone to do unpaid work is inhumane (depending on the context).

Personally, I put thought into my replies commensurate with the recruiter's message. Even if I'm uninterested, a thoughtful message deserves a similar reply.
Though I do not consider this a wise move, it is limited to a week so I don't think the "harm" will be that great (however, nor do I think the benefit will be at all worth the effort of explaining the flags to people who didn't see this Tell HN).

The reason I don't consider it wise is that I think the current political situation is completely unique at least in my lifetime (<40 years) and is not the typical political camps bickering with each other over simply "politics".

Rather, this time around there are Real Issues that are Important. The current trend of populism will have global ramifications for many decades to come. Not allowing discussion on these topics seems counter-productive to me.
Hi,

my personal POV is that a lot of issues affecting the tech community at large resolve to politics in the end - be it the fight of cities and entire countries against AirBnB and Uber for example, the infamous Flint water disaster, the "fake news" battle, internet censorship, snoopers' overreach, the role of Big Data in elections, voting machine fraud...

Nearly every story (even those about new startups "disrupting" a specific market - markets ripe for disruption are usually created by political decisions, be it Republicans or Democrats!) has its base in politics, and I believe it is our duty as citizens and educated people to call politicians and their parties out when they mess stuff up.

Therefore, I believe that prohibiting political discussions outright is a dangerous move - I'm all fine with penalties or flagging if a discussion devolves into outright fight, but not for simply bringing up the topic.
Study wetting and adhesion of graphene can help in many fileds
How Game Developers Make Money
Except, as tons of people have already pointed out, there is no way to talk about tech without talking about politics. Is research about how the Google search algorithm or Facebook's news feed shapes users' opinions tech or not-tech? Is a story about Uber researching autonomous cars with the intention of eliminating drivers in its own industry and industries like trucking tech or not-tech?
Andy Groove "High Output Management" covers this topic and more. Highly recommend! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VACHOK
I guess I just interpreted "politics" to mean left vs. right bickering, not the nuanced ethics of self-driving cars or whatever. The left vs. right never-ending debates are what I want to avoid.

If an article clearly has a pro-left/right spin, I don't want to read it.
Transaction Security with Slow Clock and Counter – How to Conjure Up Entropy
Clever :-) Glad to see another solution out there!

Myelf -- I've migrated almost all personal and small projects over to a self-hosted dokku instance. All of the static sites run this buildpack: https://github.com/dokku/buildpack-nginx

This has been a real timesaver as dealing with S3 static sites was just a pain. Added bonus is I have more granular control of nginx (if I want it)
Big Food Battles Meal-Kit Startups for Dinner-In-a-Box
Google Earth Engine: Timelapse
The water table is a seperate but related issue. And it would take a large amount of rain, and time to replenish. Not likely to happen faster than use, especially with the asinine ag well exemptions.
> It's not anecdotal, it's a comment that showed up in design documents of games by experienced developers.

care to post some? I'm cool with being wrong.