skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me, I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide, All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you."

Information/Internet technology is inseparable from politics now. I never asked for that and neither did any of us, but that's the inescapable reality.
Our inventions are being used to both enhance and disrupt democracy, and they are causing real people real pain along with the huge benefits to millions of others.
Like many, my own productivity has taken a huge hit in the last year because of all of the political news. I resent this in the same way I'd resent a hurricane hitting my house, but pretending it isn't happening won't help.
HN being a blend of pure tech stories along with political+tech stories is absolutely the right blend because IT REFLECTS THE REALITY OF TODAY'S WORLD.
Trump's election is the biggest change in politics in the last 50 years, and IT was at the heart of that election, in terms of the forces that have caused the desire for change (e.g. worker displacement, cultural upheaval), and the mechanics of the election itself (e.g. Twitter, news feeds, fake news, media manipulation, big data, etc.).
We, the IT workers of the world, are the new weapons-makers. That we never meant our work to be used that way is immaterial. Everybody in tech should now be politically informed. We should be tuned in. We should know details. We should learn the facts.
I'd love to spend 100% of my time learning about new frameworks and hardware, and that's what I enjoy doing.
We have the ring now, even if we never wanted it. Now it's our job to keep it out of hands of evil.

P.S. I started writing this response with, "Good! I am so sick of reading about politics everywhere. Great move, HN!". Then I changed my response to the one above.
Personally, I think that is quite a self-centered view. You don't want political discussions because you are in the minority? That's quite a myopic perspective to take.
For what it's worth I find discussions centered on the same
topic here to be much more civil, informative, and engaging than on most platforms (including /r/politics).
Whether or not they have it now is irrelevant (it's an example) - any proposed technology would inevitably see this requirement, and others, being identified based on opinion, not fact.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a pretty interesting, but I chuckled at this phrasing, "The hot oil is used to produce high-pressure water vapour that drives a turbine-powered generator." Seriously? Why not just call them steam turbines?

Because I was going to college in LA and my parents lived in Las Vegas, I drove that route a lot and got to watch them build Solar One[1], and toured it after it was operational.

These days with better thermoelectric generation capability[2] you can extract even more of the energy out of the heat difference than just steam turbines (which have a Carnot efficiency of about 50%) mostly because they can work down to lower differentials in heat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Moja...

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size...
Julia?
Haven't you just described 90% of the VC investments made in startups in the last few years?
> It's interesting how the "this is just for a week" thing hasn't seemed to enter the conversation.

Because the YC/HN culture is to experiment to inform future direction. "just for a week" probably means "just for a week, so that we can see if it negatively or positively influences the quality of discussion... and, if the effect is positive, we may implement a similar policy for the long term"

Thus, "just for a week" doesn't appear to have much relevance since the experiment is (presumably) part of a longer term plan to curb hostile commentary.
I want to register my disgust at this suggestion.
When the statements themselves are hyperbole. Look at how many details about the wall have changed.

I don't understand why people on the left assume he was lying all of the times he delivered toned down statements and was only telling the truth when at the most extreme.
This is really interesting. How much data does it require to build a generative model with say 60% accuracy for story type data?
Just recently added an ultrasonic presence sensor to my computer. http://www.michevan.id.au/content/are-you-there/
Good point, and it makes we wonder why the code is attributed to dmr...it looks like written by ken. I suppose recreating such a repo can only be so accurate.
Professor David Cope of UCSC has done extensive work in this space, starting with his EMI algorithm. His algos + DBs have created some in incredible music in the Bach style.
Why would this necessitate upgrades to the electricity grid and HVDC in particular? This plant's electricity is turbine-generated, just like in regular coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants.
I read a bit more about, it seems that following the whole process, not just check in and check out, it becomes harder to steal an item.

"Because it works by watching actual items come off the shelves — instead of reading a tag or RFID chip, for example — you won’t be able to steal items by removing or altering tags."
I've had a startup idea for this type of thing. We are forbidden, for nonsense reasons, to use IQ tests when hiring. This makes training your own workforce untenable for any cognitively demanding field, so we must use proxies like college education. However, one of the most important findings in psychometrics is the fact that scores on all cognitive tests are correlated. Thus there seems to be an opening for a company that is able to skillfully embed IQ tests in tests that are inarguably domain-relevant, and can be argued as such in court. If you can create an abundance of such tests for various occupations, this would seem valuable. Because psychometrics is both wildly unpopular and correct, this is exactly the type of secret, in Thiel's terms, one might expect to be under-appreciated.
The point I was trying to make is that there's people who exist outside those shared experiences, and yet have valuable contributions to make to discussion on HN, but they probably aren't gonna because banning politics will create an atmosphere where they don't feel safe or welcome.
What about a project based approach with testing similar to the AP exams (multiple graders, on a curve, with deviance from the mean singled out and examined)? I.E. implement a 12 factor web application using the python standard library that can handle x volume of traffic on n cores with y gb of ram where n and y are somewhat excessive? Could be interesting IMO.
As someone who is a regular (permanent?) attender on HN's rate limit blacklist[0], I can say that from personal experience: You will likely not be notified before HN punishes you, but from contacting HN about said incidents, it's generally (maybe always?) a manual process by an irritated HN mod. And if you email them (hn@ycombinator.com) about your apparent ban, they're generally willing to converse.

[0]I was unable to post this comment when I wrote it, and had to wait.
> 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.

I'm not missing the point of the discussion. Using regex is not the wrong tool for the job. You deemed it the wrong tool for the job. And deeming it the wrong tool for the job doesn't fix Go regex being slower than in other languages. The 2 issues are not separate .People like you talk about performances as a goal while dismissing obviously performance issues in the standard library as "wrong tool for the job".

You're not going to convince anybody with this kind of argument, aside from gophers who already think like you do. I'm not one of them.
No, the 2 GB array should still take a quota of 2 GB. It just wouldn't take 2 GB's worth of time to initialize. The overcommit "feature" in Linux is a bug that crashes C programs in places that violate the language's guarantees (such as when a write occurs to a location in memory that was allocated correctly).
Yeah, not to mention all the DL frameworks.
I've always used R for analysis, but using Python opens up the world of PySpark and more scalable ML environments. I think long term Python will become more prevalent in Data science for this reason.
Santa Barbara's just rebuilt their desalination plant.

http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/...

(note: .asp!)
So you're saying it's difficult for you as a white male (at least according to your linked social media) to deal with the issues that you encounter related to grayed out HN comments about the president-elect? The same president elect who goes on TV and and threatens to ban Muslims from entering the US based on their religion. But you are really worried about the grayed out HN comments and the stigma they give you in this community?

This is exactly why people are compelled to speak up politically in every space they can. You are not affected by the policies other people are afraid of and you feel slightly inconvenienced by talk of them and want talk swept under the rug. Whereas the other side says "we cannot sweep this under the rug because of how important it is to our well being."
So are you proposing that HN become a sort of "safe space" for your political opinions?
Statements like this are exactly the reason why I have always been hesitant about having a relationship with Y Combinator. Reminders to be courteous are welcome, but a ban of political "stories" is completely inappropriate especially at a time when minority voices are already consistently silenced.
Upvoted for disagreement.

HN is like a "release early, release often" sort of software project, which would require active testers on live code. I sincerely doubt that my sole efforts to study/game the system really made much effect overall to moderation. However, I definitely try to take your advice, and will continue to do so.

What I've found about voting/flagging is it's largely laziness, and those who take the opportunity to downvote first. Most of my posts are either downvoted within 5 minutes, or upvoted to +2 or 3, then actively downvoted to -3. There is usually a bottom on meta-moderation, though; once a post gets to -3, a post is rarely seen enough to be flagged. This goes triple for older submissions; if you make a new post on a day-old thread, even the most vitriolic and offensive post possible, you may get a 0 karma for the post. if you're unlucky. Either way your post will be near the bottom, even if +1.

I've had this account for 3 years now, and I had my first two flagged posts today, which tells you how little they are flagged.

If you're 45 minutes late to a topic, you'll likely read for a few minutes before you get to the bottom grey area. Most readers of comments flake out of a thread before they get that far. The ones that stick around usually notice the grey text, and don't downvote or flag, even if they disagree heavily with the comment. This is why it gets interesting when I experience late downvote-bombings, or someone that was so offended by what I said, that they downvote my post history; it means that someone went looking for me to retaliate. These anomalies provide a lot of information about the mean moderation activity, I think.

I'm seeing that all sides of a debate seem to have equal amounts of apathy when it comes to downvoting or flagging, and I attempt to account for that when playing.

I'm tempted to try and see how long a "Trump Supporters for Systemd" post would last in a linux thread this week, but I probably won't.
My biggest concern is the question of what is politics? Surely partisan political issues are politics, but is the position of women in tech also politics? Is climate science? I can see good arguments in either direction. The problem, then, is that it places too much power in the hands of those who answer the question of whether something is politics or not.

HN is already pretty bad at silencing opinions outside the groupthink common wisdom; I think this would just make it worse.
In 1999 I was a college "drop out" (financial aid probation due to poor discipline and depression, and I was too poor to pay for school for a semester), so I got my first "real" job doing ISP tech support in the little Oklahoma town I lived in. Had already learned basics of web dev (HTML via Notepad on Geocities) and some basic languages (Turbo Pascal, TI-BASIC, QBasic, Javascript, etc). Got into a little Perl, some heavy experimentation with ASP, and eventually, ColdFusion (learned via reading the manuals they shipped in the box).

Within 15 months of starting that job at $6/hour, I had my first development job in Houston at $30/hour. No degree, and there were no coding schools then. Just a hunger to learn.

Today there's resources like Stack Overflow, great open source editors like Atom and VS Code, and frameworks like Rails. I'd like to think it's easier, but maybe there's a greater depth of knowledge needed that makes it tougher.
Show HN: Ulterius, a complete remote administration suite in HTML5
The point of the bootcamp is the job you get after it's over. I imagine bootcamps make deals with the local tech companies to direct the grads to them, so the bootcamp can boast high hiring rates, and the tech companies gets devs for cheap.
"No lines"
I'm just imagining a huge group of people standing by the door waiting to download the app so they can buy eggs.
Still no information on reticulating splines.
There are techniques to improve aquifier recharge rates, or even actively replenish them by pumping. Of course, it all takes planning and resources to accomplish.

http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/
Just have more vodka, it kills the microbes :)
It's not really an overstatement as much as completely incorrect and misleading.

Yes, 2to3, tox, etc exist, but of course in practice it's not necessarily that simple, even for bigger libraries. Take Airbnb's Airflow for example.
Comment voting is good to filter out spam/off topic and then sadly it can be used to create an echo chamber where dissenting opinions of all sorts gets shut down.
> When I look at the tone of the downvoted/flagged "dissident" comments (not a value judgment, just an objective description of perspectives that are not generally well-tolerated in intelligent, cultured, Western circles today), and compare it to the tone of the "normative" comments, I see very little difference.... But the banhammer is applied very asymmetrically -- both by voters/flaggers, and by moderators. Or so it appears to me.

Very much agreed. I find dang having a problem with political accounts amusing, given it was dang's moderation that inspired me to make mine.
Stack Overflow and forums certainly do not pay their contributors. Many forums do not even pay their moderators. Just because there are coders that do not enjoy these things does not mean there is nobody who does. The tricky bit is to find the right people and allow them help as efficiently as possible.
> I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do...

Sure, why not. They are useless.

But, those "discussions" on Apple, Linux, Microsoft, FOSS and FSF, Vim, Emacs, IDEs, JS frameworks, programming languages, etc--they are so objective and fruitful...

Truth is, between the overton window and the commonly accepted fictions of the world there is only subjectivity, if you think you can be objective about anything you are delusional. And for someone who are not a believer in the common myths and accepted fallacies of this world--this is so much easier to fathom.

If your opinion is outside of the norm matrix you'll be downvoted, tough shit. Fair? Are your feelings hurt? This is not directed at you personally: if downvotes bother you, then don't partake in online discussions.
> It's the store's fault when you selfishly and silently put perishable goods in non-refrigerated areas so they can spoil?

It's incorrect and misleading to talk like that malicious use case is the only one at play here.
Well, this is going to be fun with the "politics detox".
That's translated inline in the original Greek, and in every subsequent translation. One does not need to understand the Aramaic, just to be familiar with the verse containing it.
I cannot offer evidence to that, but as a rational economic actor looking to maximize its profits, it seems obvious to me that it would be in WalMart best interest to act like this?

First, you kill competition, second you jack up the prices once you have established a defacto monopoly (or oligopoly)? See Uber lowering prices last year and "suddenly" rising them this month, now that they are the defacto standard in many cities?

Whethever or not laws & regulations should be in place to protect the consumer against that kind of behaviour is another debate :-)

Some variation of the prisoner dilemma could be raised as a counter argument to my comment, though...
Just a note on your point about S3 and Letsencrypt: AWS has their own tool for free provisioning of TLS certificates, which is all integrated in a very nice way if you put your S3 bucket behind Cloudfront (which is a good idea). Search the console for the AWS Certificate Manager.
I appreciate the sentiment but I fear a slippery slope. What counts as "politics"?
Which only applies to part of HN readers; from reading the comments here, many hackers appear to dislike the political arguments which take places on HN.
Sorry, but this is just goofy and bad.

If you depend on copy-on-write functionality, then you need to use an API that is specced to guarantee copy-on-write functionality. If that means you use an #ifdef per platform and do OS-specific stuff, then that is what you do.

Anything else is amateur hour.

If copy-on-write is a desirable feature, then as the API creator, your job is to expose this functionality in the clearest and simplest way possible, not to hack it in obscurely via the implementation details of some random routine. (And then surprise people who didn't expect copy-on-write with the associated performance penalties.)

This is why we can't have nice things.
The way malloc, calloc, and memset are implemented all are implementation specific. For example, memset, when asked to zero memory, may use cache control instructions such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_control_instruction#Data....

That tells your cache "pretend that you read all zeroes into the cache line at this address, and mark it as dirty (that guarantees the zeroes will be written out, even if the caller doesn't write to the cache line)

For small amounts of memory that will be written to soon, that's as good as free since it doesn't have to read from memory (the naive loop will, as it has to bring in an entire cache line before it can zero out its first byte or word)
Can't you expand this argument until it completely fills your reality? Is it exercising privilege to order a coffee or a sandwich without discussing politics? If so, simply pretend that's what you're doing here, except instead of a sandwich you've ordered some technology news and discourse.

The issues will still be there to fight when you're done, just in a more appropriate forum.
Tutorial to automate canary releasing and rollbacks with Vamp
Of course, on the day I visit the sky is covered in clouds. “No electricity will be produced today,“ says Rachid Bayed at the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen), which is responsible for implementing the flagship project.

This is a big problem with concentrating thermal solar power: it requires intense direct normal irradiance to work and performance falls off catastrophically when skies aren't clear. A conventional non-concentrating PV module can deliver about 10% of its rated output if it is illuminated at 10% of standard test conditions, e.g. sun through light cloud cover. Performance falls off almost linearly with decreasing illumination until very low levels. Concentrating solar thermal performance falls off a cliff with insufficient and/or diffused light.

You can see this effect in the EIA's data about US solar farms here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...

In the summer months, PV and concentrating solar thermal plants have comparable capacity factors. In the winter months, PV plant capacity factor falls off by less than half while thermal plant performance tumbles by ~80% (June 2016: 33.6% and 33.5%, January 2016: 17.9% and 6.8%).

A decade or so ago, solar thermal was justifiable because PV was so much more expensive. Even after PV matched and then beat solar thermal costs for instantaneous generation, thermal still had a value proposition for after-sunset operation via thermal storage (like this Moroccan plant has with molten salts). But as costs of PV and alternate forms of storage continue to fall, while solar thermal costs barely budge, I expect that solar thermal electricity is going to become obsolete even for the very sunniest regions.
Imagine HN banning crypto-related discussion for a week after the Snowden revelations, because it was too hard to deal with.
We are new to the startup scenerio.We have a great customer following.But we r looking for our seed fund /guidance to start it up;Its a platform to connect ,facilitate and empower moms.What would be ur suggestion for us to march ahead ,its a real world problem we r trying to solve .We dnt have an app and an mvp to show as our business model is slightly different.what would be ur suggestion to march ahead?We want to launch asap.
How to work with outsource developers
The issue is that currently the power is generated locally in Europe. In order for Morocco to export it's power to Europe, it would need the HVDC (high voltage direct current) power lines installed to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Reaction of a sysadmin: Nice. Let's not.

Configuration file should be passive data, not a programming language, and as
easy to process in variety of languages as possible.
"Crybully" is a particularly odious piece of political signalling masquerading as an argument, at least in my opinion. The person using it is of course also claiming to be victimized as a way of shutting up their political opponents, except that it doesn't count because everyone knows that only the "regressive left" are "crybullies".
So I love Condorcet's works .... on voting. Nothing politics ... just maths.

So I love Plato's work on SiFi hypothesis : what it means to be invsible and the implication on moralilty (cf privacy) ... just philosophy.

So I love Jeremy Bentham nerdy works of architecture on how to build perfect jails where the one in power can watch everything the others do without being watched ... just architecture.

Finally, I love Gary Gigax (D&D) quote : evil (or politic) is in the eye of the beholder!
The overwhelming majority of HN readers are Democrats/liberals/progressives and support Hillary Clinton and/or Bernie Sanders and will attempt to insult and suppress any Republican/conservative/Donald Trump supporter.
There was a huge campaign against "toilet water" when it was proposed.