skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
just today i replaced maven with ivy + a few scripts to build a java project i'm working on. it is so much better. ivy just for downloading the dependencies, the scripts for building and running. the scripts are easier to read and understand. the builds run much faster (incremental builds + starting go from 25s to 5s).

i appreciate maven's downloading of dependencies. but ivy does that too, only better: it generates a classpath list of the deps for me, to use when building and running.

maven does also handle builds, but it does so poorly. it is huge, overcomplex, slow. things that are easy on the command-line, are hard/weird to do with a maven pom.xml. the phases, lifecycles, goals, encoded in their xml format. so much stuff for so little gain. i've recently spent hours figuring out how to get my javadoc+doclet invocation in a format that maven understood (running it on a command-line was relatively easy; to get it to work in maven easily i ended up committing a compiled version of the doclet).

it baffles me maven is used so widely. i think java developers have a high tolerance (and often even love for) the unnecessarily complicated... that, or they haven't seen and can't imagine better ways.
the 2 yr rule depends on the funding agency and your profession. Most fellowship/postdoc positions funded by the government have this requirement.
And that's a fight that will be prompted by high unemployment after automation replaces many jobs.

The transition will be difficult (they usually are) but the end result (more free time for everyone) sounds good to me.
> I read the post before it was removed.

You should be able to see the flagged comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13105342) if you turn on showdead in your HN settings.

It is disappointing that HN isn't able to discuss openly the ways in which true facts are (ab)used to create false beliefs.
> Is there something like that out there?

Lots, and for decades. If you Google "AI medical diagnosis" you get a zillion hits, including a dedicated Wikipedia page.
My understanding is that sama does not run HN. I believe when things were restructured, HN became dang's baby.
I love this experiment!
Should I, in making a critical statement, be denied because someone else (or maybe several other someone elses) already have?

It seems a bit odd that if I'm a critic that my ability to exercise my freedom there is constrained by whether other people have.
There are a number of projects for transpiling X language into JavaScript. Most aren't super robust, but generally good enough for basic purposes. I feel once WebAssembly gets more steam, this will get even more robust.

Not claiming this is a good solution, but definitely would be one possible route.
I'm currently working on trying to crack an electronic safe lock based on the awesome DEFCON talk by Plore ( https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20pre... )

I don't think the photos are exactly up-to-date, but I currently have an STM32F429 DISCO dev board, configured with a ladder DAC, so I can generate the analog keypresses for the safelock via my laptop, the board also sets a pin high to force my oscilloscope to trigger and capture the voltage from my ucurrent, which is hooked up to the battery of the safe-lock.

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/safe/

I'm also trying to get some iron nanoparticles, if I can find them cheap enough, in order to try to optically image a floppy disk.

I've got some images from one in the link below, but that was using a magnetic developer, with much larger particles.

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/optical-magnetic-stri...
Same in Germany. When I visited the US for the first time. It was really strange for me to have people bag my groceries.
Also. I usually shop groceries with a back pack. How does that work in the US? Will they put the stuff in there for me?
The problem with that theory is that China is not some primitive savage culture that has no idea how to "copy" Facebook (like savages who "copied" runways very poorly).

Chinese could easily copy Facebook and call it something else but with built-in restrictions that they're looking for. They take our tech and perfect it for their culture. That's not identical to a guy in a hut with a wooden walkie-talkie. Sorry.

The only difference would be is that it's a closed network. Doesn't mean it's "less" or "primitive" or "savage" when compared to Facebook. Just different.
If you're in the bay and need someone with a simple 4'x8' CNC router running mach 3 to test with, I'm game.
"Why don't we have some politics but discuss it in thoughtful ways? Well, that's exactly what the HN guidelines call for, but it's insufficient to stop people from flaming each other when political conflicts activate the primitive brain. Under such conditions, we become tribal creatures, not intellectually curious ones. We can't be both at the same time."

I think this calls for more moderation so users that can speak civilly and intellectually about politics can do so, not banning speaking of politics entirely. "Conflict activat[ing] the primitive brain" is rather infantilizing, gaslighting, and not true.
Agreed. It struck me as a more humane (yet less hilarious) version of Missing Missy.[1]

[1]: http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html
What in your mind is 'the value of humanity'? If the ideal of humanity is to solve all problems, reach maximum efficiency, and eliminate all competition then we're probably going to design ourselves out of the system eventually.

People are inefficient sacks of meat with finite potential. When we have designed a black box that solves all problems, answers all answerable questions, maximizing all efficiencies for us, and protects us from any possible threat, what do we do next? What is left?

The value of humanity isn't a universal purpose, that's just how we fool ourselves into believing that there is a point to our lives. That's how we reason about pain, suffering, and hardship.

Human existence, our experience is existentially pointless. It is down to the individual to create a purpose. Perhaps you view the purpose as being something tangible and 'out there' to be had. Others see the purpose as simply just being, enjoying the small things, finding pleasure in the pointlessness.

No one can say what the value for another is. There is ultimately no value except that in which you find in yourself.

So let's not kid ourselves that we as a race are working toward some kind of ultimate design because that design is in our minds only and as such can't be 'ultimate' or significant to the 'other' in any way. Indeed it is likely to be a folly of our mind, a foolish solution to the non-problem of being.
> Im not assuming bad faith

You specifically asked "What's the ulterior motive here?" which implies you think there is an ulterior motive. An ulterior motive would be acting in bad faith, since it would by definition be different than the expressed motive, since the reasoning was clearly expressed above.

Presentation matters. Whether you meant it to be or not, your statement is somewhat inflammatory, for the reasons I just outlined. In my opinion, it's also a very good reason why the temporary ban is a good idea.
Yay, my five year old request for a moratorium (though it was for 2 months, not just a week...) is being honored. :) But really thanks for trying it, I hope it does good.
or http://bert-rpc.org/ perhaps.
This sounds like a cop out and I question whether this post would have been made had Trump lost and Clinton won.
> Sensor Fusion

I wonder, when did the obvious way you use sensors become a buzzword?
Some answers that come to mind:

- Azul's GC requires cooperation from the kernel; I believe it
specifically uses the virtual memory mechanism to implement a read
barrier. Basically you need a patched Linux kernel.
- Real-time GC will assuredly lower overall throughput, and increase
complexity. At the very least you need either a read barrier or a
write barrier. I don't think anyone uses read barriers normally;
write barriers are often used for generational GC, but I *think*
the write barriers used for real-time GC involve more work than
those for generational GC.
- Adding a read or write barrier to a language implementation that
doesn't already have them means you need to guard every single
place where someone reads or writes what might be a pointer. This
is easy to screw up.
- Several real-time GC algorithms punt on moving objects, and are
thus vulnerable to memory fragmentation. This obviously reduces
the robustness of the runtime system. (Others use stop-the-world
to do compaction, and thus are not real-time.)
I am not sure why we need to replace Ruby with Elixir. Nor do I understand why it is necessary to write every new code in Elixir.
I mean when Crystal gets production ready are you guys going to rewrite everything from Elixir to Crystal ? :-|
Elixir is not a substitute for Ruby. It's completely different paradigm and language. Same for Crystal. They just happen to feel like Ruby but are missing a lot from Ruby/Rails ecosystem.

I really like lispness of Ruby and the rails ecosystem. For a lot of things it's still numero uno technology.
The best way is to get a bunch of people to answer messages for you, and filter out personal insults. Also you do not need to read the news, it's possible to live under a rock and still write the best software.
If you want to talk to other like minded, conferences are nice, and also IRC, there's always nice guys lurking there and if you write something interesting they will wake up, just be patient.

Then there are community management, everything you say or write can be used against you, and there are trolls trying to make you look bad. The community can be very powerful if managed though, thousands of people can achieve a lot together.

When you make something successful, people will love you, and we all want attention, so it will be hard not to become a public figure, but you're better off not to, because there will also be haters and if you make a bad move, those fans can easily turn into an angry mob.
Here's my rough sketch on how this could work:

a) You track every person from multiple camera angles, it should be "relatively easy" to track the position of every customer at all times. I'm not sure if it can handle people in very close proximity (or e.g. after hugging in store) - maybe Amazon actually uses facial recognition to resolve the identities afterwards

b) Only one person can enter the gate at once, and it's easy to authenticate the person at the starting point

c) Leaving is also a one-way gate, and at that point the system can simply mark the shopping as complete and mail the receipt

d) The shelves are specially designed and can sense (maybe with RFIDs) when an item is removed from the shelf, and match that with the person closest to the item. A possible difficulty is handling people who take an item from the back of the shelf (e.g. to get a fresh item).
Building a startup within a startup
A 40 digit calculator using a Ras Pi, Java, 7-segment readouts, MAX7219 chips driven slightly out of spec (ab)using the SPI pins. Two 4x4 keypads to form an 8x4 keypad so it will be a scientific calculator. Found a Java library to do transcendental functions using BigDecimal. All of this on a breadboard. (I'm a software guy who doesn't know which end of a soldering iron to pick up.)

Other project. A 64x64 RGB LED display driven by a Teensy 3.2, in C++. A friend who does hardware but not so much software sent a beautifully assembled rig in a very nice enclosure.

No blog.
and that ignoring the "virus" or "symptoms" will make the adjustment that much more traumatic

There are other sites to talk about politics on. Personally, I'm happy to come to HN to learn new things.

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

An extremely active 3000-day HN user with excellent technical contributions was recently banned due to the way they chose to express themselves regarding a political story. This made the community weaker, even if it was a necessary ban.
One reading of this is that people in open source JS community should be more professional, but I think you could make similar complaints about electronic communities in general. A blogger in 1999 writing about woodworking might have had similar complaints about feedback from random readers on the Internet.

If you put anything out there on the Internet and encourage people to read it/use it/whatever, you will inevitably be surprised and repulsed by how nonconstructive and uninformed some of the feedback is. Web development might be worse than other fields in this respect because there's just that many more amateur, narcissistic, toxic teenagers (in spirit at least) who don't know what they don't know diving into it, who are going to be somewhat more focused on getting cheap upvotes on Reddit with angry rants than actually creating things.

I don't know what the solution is. Some forums have higher SNRs than others, and while I often enjoy Reddit, I have no expectation that the people posting to programming subreddits are any better as a group than people who posted to Slashdot in 1999. If you do anything and tell anyone about it, some bonehead on Reddit is going to take issue with it and write an angry, uninformed, thoughtless screed about how everything is terrible and it's all your fault. You'll find some gems in places like Reddit as well, but it's just such a random stew of people that you have to take it all with a huge grain of salt.

I agree with just about everything in the article, but given the number of Reddit quotes used as examples, part of the author's problem is taking Reddit too seriously or assuming that a given community on Reddit is a reflection of a larger programming community, whereas often the opposite is true. Oftentimes the people that post the most have the least to say, on Reddit (and the Internet in general), as in life.
FWIW, we have both automated and machine-based checkout at our grocery store, and I choose the machine-based when I can because its faster, and I usually have a wife and kids waiting at home.

So, sometimes the more automated option is also the option that involves more net 'humanity' for me (or at least more time for close/meaningful human relationships).

For me, this retail model would be attractive.

Separately, I agree that automation may be displacing people who need assistance as a result, but I think the best way to address that is to offer government assistance, not to avoid the valuable automation.
I like the idea of it being a detox and nothing more. I understand that political discussions can drag a site down, just look at reddit, but in the long term ignoring everything political can only hurt us. When it comes to topics like net neutrality, environment, and security/encryption, we can be doing the job of the government itself by crippling our grassroots/discussion efforts.

Being aware of the government stepping in our gardens is important, and if the side effect is sometimes we get mad at eachother, well, at least we're aware.
New dwarf satellite galaxy of Messier 83 found
I assume they will sell non perishable items at some point when this becomes public. I bet there will be security at the doors verifying purchases after the first couple of weeks:

http://www.inews880.com/syn/112/172511/mom-and-pop-bust-reco...

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2016/11/17/bc-man-arrest...
Wearables, Node.js and Docker on Triton
We should go bravely into the future, and solve problems as they arise. Maybe this is the catalyst for basic income?
Sounds like a worthwhile enough experiment. And at the risk of sounding political: what better time than now?

Either way, we'll see how it goes.
Politics stories seem to get flagkilled 95% of the time already, and despite the difficulty of discussing it politics affects our daily lives a lot more than the latest release of some javascript framework.
At Asteria we're using a Agent-System-Interface model, and are building models around observations of your own activity.

I 100% agree we need to teach them like humans, so they at least can build a model of how humans interact and participate with one another. At the least this will teach them about us, more than it will teach them about anything else. And if we want to participate and collaborate with that future of AI we need to have these models.
i have to agree. i hate any level of socializing at the supermarket - i'm there to get what i need and be gone. i don't mind running into friends i like, but i really get annoyed running into casual acquaintances due to the social niceties.
... war and gardening don't mix.

Well, victory gardens were a thing not very long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
As a frequent commenter I think this is a good experiment, but I think it's worth considering what kind of platform HN considers itself.

Technology and politics are intimately linked, even if it's not always obvious. Technology's impact on politics is only going to grow in my opinion so I think the "political" discussions - as they relate to technology - are vital for the community at large.

If we as a community are going to be "disrupters" whether intentionally or not, we need to understand and discuss the social and political landscape and impacts of our work better, so that we can implement our technology in a way that doesn't spurn backlash from the communities and thus their political leaders.

Talk about political scandals and the like don't do service to this community, so I think those topics should be sequestered. However discussions on encryption, automation etc... are perfect topics for this community in my opinion.
I've been developing a Motorola 68K-based retro computer. The goal is somewhere around Atari ST-era sophistication, but it isn't quite there yet. Currently has a UART, some switches, some LEDs, and a periodic timer. Still needs keyboard input, video output, removable storage, and a slightly smarter interrupt controller.

http://coderjames.bitbucket.org/

The website has a bunch of broken links to missing material, as I haven't gotten around to writing it yet. All the schematics, gerbers, and firmware source code are up though, so it should be reproducible.
You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers"? Would you like to elaborate on that?

It's not surprising that many find it offensive when people don't bother to differentiate between newbie programmers who have just learned the basics of jQuery and experienced front-end developers capable of building complex, well-architected applications.
I'm also concered that the timing of this can be partisan. Clearly Trump is still appointing high level cabinet members and discussing those things has merit. Yet during many of Obama's controversies, this site was allowed to chug away endlessly with an anti-Democratic, anti-Obama narrative. I think HN goes zero politics entirely or lets us continue as is. This move could be interpreted as pro-Trump especially if we're going to get the SoS announcement this week.

>Our values are fragile

No, they aren't. If your values can't handle a basic criticism then your values are terrible. HN shouldn't be creating 'safe spaces' for the status quo or the new administration. I'd rather get heckled at Hamilton than live in a society where we worry about hurting each other's values, feelings, sense of entitlements, etc. Open discourse is always the superior solution.

If harm is being done, challenge it on a one by one basis. I see some very rude tones, borderline namecalling here, and other issues that get ignored by the mods. Encourage a polite discourse, don't eliminate it. I'd also be less liberal with posting rights. New accounts shouldn't be able to post on day one. A lot of these political firestorms are via 'green' accounts who may or may not be paid shills coming here and performing deflection and reading off bulletpoints or playing up typical 'whataboutisms'. Or regulars who post the same axe grinding over and over. Sadly, this goes against the religion of 'growth hacking' where conversations and new signups are the only metric that matters.
I really don't think the community is OK with it, but the last year or two has experienced a massive influx of redditors to this site, bringing their "This" posts, and near 4chan-tier of shitposting.

Many of those people now have more than 500 karma, by appealing to the majority opinion, so they're allowed to downvote all they want, skewing the demographics of the site. If you've been here a while, you probably noticed the shift in discourse and submission quality.

It happens with all "Nerd News" sites; they're great at the begining, then the people that shouldn't be here start coming, and the signal-to-noise ratio gets closer to 1:1.
and i'm sure they're just fantastic for your gaming rig, but wouldn't survive 2 or 3 years in a datacenter. they will literally all fail.
Yes! This is awesome. All of the politics is tiring.
We could, I dunno, talk about tech, I suppose ...
So, do you mean only national politics?
An extremely active 3000-day user with excellent technical contributions was recently banned due to politics.

They were banned because of what they chose to write, it wasn't just because of a political discussion.
The beauty (in my eyes at least) of Hacker News has always been that the most interesting/relevant stories and discussions find their way to the top of the feed. I've discovered topics and perspectives (including those I disagree with) that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to if it weren't for HN. I've always felt there is something of a built-in filter present, so this move feels a little forced and unnecessary to me.
haha...that name is hideous
Think of the opportunity: someone can build a "privacy" store where you can buy anything without being traced.
I was being a bit facetious with the grocery bagging example. My core point is "Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once 5, 50, 95% of jobs are automated away?"
We wrote it for somewhat subtle reasons. First, there aren't too many alternatives out there — VNC is meant for human consumption, not for bots after all :). Second, for a single connection, once you're using Tight encoding, the bottleneck becomes server-side encoding and libjpeg-turbo, neither of which will depend on your driver. As you scale to many connections, the important thing becomes managing the parallelism well. Go is great for this.

We'd started by adapting an existing Python driver in Twisted, implementing additional encodings and offloading to threads for calls into C libraries like zlib. We got this working reasonably on small environments like Atari, but for environments which generated many update rectangles, we started to be bitten by the GIL. I still believe that one could make Python work, but it'd take quite a lot of effort.

libvncserver is a fast C driver, but it's GPL, and doesn't have any particular support for parallelization. We wanted Universe to be usable by everyone, from hobbyists to companies, so GPL was a no-go. (We actually talked to the libvncserver maintainers, who said that they would be interested in dropping GPL restriction, but there have been far too many contributors over its long history to figure out how to do so.)

Our Go driver, based on https://github.com/mitchellh/go-vnc, has scaled quite well. It takes advantage of Go's lightweight thread model: each connection runs in its own goroutine, which makes it easy to run hundreds of connections in parallel without needing hundreds of threads.
Can we have an Amazon/AWS "news" detox week, too? :D
NPR's Planet Money podcast did a story two months ago with the inventor of the self checkout machine, Howard Schneider.

At the end of the end of the episode he was asked what his "dream" supermarket would be, and he said one where people don't have to check items out. They walk in, grab something, walk out, and are automatically charged.

This seems to be exactly what Amazon has done. Pretty amazing to see the realization of his dream be announced only two months after his interview.