skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You assume that all men are automatically welcomed into the high ranks of science, which is untrue.

No I don't.

> Yes, maybe more boys got a home computer for Christmas than girls - but how many girls had that home computer on their wish list?

Exactly, I'm glad you see the problem. Everyone unconsciously adopts stereotypes based on how people around them act, and what they see in the world. Children are especially susceptible.

> Entering fields were nobody looks like you: maybe the women from Harvard is more similar to the man from Harvard than another man from community college, though?

Good point, class and upbringing are diversity issues too. You do see a lot of efforts to introduce computing and sciences to low-income schools and neighborhoods, which is great.

> Some studies have some merit, like the response rate according to names, but it is not really enough to chalk it all up to discrimination.

Nothing is 100% discrimination, but where it's a problem, it should be addressed.

> As for the 80%, no it is not random chance - men and women are different.

> My not-validated theory to explain it: maths is hard, let's go shopping! (Translation: women have other options).

Oh, I see. Should have read your whole comment before I started writing a response.
"You are making classic mistake of viewing ancient texts in light of recent findings and theories."

No, thats confirmation bias. That is not what Hindu texts are saying at all, keep in mind these scriptures were spoken tens of thousands of years ago and then written down, whilst Scientists are only understanding our solar system well enough over the last 1000 years. Planets like Shani (Saturn) etc were well known in Hindu texts long before telescopes existed.
I hope you recognize that you can only opt out of being stressed about politics because you're not on the receiving end. :/
I have no problems with the steps that have been taken to combat abuse (in particular I like the mention of a configurable inbox filter), but I find a lot of things wrong with the Contributor Covenant.

In particular:

> Use welcoming and inclusive language

Why does language have to welcoming and inclusive? Can't it merely meet a minimum standard of mutual respect?

> Focusing on what is best for the community

Shouldn't it be what's best for the project? I understand that's nitpicking but the focus is wrong.

> Showing empathy towards other community members

Why are people required to show empathy? Is this a group therapy session? When would it make sense for personal issues to become involved in an open source project?

Furthermore, project maintainers have the "right and responsibility" to enforce the often vague guidelines regarding negative conduct ("personal or political attack"?) and can receive "temporary or permanent repercussions" (very vague) for failing to follow the Covenant in "good faith". It just seems like despite a lot of good intentions it leaves too much room for interpretation and gives people grounds to bully others out of involvement with the project if it is taken at face value.
Very true, high emotions preclude clear thinking and this week will be a worthwhile experiment. But unfortunately web technologies are at the core of recent political events making this a very hard problem. For example will discussion on the following topics be disallowed for the week?

-Discussions of intrusions into US infrastructure by Russia which, curiously, always engender enormous political controversy.

-Manipulation of social media for political ends both manual and automated.

-Policy changes on net neutrality proposed by the president elect or others.

-Governmental surveillance as is and as likely to evolve.

-Trolling as a political tool to disrupt opposing communities.

One level up, there is also the possibility that calm well informed discussion is the exact thing that is targeted for destruction. But perhaps this week's experiment will take some steps towards thinking about that.
And that's an argument I can understand
Asset prices in China are grossly inflated because of 1) capital controls and 2) China has been running large trade surpluses for about 2 decades.

It would make sound financial sense for any rich person to move as many assets as they could out of the country, regardless of whether the nation's institutions were trustworthy.
(Look for another reply I made in this discussion, not in this thread)

SF has a different culture than the Valley; the peninsula is its own, highly technical world which SF has fewer tech businesses (though more than it used to). Sure SF has some crazy building constraints, but in the larger contexts (good universities, good laws, a much more "anything goes" environment) the whole region is really strong. SF has had a historical tolerance for crazy people since the gold rush (that kook might have $10K worth of gold in his pocket so if you send him away you won't get any of it) that few other places have had.

So cal (both SD and LA) has a different culture, more extractive, and has a different mix (lower university density for example). Remember when the film industry fled the east coast patent monopoly they went to the Bay Area first, only moving to Hollywood because of the sun (they still had to film outdoors in those days as artificial lighting wasn't good enough).
Just to provide a contrasting point of view: CoffeeScript is the only reason I ever wrote, and ever write, JavaScript. Period. Transpilers do add a layer of complexity, but all of the syntax sugar advantages make it more than worth it to me.

I would not ever write JavaScript if CoffeeScript or similar languages did not exist. Before it existed, I never touched the language. I now use CoffeeScript daily and have never been happier. A watchdog script automatically transpiles the code upon updates, and everything is completely seamless for me.
That answers my question.
Thank you for taking the time. :)
What are you trying to say, in plain English?
Playing Xvid torrents in the browser [video]
What if a tech topic (say the current Amazon Go thread) sparks a debate about 'is it socially acceptable or not?'

If the story gets big enough, the articles about Amazon Go's impact on workers will move from the tech section to the politics section of the newspapers. Where do you draw the line on HN in that case? Once they have move in the WaPo, we should stop talking about them?

I agree with others that moderating such a large online community is probably very hard and that dang and others probably experience bad times when comments thread inflame, but I think that a blanket ban on affairs of the cities is not the way to go.

Actually, I find it quite funny that we are having this debate, because in essence that is a political debate. Some US posters will consider it as hampering their right to free speech, some others will consider that making that space void of any political discussions is fine, some (as myself :-) ) think it is impossible and impractical... Debate around the frontiers of that is admitted here is entirely political, in the noble sense of the word.

As long as our debate is civil (and as far as I can see, it is), I think we should be allowed to have it. And what if my comments are not interesting and bring nothing to the debate? They will be downvoted to hell. HN, in contrast with Reddit, has apparently a very good track record with karma. It seems that brigading is not practiced around here.

I think it is probably linked to the fact that under a certain thresold, you cannot down-vote. My karma is indeed too low to downvote for instance and at first I was uneasy with the fact that I couldn't downvote...but I think I am starting to understand why it is actually a good rule for the board ;-)
Which current sensors are you using? This sounds interesting.
It's sad that you bristled so indignantly at my words...In your haste to screech that I put words in your mouth

Really now. You speculate on my motivations/intentions in black and white right here: "I think you're falsely equivocating the British-inspired American Common Law system with a fundamentally, institutionally different Chinese concept."

Silly archaic laws like NH's brothel law are wholly unrelated to Business, and if a business in NH or America formed to take advantage of archaic laws they would be smacked down aggressively by a court or legislature.

I never said otherwise. However, thanks for writing the above sentence, that cuts to the heart of the matter. I find this useful and informative.

We're discussing a complicated 3 headed legal system where natives have a different experience than foreigners.

And I deny this, where? Please look back at the comments. I'm not saying any of the things you say I'm saying. Rather you infer those things and run with them. Provide a quote that shows otherwise. In any case, thanks again for clarifying what the effective difference is.
What is the experiment? What is the hypothesis and what are the metrics we will be using to measure success or failure? I cannot understand how this is healthy or beneficial. If there are disrespectful comments, moderate them. But saying "some people cannot talk about these things constructively so lets not talk about these things at all" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm with you. Far too many technocrats simply go "politics are not my problem", and before you know it you've helped build a police state.

If we discuss and use technology without considering it's ethical ramifications then we are on cruise control to hell.

To those who will respond with "he said politics, not ethics" - prithee - where is the line?

Stifling one angle of discussion stifles others.
Thinking from first principles.

Sometimes starting the other way around might be helpful - not seeking inspiration but defining the essence of your value proposition and starting from there.

We often tend to develop horseless carriages.
https://www.instagram.com/bloudermilk/ for the lazy
Reading this article I realized that entropy is actively eliminating systems that are not efficient enough at compensating (various non-living chemical structures), making it much more profitable to be one of the systems that can compensate against it (living cells). By overcoming this threshold of entropy, life has gained resiliency. Without the constant destructive effect of entropy, probably there could be no life. Life is both created and destroyed by entropy.

On a parallel note, deep learning neural nets rely on randomness in connectivity and order of examples, and sometimes just consumes random numbers and turn them into coherent images or sounds. Entropy/randomness is essential in Reinforcement Learning in the exploration-exploitation dilemma - we need to discover the space of possibilities, and in order to do that we need randomness. Interesting how chaos is tangent with intelligence and life, it is practically creating a space for them.
Thank goodness. The snowpack is of irreplaceable importance to the ecology of California. Without the summer melts, California would turn in to a desert.
General Availability of Regional Managed Instance Groups
This is a terrible decision. The tech industry has built powerful tools of social control, and runs vast databases of private data on pretty much everyone in the country. 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.

We need to be talking about the political implications of what we've built, and figuring out how to fix our mess. This is like the period before the hurricane: everyone should be busy boarding up windows, and you can't do that if you decide you're just not going to talk about the coming storm because it makes you feel bad.
I too have not found a good place to have any type of political discussion. Even on HN it's better but still almost impossible especially if you have any type of opinion or have done anything in the past that doesn't align with what the majority of opinions are on this site.

Politics seem to work like religion in the brain. I'm not sure it's possible to have a good discussion.
"It is like Gin Gonic, but it features Angular-like (or Spring like) dependency injection and better input handling."
My buddy has something going along the same lines but is using temp sensors to detect a pint being pulled:

https://mobile.twitter.com/toms_beer_keg/status/799323771043...
My oldest son quite often comes up with a third, better alternative. The fact that I consider and sometimes accept them might make some other situations harder, because obviously he often cannot understand more complex situations and then there is a conflict. Saying no to a perfectly reasonable suggestion (because it wasn't mine) might teach him to never argue, but I wouldn't want that.
Thanks for the tip. I just implemented it and it said 44 other people are monitoring that page haha.
A "safe space" if you will.
A completely numeric orrery for lack of a better term.
I've got one of those IKEA Dioder strips, and I've got it hooked up to a RasPi. There's a node library (of course) that lets you set it to any RGB color and even supports transitions.

Next step would be to make it flash when messages come in - different color for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. - and having it integrate with the Philips Hue and Alexa.
Wikipedia: "An indentured servant or indentured labor is an employee (indenturee) within a system of unfree labor who is bound by a contract (indenture) to work for a particular employer for a fixed period of time. Indenturees usually enter into an indenture for a specific payment or other benefit or to meet a legal obligation, such as debt bondage."

Student loans aren't indentured servitude because they're not tied to a specific employer. H1-B visas are so tied, but there's the option to quit and go back to one's own country. But the Cato Institute proposal describes being "bound by a contract to work for a particular employer for a fixed period of time" enforced by a debt obligation. That's indentured servitude. Probably illegal in the US.
Why N++ when there's VSCode? Both free, but VSCode is better in most ways apart from maybe boot time?
[msft] Understood. Note that you can view notebooks w/o login. If you want a truly no login experience, try the awesome https://tmpnb.org service. But note that these are temporary (tmp-nb...) and will go away. The login we require is to show you your notebooks next time you're back. If your school has office365 the existing creds should just work.
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Politics is way more important than most of what we discuss here. Think about topics like gay marriage: being able to marry who you want is a much bigger deal for most people than whether Node.js is better than Erlang (Erlang is way better!).

That's another reason why it should be banned, because it will crowd out other topics by dint of being more important to more people - which is also a feedback loop, as more people get drawn in for the politics.
Really depends. In the Bay Area these days, sellers will usually only take offers with zero contingencies (because they can). Even if you do get a financing contingency in your offer and the deal falls through because of a low appraisal, there's almost always a back-up offer waiting in the wings that can cover the low appraisal with an additional downpayment (the bank doesn't really care about if the house appraises for the selling price, they just want to make sure that their Loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is OK.
You might want to talk to some engineers about that.

It may be possible to have a fine degree of control over air pressure in today's high spec houses because of their high air tightness requirements.

I don't know that it is possible, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was because they are so tight they have to employ mechanical ventilation. I know hospitals employ air pressure as a way of controlling for disease spreading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_room_pressure
Dhall 1.0.1: a total programming language specialized to configuration files
Does OpenAI Universe communicate in any way with OpenAI remotely regarding activity in OpenAI Universe? Essentially, are there any call-home aspects to the code base? Or, is it possible to run this locally without any outside communication?

If there is remote communication, can you detail why and where it exists in code?
OutWatch: A functional and reactive UI framework for more predictable code
Thank God. Now the West has to figure out how to conserve water better to avoid drying up and burning too much when future droughts occur. Drip irrigation in agriculture and desalination are both useful technologies for water sustainability in semi-arid environments.
How on earth can one talk about labour displacement without involving political solutions? You could say "purely economic" or "purely technical" solutions only need apply - but by doing so you are taking an ideological stance, which is political.
It may (or may not) have been a bit of stretch on my part for which the only excuse I have is that I was going on memory and the phrase triggered my memory.

The first edition discusses Least Mean Squares LMS which is in a way [that way being my way maybe] the 'evil twin' of Least Squares. It fits the data points (in this case the values produced by the agent) to a known curve rather than the curve to the data points. In the first edition, 'long running' examples are on the order of a few hundred to a thousand epochs and fitting a curve via linear regression is similar computationally.

Anyway, I'll claim poetic license if I must. And I must if my hand waving doesn't work.
I was one of the pre-orderers for the original Leap Motion. I played around with making apps for it within the first few weeks.

It was pretty bad. I was fighting the API the whole time because its post-processed palm and finger positioning data was noisy and and error-prone, and it didn't have a raw mode. The API would frequently lose track of individual fingers. You also couldn't do any hand gestures that involved your palm pointing horizontally instead of up/down because it would lose track of your occluded fingers. It also had issues tracking fingers when you held them together (as if you were going to karate-chop something). It's just too many quirks to deal with if you're trying to do hand position and gesture input.

Maybe it's improved since then, but after one day back around the initial launch I basically gave up on the tech for hand tracking, deciding that it was just not a good approach.
Might I offer a Neo-like "Woah", in response to that insight? I'll have to think about that.
How I would like to learn Scala?
also related - https://codegangsta.io/blog/2014/05/19/my-thoughts-on-martin...

Martini also relied heavily on DI and reflection for convenience and the author basically conceded that this was not idiomatic.
> often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community

That got me to post in "issues" a few times, while apologizing and pointing out they should have a forum. It's so easy too: Just create a new subreddit (or use an existing one) and - that part is important!! - point to it as an official channel. Flow(type.org) is an example. Their "support" links are: SO, Github issues, Twitter, IRC. All of them are very bad for discussing general usage questions. If your question isn't already very well formulated and very specific, with code, SO will downvote and close your question. IRC or any chat mixes everything and it is about that particular moment, it does not collect people's responses over the course of a day or two.

Oh and please don't create your own forum. Almost all forum software sucks. As much as one wants to complain about reddit, their forums work, and I mean the technology and design and usability. There is a Flow subreddit, but since the Flow support page doesn't point to it it's pretty empty. Flow is just an example.
Show HN: Toolwatch – Measure and track the accuracy of your watch
I think one of the reasons the time limit hasn't come up much in discussion is that it's hard to envision the data/information/knowledge that we might have in a week that we don't have today. I don't mean to imply one way or the other whether this experiment will have meaningful results, just that it's hard for me to picture myself, in a week, reviewing the situation and saying "wow, now I know X, Y, Z." I mean I'm not sure what those X, Y, and Z might be.

On the other hand, the idea of an interminable ban on political discussion has many obviously salient implications, emotions, and such. A sort of half-baked analogy is that it's like lighting a tiny, contained trashcan fire in the middle of a nuclear reactor--it's not really a big deal but it's easy to see how it could trigger high-magnitude reactions from onlookers.
> It often feels like there is one prevailing slant on this site and those of the majority are free to push their views while the rest of us must either read it and ignore it or face the onslaught of downvotes if we express a dissenting opinion.

Are there any online communities where their political opinions match more with yours? Why don't you hang out there instead? I realize that's reinforcing an echo chamber, but it sounds like you're looking for more of an echo chamber, right?

> even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way

Maybe an example of a time you made a point in an informed and respectful way only to be downvoted and derided would help clarify?

> Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.

I strongly disagree. I don't know what "fair treatment" means, but if enough people on the site feel a topic is worth talking about, we should talk about it. Specific incidences of abuse should be flagged, but again, it's hard for me to say one way or another without examples showing what you mean.

As to the overall question of whether politics should be allowed on HN, HN started as "Startup News". It's always been a site about entrepreneurship, mostly in the tech industry. Entrepreurship is intimately linked to politics in obvious and non-obvious ways. Politics has to do with taxes, healthcare, immigration, legality of certain types of research, market size and access, shifting demographic trends, financing sources, and much more.

Edit: I removed a final sentence because it's moot and doesn't add to my actual argument.
Cripes. I shouldn't have binge-watched "House of Cards" and "Westworld" last night.
The solution to "Certain types of story result in unpleasant arguments" doesn't have to be "Prevent that type of story from being visible". Media sites will happily disable comments on certain stories, but haven't extended that to not reporting on those stories in the first place.
Please correct me if I have completely misread your statement. It sounds as if you believe there are topics that are so important that they must always be discussed in any forum dedicated to any topic?
This detox experiment calls for all members of the community to police all comments for all mentions of the censored concepts.

Regardless of whether a given comment is OK now, once this detox experiment gains steam will anyone be able to mention anything about any of the designated concepts under the anxious eyes of a newly deputized membership?

(I'm specifically thinking about the 99th percentile of moderation activity given the large number of people on the site and the fact that neutral opinions are not counted by the current voting system.)

Or, will these sorts of down votes be weighted? And if so, by what? Using the karma system doesn't seem appropriate - there are many well-spoken members on HN that hold wildly different, even antagonistic, viewpoints.

What inhibits abusive moderation activity of the sort observed when a CTR-like group was actively manipulating /r/politics?
NYC Tree Map
Why is there such low activity on this thread vs the OpenAI thread?