skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's in HN's DNA to have a single community. The path you're talking about leads to subreddits, which would make for a different kind of site, one that was broken into silos rather than being in the same world. This is an important point, because it touches on the what-HN-is-and-isn't thing.

HN is a community for the the intellectually curious, who come here for a wide range of interests (some of which have political aspects, of course--there's no getting away from that). But there's a different kind of users, ideologically committed ones, who use HN primarily for political battle. That's not something that sits well with the purpose of this site, as I tried to explain above.

Those users really want a different kind of site than HN, and need to find another, or maybe start a new one. Plenty of new sites have spawned from HN; that's partly a function of our not trying to be all things. HN has always been in the lucky position of not needing to grow for growth's sake, so we're happy when people who want a different kind of community find it, or create it.
Unless you believe in souls or some other form of dualism, then clearly machines will eventually be able to do anything we can do.

But we're far from that point now. Anything machines can currently do is, pretty much by definition, drudgery. I'd be happy to reevaluate that statement if and when this changes.

I have no idea what the ultimate answer to that question would be. Lots of SF authors have tried to address it, coming up with answers varying from humans always having something they can do better, to humans existing to have fun, to humans having no point at all and therefore get wiped out by the machines.
Another quote, showing her true motives:

"I don’t think plagiarists are effective. I’ve read nothing by Libertarians (when I read them, in the early years) that wasn’t my ideas badly mishandled"
One concern I immediately have is that what is politics to one person might not be politics to another, and given that too many flags that are judged to be inaccurate result in the removal of the user's ability to flag...

You see where I'm going with this. It may be worth rescinding that policy during the testing period.
>Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means.

And who is going to keep the comments on track? The typical anti-US people will come out in droves to derail. So we'll end up with the same issues, but instead we'll have political filtering done on the accepted articles themselves that could generate bias.

Its not like all these people will suddenly stick to the topic. In fact, I find many articles that involve India, China, Russia, Brazil, etc usually have a top comment of "But the US is worse." There's a lot of knee-jerk anti-US sentiment here and filtering things out isn't going to change that.
> so HN users

I'd appreciate if you didn't make accusations like these which include me in it. This is coming from a moderator - IIUC, it's entirely dang's idea.

> admit

a one week experiment.

> banning all political topics

Temporarily.

> just because current state of affairs upsets someone

It sounds like it has nothing to do with that.

> how about you stop feeling offended and start listening to each other

It starts with you. There is no other word than offended for your reaction to this little announcement here. And if you actually listened, you'd perhaps glance more than just "we're offended Trump won so we're banning politics forevah".

My initial reaction to this announcement was actually negative - I like politics on HN, the community does a decent job of keeping the trashy comments flagged. But then, seeing your post essentially proved dang's point: You've been here for 3.5 years, but just couldn't help yourself and take a piss on the community you're a part of, to try score some political points.

Urgh. It's so disappointing.
I don't understand, what's wrong with that? I've never used Go so I'm asking out of ignorance.
> I see this great move as a way of the community lifting its head out of a sandy quagmire to glance at the shining beacon, the vision on the hill, the where we want to be, unsullied by political nausea.

The vision of where we want to be is the central political debate of all time, to which all other political discussions are peripheral appendages. So, no, banning political discussion doesn't let us focus on that, it prohibits even considering it.
I respect this decision and the difficulty of moderating in this crazy climate, but I think for most people those issues aren't so clearly divided. Take, for example, privacy, where a lot of the positions are based in class and political ideologies, and the outcome of that discussion very much affects tech. Or on the ethics of technologies that replace workers (like the recently announced amazon go) - clearly we need to have a discussion based on political ideologies to talk about whether universal basic income, job retraining, or something else is a solution to real fallout from these trends. Hacker news is close to my only source of smart and civil discussion about these relevant, but politically charged discussions.

I agree hatefully ranting is not working but I don't think politely steering away from the difficult part of the conversation is prudent either. I'm looking forward to hacker news being a place we can still have these difficult discussions in a civil tone after this moratorium.
Given the political issues that are of extreme interest to people here that aren't toxic (crypto backdoors, h1b, etc), why not modify the rule to be "no election discussion, broadly defined" rather than "no politics"?
When "politics" is treated as "things that affect other people that we opine about", this decision makes sense.

But this decision is the epitome of privilege. To enter a space thinking "I'm not going to think about politics" is to be someone whose sheer existence in that space isn't a political statement in and of itself. And for many, such a space is "The United States", "The Tech Community", "HN", or whatnot.

Saying "We're going to forget y'all for a week" is... just... fucking... terrible. And whoever conceived of it should be fired on the spot.
I've said the exact thing on multiple occasions. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12892550. this dude created something that opened a port and listened for commands that would control your OS. He hadn't spent 5 minutes making even some basic form of authentication and came straight to HN for the high 5's. People tried to flame me for pointing out that it seemed irresponsible to be promoting software in such a state.
Unfortunately, to achieve the functionality I described, I must have used reflection like that, which is not really nice, but I really prefer it to context based methods type assuming and casting which is essentially the same. I know people do not like reflection that is used like this, but the performance is not a concern, and I really got tired of transforming user input and checking for errors in each handler.
But it is rude. An important part of a civil and substantive discussion is not personally insulting other users. Please don't do this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thats a highly individualistic point of view. One where as long as you're willing to put in the effort and be flexible you'll be able to thrive. I see it a lot on HN because most of us work in growing fields with many opportunities. Maybe you had to uproot your life and move to San Francisco but hey, now you work for Google and clear six figures.

There comes a point where flexibility and gumption don't get you far enough. When the pool of good quality jobs shrinks so much that the ecosystem cannot support the species.

I'm not calling for a halt to progress. If you hadn't automated away those jobs someone else would have. There are very strong economic incentives to do so. I just wish governments would see the writing on the wall and start planning for the future where the status quo leaves most people out in the cold.
I'm very confidant that adults who resort to hitting children have failed at parenting.

EDIT: in this thread you have two people thinking it's okay to deliberately burn a child -to hold a child's hand to a cooker hot ring- to "teach" that child the risk of playing with ovens. Learn to parent you hopeless clueless fucking idiots.
Because title case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Case_styles
I use notebooks a lot, but with Julia. In any case, this is <3 amazing news !
The Northwest Angle: Inside the Nesting Geography of Exclaves and Enclaves
Looking at this, it looks like a very minimal, reflection heavy framework. While that's not necessarily the wrong set of choices to make, trying to turn Go into a DSL-type language always feels a little strange. Still, kudos to the authors for putting up something nifty in under 1kLoc (excluding tests).
This is a bad idea. I don't know how you managed to convince yourself that it's not.
Oh. I didn't see the HN Experiment announcement until just now.

I'm promptly shutting up about anything for which the valid answer isn't "Lisp does it better". ;).
I wonder if this policy would be coming down the pipe of Madame President were elected..
This 'detox' is an equivocation, that both sides are somehow equally at fault. That is most definitely NOT the case and shushing everyone up about it will not make this go away, garden or not.
I'll always advocate learning projects like this, but you're absolutely right that if anyone pulls it for production they deserve what they get.

My personal litmus test for OSS is to read the test suite.
Agreed. However, the title doesn't necessarily draw folks in.

The full title is "A Very Naughty Little Girl. The extraordinary life of Janet Vaughan, who changed our relationship with blood."

Really interesting scientist who pioneered and popularized doing blood transfusions among many other things. I hope more people read about her...
I for one think the imminent demise of human civilization is of interest to the intellectually curious and thoughtful readers of HN. I also believe that hurting the feelings of willful climate change deniers and suchlike people is a really good idea.
None of this is true. He didn't ask them to handcuff him and no one is smiling in the picture:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/texas-teen-arreste...

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-mus...

He was arrested and taken off school grounds. Next time please do your own research.

The police should not have been there at all, since the device is so obviously not dangerous.
Microsoft releases Zo, the successor to the infamous Tay chatbot
Here is what I think you might be missing.

You point out that there are a good number of employees in your local stores who have a productive job which they enjoy and from which they get personal meaning. You fear losing all of that if we introduce fully automated stores.

Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose we already HAD fully automated stores, but we also had this same group of 60 people who (in the actual world) work in those 5 supermarkets. What would we invent for them to do which would pay them, give them something productive to do which they enjoyed and from which they could get personal meaning? Scanning groceries for 8 hours a day just wouldn't be my first pick to address this problem.

So I guess what I am trying to get at is that I agree with your sense that there IS a possible problem with eliminating the need for these jobs -- but I don't think it's a problem of "shops need to have people". I think it is a problem of "the benefits of improved automation need to be more widely shared". If all of the benefits go to a few people who happen to own Amazon stock, then what's to happen to the 60 folks in your neighborhood?

Personally, I'm in favor of some sort of universal basic income along with a change in our society to create socially acceptable niches for people to do small, simple projects -- but I certainly don't know all the answers.
Ok, so following what I think you're saying, how does one find people with problems they're looking to solve?
I'm actually on the same road right now, currently I'm testing Piwik.

https://piwik.org
Superset by Airbnb (formerly Caravel)
Big lesson from the monstrous DDoS attack on Internet of Things (IoT) devices
Ha ! well it seems Amazon is launching a lot of services lately so I think it's news worthy to discuss their implication, pricing ...
I'm not too familiar with Go, but in chess we have millions of text-format games and very little real-time footage.
Gidi – The Best Gifts on the Internet Recommended from a Chatbot
I've used https://piwik.org successfully.
Now that's cool. Do you have some automated way of testing it or will you be in it on the first test at that depth?
So much negativity and pessimism.
> I've been told that a Russian or Eastern European weather forecaster sometimes gives health advice based on the air pressure changes.

The weather forecaster is not qualified to give medical advice, so this does not seem to constitute "employing scientific information" in daily life.

If by "woo" you mean pseudoscience worth ignoring then yes, it sounds like "woo".
I fully support this detox week. As someone whose political views don't align with the average HN reader, I often feel marginalized by unfair downvoting in political discussion, even though I have made my points in an informed and respectful way. 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.

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. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale.

Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.
People in that thread are arguing about exclusion, sexism, etc, but a simple enough reason to change the name is "I can't say I'm using this library in front of the investors and keep a straight face."
>features Angular-like (or Spring like) dependency injection

closes tab
4 Trends Driving the Industrial IoT
Those news were due to the Amazon's event. They shouldn't be that common in the next weeks. Same thing happens around the google i/o and apple's announcement events.
Maybe political subjects that are totally unrelated to tech should be banned from HN.

A strict reading of the guidelines would suggest that they already are. There's nothing interesting or gratifying in those discussions. They devolve into poo-flinging with a probability approaching 1.

In my experience, obvious political flamebait gets flagged off the frontpage out what feels like sheer exasperation. Comments not so much, but they generally end up a few shades lighter.
I've been expecting that for years. RFID tags capable of being read without collisions were expensive back then and needed a battery. There were problems with reading many tags at once. Those problems have apparently been solved.[1]

I suspect that Amazon has RFID tags on everything in addition to the vision systems. There are existing backup vision systems for retail checkouts, such as LaneHawk. Most of the components for this already exist. Now it's here.

[1] http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/8475.pdf
Type "chrome referer control" into Google. The rest is you.
I can't agree enough. I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but preemptively censoring things that might turn into uncivilized discussions seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater - we need to be able to talk about difficult things.
I think I covered that in my comment upthread? To me they're in the same category as software patents: fine in principle (unless a post is just ranty), but maybe err on the side of flagging the more politicized variants for this week.
I don't think that's the intention but honestly I wouldn't be too upset if that is what happens. I'm having trouble these days not seeing stories about Trump every single day on most of the sites I visit.
Hiring Processes Are Also Engineering Processes
To tell you the truth, I put myself into a politics news vacuum the day after the elections and the results were announced.

I no longer frequent the politics sites (left and right) that I used to visit being a politics addict. I now no longer want to listen to any politics for the next 4 or 8 years (whichever the term may end up being).

I have stuck my fingers in my ears and am spouting "la la la la...." loudly whenever I go near a political discussion.

No more politics for me (at least till I am ready to come out of my self imposed exile).
I find this part of the main problem with the recent US election. You only want political discussions when you agree with it. No matter how civil a person is, it's considered 'uncivil' when it's against San Francisco politics.

When this happens, many people are forced to get their news from the sites deemed 'fake'. The mass banning of opposing viewpoints (which has been happening for a couple of years now) has pushed more people towards these sites and may have actually won Trump the election. If you want to change it, stop silencing all opposing views.

The problem is that politics is in every part of our lives. If you ban politics and religion, people still get political and religious about other things. It's part of human nature (GNU VS BSD), (VI VS Emacs).
The ballpark of 10 cents per printed RFID is right.

I have reasons to believe several ink manufacturers/printers are working on an order of magnitude less per tag.

But are you so sure that 10 cents is too much?

What do you think the gross margin on that can is ? ;-)
What do you think the net margin on that can, once the checkout lines (and their personnel) are removed, would be?

If a stitched RFID chip on a 2€ thsirt is currently cost-effective for Decathlon, I see no reason why printed RFID tags would not be cost effective in the very near future, if it is not yet the case (and once again, I have reasons to believe it is almost already the case).
Thank you for taking advantage of that introspection. it must feel weird when you first realize that approximately half the population disagrees with you.

I believe that, if more people in the United States felt the way you did, we could have world peace in a generation.
No need for them to talk to your phone or a smart bag. They just funnel you out through a lane and scan them there if they're using RFID. They can also do this theoretically without using RFID at all if they can solidly determine what product you're taking off the shelf, maybe by using good cameras to see where you're reaching and if you're placing or replacing the item that's assigned to that slot. They've been tracking you since you entered the store so they know what Amazon account each person is associated with so they just combine the 2.

As for loose weighed items it doesn't look like they're selling those. /Everything/ in the promo shot of the store is already packaged and they look like they're going for more of a convenience store food source than a traditional grocery store.
cracked.com is a humor website is this definitely real?
Paul Allen’s tech team brings 50-year-old supercomputer back from the dead
This is the time for making ourselves uncomfortable and leaving room for others to speak.

It's dangerous to avoid short-term pain by stifling conflict. HN is about technology news and I don't think we should separate the "oh cool" part from the "how will this affect our neighbors" part.
Roofies Homewear: Statement pajamas for you
It's a half measure and it won't help much.

Hackernews is like reddit before subreddits.

It's too big now, too many people, too disparate of subjects, too much noise and not enough signal.

Over the past couple years, definitely in the past 2, hackernews has gone from say a reddit SV subreddit, to a generalized, worldnews/politics/general news generic reddit.

That's not what this is. And when hackernews becomes what reddit.com/r/reddit.com used to be, it dilutes the userbase and invites/attracts people who have nothing to do with the hackernews ideology and culture.

This is a positive first step, but far too little and maybe too late.

This site is becoming a generic catch-all subreddit for all news, and with that change the userbase is reflecting the lack of focus on SV/technology/hacker culture.

Without dramatic intervention, the tides will turn and hackernews will not be an attractive place for real hackers, real innovators. Won't be worth their time anymore. They'll find greener pastures. Many already are.
if this is happening, could we have a weekly political thread?

(kind of like how we have monthly who's hiring thread)

That way we can have the cake and eat it too.
I can tell you but you might be disappointed! What prompted this is a year (maybe two) of slow, slow reflection over how best to clarify what kind of site HN is, plus dismay over the uptick in harsh comments and primarily-political accounts that we've been observing as moderators this year.

When I say slow, I mean slow. I see part of my job (and it's my temperament anyway) as taking care to understand what this community is and how its system functions, and then to protect that and help it thrive. In practice this means that we take a long time (especially by startup standards, not that HN is a startup) to make changes, and have a strong preference for subtle changes. If we do make a significant change, you can be sure that we waited a long time for the need for it to develop.

But this isn't a significant change, not yet; it's a one-week experiment to see what happens.
> I'm not really a fan of this move.

Well I am a fan. What I'm not a fan of is yet another tech site being turned into a political controversy site by bored-at-work pseudo-geeks that need an audience for their outrages. Any time a popular tech site emerges the SJWs, wingnuts, freetards and moonbats turn up and chase off the geeks and nerds.

We DO NOT NEED yet another facet in the outrage echo chamber. The Internet already provides more than enough venues for you to bitch about Trump or Comcast or gamergate or whatever you enjoy being outraged about.

Just look at some of the pure political controversy crap that has appeared on HN recently:

Wells Fargo says that its customers gave up right to sue by having their signatures forged
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041730

Fake news. Nothing more nothing less. Wells Fargo claimed nothing of the sort. BoingBoing made it up from whole cloth.

I gave back my U.S. citizenship. I’m going back to Serbia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12963740

Click bait. Also many people familiar with SF found it to be highly improbable.

Dan Rather: Now, More Than Ever, We Must Stand Up for Science
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12950501

Pure Trump-derangement syndrome click bait by a discredited partisan.

Please; this stuff already gets enough play. Don't ruin HN echoing it as well. Just stop it. We all know what the controversies are; pretending that it's difficult to distinguish is just a cop-out to rationalize allowing it through.
Yeah I've been looking at Piwik. What do you think so far?

The only aspect I didn't like was it was PHP. Not really my strong language - if I wanted to customize it.
Politics is about who to blame and hacking is about solving problems. (Blaming is the opposite of solving problems.)
> Are there general laws governing "learning"?

This has been my question too...

Based on my understanding, it all really boils down to probability, statistics and a few important theories like Vapnik-Chervonenkis which provides the mathematical foundation for what "learning" is, can we even learn from the given data and how well can we learn (VC dimension, etc).

But I would love it if someone can point me to or explain / derive from core first principles the concept of "learning".