skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be a very boring week for stories, and I do share drzaiusapelord's concern this is happening when a new cabinet is being announced. Plus some troubling laws out of Australia and the UK.

Science without philosophy is dangerous, and philosophy without science has no use. The political implications of technology are a big part of the discussion.

I guess I don't believe this step would have been taken if someone else won, and that belief, justified or unjustified, troubles me.

But, I guess anything that gets the damn pipeline news off HN is fine. I'm getting a little sick of the distortion field and do gooders that are going to leave people high-and-dry on that one.

[I voted 3rd party for the top spot in ND if it matters]
What I'm saying is that, if you insist that monetary compensation for a particular job must be no less than a certain amount, then all other benefits (insurance, training, experience) will be limited by that.

A job that does not confer many added skills or valuable experience may therefore be available for that wage, but one where much of the compensation is training may not be available at that wage price.

It's not a case of "apprentices making more money" vs. "apprentices making less money". It's a case of "apprentices making less money" vs. "apprentices not hired at all."
5ghz 802.11ac has worked great for me.
I don't think I can fault dang for not being around for the Bush v. Gore (hanging chad) election, and the bitterness that it engendered on slashdot. Had he been paying attention then, he likely would've drawn parallels quickly and done exactly what you have said. I'll take him at face value when he says it was an action that should've been done in retrospect, but I'm not sure others won't be so quck to judge, if one is mindful of how much time the average HN reader thinks about a particular post or topic.
What I like about this is it encourages the European style of grocery shopping. That is, visiting a grocery store daily to make dinner with fresher foods. The longer the lines, wait, and commute, the larger grocery orders will get and the further people are pushed towards Costco style grocery purchasing.
http://reddit.com/r/WatchMachinesLearn is about to get a lot more popular. I can't wait. Also from the linked blog post, you can play with (against?) your agent in realtime:

>You can keep your own VNC connection open, and watch the agent play, or even use the keyboard and mouse alongside the agent in a human/agent co-op mode.
Aren't secrets stored unecrypted in kube? I'd hesitate to call them secrets, though config looks good.
I would argue that any startup or financial news is political, in that politics shapes the capitalist foundation of our society. HN is Politics, and to try and separate and moderate this type of news is exactly the kind of thing that makes people leave your site in droves.
You don't think Deep Blue was inspirational to folks who were perhaps deciding if they wanted to pursue AI research?

The same holds for AlphaGo and Watson. Also, my understanding is that they are more technically interesting than Deep Blue. Given how recent these projects are, their legacy is only beginning to unfold.

I agree with you that applying this tech to domains other than games is no easy challenge. But I would be very surprised, in the long run, if events like this are not documented as key steps along the way at some point in the future.
Experimenting it just 1 week cannot hurt.
That said, defining the scope of what should be banned is tricky.
Exemple on recent Amazon Go article and the so famous "Is massive automation implying jobs removing a good thing" :
This question is not about politics but will led to "tribal behaviour" as you call it.
Will you also ban such debates? If so where is your censor power limit?
Okay. I'll bite. What should be done about posts on 18F? Or tech policy in the government? What about stories about legislation on encryption?

Are those all in the vein of things you think we should take a break from?
Sure, it does! I just added it to register that is weird to publish as an AMA and not answer many questions.

I think your approach is right. One thing that helps me is to use hypothesis from users/visitors/customer as much as possible. Talk to customers and try to distill what are their hypothesis about a specific problem. Talking to customer goes a long way.

On the topic, I think that famous quote atributed to Ford "If I asked my customer what they wanted, I would be trying to create faster horses". I think is BS (and probably bogus). That ad absurdum scenario would only happens if he asked the wrong questions and/or followed the most superficial answers.
Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings.

I'm making a different point. Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

I.e., why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The answer is the exact same framing exercise you (correctly) accuse white nationalist groups of engaging in. And it's also a framing exercise I find more palatable; I'm just pointing out that you can't distinguish between these based on truth.

Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people. Assume some fraction of crime prevention results in people getting shot, regardless of race. Assume further that blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Given these two assumptions, you will get disproportionate levels of blacks being shot by cops, even though no one is being racist. That directly contradicts the narrative the media is framing.

Scott Alexander has a great blog post where he dives into the empirical literature on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...
Lazy evaluation is not important item here. It is merely the semantics is defined in a way that the order of declarations does not matter.

Other languages have this property too - say, C# (not entirely true, but pretty close - at least if you think about top level methods etc.).

Also an example where the order of declarations does not matter at all, because there is just one declaration:

x :: [Integer]
x = 0 : 1 : x
And read it right here on HN. There were more than a couple submissions that dealt specifically on this topic.
The recruiters probably laughed their asses off.

They're the email equivalent of telemarketers. Having someone tell you to screw of in a witty, satirical way brightens up your day a lot more funny than being hung up on.
Thank you, Donald Trump
Sorry that the style puts you off. I wanted to make a strong statement that people either strongly agree or disagree with or maybe find ridicoulous. But if it helps me finding peopoe who already agree with me I'd say mission accomplished. The rothers I'll try to persuade with the implementation of those ideas.

I started to creat a comparison of other platforms. Let me know what platforms you think are missing or where I am misjudging some.
https://cdn.rawgit.com/zells/core/master/comparison.html
The last time I checked, the price of a printable RFID tag was around 10 cents. That's far too expensive for a 15oz can of beans.

What sort of prices are you seeing?
I have heard people talk about this as becoming a race issue, and I agree. This is basically an iteration of self-checkout, and if that has issues with people being profiled at the store exit (which it does) then this will too.
It's not spelled out but it doesn't seem like it'll be a requirement. The only additional thing they could get from the phone without really limiting the number of supported devices is a rough location and that information can be replaced with tracking customers through security cameras.
This might actually be a good idea for every yearly election.

I'm of the opinion that, had HN banned political threads for a month after Prop 8, Eich would've still been in charge of the Mozilla Corporation. Which, I guess, means I view HN as a kingmaker.

EDIT: Modified post to be less flamebaity. I was genuinely interested in discussing HN's role in previous political stories.
Granted... but they're not parking it in China are they? So in terms of places you put your money being sure you'll get it back, China is not very high on that list for a number of reasons.
We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13107392.
This is all well and good unless this happens to be the week our government passes a law to require muslims to register, etc.

Considering the low quality of political discussion in general (and especially on the internet), HN is one of the few places where there are generally reasonable, well-thought-out views.

Obviously YC doesn't want HN to discuss politics because it could create a divisive atmosphere and alienate people, resulting in lower levels of engagement and harm to the YC brand.
Because (if I'm remembering the article correctly, am working from volatile memory and not gone back over it, so apologies if I've overcooked this) it's not phrased as particularly constructive criticism, it basically just hilights general pain points in a slightly snarky way.

Learning to take criticism well is HARD, I'm still relatively shit at it despite my best efforts, but learning to give criticism well is even harder.

As a community, we lack some degree of common community spirit, to coin a particularly trite phrase.
I've withdrawn my upvote after I saw this in the code:

type Injector struct {
values map[reflect.Type]interface{}
customProviders map[reflect.Type]CustomProvideFunction
}
Hear, hear! I came to HN specifically to check comments on political news items, because I (generally) found them pretty insightful and excellent.
No objection whatsoever to a pause period, but it's important for people to realize there's no separation between politics and anything else, including technology. "Everything is political" is a cliche, but it happens to be true.

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone." -RMS
Cantons in Switzerland don't have their own separate criminal law systems, for example.
ERROR 732: Intent unclear. Please elaborate to proceed with discussion. (refcode 567a8-732).
12 Tips for Managing Your Multi-Cloud Environment
Sadly yes, yes I have. One of the very first professional projects I worked on was a system to replace an Excel spreadsheet because they were having issues with locks when trying to concurrently modify it on their network share. The project requirements where literally "implement what Excel does", and the answer to any question about the program behavior was "What does Excel do? Do that". On the one hand it was wonderfully simple and a great opportunity to play around with Backus-Nauer forms and the guts of an interpreter. On the other hand spending months re-implementing Excel rather than solving the actual problem was rather soul destroying.
At What Cost? Weighing a Cure for Cancer Against Its Pricetag
Are we talking just us election controversy stuff? If so, this sounds like a welcomed reprieve.

However if this blackout includes government level censorship and attacks on internet freedom it seems like a bad move
God, where was this two weeks ago?
Many of the top-level comments here are against this move. I, on the other hand, would like to express my strong support for this move.

Hacker News has never been an anything-goes site. Tight moderation, considerate rules, and low tolerance for bullshit have made this a great site to talk about interesting technical topics and ideas. Remember that we all abide by the rules of the site, and that this isn't a magic free speech zone. If you want to talk political topics, the Internet has more than enough outlets.

Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion. This is not an opinion; look only to sites that allow political discourse (Slashdot?), or even our own comments to see how quickly rational discussion can devolve into flaming. One of the major selling points when I introduce HN to other people is the _absence_ of political topics or discussion: leaving the politics out just produces better technical content.

Also, please consider the idea that politics are regional and differ between countries. In Canada, where I'm from, many of the US political topics would never come up; many European countries might feel even more strongly. As a Canadian, I find American political musings and arguments even less relevant and noisy. By contrast, technological topics are always interesting to me - I can appreciate these, and I love that there's this corner of the Internet where I can participate in a reasoned, interesting technical community. Please don't ruin it with politics, especially the polarizing American variant.

I appreciate that the site is willing to take this step, and I sincerely hope it can keep this site useful, interesting and level-headed for the future.
Life is politics here's 2 from the current front page :

8 - Silicon Valley’s Culture, Not Its Companies, Dominates in China (nytimes.com)

21 - Russian deaths from malnutrition rate 5x lower than in the US (worldlifeexpectancy.com)
Show HN: PDD – Probabilistic De-Duplication of Streams with Bloom Filters
You don't even have to hit tangents in comment threads to run into issues. Crypto backdoors? H1B changes? There are a lot of topics that are both political and of very high interest to hackers generally and HN specifically. If Congress rams through a crypto backdoor bill in the lame duck session, are we seriously not going to have a thread about it on HN?
Though "Missing Missy" is arguably a bit inhumane, OTOH, even if you can't use Word or summat to make a poster there's always good ol' literal cut-and-paste. Even a six year old could do it. Of course, as there were probably no six year olds around the office, it's easier to put the burden on someone else (bonus for: "...and I have to leave, so here's a hard deadline to do work you're not paid for.") Which I think was the whole point of the exercise.

As for this writing, he responds more politely than I do when someone sends a req for something 3000 miles away on a tech stack I've never even seen, let alone put on my resume.
I'd submit that it's right there in the writeup. Politics literally activates different regions in the brain, producing a situation in which rational discussion is difficult or impossible. Being a site that chooses to avoid that would make HN much more valuable, because there are so few that do, even fewer of any size.

I wouldn't support a moratorium forever, because there are topics that are both of perennial HN interest and also overlap politics, like intellectual property law and things specific to the tech industry. But I would support bumping off a lot more of the marginal stuff permanently. In general I would say that I see very little HN-specific contribution to most of those topics. (Not quite none, but hardly worth poking through the dross.)
> Why? Political conflicts cause harm here

Unfortunately this a consequence of people trying to shove politics everywhere, including in unrelated communities. I don't want to point fingers but a specific camp has mastered the art of forcing their political beliefs upon others in the name of "the right side of history". The result is now, you can't be just a developer, or a techie. You have to be a techie + or a developer + qnd also support a specific political agenda, or "you're not a decent human being". Maybe people should stop doing that at first place. The same thing happened in atheist communities or gaming and it permanently ruined these communities, because it forced everybody to take sides. HN is no different. The dev community will suffer the same fate if people don't come to their senses before it's too late.

Maybe political subjects that are totally unrelated to tech should be banned from HN. I don't like censorship, but if the goal is to keep a community united and focused well, I'm open for alternative suggestions...
That's a nice alternative history fiction.

Here's an early implementation: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Researc...
Was this decision made top-down or in response to the desire of the community?

As someone who values the contributors to HN and appreciates the diverse set of opinions, perspectives and critical thinking I find here, which are all handled 99% of the time with decent respectfulness as far as I can tell, I find this effort kind of sad.

Hopefully we learn something good from this, but not sure what that could be, how to decide if it's good, or if it will be worth the effort.
That will give us all more time to discuss religion (the other topic my parents always said was verboten between casual acquaintances).

More seriously, I'm not going to rock the boat (and won't miss the discussions about politics) but I always figured those stories would disappear from the front page when the community at large didn't want to discuss them. It's a dangerous slope since you can also make the argument that other topics are also too dominant. I personally would like to see fewer articles on Angular but I wouldn't have suggested that they be off-topic for a week. I guess I assumed the up-voters wanted them.

OFF-TOPIC: Any chance we can down-vote articles with enough karma?

EDIT: I guess I should also note that I rarely flag articles since that seems like it should be reserved for some sort of abuse. My thought about down-votes is that it's the opposite of an up-vote ("I'm not interested in this" versus "this is interesting").
I would make a list, but it'd be about 25 items long. ;)

Start with "Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" and "Wahrlich, dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen" and "Und von der sechsten Stunde an ward eine Finsternis über das ganze Land bis zu der neunten Stunde" and...see? I can't stop once I get started.
Even on desktop it's hardly readable. The resolution of the slideshare slides is terrible.
I find it disturbing too. Right now one of the top stories on HN is about Amazon Go and the top comment is about whether the destruction of jobs it could cause is socially acceptable.

I don't know whether that is politics or not but I can't imagine discussing Amazon Go as a technology without having that discussion. In fact when you look at HN very little is about particular technologies. Most of our discussion is around the implications.
Thank you this is fantastic. I try to keep political discussions separate from technology and being unable to read hacker news without facing political discussions is taxing.
Godoc link for those who want to look closer at it: https://godoc.org/github.com/mustafaakin/gongular
I think this is a bad idea, even as an experiment. Treating groups of ideas as off-limits, immutable or in need of protection from other groups does more harm than good. Your analogy of "politics [being] war by other means" is exactly why we should foster political discussion just as any other intellectual pursuit. Arbitrary isolation between the political or religious self and our intellectual self is, I believe, why politics is so violent and difficult to talk about. You don't need homogeneity for a good discussion and you shouldn't assume chaos when heterogenous people start talking.

We talk about important things here and should do so in a way that is conducive to engaging conversation. Topics shouldn't be off the table.

Also, what is 'political'?

Edit: typo
> It would have been great to see it included in laptops, for instance.

It was included in laptops. It was terrible and useless.

A classic example of potentially great technology with very poor implementation and application.
That's a tricky line to tread when you think about it. Who decides when the employer has met his costs?
"I know all the people who work in these supermarkets."

Perhaps not. I worked at a supermarket as a starving student decades ago and the number of non-cashier employees dwarfed the number of cashiers. Most of the people in a store at any given time are stocking a department or cleaning or providing counter service or rather optimistically all three. We had more people employed at 3am stocking shelves and scrubbing floors than employed serving customers during 2nd shift...

There is an assumption in the comments, that might come from confusing urban convenience stores with supermarkets, that the only employee in a supermarket is the cashier.

You could make something like a quik-trip gas station/convenience store almost staff-less, but an actual supermarket is crawling with non-cash-handling employees.
I propose an alternative to templates: Use go objects to define your config. Better dynamicity, readability and typesafety. See my post https://kozikow.com/2016/09/02/using-go-to-autogenerate-kube... .
Thank you! I hope we can still talk about Leonard Cohen though.
Happened to me when I sold my house the value came in 10k lower (really... now that same place is 30-40k higher than what I was asking a year ago).
The problem I see is that everything is politics, because politics is the air we breathe as a society. It's asking the question of how we live in community.

I think what dang is after getting of is tribalism, where people show group membership with displays of insults, meme-dropping, etc.

Different things, but if any group can separate tribalism from politics, through thoughtful community-making, I'd say HN can.
FinTech in China: A 53-Point Summary
Yeah, I'm with you. Are there political threads here that I have been missing?
At least allow us to opt out of the artificial safe space.

Technology and politics go hand in hand, unless we'd like to head back into the dark ages.

EDIT: I'm not hear to offend or persuade with politics talk. I'm here to provide or obtain new perspectives and understanding. If I want an echo chamber that reinforces my perspectives and beliefs, I can head back to Facebook.
There's at least some reason to believe that discretion won't be completely discarded.
Lol the primitive brain, the entire premise of this worldview is wack peace
I second this observation. I've been frequenting HN probably 10x as much lately BECAUSE of the fact that I've felt that there has only been a slight uptick in political stories - vs. other outlets.

That is all anecdotal of course.

edit: grammar.
>There are a ton of other sites where you can follow and debate politics all you want.

But where do you draw the line of what is 'politics' and what is 'cool nerdy tech stuff'?

Is a breakdown of 538's method of poll aggregation too politically charged, even if there's a perfectly good overlap of math and statistics?

If Trump makes an out-of-left-field statement about repatriating corporate money, are we prohibited from talking about how it will affect Apple?

A blanket ban of 'political threads and topics' seem harsh, even if just for a week. I personally haven't found the political content on this site to be out of bounds, considering the monumental political upheavals we've been witnessing over the past year.