skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the idea of trying a new business model for news delivery, especially one centered around facts.

I seriously hope this project can overcome the prevalent, subtle biases in media. For instance, every single headline from the recent French election mentioned "far-right" Le Pen without also mentioning any ideological affiliation of the other candidates. Painting your opponent as an extremist is an effective political tactic, and "far-right" certainly sounds extreme. Were most media outlets opposed to Le Pen, hence the extreme label? Why not label any other candidates?

I'm not necessarily optimistic about the prospects for unbiased news, but I will be watching this project as it progresses.
yep, this is so true. i was really excited about the tiny fragments that seemed to hold meaning, but they were obviously just happy accidents.
> to accomplish a task

People are outraged because it doesn't actually accomplish any task. A number of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ comments seem to miss that this doesn't actually make juice. You're paying for them to hide 8 oz of juice in $8 packets and then again to extract the juice with this contraption (assuming your internet is working). I suppose there's some entertainment value in "juice press theatre" but you could say the same thing about a gadget that lights your money on fire.
Interesting, I'll have to do some experiments with this. I thought I knew about color from years of working with photoshop and video editing, but working with the pigments and medium of paint is vastly more complex (and satisfying despite the unpredictability). I've wondered about the spectral components I can't see quite a bit, since I like to work outside when the weather is good and some color decisions attract lots of insect interest.
It feels like history is repeating itself just like the hype over Very Light Jets about 10 years ago. A bunch of manufacturers lost a lot of money chasing after a market that didn't really exist (at least not at a realistic price).
Both Alexander and Pirsig are great and I think they have a lot of crossover. I actually just released my book this week that mashes their two ideas together. It is with sadness that I learned of his passing today and a bit ironic that the title of my book is 'Immortality'.

Death can jump off a cliff.

Http://skilesare.github.com/immortality
I think we like to believe that every child wants to be a creative spirit. But many of them are monsters. It's not till later in life that you develop a conscience, and many people in high school are straight-up barbaric to each other. It's hard to make school interesting with people like that in the system, and it's even harder to deal with those types.

A friend with an affluent upbringing was telling me about how his school would filter out anyone they wanted, and give them the option to either transfer out or be expelled. Usually this was done for kids who had hit other kids. I couldn't help but think "You were way luckier than you probably appreciate." I thought it was just a fact of life that when you go to school as a kid, you have to worry about being attacked. Not so, apparently.
Best 40 Software Engineering Books
I'd rather give this a shot than just shut it down with the cynical negativity that we oft see on HN. There are obvious faults like you have pointed out, but we have to try something to get us out of the the situation we're in.

This is the first honest effort I've seen that has some credibility.
Apple removed access to the UDID because it was being used to target advertising and correlate users across different publishers -- basically privacy issues. For a while there was a slew of third party solutions which involved hashes of MAC addresses. Some time thereafter Apple created IDFV and the companion, IDFA (For Advertiser) and really cracked down on cross-vendor correlation.
I always took "full stack" to imply web stack, like MEAN or LAMP. Maybe I'm misusing it, but I tend to call myself a full stack developer and I don't know a lot about assembly or low-level languages like C.
Obviously, many an upvoter like your "suffer through JS" bit of provocation (while the rest being surprising silent so far, ..why??).

:)

edit: ah, look, that's just a fresh comment, that's why then
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

In a character cell terminal editor we would create data files with one line per card image. In essence a punch card for fortran as each line. This is not much different than what we do today. Today we create a line for each line of code (or comments). It was just that punch cards required specific columns for code and other controlling characters.

With physical cards you would carry boxes of card around. If the cards got dropped you were hosed unless the cards were numbers. We had columns for numbering the cards. But when writing a program from scratch you could not number the cards till the program ran correctly. Much fun!

Edit: added details
Cutting affiliate revenues by 2/3 without warning hurts honest players more than it hurts scammers, who will just move on to the next scam. Also for anyone who has invested time and effort in developing this as a legit business activity it's really horrible. I don't think companies should be able to unilaterally alter contractual relationships this way, it's unconscionable.
Finally, something interesting coming out of the Gentlemen's game. Nice read.
The only Cormac McCarthy novel I've read is Suttree and it's incredible. Apparently it's semi-autobiographical, and it reads like a Huckleberry Finn outcast/hobo/dark alternate reality and extremely funny and sad the entire way through. It's entirely gripping and so very well-written. I read it voraciously a few summers back after a trusted friend's recommendation.
Hubert Dreyfus, preeminent philosopher and AI critic, dies at 87
Should resubmit with a "Show HN: " prepended.
I'll see your condescending lesson on the Constitution and raise you a trip to the Capitol, where you'll see the very real, tangible divisions between the two major parties.

You seem to be confused about the argument. It's not about what should be, it's about what is.

> So hand-wringing about how people vote in primaries and interact with political parties is silly.

It's not silly, it's an observation about how the game of politics is changing with the change in the scale of our social interactions. It's so much easier to coordinate large groups of people to infiltrate and manipulate intra-party matters than it was a few decades ago.

That's exactly what the OP was advocating: not rational engagement with the members of a party, convincing them to adopt a better view, but pretending to be one of them so as to vote in their primaries, to deny them use of candidates which are most threatening to one's own political goals. It's like a Sybil attack on the political process.
promoting Hollywood

Please stop treating the entertainment industry as a monolithic 'Hollywood' to be hated on, that's neither true nor fair.
Laws are just our social norms ("how we do things around here") codified into actionable rules.

Social norms develop and act much faster than laws, and I would suggest they are more powerful. In Uber's case, publicity about their underhanded tactics have caused huge numbers of people to delete the app. We don't have Uber where I live, but a visitor who suggested getting an Uber to the airport elicited an instant "No way I'm using those scum" reaction from me. That hurts Uber far more (and far more quickly) than any legal process.

I think the big lesson here is that you have to consider social norms at least as carefully as you do legal requirements. That's painful for software people because we love precision and predictability, so laws are cool and all those nebulous and confusing opinions that you have to talk to people to understand are icky.
That's the best thing I've read all week!
Eh, that's doesn't really cover it either.

I've always told me friends that it's about Western philosophy and mental illness. Those two subjects are covered just as much as Zen and Motorcycle maintenance.

The parts about your relationship to the machine will definitely resonate with engineers, but that's not all it's about. I guess that is why it is a great book -- there's something for everyone and it can be read in multiple ways.
I strongly suspect there was more at play there (huge kickback to one of the people ordering the hardware). And no, the customer didn't think they won twice, the first time almost killed them. For all those goodies it still did not perform. You really wonder how they managed to burn all those cycles.
> Did you get that feeling reading these books?

Not gonna lie: Blood Meridian deals in some very grim and violent subject matter. There are no heroes in that story. Its about a gang of scalp hunters (the Glanton Gang. They actually existed if you can believe it...) so I'll leave you to draw your conclusions about what a story like that would entail. The way McCarthy makes those types of scenes digestible is by almost always describing them in the past tense. You the reader come upon them after they happened. He also writes with a detachment to the event and speaks of some downright unspeakable acts almost matter of factly. I am pretty squeamish and I could handle it so you'll probably be fine because of that.

The Road I found harder to read than BM. Its less violent (although there are a couple spots that get pretty gruesome) but just unrelentingly bleak and grim. I needed to lie down after reading it. Again his detachment from the events happening make it bearable. Worth it IMO.

Assuming you haven't read them, I'd recommend digging into All The Pretty Horses or No Country For Old Men. Both are incredible stories that have the same scenes of elemental good vs evil that crops up in McCarthys work over and over again but are less... intense.
I think the main problem is.. No Consent. Consent it the cornerstone of all things.

P.S: Literally paraphrasing my Engineering Professional Practice course. An exam of which I just crushed!
Yes but... This modal explodes. Which, in most cases with design patterns, should only be used when appropriate. Right tool for the right job.
I know this is petty, but I kinda hope they build this on better technology than MediaWiki. MediaWiki has lots of annoying pitfalls. For example, there is no native support for threaded conversations. Also they have 2 or 3 different math syntaxes and no consensus on which one should be used where.
Yup. I got interested in Japan after reading Shogun as a kid.

When I was in college, I finally had the chance to study it well and they had a great program. What I learned there taught me how to learn in general, which I then used to learn Computer Science, which opened up a bunch more for me.
You need to read The Dictator's Handbook.
Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s simulation theology
Seems like it could be expanded to a total of 6 cones, three per eye? what a time to be alive :)
Faster then msgpack in Ruby only I'm guessing.
I'm currently working as a developer and aiming to go back to school within the next year or two for physics, after some catch-up math courses.
Good for you for even setting out. It's intimidating, if not down-right frightening to start all over again at something.

But hell, the unconventional is increasingly becoming the conventional. Some of the best advice I ever received was from a doctor I had when I was young. He was an old Jamaican man who went from the slums of Kingston to Chemical Engineering in the US to a practicing MD (physician, general practitioner) in a small town in Canada. He just said (kind of what you'd expect from a Jamaican man): not to worry about anything.

Just do things, make messes, clean them up, do more things. You just might do some good in the process.
Why not improve MediaWiki instead?
I think the party that sued are the drivers themselves who allege that collection such information is tantamount to wiretapping. I could be wrong in my interpretation though.

On the other hand, I completely disagree with your last paragraph. That kind of world is my definition of hell. Winners are "happier"? On what metric? Is Lyft a "loser" company? Are it's employees losers? Who's "unhappy" in this scenario? A "win at all cost" culture that leaves the losers in the dust sounds like a nasty, vile dystopia.
"Child of God" was pretty tough to get through. There were moments of such absurdity that I had to laugh despite some of the grossness (you probably can guess what I am talking about).
If you're a software engineer at Uber you can more than afford to feed your family, and you probably have comparable opportunities elsewhere. IMO people making $250k+ a year lose the "I just need to put food on the table" excuse used to justify their immoral job.
Interesting point. Figuring out how to teach agency and spread consciousness on a planet still ruled by the law of the jungle in many ways is definitely one of humanity's biggest challenges.
Robert Paul Wolff @ The Philosopher's Stone left a touching story/anecdote on his blog:

https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-sad-day.html
Consider the difference between a race and a boxing match. They're both sports but if you sign up for one and find yourself involved in the other you'd be unhappy. In law this sort of things is referred to as 'tortious interference'; Uber isn't running their own business here, but trying to fuck up Lyft's If they want to play that game, then why shouldn't Lyft send spies to their offices and attempt o steal Uber's corporate info? This sort of no-holds-barred capitalism has been tried before and people didn't like it.
I've read both books and I'd be very interested in reading how they are related.

I do agree they are related, but though the use of the word "quality" in both contexts probably confuses issues rather than illuminates them.

I agree with Paul Graham when he says that most philosophical discussions reduce to disagreements over the meaning of words: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

It's also true that both Pirsig and Alexander are reluctant to define their respective "quality". I think there are profound core truths in both of their ideas, but I think they're also too ambitious.

They're both trying to apply one concept to a multitude of things. It's almost religious -- there is one answer to all problems.
I revoked access two years ago, but I don't recall going through the steps for deleting my data. Does anyone have any advice? Should I sign up again and ensure that everything was deleted, then revoke access again?
Do you mean $1M per year or over 4 years? 250k per year in total compensation does not seem like that much.

EDIT: Since I am being downvoted, I thought I'd provide some data to back up my claim. The average total compensation for a Senior Software Engineer in the US at Google according to Glassdoor is $267,413.
Mexico's ancient city guards its secrets but excavation reveals new mysteries
Sure, but that ruins the fun :)
I believe you can manage upwards and downwards. You don't and shouldn't have to shit on your team to make your superior look good, but if you can in a way that benefits the team, then do it!
Hey all! Built this over the weekend with hshoebridge and mswofford for Ludum Dare.

Source code is over at https://github.com/zachlatta/final-fantasy-live.

There's around a 10 second delay on Facebook's end for any live video. Sorry for the lag :-(.

Would love to hear any thoughts / comments / criticism.

- - -

Quick update: Facebook took our main stream offline. Have a new one online at https://www.facebook.com/crynix/videos/1151445734967464/, but will only be available for the next 4 hours.
My goal is to be the last programmer standing who started on IBM punch cards ;)

By the way, I was at an Azure Bootcamp on Saturday (great event!) and there was a 70+ year old there with his laptop doing the labs.

Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young.
Astronomical Chronology
The way I read it, McCarthy makes it painstakingly clear that destruction is a necessary catalyst for creation. He treats violence honestly and respectfully, but he does like to write about some pretty dire scenarios (massacre of Mexicans/Indians, post-apocalyptic scavenging).

McCarthy expands on this theme slightly in a rare interview: McCarthy likes the scientists at the Institute for a simple reason: The stuff they explore, like his writing, cuts to the bone.

“If it doesn’t concern life and death,” he says, “it’s not interesting.” [0]

If you're looking for lighter (but still excellent) storytelling on similar Western/survival themes I'd suggest the Border Trilogy [1] by McCarthy. My high school English teacher had us read these instead of Blood Meridian (his favorite book of all time) because they're much less violent. You won't get the full experience, though, as some of McCarthy's characters are genius because of their depravity, violence, and seemingly chaotic natures.

[0] http://www.davidkushner.com/article/cormac-mccarthys-apocaly...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Border-Trilogy-Crossing-Everymans-Lib...
Depriving oneself the full range of humanity sounds more disturbing than any single book.
in 2017 are there 60 yr old front end devs?
As a baseline, deception is immoral. If you want to be deceptive, you should have a good reason. Your winning a zero-sum game isn't a reason anyone else should be happy about.

In the football tapes example, I don't think there is anything deceptive happening, because everyone understands that other teams are doing this. However, if it were explicitly against the rules or implicitly against established norms to review other team's tapes, doing so and not telling the other teams is deceptive and wrong.

I think I disagree that there was no subterfuge in the Lyft case? I don't actually know this, but I assume that if Lyft knew this was happening, they would behave differently, and if the drivers knew this was happening, they would behave differently.

If you do something that you know a lot of other people would care a lot about, it is in my opinion your responsibility not to try to conceal it from them. If it's not difficult, as in this case, you should notify them explicitly.
I have a modest proposal that is a kind of earned basic income. Would love comments and feedback.

Http://skilesare.github.com/immortality

Its a long term solution and doesn't fix the immediate problems.
Hiring ten 23 year olds and paying for 20 servers is cheaper than hiring five 40 year olds and paying for 3 servers.

It only becomes a problem when you need to stop burning money, because you can't easily reduce the hardware cost.
Why does this keep getting reposted twice a week? It always gets flagged; it's not a very good article.
Obligatory agreement that JavaScript is terrible, but this horse is too dead for me to bother digging up a bunch of links about how bad it is.
> China, gov't has evolved to a whole new level, they don't manipulate media with fake news, but with selected truth.

This is unfortunately nothing new. They did this in the USSR and East-Europe, and even in "free" countries such as Norway where there was one single national government-owned broadcaster (NRK, similar profile as BBC in the UK) feeding propaganda for the socialist labor party in the political areas. Satellite dishes was forbidden up till late 80's, and the first commercial national broadcaster (not via satellite) came about in 1993 IIRC (the gov't channel was BTW ad-free and financed through a TV-license, giving you the right to own a TV and radio).

This is organized censorship and I have been around long enough to see this come and go in various places.

I'm sorry, we don't need any company, corporatistic organization or government to tell us what is factual information. We can discern this ourselves, we can do the necessary research ourselves, and most of us has the experience and ability to call BS when we see it.

I am a bit worried for the younger generations though who's only source of information seem to be in many if not most cases, sites like Facebook, Google and so forth. That combined with a filtered mainstream media and a very poor education system could easily lead right back to where East-Europe were only a few decades ago, but with a different style and flavor as well as refined techniques and better ability to push targeted and effective propaganda to the masses. This is history, not conjecture, don't let it repeat.
People may also be misled by how comparatively quiet electric cars are in an urban/suburban environment, and expect electric flyers will be similar (assuming the battery problem is solved.) This view overlooks two things: 1) a VTOL flyer would be at maximum power at take-off and landing, and at a high power level in cruise; 2) a lot of noise comes from the propellers or fans, and there is not much scope for reducing it.
Oh please, like Lyft doesn't have Terms of Service for their API and like Uber doesn't have a legal department full of people whose; job is to study such things.

Is it immoral if I watch tapes of the competing team's last football game [...]

No, because they can do the same withyour last game. It's called a level playing field, which is clearly a foreign concept to the people who work at Uber.

What makes your competitors pleasure a barometer of morality? Almost always, winners are going to be happy and losers are going to be sad. Is it immoral for anyone to win or lose?

There's more to competition than the zero-sum variety.
Tried to make a donation. Hit the button and then got an endless "please wait" message. UPDATE: oh no I killed it.
How does this have 71 upvotes in such a short time and two comments. It's a Ruby C extension for JSON, nothing more. Something fishy here, especially given that a link on the homepage is "Vote on Hacker News."
What checks does the Wiki model offer against, say, a 4chan-style brigading? I love the idea, I just want it to be bulletproof too.
Corruption is corruption. He's a centrist Democrat considering a party switch.

Happy now?
Companies who give candidates homework assignments: knock it off
I'm pretty confident it isn't social anxiety. I'm great at talking to people I'm comfortable with, almost to a point that I love socializing with them. With people that I've just met, however, it's different.