skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
--A bit of a Rant---

I would argue that politics have infiltrated tech too much already.

Don't believe me, try being a open, vocal Trump supporter or conservative at a major tech company in Silicon valley. You will be labeled a hateful, racist (fill in your favorite derogatory term) based on your political beliefs irregardless of your actual actions both at work or even in your personal life. Most people who are conservative are afraid to talk about their political beliefs due to the very real threat of losing their job.

Look at Larry Garfield with Drupal. In the course of things stuff went as far as people in the Drupal association actively trying to ban conservatives among other things.

The ruby community is just as bad. Rails Girls, Rails Bridge and later on tech404.io banned a woman because she was conservative https://code.likeagirl.io/thoughts-from-the-editor-172e93ecc.... Then there was Opalgate where a community diversity leader tried to get a key contributor banned over his personal conservative beliefs.

At this years Lambdaconf a black, first time speaker and military veteran, who grew up dirt poor in the projects, but pulled himself up by his bootstraps was blasted by a group of people because in his personal life he believes in the red pill, specifically, in his own words seeking the truth, not being anti-woman.

As a moderate I really don't need to be concerned about someone's personal beliefs work with people or to even have a friendship with them. People are messy imperfect beings and there are many shades of grey with people and beliefs even when they hold views that I'm against. The only time that becomes an issue is if someone acts on it. IE: they steal from the company or murder someone etc. but that is not what I am talking about here. In all of the cases I mentioned here, these people did not act inappropriately in a professional setting. They didn't harass people, try to convince people about their personal beliefs, make sexist statements etc..

People who dedicate their lives to parsing out complex political/moral issues have a tough time doing it. If I go to a tech event I'm there to talk about tech not a political conference. The irony is that if people on all sides of the political issues have a place where they came come together and see someone as a human it also may be more effective than the division that the politicization of tech has been creating. Could that open us up to some bad, maybe, but politics being combined with tech are causing a lot of damage to the industry and people already. More importantly its not working.
---Rant over--
I'm yet to see a political discussion among people not dedicated to that or with no in-depth knowledge that actually accomplished[1] something. Several (hundreds) of posts/comments asserting opinions before dying out, or turning into a flamewar of insults, doesn't do much to change the world, as far as I see anyway.

With that in mind, I don't see the point of promoting even more (it's not as if there isn't plenty of it already) political talk in HN.

Is it important to be aware of political ramifications? Maybe, and that's why I personally follow several general news publications in my RSS feeds and not only tech blogs. Is it important to discuss it? Following what I said above, not, in my opinion.

[1]: Even among knowledgeable persons, most of the accomplishment is swaying people from one side to the other and that can be good or bad.
Hence my clause "if that's all it takes." My point is that outsized rewards for early investors do not make something a pyramid scheme, which is a specific illegal structure. Neither stocks nor cryptocurrencies are pyramid schemes.
https://www.spreadshirt.com/create-your-own?product=10193909...
> "Being stuck in problem solving" IMHO is a veritable source of professional happiness, not a detraction from it, among the best developers I know.

Depends on the problem being solved. Debugging platform or OS problems are a minefield of frustration.

Some problems presented to developers are also very far afield from their strengths and interests, like UI and UX, and so also might be of little real interest despite being important problems.
Great points here! When you stated "post-Giuliani" it reminded me (I had so forgotten!) that it was during latter parts of his administration - and then thereafter - when a bunch of the Disney-ification happened! And, definitely the phrase "Disneylandification of New York" so perfectly captures the sentiment!
I strongly disagree that contributors aren't providing content 'for free'. I request a stream of bytes from them, they provide a stream of bytes free of charge. Its up to me how I want to display those bytes, and I'm not stealing anything or breaking any contract by choosing not to render every single one.
Fake Moos: Are soy, almond, coconut, and rice milk really “milk”?
Quickbase is the usual suspect for workflow via a spreadsheet, with functionality that's broader than say Airtable.

Google's "app maker" looks like their attempt to do something similar. https://developers.google.com/appmaker/ Though they seem to have left out the 'start from a spreadsheet' part.
why would they leave in the time of 0:00:00 for all of the date data that didn't include a time?

who would publish a chart like this?

you're all idiots.
Some of Ethereum's tech may be better, but their Windows client is lacking in terms of customization. If you don't have enough free space on your C drive, you can't run it... at least without symlinks or manually running geth with command line options first before running the ethereum client, which is very kludgey and doesn't work well with the internal updater. Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc all let you select the location of your blockchain store so a typical PC configuration of a fast smaller SSD C: and larger D: etc data store can run it without issue. And you can install those clients anywhere you like and keep the data anywhere you like for maximum customization and security.
The Disneylandification is very frequently applied to the Times Square area in particular. But it's complicated. Gentrification and, often, homogenization have their downsides. But 42nd Street, Bryant Park, etc. in the 1970s/80s were really not all that great.
It just means people outside the U.S. will always see the ads, and won't be able to choose to pay with Contributor instead.

I'm not saying this isn't a hilarious embarrassment for a global company like Google to keep launching products U.S. only, but it's not as bad as you're making it sound: It will simply not have a noticeable impact on international users.
“Building a better web for everyone”
The NY Times and the truth of profanity (2016)
So what's the right algorithm to use instead of md5 if I just want a fast checksum that's widely supported?
I went to school with architects of the aesthetic variety (vs. the keep your family dry with a good roof variety).

1. To their way of thinking, what we think of as "superclasses" are more like classes to them. i.e. They see little difference between GoL and Rule 30. They are essentially the same to them. The aesthetics are similar and the process is similar. Most importantly, the intention or thought process which produced the technique is almost identical.

I like the example below about Eliot vs. Shakespeare, although it's a bit overblown. I don't think architects would go so far as to conflate an entire museum to the entire works of two different individual's lives, especially when the two had such differing approaches to playwrighting. YET, conflating variants of two individuals' algorithms is within their scope, clumsy as it is.

2. Furthermore, architecture is an unclean collusion of politics, aesthetics and technique. It's very difficult for all three of these parties to have the same vision. Errors get amplified. White lies persist to save feelings, face and budgets.

3. In conclusion, yes they are wrong and intellectually lazy, and emotionally fearful about making it right. That brings me to my last point about architecture: Once it's erected, it's generally there to stay, baby. A bird in the hand. This is why architecture is so valuable to politicians. On three fronts: it's protection in the form of walls. It's production in the form of moving people where they need to go. It's influence in the form of symbolic power which will dominate the thinking of all those who pass through those walls. For many years. Who can argue against the triumph of digital patterns in shaping our generation?

Even though we're right, we're right like Big Bang Theory characters. No one wants to agree with us, because we're subordinate to the power of architecture (as leveraged by state politics). Our objections are a cute footnote on a museum tour for your aunt to amaze you with on a holiday weekend :)
Curiosity rover finds its crater was habitable for 700M years
404 for me on the link.
I see #1 more about people developing against ill-defined visions, problem statements, or requirements.

I've often seen situations where developers are told, "solve this problem" without being told the context or even success criteria. They then spend inordinate amounts of time iterating without clearly knowing when it's "good enough" to stop and release.
Emperically, a friend's bag company rented space in the LES for 1 month last December, and broke even on sales. This company is online only, and they justified the storefront as a marketing opertunity.

The space cost them $18k for the month (which is low, considering the area), and the only reason they got that price is because a big company backed out on their pop-up store deal.
Ok, why are we unable to find productive work for the workers?
Regardless of how they are presented, all ad networks do awful shit. It's an entire system built on distrust and the users machine is responsible for fixing it. It's an absolutely insane business model. Show me an ad network that doesn't work that way and I might consider it acceptable, until then all of them need to be universally disabled.
Why ban it when they can nationalize all the miners and have total (>51%) control of Bitcoin?
>It is someone else's business, and I am there to do what they ask me. Which may or may not match to what they need, but that's not for me to decide.

I know that this is the right idea, but it is so painful to build something you know is stupid and waste of time. Its impposible to go home happy knowing what you are building is crap.
My bank account can turn off public digital transactions and trade in hard to replicate paper tokens and private network digital transactions.

How does that work with a distributed public ledger?
I humbly submit this magnificent calving:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU

Mind boggling. A chunk of ice the size of Manhattan rolling over.
How can businesses prepare for the $15 minimum wage increase?
See the book: "Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making" by Deborah Stone for an exploration of this issue of resource arbitration and politics.

One simple example she uses is how do you divide up birthday cake? Equal pieces? What if come people arrive late to the party after you start cutting the cake and giving out pieces? What if some people are full but others have not had dinner yet? What if some people don't like the pieces with chocolate icing?

While we can be "objective" within a set of established priorities, we can't be objective about designing a set of priorities. Albert Einstein wrote on this in "Science and Religion" about how science can tell you about what is and how it is all connected, but it can't tell you what should be.

One other point Stone she makes is that when people are on the outside of an organization they want transparency of the decision making process -- while then the same exact people move to the inside of an organization they suddenly have many reasons why they want decision should be opaque. "Yes, Minister" has a great comedy episode on that called "Open Government".
The trouble with Brave's approach is that it removes the user's choice of browsers.
> I've never felt very productive doing any programming outside. Is that just me?

Depends on your personal history I'd say. If you spend years working from home, with little outside interaction in the day to day, productivity truly suffers. Changing your environment can be a huge productivity booster.
To be fair, while I do agree with you, sha-2 512/256 is an especially confusingly named hash. A _lot_ of people naturally read it as sha-2 512 or 256, which it is not, but thing/otherthing is a common enough pattern that the confusion is understandable.

sha-2 256t or something would be much clearer. As the article notes, changing it now is not trivial, but given the potential for confusion is something that might be worth doing, none the less.
Yeah... the worst part of spreadsheet is that it's hard to document their structure and purpose. You may try to explain it with cell comments and blocks of color, but there's no easy way to signal the entry point or see an overview of how the different parts work together.

At least they are functional reactive, so it's easy to trace the evaluation of expressions.
I'm thinking of splitting my logins into a set of essential information in a paper journal -- while keeping some transactional passwords on 1password. 1password was one of those times where I decided to trade off convenience for absolute security -- which I'm realizing is a mistake.
Let's say I make a hash of an asset and put it into a very long-time archive (like 100 years or whatever). What checksum algorithm should I use to be sure it will be readily available in software after 100 years? And to make the choice more realistic, let's assume that the algorithm must be sufficiently fast today (like md5 is).
"Look at the taste that I have, in choosing this experience for myself"

I cannot remember thinking that about others but maybe I don't follow the same people as you.

"Look what I'm doing right now!"

Isn't this just like a smaller version of Show HN?

I mean: you make something, you post it and someone else chimes in with ideas or (hopefully) constructive criticism?

Is there any reason that I cannot see why making food isn't a form of making that we can be proud of?
Ignorance is not a commitment to unethical behavior. Ignorance has certainly been used to justify evil but it's arguable how much of that justification was merely a means to an end.

For thousands of years there have been people who choose good and people who choose evil. I believe quite a bit of the people who have chosen evil did so while knowing at some level it was wrong, regardless of how much scientific knowledge the had.
It's important to recognize that capitation provides a powerful economic incentive to provide as little care as possible. Every pill, X-ray, MRI, or surgery comes straight out of the insurer's bottom line. You'd like to see an allergist/rheumatologist/orthopedic surgeon? How about the thirty-third of Nevember? Instead you can talk to a high-schooler in another country with a wellness script.
Jacques M,

Presumably, you have read through the comments of the referenced thread[1]. If so, your essay omits a perspective about politics dicussion that many HN participants have. I'll attempt to summarize that position:

1) Yes, politics is extremely important.

2) Yes, politics touches every subject.

3) Yes, HN readers perform technical work in programming and hardware that affects politics, and vice versa.

4) All that said, the politics discussion on HN and similar sites is low quality, bad signal-to-noise ratio, full of emotional comments instead of insightful ones.

5) The overall net effect of political discussion on HN is negative and we'd rather not have 1 of the valuable 30 slots of the front page taken up by a political story (e.g. "Trump denies climate change.")

To reiterate the points above, it does not mean "climate change" is unimportant or that HN posters are "burying their head in the sand". That's a 1-dimensional caricature of the people who'd rather get their diet of political discourse from somewhere else besides HN.

Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN. Your essay doesn't address this perspective.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
Show HN: Ctr – The CSS Framework
Scientists find cure for allergies
I don't think it's correct to compare index to what basically is a stock.
I don't think we're at any risk of research on hashing stopping.
choose better people to work for. you are not a helpless victim.
I'm far from an expect, but unless I'm misunderstanding your question, no, that's not it. RSUs negate some of the downside risk for an employee (vs an option), but have similar upside. With an RSU, it has value as long as the company has value, with an option, it has no value unless the sell price is above the strike price.
What startups can learn from Amazon’s cash machine
Yeah, that's the point. People like you would stay, people who want cheap news discussions would leave.
Publish a Skill, Get an Echo Dot
They do! The person telling me was a foreign teacher too.

I'll note that the man in this case was Japanese.
Hacker News is a high quality forum because it disallows political discussion.

Maybe someone could build a forum that enforces civil discussion on political issues, either with automated or manual moderation, but Hacker News' moderation isn't nearly strict enough.
Ask HN: What SaaS do you wish existed and would pay $10/month for?
As an extension, what SaaS would you pay $200/month for which is targeted at business?
I think it's a calculated illustration. Power is all about making calculated gambles like that. If everyone was bare with their intentions all the time, it'd be easy for their enemies to bring them down.

The fact of the matter is that any type of change to the tax status of a significant asset is going to have far-reaching implications and plenty of people sticking their hands in the pot to try to make the outcome favorable to themselves.

A puff piece that features one of the most-conspicuous richest men in the world suggesting a tax hike against himself is just throwing a bone to the dogs; it's fodder that keeps Berkshire Hathaway and Buffett in the news and it makes the Buffett/BH brand more recognizable, likable, and personable, which are very important qualities.

It also gives him an anchor to point to if he ever needs to negate bad press. He can say "Look, I have a track record of advocating for selfless causes. What kind of greedy billionaire would get on TV and ask for a tax hike? You wouldn't see Donald Trump do that! The things that are causing my bad publicity are not actually bad, they're just misunderstood."

When people hear "tax hike" they think about it in relation to themselves, i.e., a hike on wage taxes. Beyond PR interest, the ulterior motives would be a) increasing the tax rate on people who are having good years in their small businesses, so that the growth of their nascent empire is stymied, lest it someday pose a challenge to BH's interests; and b) many of BH's major holdings are closely linked to government activity, things like railroads and utility companies. More money to the government = more money to BH, and this good PR makes government employees more favorable to Buffett/BH since he is not demonizing the thing that pays their salaries (taxes).

It's convenient to assume that people are honest and straightforward as long as one remains naive enough to believe that. But with something as complex and interconnected as BH and Buffett, nothing occurs in a vacuum. Buffett's private thoughts remain private. He knows when he is on the public stage and he certainly knows to calculate the consequences of his actions there. To deny that this is significant is to deny the purpose and value of Public Relations completely.
Many idiotic statements (such as yours) would be prevented if English language speakers agreed to a global moratorium on the use of the words "objective" and "subjective" until such time that it could be verified that 99.999% of the population could use them in regular discourse in non-idiotic ways.
You should not use md5 for anything. It's completely broken and that's just asking for trouble if someone swaps out whatever your checksums are checking. It's worth the security to swallow the extra computational power. Though, if you're hosting something no one cares about, it's still worth the security to keep your small audience safe from the random malicious person you thought you'd never see.
Only if every python programmer can easily implement and distribute their own c functions for every performance hotspot they find in their program.

This is the trade-off I was talking about, you cannot trust the language itself to be performant, you have to rely on others or jump through extra hoops. It's certainly one way to ensure you won't spend the time to fix performance issues until they're really biting you (premature optimisation quote goes here).
And at least Cristiano Ronaldo is a EU-citizen...

When you're Neymar and you get paid for a toothpaste add in Japan, you get 3 countries possibly arguing about that revenue.
Hence Panama, at least until you figure it out.
Distribution is the hard problem. Capitalism has operated in such a manner that labor has been the means of income redistribution. After you work some time you can invest your income in a market that will provide and even more productive future.

When labor becomes disconnected from gaining capital things become problematic in countries that do not believe in wealth redistribution. If you don't have a job "It's your fault for not working hard enough", if you are getting money from the government "you're a welfare queen". You can run into a system that deadlocks. There is plenty of production. There is lots of need. But there is no means of wealth transfer between those two groups and you can run into a state of consumption collapse.
Make website in 5 steps
I have a lookup table in 1password as my brain can't work with indexing random strings with numbers in them easily
From my experience the public versions of g suite run a more bleeding edge version and they introduce stabilized features into g suite.
Convincing C programmers to switch to C++: A look at human behavior (2016)
Uber Says It Just Noticed Error on Pay, but It Was No Secret
Which simply avoids the issue I raised. How long has Linux been going?
>" BGP is a highly complex routing protocol and you can tweak it to your exact needs."

BGP itself is actually a relatively simple protocol. The complexity really comes from all the available configuration options.
Giant Antarctic iceberg 'hanging by a thread', say scientists
That is the superposition principle for scalars.
Ask HN: Why does thinking about moving homes give me a panic attack?
I should be excited to think about the prospect of moving to a larger home, in a better neighborhood for my kids (read: more kids around), with more space. But every time my wife brings it up (and she's very persistent on it) I start to freak out inside. it just seems like so much to do.

I'll do my best to convince her that where we are now is good enough, but it's obvious that this is something she really believes in. And it's becoming more obvious that there's just not enough room.

I think that growing up in a small house in an old neighborhood makes me feel like this is a "keeping up with the Jones'" sort of moment. But in reality, we're outgrowing our neighborhood, size-wise and financially.

Homes in the midwest are affordable and huge. Neighborhoods grow like warts around here. I suppose I just need more convincing?
Actually, Bill Gates has directly called for a capital gains tax increase (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/02/bill-gates-calls-for-higher-c...) -- I assume capital gains would be most of his current taxable income at this point. Capital gains taxes are of far more concern to mega-rich people and big businesses, compared to small and medium businesses (which can take advantage of some capital gains exemptions specifically designed for them). So in his case at least I don't think this is reflecting some nefarious hidden agenda.