skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone once put it: "There's a sort of Gresham's Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it."

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

I've seen any number of fora over the ages, and the debasement problem is a significant one. It's not limited to online, as the saga of The American Mercury illustrates:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury

My preference, increasingly, is to be acutely aware of the limits of my own time and attention, to block fuckwits with abandon, and to treasure both the individuals and fora which actually do deliver quality.

On which, a thank you to HN's mods, dang and scbt, both of whom put in a hell of a lot of work, much of it gentle, and for which HN is decidedly one of the better, and longer-lived, discussion platforms on today's Internet.

(Metafilter also seems particularly resilient.)
How much impact does the average American have on public policy?
Not to mention paying for a studio apartment on a highschool dropout hourly wage
I'm saying at this point it's wiser to say that it is than to say that it isn't.
The Moon Mining Race Is Getting Serious: Laws and Economics in Play
You can order on the walk over. Ready when you arrive.
Doesn't GitHub have a rating system of some kind?
Motorcyclists have a word for this phenomenon. It's called SMIDSY - "sorry mate, I didn't see you." Clear road, good vision, bike traveling in a straight line within the speed limit, car still somehow pulls out and hits the bike. Even worse, the times when the bike is stationary at a red light and the car just drives through it.
Statistically, you can't do it

I'm not sure that's true. I mean, yeah, it's a given that "most new businesses fail", but that's ignoring the point that you can try again and again. Even if you "run out of money" and have to quit, you can go to work for The Man for a few years, rebuild savings and then try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. To be fair though, I'm assuming a situation where you don't have kids, a house payment, etc.

and you'll waste a lot of time, money and prime earning years figuring that out. That's not to say you shouldn't try, but only to say you should be realistic about what you are likely sacrificing for that small chance of success.

Is it really wasted time though? The way I look at it, if you try to start a business and fail, you still gained from the process, because you mostly likely learned a shit-ton from the process itself. Speaking from my own experience working on Fogbeam, even if we never make a penny, the process will have been invaluable to me, as I've learned, grown and extended myself in ways I never imagined I could.
When sharing the link on facebook, there is no useful preview, mostly just a white block.
I think it varied a bit by store.
I think the outrage is moreso because he wasn't a spy or someone trying to attack DPRK or the North Koreans. He was imprisoned on relatively minor (speaking in context) charges and instead of simply being held prisoner seems to have suffered permanent disability.
Brave already supports this.
Yes, they could purge the public QA and sell the history as a service to companies.
Because most tech start ups in the valley are funded by private investors, and for them usually the best outcome is either an exit or an IPO. When the industry is dominated and controlled by this kind of funding, these goals end up idolized because that's just what rules the land. The VC wants to flip it to Google, the entrepreneur just hopes that he doesn't fuck up and that his investor gets his outcome.
Of course not, they just believe this is a white christian nation and we should be packed off on a boat (again) and shipped somewhere I don't know and have never been. Or maybe we will be mysteriously """convinced""" to "self-deport".
it sounds like an excuse.
Shouldn't the first version be in French then?
How do you get proportional representation with single-member districts without involving party lists somehow (as in e.g. MMP)? STV doesn't fix it - while it makes third party votes viable, it still means that third parties are going to win far fewer districts than the overall proportion of their vote across all districts.
I thought Maltese was Malta's official first language.
Stay away from Bitcoin – it’s complete garbage
Hmm... if we're picking a lingua franca for the Earth, that would have to be Mandarin (~14% of the world's population speak it)
There's a difference between an obligation to humanity as an aggregate entity, which is sort of always there with an uninterrupted continuity (even as individual members are born and die), and obligation to a specific hypothetical human being that may or may not exist. This is especially weird in the context this question, where your very decision is about whether they'll exist. I just don't see how an obligation to create can be owed prior to creation.
Great game!!
FireMonkey is pretty good. You can use it with Delphi or C++ Builder:

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
#IconoHash – the world's conversation archive
> 6) Its development is extremely rapid, new releases every couple of months with a lot of improvements and new features every time.

How stable is the api then?

I think google is a bit notorious for this (e.g. Angular vs Angular 2).
Exactly. The same logic applies. It's a glorified hotel reservation site.
Both Safari and Chrome have recently adopted a 'flatter' version of their icon colours. Firefox still holds on to quite a few gradients.
Whitespace-implied parenthesis.

1+2 * 3 == 9

Sick! I wish Haskell notices this.
Yes, and I'm trying to say that this would be nothing out of the ordinary for someone imprisoned for minor crimes in the US.

I mean in the US they regularly cook prisoners to death http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2009/09/dog-days-tu...
Yeah, same here, sorry.
> People didn't believe what the party said,

True to some extent. However, while suspecting the party lies, they absolutely had no idea how deep and vast the lies were and that exactly was the truth. I've once heard an anecdote about North Korean woman who fled to South Korea and was asked how she thinks the life in the West is, how she thinks people in countries like USA live. She said she thinks it's a very good life, everybody is rich - everybody can get no less than 800g of rice every day!

The point is that when you live in the environment of a totalitarian state with little to no access to outside sources of information, you can easily deduct you are probably not being told the truth. It is much harder to know what the truth is, especially if you most basic assumptions might be based on the same propaganda you seemingly reject - because you've had nothing else to base them on.

And if you look at Russia now, it is surprising how many people who were alive at Soviet regime feel nostalgic about it and even about figures like Stalin. They experienced all the lies themselves, they knew those are the lies - and ask them now, they'd repeat them anyway.
Recommend me a book
I'm not really sure what is uncivil about having an alternate view on something?

Maybe you're right, this community and it's attitude towards censoring alternate views isn't really working out for me.

What's the point of having a comments section if the discussion generally only goes one way.
Winn-Dixie ordered to update website for the blind
The app actually does seem like a great idea. I would love to become early beta tester when it's out -- please keep me posted.
If you go back in history to when the SI units were defined, there would have been no way to measure a Coulomb of electrons, since in nature you'd somehow have to distinguish the electrons you are counting from all the other electrons sitting around. With the invention of single electron counting, we could do it now, but we aren't going to change the SI system a century in. And, the idea was that the seven primary units are both independent (you can not derive one from any of the others) and sufficient to derive all of the other units of measure. Once you have the Ampere, you can define a Coulomb as a relative quantity.
For such a "lingua franca" the pure number of speakers is not quite as relevant as the distribution of those speakers. According to the numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...), approximately 14% of the world speaks English as a first or second language as well. More importantly, English has 400 million more speakers who speak it as a second language when compared to Mandarin, which suggests that its speakers are more widely distributed on Earth.
I've been meaning to read Don Quixote in Spanish some day.

Slightly off topic: Would there be scope for a bilingual epub format for wide-screen devices displaying native text and translation side by side? This could be useful for Ancient Greek and Latin verse, Norse sagas, devotional readings of sacred texts, Hamlet in the original Klingon and even automagically machine-translated documents.

Dead-tree parallel texts have something of a market at the foreign language section of one's local book-store.
Homan Square: The Guardian reported in February 2015 that the Chicago Police Department "operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Police_Department#Homa...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square
Optimizing impact: why @mattklein123 will not start an Envoy platform company
Can you go into more detail on this?
For searchcode.com I am getting about 300,000 uniques a month and ad revenue around $700 a month using carbon ads. It's enough to pay the bills which is all I really need for it.
You vastly underestimate the volume and dimensions of proper totalitarian propaganda, like Soviet one. It is literally everywhere. You think stuff like "hidden as organic voices of different organizations" was invented recently? That's just the basics, Soviets had that in early 1930th when there were letters from workers and peasants demanding that the party would take care of Trotskyist-Bukharin traitors or whoever was the traitor du jour that day. It's something they have done for decades, and they did much more. You think you'd be able to tell truth from lie in such environment - unless you are spectacularly bright genius, you'd probably not able to. You may identify some lies, but definitely not all of them, and would be definitely driven to believe into a lot of things that were either distorted or completely false. In an environment where nearly all information sources were controlled (except for rumors and foreign radio-"voices") it would be very hard to discern and avoid it.
The reason is in essence that more trivial things are easy to consume and therefore easier to give Internet Points to. Who can read and upvote a HN comment? Anyone! Who can find, read and approve of a GitHub patch? Not too many people. Maybe 2-3, if you're lucky!

It's basically the problem of specialization. Anyone can perform a task that requires no specialization, and anyone can comment on it.

This is a really great article. It's very rare I read something that is both subtle and nonapparent, yet obviously true upon inspection. That's what this article is.
This works if you're young (health insurance is expensive, working/traveling away from family), have resources (for those unexpected expenses, and the slow payers), and are able to take your work with you on vacation (important customers need service); but for the vast majority of professionals it's just not possible any more, without significant financial support starting out.

You need a good chunk of capital to survive the first few years, before you even think about expanding. (Which, when it's time, you must do, or risk shrinking into oblivion. And not everybody is able and willing to expand forever. I wasn't.)

Just sharing my own little caveat; otherwise I think starting your own firm/consultancy is fantastic.
People have a tendency to forget that famous public figures are people and feel comfortable saying mean things without thought. I think Few's experience of Twitter is probably an amplified version of what most of us know.

I still like Twitter. Compared to other online forums, it still has the most thoughtful discourse I know of (except for HN). Even if it means tolerating a bunch of unpleasant garbage along the way.
On another thought, some recruiter do spend time on an introductory call with me, they appear to be studying my background and qualifications and do send few interesting jobs initially, but then, almost always, something horrible happens and they start sending my way every single job they've got. At that point, I just stop responding to these individuals and send their emails straight to spam (hoping it will train the filters correctly, but wondering, how many legit opportunities were missed simply because they got stuck in spam box). I'm hoping recruiters are reading this post and draw conclusions. But that was my original question -- perhaps, they (the recruiters) are doing so great these days, so that they simply do not care.
I want to do it. I'm just not sure what problem to solve, or how to broadcast my skillset. I welcome suggestions!
So many "how I did my own thing" stories out there remind me of that old "How To Draw An Owl" meme[1]. It's always: 1. I quit my job one day and decided to [do a startup | independently contract] 2. Fast forward a few years and [I sold to Google! | I've got 5 contracts and I set my own schedule!] I mean, great work, and congratulations, but I think you skipped a few steps there.

1: http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/572/078/d6d...
What software did you use to decrypt it?
Statistical Anomaly Detection (2015)
Maybe this is a little glib, but I've learned to pay less attention to arguments as to why a person should value X or Y and to pay more attention to any information that would help me predict (and when I am feeling bold, to influence) what people (and what groups of people working towards a common goal) actually value, i.e., to what "ultimate" ends are they actually willing to invest sustained effort and to sacrifice. (The purpose of the word "ultimate" in that last sentence is to distinguish between ends or goals that almost everyone has to work towards (which some call "instrumental" goals) and ends that do not have that property (ultimate or "terminal" goals).

For example, at least in the U.S., almost everyone has to put in sustained effort to produce an income and if they fail at that goal then they will struggle to achieve any goal (good or evil). Consequently, in the terminology I've just introduced, ensuring an adequate income would at least where I live constitute an instrumental rather than an ultimate goal. It is people's ultimate goals that I am the most interested learning about.

An internet manifesto with 10,000 signatures tends to matter less -- tends to have less of an effect on reality -- IMHO than a few relatively rational people willing to put in a few hours of effort every month towards an ultimate goal (or some collection of values that includes an ultimate value) as long as they can keep up the effort for long enough. By "effort" I mean effort sufficient to keep a job that many other people want (doled out at a rate of a few hours a month on average).

Also, people underestimate the importance of what (evil) things you (or I) are not willing to do and overestimate the importance of what good outcomes (e.g., curing cancer or ending world hunger) a person or group is aiming to achieve.

In other words, I believe that if the only thing you (or I) accomplish in the world is never doing any harm to any person -- never to steal anything that according to the generally-believed ethical standards of your society rightfully belongs to them, never to lie to them (particular for personal gain) -- then you (or I) will have done more net good than the vast majority of currently living human beings.

Since I started believing those last 2 paragraphs in 1992, however, I've met very few (but not 0 or 1) effective people who agree with them, so I will backtrack somewhat to the position that it is at least worth studying whether what I just asserted is as an important human cognitive bias.
What about health insurance for those of us in the USA?
I know a few high-school dropouts in our IT department.

I also work for a bank. A massively large bank. I'm guessing it happens occasionally.
I was born in late 1980 in North Vietnam, at that time the society and education system was still under the heavy influence of the Soviet-era propaganda. Other than the USSR, Vietnam at the time was also under some influence from the communist China as well.

For fictional novels, we had Russian books such as Nought the Seafarer, Dr. Aibolit, The Copper Jar of Old Khottabych, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends, and many other books translated to Vietnamese. They were printed in the USSR in beautiful, high-quality paper hardcovers, and were a joy to read and was the inspiration for my destitute childhood. Even Vietnamese children literature were also quite enjoyable. For instance, De Men Phieu Luu Ky (Diary of a cricket) were about adventures of a cricket that found the traditional life boring, broke through and went exploring new places. I mostly find them inspiring and non-offensive even now (I am currently living in the US and had a liberal college and post-graduate education in the US). Adult literature was much more blatantly brainwashing.

I don't know about what happened in China and Russia, but I don't feel that western children literature books were under scrutiny in Vietnam, I still remember vividly my dad has a stash full of children's books such as Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, 1001 Arabian nights,... they were all available in Vietnamese under the mainstream publication, although the books looked awful cosmetically, because they were printed and bound domestically.

For non-fictional books, I can recall several excellent children books that were published in Russian that were my inspiration when I was young. In the Russian side, Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman was the one book that I would read and read again. On the Chinese side, One Hundred Thousand Whys is another series of books that were surprisingly well written. They have many of those on different topics such as Maths, Physics, Literature, Biology, Medicine, Astrology,... each book has several hundreds of answers to basic and advanced topics written in an accessible manner. It was kinda my childhood Wikipedia.

That was my anecdotal experience. Maybe it wasn't offensive, maybe I was used to it, or maybe I was romanticizing my uneventful, brainwashed childhood.
Is this true? So if the toxin is already there, and you boil it, you'd be fine? I feel like that's not true.
Conv Nets: A Modular Perspective (2014)
Right, well I can say the same about your intuition regarding causality and locality. Personally, I never thought that the locality requirement or speed of light limit was an absolute necessity. After all, you get spooky action at a distance either way. In fact, I would submit that avoiding pilot wave theory doesn't rid you of the possibility of non-locality. It might still be the case and now you have even more baggage.

Frankly, it's much easier for me to imagine a particle traveling along a pilot wave, and non-local events, then to imagine the world splitting into an infinite number of possibilities at every instance and everything being entangled with everything else in infinite to the third power set of possibilities.

By the way, is this an accurate overview? https://youtu.be/rbRVnC92sMs
They concede that IQ (a) exists, (b) predicts many life outcomes, (c) differs between groups, and (d) is partly heritable. If an alien at this point were presented with these premises, does anyone suppose its natural conclusion would be, "this must be completely due to environmental factors, and not in the least genetic ones?"

Surely claiming a difference of outcome is entirely due to environmental factors is as extreme as claiming it's entirely due entirely to genetics. Yet imagine the uproar if someone had claimed the latter. Contrast that with the support Vox has gotten for their article.

It is dangerous to require a conclusion to be true rather than being open to whatever is.
I understand the supposed reasoning, although in my own experience the uniformity of the fries is very spotty nonetheless. Usually employees don't spread the salt properly or they don't hold the shaker long enough for all the salt to properly dispense anyway. This negates any benefit of the AccuSalt.

Instead there are generic shakers that could get a very similar result with some training, even though they don't have a built-in measure. All commercial kitchen supply outlets have them.

Better yet, when kitchen staff are ultimately replaced by robots (or the salt dispenser gets built in to the fry station) this won't be an issue anymore.
> politics in democratic systems should transcend this immature behaviour.

Yes it should. But in highly politicized subreddits, left or right, it doesn't.
No doubt cynicism is as old as politics. But there is a difference when a wag says "don't trust the government" and when the newly elected President of the US says it.

There are legitimate debates to be had about the size and function of the government. But I've never understood the populist appeal of the declaration: The government only causes problems -- elect me and let me prove it to you!
Show HN: Utilize the diversity of word meaning to train the Deep Neural Network
COBRA is a good stopgap if you're leaving a corporate job, and the health exchanges vary in quality.
I agree. But I've noticed a similar "downvote" in physical conversations with people.

I think there's a strong desire for the whole "build a huge audience for your free product, then monetise somehow" model to be valid still (if it ever actually was). Because it's easy, I think.

The fact that it doesn't actually work any more is upsetting to people. So they downvote. That's my guess anyway.

Not that you'll be able to read this, because this post is about to be downvoted to oblivion too ;)
Depends what you consider a "studio apartment" to be.

For most it's not some huge NY loft above Central Park or Soho, but an all-in-one, cramped, small space single room apartment that's usually the cheapest option, and is around 300-600sq feet.
I mean, sometimes you just have to draw the fucking owl.

People want a nice little checklist of how to start a business, but that isn't how it works.
The August 1982 registration discussed in the article was entitled "Computer program for electronic mail system." There are many subsequent registrations for things named "email." The copyright office catalog has 1977 registrations for a newsletter about "electronic mail & message systems" ("covering technology, user, product and legislative trends in graphic and record communications.") There is a 1979 registration for a book about "The Electronic mail market in Europe" and another for "Electronic mail in the 1980’s."
As an anecdata of just how tight this control was, my high school professor told us stories of how he used to smuggle rock'n'roll CDs into the country in the 60s and 70s. Selling outside music was illegal and he could leave the country regularly without suspicion because he had family in Italy.
Dude this game is fantastic. Especially how the individual letters split off. Great job!
This is probably off-topic, but I'm wondering how aggressive is China's GSD (General Staff Department) domestic SIGINT ops compared to U.S.'s NSA or Russia's Spetssvyaz/Special Communications Service?