skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What gadgets you didn’t think of but found you could not leave without?
There are often gadgets we think are too pricey, or maybe we thought the idea is just too silly to get, or we thought it was useless. But when we got it, found out that it actually changed everything. What was that gadget for you?

For me, there was two.

First is the Google Chromecast. I didn’t think it would all that useful, but this $35 gadget changed the way I watch YouTube, Netflix, HBO Go, downloaded movies, listen to music through my TV!

The other is my Fitbit. Measuring the quality of sleep I get and also my average heart rate and the daily steps I get has been life-changing.

What's yours?
I assume you talk about Aldi Süd? Their card handling is pretty fast and they can even start scanning the next customer's items while the machine is still processing. Aldi Nord on the other is hand is (while still faster than average) not particularly noteworthy.
Those countries already have outsized consumption because carbon externalities are not priced in. Failing to border adjust a domestic US carbon tax would incentivize them to import less, not necessarily consume less.
It's probably related in that markets beforehand were more national than international. Nowadays, the national barriers are pretty porous, so lower-skilled workers have to compete with labor at a fraction of a cost of theirs.
This is true, and I've known people who seem to find that quality of broadcast TV addictive. Over the years, they tuned the transition to keep viewers from switching channels -- removed the trailing commercial gap, sped up the closing credits, etc. -- and perhaps increased the addictiveness in the process.
While I am sure it comes from a good place, I wonder why there is a prescription being given when he states he is happy the way he has it and has no interest in living any other way? Coulent he be genuinely happy with his life and in no need of change?
I understand the article wasn't peer-reviewed, it was only an example of the absurd level of polarization that has distorted the scientific process in climate research.

However, it must be said "peer review" is no guarantee of scientific purity, the peer review system is subject to being gamed and can exhibit severe bias against unconventional approaches or novel findings.

One version is the "file-drawer effect", operative in a range of science publishing. For example, accepting drug studies showing positive results but not those where drug treatment doesn't separate from placebo gives a falsely favorable impression of the effectiveness of the drug.

Logically we could assert that in the presence of bias toward publishing climate studies supporting warming vs. reports not showing warming, the credibility of widely quoted results becomes questionable.

It's natural, healthy and desirable for serious students of a subject to disagree. OTOH whenever political force imposes suppression of opposing points of view the process of science grinds to a halt, leaving only pseudo-scientific mythology in its place.
SKYACTIV-X is the world's first commercial gasoline engine to use compression ignition, in which the fuel-air mixture ignites spontaneously when compressed by the piston.

Just pure curiosity, I wonder if SKYACTIV-X engine would also also consume diesel or gasoline/diesel mixtures?
It was posted to a board called "pc-considered-harmful"

Sounds like this memo is exactly what that board was for.
If he is, as the following article says, "considering legal options," then he wasn't given an exit package. Or I suppose he could have been offered one but turned it down.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/google-em...
thanks for linking that. yes indeed Liberalism (capital L) is the best technology yet invented for preventing civil war, which is otherwise the more-or-less inevitable outcome of tribal politics.

the most important methodology of Liberalism is the cultural norm and moral importance of unfettered freedom of speech, expression, and association. The moral and normative importance of free speech cannot be understated. Losing this as a norm has eviscerated the left leaving them as noxious authoritarians sliding down the slope to Mao-ism.
You don't need a "great idea". We built an incredibly crude v1 of Cronitor because my friend and co-founder needed to know if an important cron job failed. This meets no definition of "great idea" but has been a fun, challenging and profitable side business for over 3 years now.
To be honest I didn't see donations box nearby, but I would not bet on not being there either. If there was, I would certainly put coins there.
Thanks, I didn't know those Unix versions included disk I/O.
> always identified left but I'm definitely starting to feel confused by the actions of other leftys. I definitely don't identify with the right so overall I'm feeling tribeless as of late.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Lifelong liberal here, and lately I feel the left has abandoned me. Whenever I call something into question I'm told that I'm a nazi, or that I'm "just not angry enough" and some dishes have to be broken for the cause, etc. I no longer feel part of the crowd, but I am certainly far from a right winger, so.. tribeless myself.

The left is turning into a fascist group. Ironically while waving the flag pretending to fight it. In fact, the liberal movement is turning into the type of populace the government has always wanted. No right to an opinion, speech and expression are heavily regulated, and we rely on the government for everything. We tell others exactly how to live their lives and punish them when they don't.

This wasn't what I signed up for.
Firstly, I'm not a native speaker and I don't dare to judge how consistently is English used in politics. But once again, I claim that making conclusions merely based on "language similarity" or something like that is a poor way to discuss stuff.

Secondly, I find it perfectly valid to discuss the very foundation of the policies (instead of discussing individual policies).

FWIW this does not mean I agree with the memo. But I think the immediate calls for getting the guy fired (and firing him) are damaging for the discussion.
Lots more info here for the curious: http://great78.archive.org

You can see a picture of one of the four-armed turntables here: http://great78.archive.org/preservation/
Thank you

It definitely keeps us busy 24/7 but we've built some internal tools to make this as quick and efficient as possible

We're definitely nearing the point of needing a dedicated Community Manager to take over this function
Not that I've had any time to do them, but I have often written up entire business plans just based off of profiting from something that makes me angry.

For example, when I had a contract programming business 10 years ago I absolutely despised the RFP process. I still have a business plan sitting around built entirely around that flow. I still hate the RFP process, but I figured if this thing is going to still be a thing I may as well make money off of it.

If I ever had free time to just sit and build stuff day after day you'd end up with this entire incoherent set of businesses based on things that I couldn't stand. :)
Because a lot of enterprises running Linux are running some kind of "enterprise Linux" e.g. Red Hat, Ubuntu Advantage, SUSE Linux Enterprise, where purchasing an "enterprise Linux" allows for support contracts etc.

If you imagine WSL for Windows Server not as competition for CentOS and Debian, but as competition for "enterprise Linux", then you can have a compelling sales case for enterprises which are already heavily invested in Microsoft, i.e. with extensive Active Directory and Office 365 deployments. Why purchase two support contracts, one from Microsoft and one from Enterpise Linux Vendor X, when you can buy just one support contract from Microsoft and still run everything you need?
I'm the complete opposite. I never have cash on me and I get irrational angry when some place does not accept EC.
Sharing photos is easier on facebook because all of your friends are connected. Quality is worse but speed and discovery are easier.

Strangers don't belong in that model because they are not friends. Most people want to keep strangers away from your real life until they become friends so having a third party site keeps that experience away from preying eyes. Once a couple is formed they will connect over facebook and start sharing their experiences.
The real reason there aren't more female scientists
The challenge is that this is non-uniform across social classes. The poor spend a large portion of their income on groceries, gas, rent, and basic necessities. The middle-class spend a large portion of their income on health care and education, which many poor people don't spend anything on because they can't afford it. The rich spend a large portion of their income on asset purchases like stocks and real estate.

The Fed already tries to adjust the basket of goods to reflect what real people spend their money on. The problem is that the average dollar is not reflective of the average person. Dollars are concentrated among the rich; that's what inequality means. The rich spend their money on asset purchases like buying stocks, real estate, and businesses. To my knowledge, asset prices are not included in the CPI at all. If all the money that the Fed pumps into the economy ends up being concentrated in Facebook and then is used to buy Whatsapp for $19B, that doesn't count as inflation at all. So they keep pumping money into the economy, it keeps going to the 1%, asset prices keep rising, and the rich get richer while the poor get nothing.
So you're saying develop on Windows Server and deploy on Linux? Why not develop on desktop Windows?
You make a really funny analogy, but I hope you see the other side to that argument.

Kids really might stay up all night playing with "addictive" wooden blocks. They might spend 10+ hours a day with the blocks. They may have violent mood swings when you take the blocks away.

But wooden blocks...suck. The types of entertainment kids have had access to in the past is nothing like what they will have access to in the future.

When I was 6-10, I had an unhealthy relationship with comic books. I stole them. I read them to the detriment of education. My parents just had to manage my addiction, because beating it was impossible. And these were just ultimately just crappy drawings on crappier paper.

When my child is 6-10, he will be able to put on a VR Headset and actually BE a comic book superhero. If children can be overwhelmed by a wooden blocks obsession, how the fuck are they supposed to incorporate the type of stimulus into their lives we are now building for them?
That's actually a big question I have as a new Californian. In Houston, you got caught, every time, if you sped on the freeways. The cops were everywhere.

Here not only do I rarely see cops, I've read in the local papers that cops can't pull people over for speeding if EVERYONE is speeding. You have to be speeding far above average. So everyone is actually incentivized to speed together.

When I first got here I saw comically low speed limit signs - as low as 55mph on freeways! And averages of 65! That's INSANELY slow for how big these freeways are! But apparently it doesn't matter in California, here everyone just speeds and is protected as a group.

I don't doubt that I'll pay my dues eventually. You don't get away with 95mph on a sportbike forever. We make targets of ourselves. That's fine, in Houston I got ticketed ~200USD every three years or so, that's a fair price to get to go above the speed limit for me.
Please note that is does not include losses from asset devaluations, e.g the housing crash, stock market crash, failed investments, etc.
Interesting article. One key difference is that this was done before/during the Industrial Revolution, so it was probably too early. The amount of human labor it takes to provide basic needs for one human is an important factor. For example:

It was intended as an emergency measure to help the poor when grain prices had risen sharply due to meager harvests.

Today we can produce so much food we have to come up with creative ways to keep it valuable - subsidies, dumping it, etc. We've "lost" a ton of agriculture jobs since that experiment was tried, because we can do it with less people. Seems reasonable to transfer those gains back to the people instead of all of them going to the guy that owns the harvester.
BIP 141 (Segregated Witness) has locked in
Show HN: Reliable Server-Sent Events for Django, using Pushpin
Is SegWit activated yet? Yes :)
People are totally interested in his psychology. They watch his lectures. He is earning an extremely respectable amount on Patreon (>$57000 / month). He is planning to build an online university to give a classical humanities education, whatever that means. His advice to "clean your room" has become a meme among his fans.
Any idea on how this compares to the deep learning course here: http://course.fast.ai/?

Very interested in taking a course, but there are so many offerings available. I have high level ML understanding from classes I took in college, but wanted to dive deeper into it.
I don't use gmail - I prefer inbox.
While that's true, I suspect that for archive, the original is best -- anyone can (software licenses notwithstanding) apply current state-of-the-art restoration techniques, but if all we preserve is the restored version then it's going to be really difficult to apply a better restoration technique in ten years.
Islamically the concept of a Wali applies only to women but we totally agree, this will be expanded to both genders.
I bet on plugin hybrids, specifically ones with large batteries. This seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I think the Voltec drivetrain shows what's possible here. Pure EV purists dislike PHEVs because they have the complexity of an ICE car + an EV car, but I think there's some serious advantages. Like you say, Atkinson cycle for electricity generation for when the battery drains beyond smaller commute ranges. Something like this new Mazda engine in that context would make quite a bit of sense for overall fuel efficiency.
The Uber car's are absolutely everywhere in Pittsburgh. See probably an average of two one way on my daily commute.
I was thinking if something like eve, would be able to carve out a similar niche. Someplace between spreadsheet (that can surpass simple desktop apps in complexity), database, data-analytics worksheet and a thrown together dashboard?

I need to get around to try eve. So far I got by using Jupyter/iPython notebooks for similar purposes, which means I don't have as much of a need.

If you tried eve already, what did you build with it?
These kinds of products are extremely hard to get right.

You likely end up in an awkward position where big or serious companies don't take you seriously because they have their own ways and methods and teams and baggage and don't want someone else's magic touch.

And on the other end of the spectrum you have noobs who need way more hand holding than your stuff provides so your product is too technical for them.

Another problem is a case of "death by a thousand cuts". You inherently end up dealing with an infinite combinations of environments and requirements and you can't fully satisfy any one group of customers because each one is just different enough to cause a problem.

So put simply I would say something like this is too abstract and too general for a small operation.

Perhaps companies like Amazon can afford to dump resources into projects of this nature because they have the resources and they have the eco-system to put it into. But I would recommend against trying to bootstrap projects of this nature.

As a generic advice I would suggest attempting more concrete problems that have bright and clear boundaries and a finite and small domain so that you have a very clear "finish" point (and you will still never be finished).

A completely made up example to demonstrate generic vs specific, instead of "DevOps as a service" think "Hosted Redis as a service".
From the FAQ on the course's page:

"Programming (expected): intermediate Python programming skills: work effectively with loops, control flows, data structures, files, functions and OO programming. Prior experience with PyData libraries is also recommended (e.g. Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib)Mathematics (recommended): Matrix vector operations and notation.

Machine Learning (recommended): understand how to frame a machine learning problem including how data is represented, how models are evaluated on the task and against each other, and how to optimize model performance for the best evaluation."
The whole discussion is not about the guys but YC and if they can back such a business.
Interesting, or a similar phenomenon to situations where in order to maximize deductions you might want to increase charitable contributions, better to give the money to a friend non-profit than Uncle Sam
I have a 2012 Mazda3 sedan with the 2.0L Skyactiv-G engine. I drive a daily commute on a 50-50 highway/stop-n-go mix. My average mpg has consistently been 35 mpg (40 highway, 32 off). The hatchback has slightly worse mpg, so does the manual transmission, but 29 mpg sounds more like the non-skyactiv 2.0L engine. The 2.5L sport engine would be closer to 25 mpg.

I'd check under the hood just to make sure :) then fill up the tires, reset the average fuel economy, and baby it on the highway to see if you can get around the expected 40 mpg.
How STOX Raised Over $30M with Ethereum?
Well, you used a word that already has different meaning.
Financial Time-Series Predictions and AI Models (Part 2): HTM Models
the financial past is littered with the corpses of BTC shorts.

Something to consider is that most of the ICO buyers would prefer to exit to BTC rather than exit to fiat currency. Possibly an ICO crash would make BTC go even higher.

Actually, short BTC please.. I need more fuel for my long position :]
>There has been congressional testimony claiming Wikileaks as a propaganda arm of the Russian government.

Well, it can be called propaganda if anything they publish is a lie, but that is very far from the truth. Russian government's arm or not, USA is getting pretty drenched and that is a fact. Just like how no one wants to debate on what the fired employee wrote.
I like the precision and clarity of your thinking. Would you be interested in being paid to write freelance blog posts?
This man dared to challenge 50+ years of post-modern indoctrination. The result is hardly surprising. I salute his bravery though. Look forward to his discussion with Jordan Peterson. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/89490930975844352...
I don't know what I was thinking....
LibreRead(beta): Self-Hosted Free(Libre) Ebook Reader
My side projects tend to be libraries for other programmers. I usually get ideas by using existing libraries but being unhappy with the interface / api they offer. I love designing good apis that express the underlying concepts well, while hiding implementation details, and while many niche libraries have a good solution for their problem domain, many are lacking in api / UX.
There's some interesting technical background on the WSL blog, e.g. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process...
I solved my own problem. I cut the cord two years ago, but I love to watch college football. When doing research this year to figure out where to stream each game, I realized that a lot of people would be doing this same research.

I built [https://wherecaniwatchmy.team] as a site specifically for determining which streaming service is best for watching a specific sports team.

I'm no entrepreneur, but I think it's something that could actually turn into a basic side income.
>Almost 100% of midwives in Ontario are female
No, it is only a problem for the "good jobs" that are dominated by men. No one will fight for gender ratios in the coal mining business, despite how useful "a diversity of life experience and opinion" might be within this industry.

This entire thing is a political tool being disguised as a moral crusade and it is playing off our collective desire to do the right thing. Absolutely disgusting.
Why is this on the second page with 246 points in 1-2 hours? Seems strange...
If they're going to break source compatibility again, here's one vote for cleaning up the `if let` and `guard let` syntax. IMO it's rather unreadable and unwieldy.
OT: what could cause a system to have a load of 1 when idle?

I have one (unimportant) Linux system that idles with a load of exactly 1. The issue persists through reboots. It is a KVM virtual machine and qemu confirms nothing is going on in the background.

Any ideas how to find out what's causing it?
You completely ignored the point being made, a society that sucks for most people where the benefits flow to only a few is going to be seen as unfair by all those people who aren't benefiting from it and when that gets too extreme, it leads to war. Economic inequality to the extreme is dangerous for everyone. Trying to justify why it is fair, what you did above, is utterly missing the point. You can't dismiss the majority of the population as "some part of the population". You may as well have said "let them eat cake." An economy that benefits only a few, is a broken economy.
Copyright on music is one of the thornier areas of the law: to start with there's the dual nature of music copyrights (both the composition and the specific recording have a copyright). Possibly even more relevant here, sound recordings only came into the federal regime relatively recently in the 70s, leaving the works created before then to a hodgepodge of state laws.

The Archive is taking a fair use stance here, but as with some of their other projects there's a significant "ask for forgiveness, not permission" element at work as well.
The mobile card readers are very uncommon in the US. In Canada, they're everywhere.
> How can there be a genetic difference between genetically invalid (badly defined as you say) concepts? I.e. the concept of race is completely social, there is nothing genetic about it

Are you denying that there are differences in the genes controlling hair color between different racial groups? Or the frequency of something like lactose intolerance?

"Races" are badly defined, with shifting definitions and fuzzy borders and many different ways of grouping the same people. The idea of categorizing people into a handful of "races" rather than looking at hundreds of intersecting ancestries mixing together is dumb. But there is still a correlation between the two concepts. If you can find a gene that correlates with an ancestry (which you can do), then you've also found a gene that has a weaker correlation with "race".

And because there are thousands of genes that will correlate slightly with race, it's possible that one affects intelligence in some manner. It's not my problem if that's true. I'm confident there are no practically significant differences there. But that doesn't mean there isn't some .002% difference in median intelligence between groups that's caused by genes. It's bullheaded to ignore the possibility just because some awful racist will use it as "evidence" of their superiority. If they can't find out-of-context factoids to abuse they'll make things up anyway.
I was working as mobile game developer and came across a 3rd party tool called Particle Designer which was just fun to play with so I created an app out of it called Magic Fingers which didn't take off for a year and now has around 2 million downloads. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/magic-fingers-lite/id4988704...]
Last days the defcon issue, and this week for some particular reason we have a few similar articles here and there talking about how fabulous and great would be for a 'good nerd' to work for the military, government, etc...

Can we spot a pattern here? PR damage control?
Ask HN: Would you be comfortable with being employed by an intelligent computer?
All other things being equal.