skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's something to be said about a predictable experience. no one needs checkout buttons on the left and mystery meat navigation [1] for the sake of being unique. i personally don't want a MySpace or Geocities shopping experience. brick and mortar stores are also not that different for the same reason.

our avg purchase online is $500 and a phone purchase avg is closer to $1,000. we're happy when customers call so we can further differentiate ourselves from our competitors.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
If you have an integrated and separate card for gaming, then you can do just about anything, including running Mac inside Linux:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
As a geographical outsider, it seems to me that this is more indicative that Silicon Valley runs on a deep amoral cynicism that uses hypocritical marketing messages to appeal to a segment of left-leaning youthful technological tastemakers.

I feel this is more of an indictment of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the gargantuan power players in SV than of the alleged political beliefs (techno-utopianism, liberalism) being discussed. The line of discussion that this thread represents, which seems common on HN these days, seems to disparage liberalism as if it is to blame for being used as cover by powerful corporations that seem to me to be more anarcho-capitalist than anything else.

Are there really very many techno-utopians in SV, or are they mostly people and companies who use the language of making the world a better place as a cover for consuming it economically?
> In USA, the nation is mixed, heterogenous, and thus being anti-diversity unavoidably involves some discrimination of your fellow citizens, being an asshole to some groups of them; and justifying this discrimination tends to require some racist arguments.

I'm anti-diversity not because I don't believe races exist, I'm anti-diversity because I think hiring people for the color of the skin is itself racist. Affirmative action has made me skeptical of every woman or "diverse" person in high places, because when I see their authority, all I think about is how they had an edge just because of their biology.

I really don't care about natural racial diversity, it's inevitable in our country. However, I'm not really a fan of cultural diversity. A culture defines what is expected from one another socially, and without any set norms, people have no predictable way to interact, which is no good IMO. I understand that multinational corporations are required to allow for multiculturalism so they can behave globally, but I don't see why local areas can't have their own cultures.

I have reasoning behind my opinions, but because they are currently taboo, the only way I can discuss my opinions are on anonymous forums like this. That's sad to me. I may be wrong, there may be a flaw in my reasoning, but because I can't discuss them in public, the discovery of those flaws becomes delayed.
I quoted the specific portion because if the propensity of people here to immediately jump in and "tag" articles with the year they were published. If loeg had left the quoted line out if its post I would not have mentioned anything.
This article is verges a bit much the ad side for the author. However, part me like the idea of a lot fluffy commerce stuff leaving the internet and it just being a giant library of information. However, that's not happening especially since a lot commerce websites also post information. I also don't see how chat functionality would cause such a shift? If you are wanting to reduce the amount questions your website is generating maybe add more content to it. I hate how so many "modern designed" websites are so light on information. They just end up as fancy brochures with little to no information. Give me data sheets, give me all the details I could possible want about your product/s.
I've heard this phrased in another way. The question isn't why many women seek more balance, it's why some men are insane enough to want to work such intense hours.
Post flagged: Low Quality
"Gish gallop" is a term for a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming one's opponent with as many arguments as possible, without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments.

That's not Gish Gallop. That's two sources that you didn't bother responding to. My conspiracy involves data, yours is blanket denial. Don't understand your motivations.

Can we not be realists about how countries behave? I see nothing incompatible with Russia's actions in the recent past (annexing Crimea with unmarked soldiers) and the use of propaganda. But again, the difference is, I'm willing to test this. Do you just assume it's false without testing?

Noticed in your other post that you called Khodorkovsky a "murderous clown". To my knowledge, his sin was being an oligarch who got on the wrong side of putin, went to jail for it, and now is a critic of him. Who did he murder? Why do you call him that? Do you believe putin (whom there is evidence that has killed political opponents) is guilty of this, too? Just trying to understand your motivations.
A big part of the discussion is going to hinge on what we mean with cities and slower-growth communties. Almost everyone live in areas where public transport is vital.

You have to ask yourself, generally when you leave these car utopian places, will you pass or enter areas where public transport seems to be a good idea? The answer of course depends on the definition in the first paragraph, and I'm pretty sure you overestimate the population needed for good public transport by some order of magnitude.. If those places are an important part of your life then you also need to think about public transport.
>As Google made it easier to find the world’s information, it also started to dictate the rules through the PageRank algorithm, which forced companies to design their websites in a certain way

Page rank is not dictated by website design, and it's not the reason many websites share the same components... UX is, we have found the proven path and following it makes it easier for our users.

Los of other valuable criticism in the site's own comments as well...
Interesting that you say that. "Meritocracy" has become a bit of a bad word in Bay Area tech companies. [1]

And in case I didn't make this clear, that was just a quick dump of views that I think are generally considered conservative. Real life is much more nuanced than a list of bullet points. I fully agree that there are, for example, people who want tougher immigration laws but otherwise don't consider themselves conservative.

[1] https://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ I realize this is just one example, but people on my own company's forums have caught flak for using the word "meritocracy".
It has given me a lot of things through the years: lots of insight both on things I'm interested into as well as things I don't pay much attention to, quite a few interesting articles and entertainment.

But the thing it really stuck with me is inspiration: the endurance and obstacles you must overcome to create a new product. The original post on Dropbox[1] had a lot of naysayers: on how the problem is already solved, that you have to install something, that is seems that is a solution looking for a problem, etc.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
To me you conflate culture and religion with race. Which is often or at least usually the basis of racism. I dont think race is foundational, in really any way that matters.
Genetic algorithms?
Meritocracy is incompetent. It is trust destroying because it's inherently corrupt. The privileged, the elite, control the metric by which merit is defined and judged. They create a system of self-preservation that excludes others who would dilute their control. There is no such thing as privilege, elitism, without exclusion and inferiority. Meritocracy always leads to the very thing it purports to try and avoid: incompetency. And that is why it is incompetent.
In my previous quick search I did not find the incubator-openwhisk-devtools repo, that left me with the impression that I had to run k8s which for my purposes is too heavy handed. A docker setup is more in line with my needs (run on vpc for quick side projects). thank you!
Did you include those who didn't vote, but would vote for Democrats? In other words, double digit election returns are from those who voted, or "votes for Trump as percent of eligible voters"?
I must say that the HN community has cranked my career trajectory up a notch. Like many commenters here have said, this remains one of the healthier and more intellectual online communities out there. I've learned many more things here than I do during my day job, and it has continued to motivate me to do better every single day.
I learned about Bitcoin here when it was just a whitepaper, but didn't recognize the opportunity then.

A year ago, another user mentioned Monero so I looked into and discovered it's more "bitcoin" than Bitcoin and bought what I could.

I'm not a millionaire, but it sure has helped me financially, so I'm really appreciative that I took advantage of that opportunity.

EDIT: and for something a little more intrinsic: Everyone's experiences on different things. I've read lots of great comments on raising kids, and hope to take advantage of that shared knowledge when I have a family.
I got a few Amazon gift cards after some of my comments. That's always amazing, and surprising. (And if someone created a cryptocurrency tipping browser plugin for HN (that I can use on Firefox) I'd probably tip people small amounts here and there.)

Someone got in touch about books for children and I got some nice recommendations.

Someone else got in touch about some work they're doing around mental ill health. It was fascinating, and it gave me some ideas that I wanted to shamelessly steal.

I've got an appreciation of the difficulties of building for the modern web, with competing demands from unclueful bosses / clients, vs visitors and users. I still don't quite understand why text can't just be text, or why mobile browsers have such terrible defaults for plain HTML pages.

I've got a bunch of useful links and I've learnt a lot.

I've managed to smooth out some of the rough edges, I think.
Did they later claim their study was done by accident?
in a cave apparently, seriously though I don't have many personal friends
This seems... Very out of touch.

The author makes the argument that all websites look the same because of Google, but never really gives a reason why... (besides name dropping "PageRank" once)

Then it goes on to say that same experience (or more accurately the lack of a "unique" experience) is why they have poor conversion rates.

Then it blames the website for causing an increased spending in customer service, pointing to this as the reason why they think brands will start "closing" their websites.

But every step of the way I think the author is way off. Websites don't look like that because Google's "PageRank" is forcing them to somehow, and that look and feel isn't the reason why conversions are bad.

In my opinion, websites look like that because a useful website follows some guidelines, and that may make it look "bland" but at least I know to look for my "cart" at the top-right of the page (or even have the concept of a "cart").

Also, I think the reason why conversions are bad is because retailers looked at the web for years as an afterthought. The reason only a handful of large companies are doing well on the web is because so few treated it as well as they treat their storefronts. You can't treat the internet as an afterthought, you need to build your business around it. Amazon, eBay, Overstock, and others have done this, they spent the time, money, and engineering to do it right, and do it fast. Someone like Nike throws something slow and cumbersome to use together as an afterthought just to have one.

If websites start closing, it's not because of the "big bad google", it's because ecommerce is hard, just like how some online-only or online-first companies are now finding out how hard brick-and-mortar really is.
The first few thousand subscribers to my side project. And tons of great advice on how to improve it!
The smart way for Russia to help Trump: manipulate votes to elect Democrats
I think everyone is thinking about chatbots and conversational interfaces backwards.

Consumers should be the ones building chatbots to talk to brands not vice versa. The brands can use NLP and AI to partially automate much of the conversation, but it needs to be consumer driven... too much of the promise of chatbots requires breaking down barriers and as long as brands control their own experience and every bot is siloed, the real pain of consumers and current ecommerce wont be solved...

Too much of technology today is focused on optimizing businesses and ends up the end users.

Online advertising is a protection racket where publishers steal and hold customers hostage and sell them to the highest bidder...all the middleware is optimized around grabbing your piece of the advertising pie without caring about the end users or the advertisers...in the meantime, its just driving up costs to deliver value...

We need a buyer driven market...we need long term visionaries who stop optimizing to business revenue and cost savings and optimize to GROWING THE OVERALL MARKET!!! optimize to what really serves customers and advertisers instead of these short aighted plays solving problems the previous startup created...

We wouldnt need facebook ads if our competitors werent reaching our customers on google and we wouldnt need content marketing if publishers actually tried to serve advertisers instead of just trying to drive up their costs...

These companies are thinking about everything backwards imho.
About 6 years ago, I posted an article I wrote about my experience on the app store[1] and somebody (now a good friend of mine) reached out and asked why I wasn't living in silicon valley. Long story short[2] I ended up moving to San Francisco less than a month later and I've been here ever since. That was unexpected.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2705440
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424592
I think it's a "natural" thing. Contextually only ideas can be efficient, not the whole, so islands (languages, companies) grab what they can in gradual chunks.
It's basically Tragedy of the Commons isn't it?
A deeper appreciation for groupthink.
I'm much more offended by the ratio being given as 'grams per pound'.

I appreciate the road to metric can be unsettling to the holdouts, but this doesn't feel like a good way to do it.
The article is worthless. Nothing to do with “how” it got wireless. I was expecting a technical article.
24/7 "service". Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of a tunnel just so some middle manager can claim that the line is still running. I would prefer they closed the thing at night and put some serious effort into improvements.
$200k yearly, consistently, for N years, managed well, is almost certainly rich. 200k yearly without any further context doesn't say as much. Yearly income, by itself, may be here today and gone tomorrow (or next year).
10x probably implies good soft skills too. Being able to deftly shortcut established official roadblocks might contribute just as much as technical prowess. Using influence to get best practices established, leveraging good 3rd party work, etc.

I've seen 10x'ers that mostly used existing code and political/influence moves to go faster than everyone else. Smart people for sure, but not just code slingers.
Why Drones Are Still the Future of War
You can't build an airplane from bricks.
-- Steve McConnell, Code Complete
Presumably for the convenience of people who don’t immediately know what “SF” is. The full name would be even better, as “San Fran” is pretty twee, but it’s sound reasoning.
> In our numerical model, we do not integrate the orbit of the Moon and instead use a single particle with the combined mass of the Earth and the Moon.

Is that a standard assumption for this kind of model? For such a chaotic simulation, would it not be very important to approximate the effects of the Earth and moon very precisely? Especially since these bodies would have such dominating effects early on?
Great question. So far.. links to so many interesting websites, books, papers, blogs—mostly linked to in comments and in AskHN. (And then, maybe even more, the sources mentioned in turn by all those.) Way too many really. Already I'm thinking of having a break from here for a while to actually read all those books (have read some..e.g. just the other day got Crucial Conversations thanks to a mention on here, started reading it with my housemate, it's going to transform our lives—at home and work, everywhere—for sure, and already has helped) and to concentrate solely on what I'm doing, rather than the endless stream of fascinating leads on here to new stuff. But I've got more in a few months on here than I would in many years elsewhere. It's fascinating reading the comments too, usually—typically far more than the linked articles. Thanks so much.
It would be great if they explained that anywhere in their documentation.
An very underestimated nutrient is fat. The Wikipedia entry on "rabbit hunger" has some very graphic descriptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

The human body can do without carbohydrates (the Inuit have some evolutionary adaptations towards a mostly-meat diet), but not without proteins or fats.
Next to nothing. I scan for links and sometimes find one or two to my interest. I might scan the comments to see if the link is being revered or dissed before I visit. If I'm bored, I've made a few comments. Otherwise HN is nothing more than a link list to me.
It seems like this guy is trying to advocate for conversational interfaces (what a surprise, given his company). They were all the rage 1-2 years ago, and I think right now we're probably in the "Trough of disillusionment" in the Hype Cycle. I wonder if the author is simply behind everyone else on the curve and harboring unrealistic expectations, or truly sees where that technology will fit into our lives. Given his prediction of a "major website" shutting down this year, I would lean more towards disillusionment.

I think many are coming to the conclusion that proper natural language understanding will require more than just a deep feed-forward network with back-propagation.
Keystroke dynamics features for gender recognition
A bold prediction. Don't think it'll come true. I do think that the way we discover answers to our questions online will change though. I'm not saying Google's days are numbered, but it's about time we saw some additional innovation in this space. Google has this underlying requirement to continually bolster ad revenue before releasing tech, and I feel this actually stifles it's ability to innovate in the search space...
Theres a lot of really intelligent people on here. To me, its often more interesting to read their insights and debates on an article than the article itself. HN always introduces me to new technologies and new ideas. I love it.
I understand this, but good lord people need to stop bringing this up in every damn thread that mentions Ethereum.
We all know about the DAO and what happened afterwards.
Discovered Dropbox here.
Also have gotten many interviews via the monthly who's hiring posts.
A job that I've had for years and 2 people that I hired via the "Who's Hiring?" threads. Beyond that, a sense of what smart techies are talkin' about via the headlines and some comments.
Well I get to read well thought out arguments against things I firmly believe in. Not just "your idea is stupid"
However, you need to receive a text message to use the free Wi-Fi, rendering the service less useful for tourists. So it's for some valley where you have a cell plan including SMS, but not decent data.
I find it interesting there is a market for gluten-free stuff. I get if you are buying some diet fad you might buy something like that but if you are actually allergic why not just abstain from bread or pasta for example? If you are gluten intolerant and pasta makes you sick there's a good change you don't even want to see anything resembling what made you sick. I guess if one is self diagnosed then it might not be a problem.. Gluten-free products are expensive as hell.

For lot of allergics out there you can't even entertain the thought of eating out in a restaurant because of cross contamination (peanuts etc).

Being food allergic myself it has forced me to eat healthy and avoid crap food. Having a muscular ripped body is just one of the benefits.
I would suggest trying to use a different term than "social lynching". It is a hyperbolic word that describes actions that are quite out of proportion with what might be called "actual lynching". Loss of a specific, typically rarified, job is far less consequential than death.

Using that term is going ensure that a large portion of the population disregards your argument out of disgust (at the co-opting of a historically powerful word for political points). Use it if you like, but you should expect that it will lose you debates if you do. There is probably a different term you could come up with that would be better received.
I think if your heap is less than 32GB then this GC isn't for you in the first place - it's designed for really big heaps.
It gave me a job, a company, and a sense of purpose. In 2012 I did a Show HN for GitLab.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Today we are 1800 contributors and a company of 220 on a mission to ensure that everyone can contribute.
Every time they get caught doing something shady it's a 'bug'. Same for Google sniffing up all the WiFi signal data from the streetview cars.

It fucking stinks.
You can he decentralized and mutable...
Beyond learning a lot of stuff that I don't think I would of been introduced to and/or thought about looking for, it has given me 8.5 years of my favorite side-project to date with http://hackernewsletter.com. With it I've met a ton of folks and the best company to work for that I could of asked for.
Silly, but some self assurance. I'm mostly anonymous here, so my job history / pedigree doesn't weigh into anything.

But, I still manage to be in the middle of meaningful discussion, and contribute something worthwhile here and there. Even got a few thank-you notes over a 2 year period.

Tldr: Helps with imposter syndrome.
I've always thought it's because early computing was very similar to data entry/accounting.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

> Rather, managers hired women because they expected programming to be a low-skill clerical function, akin to filing, typing, or telephone switching. Assuming that the real “brain work” in electronic computing would be limited to the hardware side, managers reserved these tasks for male engineers.
The argument for technical people is not that a more diverse group per se produces better results (although that argument is made for some other professions, such as marketing). The argument is rather that by restricting the candidate pool based on irrelevant attributes like ethnicity or gender, one is likely to overlook good candidates and thereby reduce the overall competence of the team.

I would expect you to agree with this since you say you haven't observed a systematic difference in performance between these groups. No?

My own thinking is that it's good to invite a diverse applicant pool, but final hiring decisions shouldn't use diversity except as a tie-breaker. At the same time one should try to be aware of one's own biases, and rigorously careful not to devalue candidates unlike oneself.