skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes yes yes - you're completely missing the point. The point is that it's easy to come up with some sort of contained scenario in which you can devise a perfect technical solution for a well-defined problem. But it's hard to get groups of hundreds of people to always behave perfectly according to protocol, every time, everywhere, with not a single slip-up over several years.
As someone in their mid-twenties, I have to ask the older HNers: has it always been this "stupid," so vitriolic and hateful? If not, when did it become this way?
I didn't make myself clear. I agree, I use pen and paper every day to complement my laptop use, and it's miles better for some things than can be accomplished digitally even today.

It's still doable to only have a laptop and use that for everything, if not practical or quick enough in many cases. Pen and paper is nice to have, but it's not 100% required.
aggregate statistics everything is getting better

Is that something to brag about? I just realized that in aggregate things might have been getting monotonically better in every period of aggregate civilization. Enslaving by the Romans was not without benefits. Fall of the Roman Empire meant a dip, but given wider distribution onto Germans, Huns, Vandals &c. I don't think it's unreasonable to argue most people were better off.

About inequality I think HN's own @pron nails it: the issue is power and disempowerment. Solutions aren't known, but neglect by reframing the issue as lesser evils as you just did is a sure way to discontent and violence.
The majority of humanity can work for subsistence level wages. The primary economic activity of the rich can be gambling, which typically takes the form of repeated inflation of asset and financial instrument bubbles. The rich can also make money selling luxury goods to one another and to an upper middle (professional) class. That class would still exist but would be relatively small like the priestly and knight classes of feudal Europe.

This isn't optimal from an economic perspective nor does it result in the greatest wealth for the rich or anyone else, but it seems to be how things unfold. All we need is powdered wigs and merkins and we'll be in 17th century France.

The problem is that the rich are human and humans don't respond to Skinner boxes any differently from rats. The lower classes generally can't lose themselves in Skinner boxes because they must engage in something resembling productive work to survive. The rich on the other hand are untethered from this demand and will naturally find whatever Skinner boxes present themselves. Financial speculation, literal gambling, hedonism (Trump with his porn stars etc.), and palace intrigue (which in the modern age takes the form of political maneuvering or media/celebrity drama) are all Skinner boxes that deliver those dopamine hits with escalating spacing between doses that we're wired to become addicted to. Super-wealthy people who engage in productive work (e.g. Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk) are so notable because they're rare. Maybe they have some inborn or conditioned resistance to Skinner boxes that most people lack.
I think once they get to 'as good as people' we should let them on the road, because they are 'as good as people' but never get tired, angry, and/or drunk :)
Why is the right to skeet shoot with a military weapon in the same breath as forums for free speech? The splash damage of these two efforts isn’t remotely comparable.
You are absolutely correct.
People make mistakes. Even very well trained professionals make mistakes.
Incredibly experienced skydivers die.
Industrial safety is tough despite well designed processes and constant training.
Tradecraft slipups happen.
etc etc
The weak link is the human being.
This gets trotted out all the time. Norway is a very small country, in terms of population and GDP. Approximately 5 million people. Car ownership is about 58%, so roughly 3 million cars on the road. This is a nit, an infinitesimal number of cars. It's like using Arizona as an example. Same general population and GDP.
After I graduated in December, I was hired as a consultant for the company I was interning with on and off the past couple years. I was tasked with automating and migrating as much of our workflow as possible onto a hosted solution.

After trying out AWS and GCP, we settled on GCP for a few reasons in addition to what benthehenten outlined.

- Development experience is great, docs are on point.

- BigQuery is fantastic. It let me seamlessly hand off an interface to a full time employee that had experience with SQL without the overhead of them having to learn a whole lot more.

- Custom VM's provide us with the flexibility to get exactly what we need to run our workloads, no more, no less.

- TPU's though not generally available at the time, were something we knew we'd want to take advantage of in the future. Because we're a TensorFlow shop, it just made sense.
Ask HN: Embarrassed to open-source code because of code quality?
Folks, like many here, I'm a self-taught developer.

And while I've been doing it for a few years now, I've generally prioritized outcomes over technical elegance, so I often hesitate to learn the trendiest frameworks & instead just focus on shipping.

This results in a fair helping of code that works well but might use untrendy frameworks, sub-optimal structures, etc.

I now run 2 ventures with decent traction. While I never handle sensitive/financial information, my beliefs in privacy, transparency, and freedom require making the source available (at least for the local client software like desktop programs, smartphone apps, etc).

But I wonder about the downsides...how would you (as a user, or as an employer) think of code that technically works (doesn't crash), practically works (gets users, makes money, etc), but looks kinda unprofessional (not super-concise, not terribly efficient, etc).

Every project I've come across on GitHub looks like it was built by people who are so much more experienced than me.

I've heard some founders (the Foursquare one comes to mind, but I know there are others) say similar things (i.e., they're "lousy" at programming and can only do "just enough" to get the job done) but they didn't make their code available to the world. Then they raised millions and hired great programmers to fill their gaps.

While I plan to make a decent amount of money, I'm not betting on unicorn status. This is a different level of scrutiny, and while I'm confident the principle of open-sourcing my code is sound, I'm not so confident if the code itself will live up to the reputation of the services it provides.

Any thoughts?
>Its their fault they forced craigslist to shut down a section openly advertising illegal content? I love the contortions people make.

Given how arbitrarily laws are applied, it is the fault of the people choosing when to arbitrarily apply a law as to the impacts of arbitrarily applying that law.
Mark Zuckerberg Plays Along with the Scapegoating of Facebook

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mark-zuckerberg-plays-...
(Pinker lists the following medical researchers and public health crusaders as having saved more than 100 million lives each: Karl Landsteiner, Abel Wolman, Linn Enslow, William Foege, Maurice Hilleman, John Enders. How many of them had you heard of? I’d heard of none.)

The first 94 pages are available on Google Books. Here is a link to the page with a table of these researchers' accomplishments and approximate lives saved.

https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&
Sanders outspent Clinton but Clinton (like Trump) was a well known and established public figure reaping in huge benefits from free media coverage.

Yes, that's part of my point. Suppose you overcome the many Constitutional and logistical problems and pass campaign finance laws that limit candidates to spending a fixed amount of money and prohibit third party spending. This would give an even bigger advantage to candidates who are already well known, political insiders, and those the media chooses to give attention to.

People say Sanders got crushed by Clinton, ignoring the media blackout on his campaign for the first half of the primary and the fact that he started in the low single digits for name ID and ended with 45% of the votes.

And the DNC blatantly putting their thumb on the scale. Sanders did as well as he did largely because ordinary people were able to contribute to his campaign and help get his message out.
Ransom note effect
It's censorship, it's just legal censorship because it's not the government doing it.
I'm surprised more people don't know of mbasic.facebook.com
Ask HN: How can I prepare myself for a full-time remote?
I hold a CS degree and I have about 2 years of experience as an SE (backend). In the next two years, I would like to get a remote job while living/traveling around Africa. How can I best prepare myself to land a remote job? Thanks
A few people in the comments have pointed out problems with the reporting, and the general motive of downplaying environmental issues aligns with those of the aforementioned media company.
...which is ironic, since due to that same polarization, Presidents in general seem to have less ability (or maybe it's inclination) than ever, to effect any meaningful change about anything that matters.

It doesn't matter who's President.
I'm curious if they could alter the hydrogen/stupidity balance to favor hydrogen.
Two weeks is not enough to tell if your child is perfectly fine. Not to be negative, but there are plenty of developmental issues that may not surface for weeks, months or years. That doesn't change anything of course. Love your child as if he's "normal" because for him he is.

I have a child with developmental issues (autism). It's mild enough that he was not diagnosed until last year just before he turned 6. It's hard to treat him as a "normal" person when he's engaged in stereotypical autistic behavior (e.g. having a meltdown because today I accidentally broke what routine he expected just a little bit). But those episodes don't negate the fact that he's a human and needs (and feels) just as others do.
> the #metoo feminist supremacist movement

Yes, damn those feminists and their opposition of rape... /s
Wow, is this really going to 1-2k a copy?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0931722462/ref=tmm_p...

Bought a copy off of eBay for $10. Not sure what the above is about.
Of course it can. Someone might want to have sex with you, and consent, and then they might want you to stop, and remove consent for you to continue.

Continuing sex with someone after they tell you to stop, no matter what they said before, is sexual assault.
> I would only get a masters while working

Same here. Back in 2004, I found myself surrounded by Indian folks who all has master's degrees from US universities, and here I was with nothing but my lowly little bachelor's degree. Since my employer had a tuition reimbursement program anyway, I went ahead and did a master's program - it was free, and what could the harm possibly be? More education is always better than less education... right? That's what made that Aline Lerner blog post such a gut-punch when it first came out - I had never considered the possibility that somebody could be evaluating me on paper and reject me because I had _too much_ education.
I haven't ever had a facebook. What I find more chilling is why would my phone be giving over all that meta data? I'm just wondering then what other apps are just collecting that data and what security setting can be enabled to say that data shouldn't be shared! wtf.
I'm sure.like any professional they use the tools at their disposal. There are new makes and models coming out every year. Why wouldn't a professional use YouTube as a reference? Would a programmer get scoffed at for referring to stack overflow?
>"We were told, things like that don't happen here."

The perfect epitaph for Western Civilization.
Do you really think corporate conglomerates have no interest in PR campaigns that benefit their bottom line? It doesn't take "huge amounts of people", just a handful of board members.
As I've gotten older and have seen enough side switches, I've found it increasingly astounding to watch how predictably the partisans memory wipe themselves about XYZ terrible thing that their side did. Now that the bad side - the side they're not on - is in power, they must protest that same XYZ thing.

It's said that Trump is terrible with journalists (he is). And there's Obama's quiet, terrifying war on journalists with the Espionage Act, that the partisans on that side almost entirely ignored.

Assisting in the destruction of Syria and Libya is a fine thing to ignore (one should perhaps get a nobel peace prize for it). Destroying Iraq is genocide and a war crime. Or vice versa, depending on which side you're on.

The sides just flip flop, memory wipe past misdeeds, and then resume the perpetual partisan war. I think it works to assist them in staying in power, maintaining the always conflict. Oceania is always at war with Eastasia.
The crux of the issue here seems to be that the author believes that a "true" MSCS is one that can only be obtained by those who have first completed a bachelor's degree in CS. We might want to consider whether that is a valid definition or not.

This isn't really a brand-new thing either. One of my best instructors was a seasoned industry vet (former senior architect at a major firm, member of W3C and author of several of their proposals, etc.), and he had a bachelor's in Physics followed by an MSCS... from Stanford. Are we to say that his masters is not legitimate or that he is an inferior engineer because he technically did not complete a bachelors in the subject first?

To me it seems to be a problem of defining in general what the purpose of a masters degree should really be. In some fields it is used as an extension of a bachelor's in the same field, while in others it is used to supplement undergraduate education with skills in a different field, typically for the purposes of better rounding out the student's knowledge in preparation for pursuing certain career paths.

For instance, consider a professional degree like the MBA, where you can come in having a bachelor's in literally any subject.

What the author is noticing is that universities are increasingly offering the MSCS as something more like a professional degree instead of solely as an academic-track stepping stone to the PhD. And clearly he does not like this.

This issue seems to highlight the dual-purpose nature of universities as vehicles for training both practitioners as well as researchers. On the practitioner side, I think there is immense value in being able to supplement a bachelor's degree in one subject with a different set of skills obtained in a second degree. E.g., many people take the track of getting a science or engineering bachelors and then an MBA afterwards. The combination of those two disciplines can provide a very powerful skill set.

What seems to be happening is that the increasingly tech-centric nature of our economy is causing the skills offered by CS to start to make a lot of sense for some people as a form of secondary training. Much like business, technology intersects virtually every industry, and those who have training in a specific subject domain in addition to CS can be highly effective problem-solvers, much more so than those trained in just one or the other.

Sure, perhaps we can argue about whether an "MSCS" is really the most appropriate vehicle for such people. But being one of those people myself I will say that my experience does not at all reflect what the author claims (see my other comment re: coursework). The reality is that there are an increasing number of people who want to supplement their undergraduate training with CS, and this is a good thing. The author is correct in noting the distinction between this demographic and those who are on a research/academic track, but I'm just not convinced that we can definitively say that an MSCS must always require a bachelors in CS.
That's a lot of nots. So you are saying that Dennett says that the brain might be reducible[1]?

I don't think that's a strong claim or that it even qualifies as a claim at all. Lots of things might decompose into simple components if subjected to the right analysis, very few things definitely won't - for example many clever people have spent a great deal of time attempting to reduce quantum and cosmic scale physics to simple intuitively founded laws... If Dennett's claim is that the human brain is the same order of object as the universe I can accept it only if we agree that all objects share the same order. Where does that get us?

[1] Apologies, I don't know what reductible means, but guessed typo - I'm open to education though and unworried by typos!
> they could deem the content inapropriate for the site

In before the gun channels continue exactly as they were, except for the one change that their hosts are now nude
Much more difficult to spoof an IP than a phone number. Once you’re behind a NAT, all bets are off, but the public IP has to be routable back to you in order to be usable.

Instead of phone number, think port on the phone company’s switch or a specific pair of wires. That’s hard to spoof.

It’s much easier to spoof a MAC address, which can identify specific hardware associated with the IP address, but that doesn’t make the IP any more difficult to identify.
The safety drivers should theoretically be operating under the assumption that the self-driving system can fail randomly at any moment. Of course, humans are not wired as reliable backups to handle random split-second problems when the system, in fact, works correctly most of the time.
I mean that when I signed up for Telegram I never checked any boxes agreeing to recieve marketeing materials. Since signing up for Telegram I have not joined any channels or done anything that could be interpreted as consent to recieving marketing materials. And regardless the sent me spam about this (via the same channel that they sent me a code I needed to login to a second device).
There is already some analysis of the footage, that claims the police video is manipulated, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg

also there are videos showing the real conditions with simple smartphone cams, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

Imo this is a clear attempt to shift public opinion. Also for everybody it should be clear, that a car should only drive as fast to be able to break once something comes into sight.
For the whole industry it is very unfortunate, that some just don't understand the responsibility that comes with new technology and it's limitations.
And by "... allowed by law", they do not mean the posted speed limit. They mean driving too fast for conditions to allow.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

> Speed also affects your safety even when you are driving at the speed limit but too fast for road conditions, such as during bad weather, when a road is under repair, or in an area at night that isn’t well lit.
Not only will China stick together, I’m afraid that people will start looking at them as a model to be followed as our own society scales to a billion people.
I get what you're saying but the same is true of any transplanted cuisine. Thai food in Australia is different than in the US is different from wherever but in most cases it's a lot closer than you're giving credit for—which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south? And of course you get some places like Uncle Boon's in NY that do a tremendous job of recreating Thai street food but wrap it up in a lot of cuisine. I can promise that Uncle Boon's is not frequented by FOB Thai immigrants, but I doubt the menu will lose its flavor profile.

As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.

Besides if we're talking about the western palate we're including all of Europe in that, with an incredible diversity of cuisines and tastes.
So one private company uses its agreed-to right to shut down these outlets, whatever you think of censorship is irrelevant, terms and conditions give youtube and google all the power they need to do whatever they want, you agree to this when using the platform.

Now, these outlets instead of moving to an open system like steem, dtube for example, they move to another private company and not only that but a porn company, wtf are they thinking?!?

Reeks of suspicion...

Don't fall for the divisive bull-plop, unite, preferebley on a public alternative.
You are confusing 2 different things:

1) The choices that need to be made for the company to succeed

2) How much equity you have or should get.

“The vesting schedule means the massive contributions will only help me if I see it through” ...errm, yes, that’s the point of a vesting schedule.

As noted by others, the way to succeed is to make the whole pie bigger (and therefore your slice also becomes more valuable, even though it’s the same percentage). You should assume that your equity slice will never get bigger in percentage terms, the investors want you busting a gut to make the pie bigger, not fighting over percentages.

Now, if you really think the CEO is destroying value I.e. making the pie smaller, and you can’t resolve it between you, then both of you need to talk to your board investors. The likely result is that one of you will be leaving the firm, and that person’s equity will return to the company since neither of you has hit your 12 month anniversary, assuming you have a standard vesting schedule.

I feel like some of this is due to cultural differences between academia where it sounds like you were clearly successful, and vc-backed startup world.
It's not different at all. It's traveling somewhere afar without objective practical need.

Going to music festivals is sort of like pilgrimage as well. But I definitely count it as vacation. People do classic pilgrimages and call that hiking vacation nowadays. Amateur sports events, especially multi-day stage ones, are totally like pilgrimage. You get together with people with common goal, do shit and hang out. I sure as hell count that as vacation.
And now you'll have the "innocent" john sorting through ads selling any number of illegal offerings, because he will have to use the TOR version now.

Can't help but think this will be a boon for those in the business of sex trafficking.
how about knives, and knife making?

> What are you teaching, bomb-making?

plenty of folks on there doing chemistry experiments of the variety that folks enjoy watching.
Show HN: Grid Music, 2-dimensional MIDI step sequencer for iOS
Oddly if you make your account not via a phone - then it does have a login and password. Which is just plain confusing.
I don't buy it. Cabellas and Bass Pro make a killing. There are plenty of companies out there willing to cater to this market. This is nothing more than a Silicon Valley political thing.
PornHub? Seens right. Now the ammosexuals can masturbate over their gun porn among their equals on a site perfectly suited for such activities.
Hi! Appreciate the feedback.

So you raise any interesting point. I'm only concerned about the law of the land since it's generally more or less the common ground we are forced to live on.

New question, and this is more open to derailment, but let's risk it.

ASSUME your current policy (liberal or conservative) is wrong, what what extent do you have the right to choose it anyways?
Have you tried to reactivate or re-register the account with the same details? Out of interest really
> I think this has largely been achieved.

Indeed, “combating sex trafficking” seems to already be a euphemism for cracking down on sex work of all kinds.