skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Though it certainly isn’t a perfect solution for all use-cases, I think the comment system is so incredibly useful for the things it does well that it’s worth dealing with it’s issues. Key example for me is getting answers to questions without someone’s personal bias / agenda leaking through. Five years ago if I had a question about, say, which vitamin supplement brands are good quality, I would have googled it and imply clicked on one of the first few links. In all likelihood that would have led me to a blog post written by one single person making recommendations based on who pays them affiliate dollars. THese days though, I do the same search, but I append “reddit” to the end of the query. Invariably someone has already asked the same question in a subreddit, and the first comment is an answer that survived the onslaught of downvotes that come from spam, bias, etc.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s loss better than the next best option.
“most of the times the things getting downvoted and buried are simply comments or opinions that are worthless.”

What is your basis for saying “most” of the time. This is very different from my experience and I find it difficult to measure as groupthink prevents discussion, so what do you measure.

I’ve watched many subs for hobbies I follow get boringer and boringer as mods try to enforce various rules and start moderating what’s appropriate or not. As a result, discussion kind of stopped. So I’m glad your experience is that mostly racists get banned, but I’ve seen discussions on /r/badhistory devolve into weird gender/race discussions that don’t really have a productive outcome.
Pretty much every single being on this planet is playing social status game, all China did is put a number on it.
Is this where some nasty european posts that escalator-to-a-fitness center photo from the 2000s?
I think it would be possible to limit the use of abusive down-voting as a censorship mechanism. You'd need a list of what kinds of posts can be down-voted, and enforcement where people who moderate badly lose the ability to moderate.
I would hazard a guess that percentage-wise more of Reddit's users are savvy enough to install script blockers than Facebook users are.
The Prosperity Plea
Case in point, the no-fly list in the US. No one publically knows if they're on it, there is similarly no means to appeal being on it. At least one would know if they held a poor Chinese social credit rating - though I don't know what resolution mechanism they might have for mistakes either.
You have got to be kidding me? All those other countries have public health service. You don't have to worry about how you're going to pay for cancer treatments in Germany if you get a brain tumor and can't work.

Medical debt is still the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. Our systems are abysmal:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-...
>Hacker News Guidelines

>What to Submit

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The thing is you can't have one without the other. You can't enable niche communities in a platform without also enabling communities that you consider reprehensible. You can try but all such attempts tend to devolve into a game of whackamole and frequent bad PR storms.
I agree. Although, it also wouldn't be terribly surprising for China to pass the US on this metric.

When you look at the obesity numbers:

US 36%, New Zealand 31%, Canada 29%, Australia 29%, UK 28%, Israel 26%, Ireland 25%

Thailand 10%, Indonesia 7%, China 6%, Philippines 6%, South Korea, 5%, Vietnam 2%

Vietnam's life expectancy will overtake the US in the next 10-15 years as well most likely (they're about three years behind). In most cases if you prevent people from starving or suffering serious malnutrition, provide a basic level of healthcare & sanitation, and have single digit obesity levels, you'll almost automatically see 75-80 year life expectancies.

South Korea's life expectancy went from 65 years, to 82 years currently, from just 1980 to 2015. They passed the US around 2003. South Korea's GDP per capita was $14,000 at that time, versus $40,000 for the US. One would expect China to have no problem replicating that.

It's a small wonder life expectancies in the developed, high obesity countries are as high as they are. The US is no doubt expending hundreds of billions of dollars extra per year on healthcare as a consequence of its obesity level (cancer, disability, diabetes, etc).
CA's Senate passed S.B. 822, a gold standard in NetNeutrality protection bills
I don't see how any of that is relevant to the point: "You could have saved a dozen lives. Instead you bought a watch. I have a perfectly objective justification for holding you in perfect contempt." Okay, granted that 'perfect contempt' is a bit strong, the reasoning seems good to me, I understand it and sympathize. How much money they have left over or what they do with the rest etc doesn't affect that in the slightest. Does it?
I'm pretty sure I couldn't pass a drug test for at least half of my undergrad and all of my graduate career.
An idea: Take a topic that catches your interest, and explain it to a non-specialist or even non-engineer. I happen to enjoy blogs like that when they are well written. If a simulation is possible, share some code.

There's the old quote, attributed to various people, that you should be able to explain your research to a barmaid if you actually understand it. Having to explain it at a basic level will actually improve your own grasp.
I've already disabled location history yet Google Maps continuosly keeps asking to review nearby places and take photos even when I haven't used the app in a long time. So it clearly polls location once in a while just to ask those questions (and log everything of course), very irritating.

I know I can disable notifications but I'm not sure if it would disable polling in the background. I guess the only way is to keep location toggled off completely.
This is not true!

Just to be sure I just tried it via iOS Safari and signed up for a new account by entering a username and a password. Left the email field blank. Works like a charm.
I think that Autonomous ferries are a better idea than Autonomous Tractor-Trailer trucks going down the crowded freeway.

For machine vision the fact that there are few obstructions on the water make this a killer testbed.
Have you seen the quality of detail on marine charts?

I work in a shipyard and understand docking is difficult.
It is an easy engineering challenge though.
If we can do it on the space station then it is achievable on the nations waterways.
Most of my time was on Google Maps.

The reason it was hard to slow down and learn was that promotions were so difficult to get. You can only apply every six months, and so many stars have to align in your favor to get promoted and so many things can derail it. Your project can get cancelled. Your project can flop even if you personally did everything right. One of your senior teammates (whose word carries a lot of weight with the promotion committee) can leave the company.

It was so hard to get promoted when I was trying to get promoted that I felt like if I wasn't focused on promotion, I'd just never get a promotion.

I wrote a longer post about this a few months ago:

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

>Additionally, did you feel that you had the freedom to learn and apply ML?

I theoretically had freedom to learn and apply ML, but it would have been at the expense of my career. For example, my last major project was to launch a new ML pipeline in six months (it sounds like a long time, but it's really hard to do this with all of Google's bleeding edge infrastructure and bureaucracy). I was leading a team with two other developers, both of whom had graduate degrees in ML-focused subjects. I could theoretically have assigned myself more of the ML work, but the most likely way for us to meet our deadline was to let my teammates handle the deep ML work while I did more infrastructure work.
The beginnings of the end of private life in the late nineteenth century
A government issued number. Thats the key difference. In the real world you can move in the country and start anew somewhere else.
I think this is the more important part of the quote:

> Racism, bigotry, and misogyny are not political topics.

Is there gray to any of those?
Not if it's got substance to it.

If it's sarcastic and rude, then yeah, but this wasn't that.

The other side of a coin is always bound to be the same size as the first side. A counter point to a point is necessarily similar, rhetorically, to the original point it's refuting.

Also, if you're wishing Internet conversations were more real, perhaps looking somewhere besides the Internet may benefit you Makerspaces have hackers, as do hackathon meetups, conventions, hell, sometimes libraries have resources for computer scientists or enthusiasts.

I like the hn format because of the density and accessibility. If I want to talk to another hacker in meat space I gotta go out, make an appointment with them, inevitably buy them coffee, survive the subway, it's inevitably late, so now this guy thinks I'm a jackass, and I have a urge in the back of my head to check my phone for hn while we are small talking before we can appropriately arrive at the twenty minute chat about whatever before doing the entire routine in reverse.

Or I can just read hn.
> The word from our engineers was that Watson was designed to sell commercials, not be a useful tool in a problem space

This is the number one thing to remember about Watson. I've worked with teams within IBM that spent years and thousands upon thousands of man-hours trying to get it to be useful in a fairly well-defined, constrained use-case. Eventually they bailed and went to what was essentially a simple decision tree. It hits it out of the park on the sexy buzz-words, but I'm ready to curse the whole field for giving customers wildly inflated expectations.
You're incorrect. You can leave the email field blank.
I recently ported a very small micro service from Rocket to Actix and found the migration to be painless. In fact, it's use of types and inferencing along with integration with Serde made it very easy. It also worked on stable-rust and can work with connection pooling against postgres. This makes it a winner in my mind.

I'm excited to use it again in my next service.
Did the ferry's crash because they were autonomous?

No quite the opposite. Human error.
> but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else

Maybe people did notice, and just decided to take this subreddit for something else than laughing at over-patriotism. It's a very successful strategy against shaming, if you can pull it off - just not being ashamed and not being afraid to demonstrate it. Reddit provides excellent venue for that, subreddits being good Schelling points.
Honestly the overhead of a modern OS, especially one like Linux which has been finetuned for these sorts of workloads is negligible. More importantly, any gains you make by stripping out parts of the OS you don't need you immediately throw away by going for a virtualised, sandboxed ISA.

If you want to squeeze more performance per watt than you can get from a modern server, the only way forward is to code your application in Verilog and to run it on an FPGA or ASIC.
Everyone has a different perception on that. Sure, HN is big. Reddit is huge though, with tons upon tons of subreddits. What you perceived based on subreddit X or Y someone else felt different, or they also went to subreddit Z, or solely subreddit Z.

HN serves a rather specific goal, it is basically PG/YC's playground. This community will never be allowed to deviate much from their interests. That's a given you know pretty much when you sign up though.

At the very least Reddit is far more broad. So of course you're going to find a subreddit where you feel you belong. Some just might have to search further. In a way that's an easy statement to make though akin to "If you date enough people, you'll eventually find your soulmate."

Anyway, the comparison is moot due to the size difference. Its more fair to compare subreddits or groups of subreddits (how does that work?) with HN. Such as say startup-related subreddits.
Any sufficiently large software project can't rely on the distribution to provide anything for them. The macOS and windows application distribution models are much saner in that regard. The goal should be a self contained, easily reproducible build with minimal external system dependencies. This is why build systems like bazel are so great: They force you to be very explicit about what you depend on and give you a stable and reliable way to reproduce your build once you've specified that.
It would surprise me very much if the Model 3 couldn’t handle a single stop from highway speed since it took 4 laps to fry the brakes at Laguna Seca.
> So now the EU is in charge of how I decide to build my app, and is trying to dictate what suppliers I can use?

No, the EU only stipulates that you are not allowed to sell, leak or otherwise slander personal data from EU residents without their freely given consent, and makes you liable for that.

IANAL, but I think there is no reason to fear too much, though I would stay on the safe side regarding interpretation. And remember that anybody can report you for anything to the authorities, or sue you already; if you are prosecuted you'll have to pay your legal fees and fines whether it's about GDPR or not.
I also appreciate the open nature of Reddit. No account is required if you just want to read, and you don't need to be first "approved" to most subreddits to be able to contribute. No "real-name" policies that often do more harm than good either.

While Facebook by default erects walls around content, Reddit by default promotes the free sharing and equal access to information, which resonates much more with the original promise and mission of the internet.

It's encouraging to see Reddit overtaking Facebook in popularity at a time when the freedoms of the internet are often under attack. Yes, Reddit has its flaws, but in the end, it is one of the best defenses that we have.
Wikipedia does well with a periodic fundraiser. Hi Jimbo!

Could Reddit do similarly? Style itself as mostly a service and not especially profit-driven?

Hi, I'm @spez. By Creddits this week to help Reddit meet its quarterly fundraising goal! We've gamified it a little ...
> I'm not requesting the compiler to read my mind, I'm just asking for dead obvious and simple guidelines that allow me to perform a cost-benefit analysis and tune the compiler's behavior to what I consider acceptable.

And how can I, as a compiler writer, know what you, the compiler user, consider acceptable without reading your mind?

It would be nice if we had some sort of contract. I, the compiler writer, will say that, so long as you write code that conforms to this contract, I will faithfully execute that code. And you, the programmer, will say that you will only write code that conforms to this contract, and that I don't need to worry about you writing code that fails to conform to this contract. Well, somebody already wrote this contract: it's the C specification.

What you're really saying is that you don't like the contract you have, which is a totally valid position to take (I myself would love to see strict aliasing go die in a fire). But almost no one who objects to the C contract is willing to actually negotiate a new contract. Instead, it's almost invariably a complaint that amounts to "you fucking compiler writers are ruining my code with your stupid optimizations." Well, no, your code was already broken per the contract; we were just too dumb to realize it earlier. And for the big undefined behaviors where well-behaved semantics are feasible (such as strict aliasing or signed integer overflow), we provide options to let you say "I don't agree to the C contract, I want to agree to a not-quite-C contract instead."

Many people right now don't realize that undefined behavior is merely a contract that the programmers not to create these statements, true. But that's why we, as compiler writers, try to educate people about why undefined behavior exists, what it means for programmers, and providing tools to make it much easier for programmers to find where it exists (hence things like asan and ubsan).
>Reddit works because it’s anonymous //

Yet I presume the majority of the drive to make users use the app is in order to deanonymise them and associate their input with a real person?

>I’m still skeptical of Reddit’s ability to turn a profit. //

The reason it fits in with a media conglomerates portfolio must be influencing and profiling, no? Such profits aren't direct, they're through things like tax regimes tailored to the overlords, political systems that serve your needs, etc.. That's the media tycoon game isn't it?
The earliest Homosapien bones were discovered in Israel:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controversial-fos...

Though it’s still not a disprovement of the OoA theory but it places the time scale for homosapien much earlier.
Does that solve the problem on Facebook?
Congratulations to China and the Chinese people who have managed to measurably improve their livelihoods over the last few decades.
Really? f7u12 was really big early on, as was wtf, politics, atheism (back when the sub was way more crapping on religion) and videos:

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.gawkera...
This is exacerbated by the down-voting and flagging asymmetry by established members. I understand how it makes sense to weight those that successfully contribute more to have greater power since they (by some metric) are the community since they were here first and have successfully contributed more. However, it does create the effect that a dissenting viewpoint, if unpopular among those with power, can be effectively squashed. Exhibit A: A very cordial and constructive conversation that was flagged and buried. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17139934

Reddit has a different weighting on this stuff and as a result you get a different culture, and these even differ between sub-reddits, but have the signature of a different weighting system, and a greater ability for sock puppeting. I don't think one is better or worse, just that these trade offs are there and have to happen.
From your question I presume you don't have much CS / SE core knowledge either. For that reason just learning a "coding language" (as you called it) is probably not going to work out well in the long term.

For that reason I recommend learning Python 3 with a good teaching book, e.g. https://legacy.gitbook.com/book/wizardforcel/sicp-in-python/...

Charles Simonyi, the guy who managed the MS Word and Excel projects, described "coding" as in encrypting the intent of a program so as to be unfathomable by others. Please use the term 'programming' it has far gentler connotations.
While this maybe true, none of what you mention has changed recently but this ranking did. This ranking change at least points to a trend. Maybe the percentage of mobile use is increasing at faster rate on FB vs Reddit, recently. But according to the nextweb link someone shared in this thread, FB had nearly 90% of their traffic via mobile already in 2016.
This sounds like the plot of a mediocre thriller. Oh wait, it is.[1]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/30/fear-index-rob...
What motivated you to move away from Rocket (just curious, I've only used Iron)?
MyAnimeList Enters Third Day of Unexpected Downtime
In EU many governments force you to fund state TVs you never watch; instead giving portion of that to a site (or sites) of your choice could be preferable.
Interview with Intercom's Co-Founder, keeping focus after a round raised
> Why not a 16GB version, didn't Intel even launch Optane with those small sizes?

16GB is a single 3D XPoint memory die. The DIMMs need to use more than a few dies to support the throughput that people expect from their memory bus. The same is actually true of DRAM; if your current memory modules only had one DRAM die each you not only would have 1/8th the memory capacity, but your memory bandwidth would be annoyingly small as well.
While I agree with you, searching for unknown terms is easy, many people browse on their phones, where searching is not as convenient.

More importantly however, if a phrase is uncommon, then one person asking and one person answering can save hundreds of people from searching and thousands of people from not searching and not knowing.
That's not how MTBF works. It's not how long you expect the drive to last. The number is how many failures on average you get for the number of service hours in use. It's really only useful in aggregate.

For a MTBF of 2 million hours, that means that on average, if you have one thousand drives, then you should expect one drive failure every 2000 hours, or 83 days (1k * 2k hours = 2M hours)
I also recently just finished porting a side project of my own from Rocket to Actix. I'm absolutely loving Actix so far!

Other than Rocket being nightly, the other reason I switched to Actix was because Rocket doesn't have the ability to respond to requests directly within the middleware layer, you can only modify the response but not return early. This is pretty important with regards to CORS and trying to catch all OPTIONS requests. There are a few solutions of course, but all of them felt hacky or verbose.

I have no complaints with Actix yet.
But in the Chinese system, your number goes down if someone you're friends with on social media makes a post that the Chinese government deems politically unsavory
many of the fundamental analysis models fall apart with "tech" companies who's largest asset may be the brand itself

"Largest asset may be the brand itself," isn't that the definition of a reputation bubble? Sounds like a bubble to me, just a very long term one. There are some who say that the Bay Area/SV startup scene is a combination of real innovation and a bubble caused by ready availability of investment capital, which in turn is the result of governments injecting huge amounts of liquidity into the economy to kick the can down the road on the natural cycles of economic recession.
Ask HN: My former employer wants my sig for a patent filing.  Should I bother?
I left a large tech megacorp a few years ago and their lawyers recently contacted me to obtain my signature for a foreign patent filing. I'm pretty indifferent to the company but not a huge fan of the patent system. On the other hand, it is a pretty easy ask. I don't see myself working at this company again, but I might, in a pinch. I don't really want this to come to bite me in the ass later.

So, what should I do?

1) Just sign the doc for them

2) Ask for some sort of payment

3) Just ignore it all and hope it goes away?
It's vague but real.

Maybe someone who makes the experience miserable for other users? Or is destructive / harassing / mean-spirited?
How is this functionally different than e.g. a criminal or financial record?

If you can escape these, you can escape other government records.
Making a 15 years long commitment at 25 seems to me like a huge gamble with limited upside (the salary) and basically unlimited downside. What if you are unhappy at the DOE but have to stay there until you are 45?
I would have recommended Scheme as well, but in recent times SICP course has been changed from Scheme to Python. Unlike Scheme, Python is available on all the major operating systems and is supported by a huge number of frameworks and platforms.