skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A community answer to the question "What is fair?"

Or is it, "what is just?" It's not clear to me that these are necessarily the same. Fairness seems to entail some sort of consequentialist reasoning (like progressive ideals), but justice seems to be more on deontological footing (like the constitution).
It most likely won't kill anyone who currently exists, which are the only people you're claiming have rights.

My point is that once you start considering the counterfactual world of 150 years from now in terms of, "What harm will it do to the people alive then," there's very little daylight between your views and Cowen's.

I don't think that Cowen believes that there's an absolute moral importance to have children, for example.
I'm no expert, but here are some details.

If microorganisms gather on the surface of your fermented food in large enough numbers that you can see them, you have two choices: (A) try to save it, or (B) throw it out. If you don't see any, then there hasn't been an environment suitable for them to grow, meaning they aren't there in nearly enough numbers to get you sick.

As far as pests, you're generally expected to cover your fermentation somehow. Something like a tea towel or cheese cloth can work, or even a pot lid, probably depending on the fermentation in question. Just follow the instructions and it should turn out okay, but I don't see any reason to keep it uncovered.
Uses AI to group similar content and to find trending topics. By that it cleans up your feeds. Works for english and german, more languages on public demand :) Auto dark mode included
Passion notwithstanding we can all agree that it is sensible to enjoy doing work.

The problem is that many people swing from being passionate to the other side of the spectrum by becoming cynical of work.
It’s probably presented in such a way to b convincing to the maximum amount of people. Being addressed to an English-speaking audience that tends to already be suspicious of a Chinese grab for economic power, that serves as common ground to establish rapport with the audience.

This being Soros, any connection to the US election would already doom his message to be disgeraded, or even taken as evidence for its opposite.
Oh damn, this was the first desktop we had at home :)

I remember struggling to find the right settings to play monopoly and double dragon. And IIRC there was a version of MSWORKS for this too
That's funny coming from from George Soros especially that it was delivered at Davos.
How was the original statement perfectly valid? Let's try with two different compilers:

gcc 8.2: https://godbolt.org/z/ZcsChr

clang 3.8: https://godbolt.org/z/pVDCPi

It looks like at least gcc disagrees that reading uninitialized variables is a way to find out what's in memory.
Ask HN: Should I be learning Scala in 2019?
So, I'm mostly a .NET and Node.js guy (with front-end experience as well). I wanted to branch into the Java ecosystem but having prior experience in Java, I was not a fan of the syntax.

I have heard a lot about Scala and I decided to jump into that (without enough research). I got a Scala book and I'm about a 100 pages in and I must say I do like the language, its seems very interesting and productive to me thus far. However I decided to google about language usage, future and jobs.

The results weren't very motivating and now I'm doubting whether I should keep going? Are companies choosing Scala nowadays for new projects? (not talking about legacy systems)
The way people talk about this stuff never quite fits with my experience... I gave up newspapers & most news about 7-8 years ago, TV about 5 years ago, which has been great. I'm 'still' on FB, but never read the news feed, just chat with friends in many countries & sometimes look at the recent pics of the person I'm chatting with. (I never see ads on FB, so all that debate seems weird to me) Sometimes (like today!) I spend too long on HN, noprocrast is amazingly effective for that. Ban myself for 6 hours until the habit to keep coming back is gone. Also have never had a mobile phone. People contact me by FB (mostly) or email (which I dont check so often) or my website (occasionally).

p.s. Not sure why people don't think HN is social media!
Wow that is really neat. Thank you!
> I find writing raw SQL to be quite annoying for simple CRUD operations. It's just so easy to make stupid little syntax mistakes when writing SQL.

There are ways to mitigate this [1]. You write your queries in .sql files in Visual Studio, so you get intellisense and syntax highlighting, and you can even add these to your automated test suite to ensure they run correctly.

[1] https://github.com/naasking/Dapper.Compose
What an idiotic discussion. Energy-efficient buildings can reduce our power demands by 85%. Then we can talk about which nuclear power plants to shut down, instead of arguing about whether we should build more.

The free market prioritizes cheap buildings and profit. One law that requires energy-efficiency for all new structures ends the argument.

No offence, but participating in the nuclear argument makes you a moron.
how many people would you say try and fail 50 times?
of course, failure can be defined in many ways. But I wouldn't think you end up in a bad place without having learnt a lot.
Get Out of Your Own Way
Oh yeah, I found the rope paper online
> In their study, Leonhardt and his colleagues made light out of positive and negative frequencies. Their positive-frequency light was infrared, while the negative-frequency one was ultraviolet

What do they mean by negative frequency? That they're out of phase...?
That is precisely the reason they are not going to be supported.
Do CIFAR-10 Classifiers Generalize to CIFAR-10?
If it's only called in one place, it should be easier to optimize as well, because the context of the call is clear.
First of all I agree with the top (currently) commenter that the examples the author gives are not really abstractions, at least not of the kind I thought this would be about.

Anyway, my thoughts on the subject:

Ofcourse the problems with abstractions is when they leak; when you read an unfamiliar codebase for which you do (not yet) understand the abstractions and reasons behind them, you brain will be leaking cases all around them. There are ways people try to prevent that; 4gl, xml/json ‘definitions’, DSLs etc but unless you actually deliver the ‘runtime’ or libraries (classes (sealed etc in C#) and frameworks) as binary, your new colleagues will look under the hood and probably cry until either they get it or find it is actual crap.

In the end it never really works if you go broad (let too many people look under the hood) because people want to/have to break out of the abstraction and start to abuse the leaks. And then the result will become an absolute mess.

I did a lot of successful projects with very high level abstractions but they all rot when another team takes over. That is normal for most code imho though; I measure success in decades not years and I have stable ancient code running in many companies/online which use the abstractions and the shielding to keep those transactions from leaking for all those years. Yes, it limits what you can do with it, but if that is a given and the business case holds up and management is not swayed by ‘but I read now we need to use something called React/Redux’ then there is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of effective abstractions.
It’s not a personal attack, it’s a thinly veiled death thread.
lobste.rs

They have transparent moderation, and - I believe - you have to state a reason for downvoting.
same replies as above. Our robots have been receiving in our opened service (Lyon airport) on a daily basis vehicles up to 3 tons (incl. heavy SUVs with hybrid powertrain). Our mechanical spec. is higher though
So much this. Downvotes are not for disagreements, they should be used for trolls, shills and bigots. If the comment adds a view you don't agree with, write an answer or ignore it. Downvoting in this case doesn't adds value. Reddit suffers the same problem.
Some electric ovens also have the ability to "cook" at low, precisely controlled, temperature for several hours, which makes it possible to produce yogurt.
Use polynomial regression to dynamically position a button
Show HN: Min-char-RNN-rs: A rust implementation of karpathy's min-char-rnn.py
thanks. but really old now already, and it was in an easier - indoor - environment. far better coming very soon, please stay tuned ;)
We Moved from Wordpress to React and Raised $80M
I didn't make that connection but you're absolutely right.
Where I'm at (US Fortune 500 companies) it's all Java, very little .net. Ymmv
Look at OP's past submissions, in particular the domains.
I got seriously into fermentation several months ago. I really enjoy Bon Appetit's "It's Alive with Brad" series, which prompted me to read some of Sandor Katz's books. I'm doing two ferments usually at a time, cycling between: sauerkraut, full-sour dill pickles, Russian pickled tomatoes (my favorite recipe so far has been this Indian-style 'kraut: https://myheartbeets.com/indian-sauerkraut/). I also started maintaining a sourdough starter. I want to try hot sauce and mead next.

There is very little chance of getting sick or infecting oneself with Botulism with active vegetable ferments (i.e. not sanitizing then canning). Vegetables are covered in natural bacteria, and the conditions created inside the ferment make it essentially impossible for Botulism to thrive. Canning can be dangerous because the process of heating (i.e. killing off microbe activity) of a ferment leaves only Botulism because it has spores that protect it from heat. Some meat ferments require more care, and I've heard of some issues with say: fermenting garlic inside of olive oil. Overall, though, fermentation is one of the safest food preparation techniques we know of.
Cannot agree more with you
This was a great read. Thanks for sharing
They aren't anymore. This article is from 2014; the rule was amended a year later to make an exception for grid-enabled electric water heaters.[0]

[0] https://www.phcppros.com/articles/5312-water-heater-regulati...
Smoking and getting regular exercise is still better than just smoking.
Genghis Khan didn't need modern technology to kill millions.
It’s cheaper to use a gas-powered water heater, right? I assume that’s because it’s also more efficient?
thanks.
what you say is a nice vision, level 5 of such AGVs ;)
and as you say, the prior levels are already pretty interesting (our customers, the parking lots owners, saying) as first steps
Which is why it would make sense to write a reason why you're downvoting. A lot of people wouldn't have energy to write an explanation when downvoting on a knee jerk reaction.
This, of course, requires you to print your thesis in colour, even if everything else in it is in black and white.
There's no way to save this one. I would be annoyed if someone used a stereotypical southern accent after finding out I'm from Georgia. They wouldn't get any of my money.
Lots of submissions from this same person from the same domain. Lots of upvote points on a marketing topic meant to drive clicks. I'm guessing the OP is a spammer and this submission is being gamed.
Perhaps, it is not HN that changed but you've grown up.

As they say (paraphrasing), don't visit places you loved as a child, to avoid killing happy memories.
In your profile, you can set "showdead" to "yes" in order to see all comments. Admittedly, you still can't respond at that point, but I think this gets pretty close to the "merely used to order comments" situation.
And as of now, he has 2 articles on the front page. I wonder who votes for that tech keyword salad.
> As one example of this, how are you supposed to protect these fermented foods from pests? I get the sense you're supposed to leave them out, uncovered, but that assumes you live in an area that allows you to do that.

Typically the recommendation is doing ferments indoors with a cloth on top to protect from pests. I use jars with one-way valves that allows gas out but not in. Vegetables are covered in natural microbes and you don't have to keep them uncovered or out. I do my ferments in a city apartment with no issues. :)
> If you prioritize making money over making something worthwhile, you are just going to accelerate our destruction.

Amen. This seems to be one of the primary problems with the tech industry today. Is building another convenience app for X really a good use of time for bright and talented individuals when there are so many pressing problems to solve? But I guess as long as the money is flowing there will be people willing to do these things.

I'd love to figure out how I can apply my software engineering skills toward something more "worthwhile", while also making decent money. It's hard when at this point many of the real pressing problems for humanity to me don't seem to really involve software as a primary component. I feel like we've reached diminishing returns with software. But maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.
I agree that webapps aren't currently on par with native apps. However, it seems somewhat inevitable that things will go that way. We're just stuck in the ugly transition period.

Sadly, the turning point will probably be when browsers and/or WASM add enough DRM type functionality.
8hrs.xyz deploy discussion
Why, exactly? It's not electrical power storage, sure. But a water heater is by definition energy storage. You want hot water, it takes time to heat, so keep it in a buffer.

And in fact a well-insulated modern tank is a very efficient store for energy that you're going to use at some point anyway. It makes perfect sense to use it as a flexible load to buffer grid management.

> On another note, I wonder how resisitve heaters compare to heat-pumps.

Heat pumps are sort of an orthogonal trick. Ultimately they work by using a lower temperature state to "steal" energy from the cooler outside temperatures. They don't make "heating" any more "efficient" per se. But if you have such an outside environment (i.e. colder than whatever the operating temperature of the heater is, but still warm enough to provide energy to the coolant) they are worthwhile.
We would all like a formula, but good, innovative products are firstly a response to some personal problem or need. Someone gets an itch - from bad taxi service, or high hotel prices or wanting to know what their college friends are up to - and they scratch it. Note the crucial step: not accepting things as they are.

The second step is to think outside the box. There are problems that cannot be solved, problems that can be solved in conventional ways and there are the ones in between. It is the ones in between that are ripe for innovation. We all have conceptual buckets, things like "AI" or "on demand software" but conceptual buckets are deadly to innovation. They become the reasons things can't be done or should be done in some conventional way. Certainly, being aware of AI is good, being aware of blockchains is good. Thinking they are the "answer" is not good. Remember the Zune!

Follow the path. Innovations have a logic and truth of their own. Airbnb started with the idea of air mattresses, but they adapted and followed the path inherent in their idea. Have the tenacity to follow where your innovation leads (but try not to be stupid about it).

Be lucky, as in make yourself some luck. Success happens when you are in the right place, at the right time, with the right innovation. (And being early can be as bad as being late). Success may not come the first time, or second or ..., but factoring in multiple attempts improves your chances and you gain experience to boot.
"fair" is not equal to "what the law says".

For example our laws allow a lot of unethical actions at stock markets. Things like buying all resources of one kind to later sell them for higher price, all in the name of profit.
Even when a law should actually protect us, the reality is, that they who have sufficient financial means, wealth, whatever, can go against the law and hope to get away with it for many years or even hide the fact they did it from us, because of lacking transparency on many layers of our system. Some are more equal than others before the law. Unfortunately still true in 2019.

We have separation of power, at least, which in many cases protects us from the ones with a lot of economical power directly making the laws. Also some praise at this point to the people who make the law, because to me it seems that they are rarely bought. There is some integrity there.

I would not call the big ball of mud that our law systems are very advanced. Actually it is rather primitive, some kind of patchwork rug, where we only try to fill the gaps.
To make a really advanced law system, that does not only react on oversights from the past ("Oh that's a grey zone. Let's make a new law for this case!"), we would have to get rid of a lot of the interpretable adjectives in the texts or define them all in a way, that is accessible for non-lawyers and not only based on past decisions in law processes (You can buy commented law texts, about 10 times as much text to read to understand a law and how it was used in past processes, which is what verdicts are often based on.). We would have to prune many special cases and abstract from them to more generalized rules. The law would have to be made in such a way, that most people could understand and need not go to a lawyer to "learn what is right" according to the law.
Especially in the Internet / IT sphere laws are being made, where one can only scratch ones head and ask oneself: "What were they thinking?! Did they have _any_ expert on board when writing this text?" It seems that law making has too few interaction with real domain experts and a disconnect with reality in the IT area. Law is a very traditional subject, while IT is a very modern thing that evolves faster than they can make new laws.

While our ideas of law might be a great accomplishment and certainly indispensable for our current society and its structure, I would not call it "one of our greatest". I find philosophical ideas to be a much greater result. Admittedly, it is a hard problem to solve, to put philosophical ideas cleanly into law texts. That's why law making should never be rushed and well thought through, while getting input from as many real experts as possible during the whole process.
I wonder why HNs system is not catching stuff like that
I Wrote a Hearthstone AI
Here’s one from Lyon:
https://youtu.be/V4bgiMP_WfM
The Dark Romance and Grim Reality of Life in the French Foreign Legion
I agree wholeheartedly on the beginning, but I feel the need to address you last points.

> [..] A dying planet [..]

the planet isn't dying. Its gonna be fine after our extinction in a few years.

> 5.

keep in mind that a lot of people don't have enough financial stability to actually do follow their dreams, or don't have any dreams to begin with.

> 6.

Not everyone can nor should work on these topics. Its great if people feel empowered enough to actually look at these challenges, but most of us wouldn't be a good fit for such an environment.
> he thought of using a space theme [...] and created initial bitmap images after the octopus-like aliens. Other alien designs were modeled after squids and crabs.

I find it funny how the thought goes to deep space, yet reaches so close to Earth.
> Don’t underestimate erasure. Theories for free is a useful thing.

Indeed, phantom types are wildly underappreciated. Long ago, I created an library [1] that ensures the type safety of any runtime generated programs you create using it. It does this by typing the various stacks that are in play at any given time, but every new generic type on the CLR ends up creating new type descriptors in global data structures (which aren't GC'd), so complex programs with deep stacks end up generating a lot of static, uncollectable data that just hangs around forever.

[1] http://higherlogics.blogspot.com/2008/11/embedded-stack-lang...
Thank you for this article, it really helped me out several times :)
It did seem like generic and low value marketing fluff to me and I was pretty surprised to see this at the top of HN...

I very much doubt the tedious and meticulous process outlined by the author has ever led to success for anyone in the software field. In a fraction of the time that would probably take, you could write an MVP, throw it out there, and get far more valuable real-life feedback on what the market thinks.

As for a good read on the article's topic, the gold standard is still this in my opinion:

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Your average household uses somewhere between 30 and 60 gallons of hot water a day [0], and a bigger tank will just have water sitting in it, going cold. Any extra surface area costs you extra heat, even if the marginal loss decreases with growing tank volumes.

[0] http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/publications/pdf/FSEC-PF-464-15.p...
The point at the end, I think, is that the money is too big to ignore, especially if you're on an VC-expected growth path.
Our rented apartment here in London has storage heaters in each room which only turn on at night, when tariffs are off peak; they then release the heat during the day.

I think there is a separate power circuit for that. There are also two separate switches for the main water boiler, one for off peak power and one for peak power.

It's not ideal - it gets too warm at night - but I'm sure it saves quite a lot in the energy bill.
Using electricity to heat water is a waste of a high quality (i.e. low entropy) energy source.
Carefully tuning when to use electrical water heaters and calling this energy storage is not quite right.

There are much better ways to heat water for domestic use, depending on the climate and context, such as solar panels, heat pumps with ground drilling, industrial heat waste, etc. These are standard technologies being used in large parts of the world.

For more info I recommend the excellent book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by MacKay (pdf freely available at withouthotair.com).
> It sounds disingenuous to call one-way energy sinks 'heat storage’

One-way conversation of energy to heat is a very common use-case: Warm water, heating are all things a lot of people use. Currently, most of that conversion happens on-demand, when someone turns on the tap. Heat is a form of energy that is fairly easy to store. Have a large bucket of water, well insulated and you’re mostly set. It’s dead cheap. There are similar concepts that use a generator to provide electricity for buildings on demand and store the waste heat for warm water and heating.

> Calling such a one-way sink a battery is even worse.

The article does not. They are a replacement for batteries in some use cases. The article may overstate how often that’s the case but it does not pretend you could regain the energy stored as electricity.
My attempt at an approach:

Disable auto-play.

Never click on a “recommended” video.

Subscribe to channels with high quality content.

Basically be picky, and make sure to be the one selecting what to watch.
From 2016, but a better question would be what it would mean for a heavy drinker such as Hillary Clinton to have control of the nukes, vs a teetotaler like Trump.
is HN susceptible to bots like reddit?
I would also love to read/buy this!
No, it's because gas is (if your property is plumbed for it, obviously) cheaper to produce and transport than electricity for the same amount of heat energy. It doesn't make sense to talk about "efficiency" for heating itself -- energy is energy. I don't know whether it's more "efficient" in the sense of transport losses or not, my guess is it's a wash.

Obviously gas inherently involves digging carbon out of the grown and throwing it into the atmosphere, though, so there's that to think about.
Well, surely Microsoft wouldn't randomly pull the rug out from under a small subset of its own customers!

Unrelated, anyone know how I can get my Windows 10 Mobile phone to sync Zune songs to my Windows Media Center? My Xbox360 stopped working smoothly after the last few forced updates