skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a bot that posts random Wikipedia articles to HN, or what?
Exactly. Political parties spend most on social networking teams now! look at India! Entire elections are based on fake news spread on social networks. Nobody cares about healthcare, economy, jobs and of course education. Obviously if you educate people then they will start judging everything rationally just like we are doing on this thread ;)
Is this a bit?

It's not clear to me that free software is any more essential to a free society than libraries are. Which is to say, it's a clear public good but that's not a compelling reason to position it as a requirement for a free society. I would very much appreciate if you could expand on why it is childish to believe otherwise.

Look, there's free software that I absolutely love like Vim, but unless things have drastically changed in the past 12 months many open source "alternatives" trail their paid alternatives in features and ease of use. I would choose open source applications if they could demonstrate a superior experience, but I'm unwilling to jump over hurdles for promises of quality that have yet to materialize.

For instance, I agree that Adobe's model is just awful, but Procreate is miles ahead of Gimp so I'd rather give those devs thirty bucks as a one time fee over using free software that is less enjoyable or expedient for my work. That's the crux of it really: for most people computing is a means to an end so it makes sense that users optimize their choices around results rather than ideals about the future of computing.

Also, what you've described doesn't sound like a better economy at all from where I'm sitting. I love not being a sole proprietor or part of a small dev shop. It's great being able to go home on a Friday and know that if anything comes up over the weekend that someone else will handle it. It's equally great knowing that I have the resources of a large company and the combined expertise of a massive pool of employees. I would certainly be less happy as a consultant, independent developer, or entrepreneur.
He's not going to name names. Those lifers in MS probably know who he's talking about, he did name products as well. Those folks can infer. Ra-ra feminist piece? Think we're reading different things. What he said regarding women rings true.
You are describing a serious psychological issue. I urge you to seek treatment with psychologist or psychiatrist.
Bruce Schneier on how insecure electronic voting could break the United States
They are capable of being fired underwater.
There's nothing particularly difficult or expensive about a wooden differential.

edit: no seriously, zoom in on this pic here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/South-po...
I appreciate the opportunity. I quite like FocusMate but the emails drive me nuts.

When I'm logged in I can change email settings for Calendar Invites (I definitely want these) and Performance Reports (if I could track my own performance metrics I'd want these but for now they're really just a prompt to schedule mores sessions like every other FocusMate email). Opting out of Performance Reports apparently doesn't opt me out of "FocusMate Stats" emails even though they're basically the same.

Clicking "manage subscriptions" at the bottom of an email takes me to a different page of email settings that's almost impossible to figure out - Engagement? Outreach? Important Messages? CEO? I have no idea what I'm opting into or out of.

Important messages sounds like something I want - I'm glad I got your emails about the new subscriptions, for example. (Was that an "important message" or "CEO"?) But important messages also seems to include not so important stuff - like the email of dubious veracity about the unemployed food truck guy who turned his life around in a week by scheduling a ton of FocusMate sessions. That was (yet another) email trying to get me to schedule more sessions.

I like FocusMate and I think it's is well worth $5/month but any email that ends with some version of "book more sessions" is an email that I don't want or need.
Latest round wasn't led by Softbank. Softbank just led the D.

"The round was co-led by General Atlantic, Access Technology Ventures, and Lennar Corporation (the leading homebuilder in the U.S.), with additional participation from new investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, 10100 Fund, and Invitation Homes (a leading property owner of homes for lease in the U.S.). Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Lakestar, GGV Capital, NEA, and Khosla Ventures also participated in the round."

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180613005382/en/Ope...
I hate selecting text on my work iPhone. Android does this far better and you don’t need to learn tricks like pressing down spacebar.
I referenced post-WW2 Germany for their demonstrated ability to deal with a past national sin. Sorry, I thought that was an obvious reference.

Edit: Did you really miss the word "after"?
The specifics unfortunately depend a lot on what you're protecting. Are you writing an enterprise web app? Consumer web app? Phone app? Desktop app? Blog engine? E-commerce store? Multiple of the above?
This assumes a simplistic view of how its core search algorithm works, though. It's obvious through even some basic querying that it uses different strategies for recognizing intent based on the nature of the input: single words, addresses, arithmetic, business names, full text queries, etc.

There's no reason to think that they will enact this to the detriment of other queries. It _could_ happen, but I am skeptical - optimistic even. As they mention, this improves ~10% of queries. The other 90% likely represent different forms of query input and I would hope remain unaffected.
Are you talking about the charity people with clipboards in SF? They're seriously the most aggressive people I've ever seen. I'm surprised they have card readers now. I think they used to just write your credit card details on a piece of paper.
In the Halls of the Mountain Kings
> The actual change took place at 4:50 AM and vehicles driving on the road at that time were instructed to change from right to left as they were driving.

This makes it sound haphazard. In practice, traffic stopped at 04:50, everyone had 10 minutes to carefully change side, and traffic resumed at 05:00. Also, all non-essential traffic was banned between 01:00 - 06:00.
Motion-sensing automatic doors can be opened by deer, bears (which has led to some excitement in hotels and hospitals), and even birds. I've seen birds that can activate the doors in the hardware store near me, and that know where the birdseed is on the shelves in the garden department.
getting around in nyc is more difficult than it has to be, because of people looking down at their phones.
Yeah, but surely the vast vast majority of dropbox's business has to come from PCs. Given how hard (and wrongly) they are pushing to be a collaborative space for work documents, I think I must be correct about this. I know it's cool and all to imagine everyone working on their phones, I just can't see that as a viable work process atm.
The “free market”, as it’s often portrayed, is a magical idea that exists only in text books. It’s not real. The real market is a mess of information asymmetry, unpriced negative externalities and govern emend subsidies.

Economic theory is great for determining the direction of economic policy but not defining policy itself.
Basically the same ones, yeah. Donating through them harms whatever cause you're trying to help.
The mines are located at the top of a hill? I tend to think of mines as being down underground. Are we talking about strip mining here?
I would agree on the consumer level, enterprise not so much. Making big moves in ERP space among other places.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Just regular fluid mechanics in a gravitational potential.
I always figured there was one person that just regularly got lost down random wiki rabbitholes daily and shared the most interesting find of the day.
I'm gonna be publicly ridiculed for this one and I'm good with that.

I've been trying to get the show desktop gesture on my mac right for years. You know, the one that "windows-D" was doing so loyaly for ages.

My habit is to arbitrarily swipe as many fingers as I can find available from center of trackpad outwards. It used to take me ~10 trials to get it right.

And now, enlightened by this random thread, I suddenly figured out I actually need to swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downwards simultaneously. This is the greatest Epiphany HN had given me since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13651148
Gravity wave the word has two very different things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave
How close are you to actually having any effect on the politics of NH? To having a controlling effect?
Yeah, that's my point. It was like a playground of technologists and hackers. I wish I was born earlier to experience this magic place.
There is so much tech in life, it’s hard to know where to even begin. Seems like every time you want to do something it starts with a google search on the best way to do it. If you don’t, you risk wasting a lot of time or money, and then people will call you an idiot for not googling it first, and sometimes the person calling you an idiot is your own self.

Life has become nothing but a series of google searches and finding the best tech for the job, while finding the most efficient way to pay bills.
Such a strategy failed utterly in Canada. They moved a government department from Ottawa to Miramichi, New Brunswick for similar reasons. All the skilled bureaucrats used their reputations to get transfers to a different department so they wouldn't have to uproot their family, and the department was rebuilt around a core of incompetents. I'm sure the locals they hired weren't so incompetent, but rot starts from the top. That move caused the failure of the long-gun registry and a waste of $2B. After the long gun registry was cancelled they used the same department to rewrite the pay system (code name Phoenix) and have managed to waste about $5B so far, and growing.

That's about $50 million wasted per job.
Last line... at the end:

I reboot every night.
Sure, the wall chargers you have in your house are. You think the 400V, 625A circuits (250kW chargers) are just dumb circuits though? Fairly certain they have temperature and voltage monitoring on both sides of the cable and both sides of the connector, all to monitor for any issues with either the connector or the cable continuously. Anything goes wrong, gets to hot, etc? It kills power.

You're right though. Medium voltage circuits (and above) are going to be much more complex. The fact is, once you start operating at medium voltage and above, stuff that previously was an insulator may not actually be as insulating as you think...
There are different sorts of hard bits IMHO.

OAuth and OpenID Connect can be _conceptually_ hard; you are abstracting authentication and authorization into a protocol and therefore inheriting someone else's model. When that model is presented in the form of a spattering of specifications, understanding and mapping to that model can be really laborious . You also may be doing this as part of a new architecture on your side (e.g. moving from traditional server-side rendered web applications to PWA/SPA apps using APIs).

Strong Authentication and Account Lifecycle Management actually are just a whole lot of logic. Authentication is also something which is continually evolving to stay ahead of attackers. They are hard from the perspective of amount of work required, the distraction from your actual product mission, and the consequence of getting them wrong.
Having just added a (simple) calendar view [0] to my tumblelog static site generator [1] I can tell that in my experience "from scratch" is quite some work.

[0] http://plurrrr.com/archive/2019/

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
> Nothing about free markets guarantees "equitable" distribution

More than that, free markets guarantee nothing at all. But the historical record is that free markets have lifted far more people out of poverty than anything else.

The most recent example is China turning to free markets, and the resulting vast improvement in their economy.
App-Armor: Mandatory Access Control
Yes, and it deserves to be pointed out, no?
The world's tourist must-see spots are seeing an unmanagable spike in foot traffic.
Which is why I deliberately left that sentence in there. Its because there is a profound misunderstanding of the definition "free market". I also disagree with the contention that what the most number of people mistakenly define to be true is justification for miscategorizing and dismissing something.

The "cheerleaders" you are talking about clearly did not understand these concepts, and the result is mis-association, and thereby in effect dismissal of the idea of freedom as absurd.

Even though "ideally", "In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority", In practice to achieve this end, this means creating a level playing field which take things into account such as "IP protections, environmental costs, etc."

From a libertarian perspective, in order to eliminate a "government or other authority from all forms of economic privilege" in the long term, is to in the short term work to better define property rights and rules to play by to force more accountability with the individuals involved.
Been a while since I've done Lisp seriously, but I don't believe that's possible, at least in Common Lisp (SBCL). While if responds to symbol function:

* (symbol-function 'if)
#<CLOSURE (:SPECIAL IF) {1000C5084B}>

SBCL refuses to set that value to an alias:

* (setf (symbol-function 'foo) (symbol-function 'if))
#<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {10005205B3}>:
#<CLOSURE (:SPECIAL IF) {1000C5084B}> is not acceptable to (SETF SYMBOL-FUNCTION)

Trying this with regular functions works as intended:

* (setf (symbol-function 'bar) (symbol-function 'mapcar))
#<FUNCTION MAPCAR>
* (bar #'1+ '(1 2 3))
(2 3 4)

Special forms are, well, special and a lot of the regular parts of lisp doesn't work with them.
How did the US custom of tipping come to exist in the first place? I live in a country where tipping is practically nonexistent, and I think I would feel severely uncomfortable with prices that don't actually correspond to what I'm expected to pay, even if the mental arithmetic is easy.

I hear that tipping in the US is necessary because of low wages, but I can't help feeling like it's dishonest business to shift the responsibility of compensation from the employer directly to the customers.
Clearly you are not one with the body. You must be purged! :)
Scooters, scooters everywhere :-)
So life was better before google—when there was still the risk of wasting time and money, and only limited means of research?
OMG you just brought an enormous amount of happiness to my life! these disappearing scroll bars were a nemesis of mine and i have been blaming Chrome for this calamity. thank you so much :)
Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read).

And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
in that case, top of the hill compared to where to material needs to go, which is at the foot of the mountain.
This isn't always true. Free trade has been shown to work fine even if other countries are imposing tariffs and performing currency manipulation. There may be a temporary deficit, but those dollars still need to eventually flow back into the country with the trade deficit, and lose value over time which is an advantage to the country with the deficit. Australia and NZ have been able to build very strong economies using this approach.

Where it doesn't work is when other countries are willing to engage in theft, including intellectual property theft and industrial espionage.
GM doesn't even make the Volt anymore and it was only ever a car for compliance with federal emissions laws. It might be harder to get parts for it in 8 years as a result. In 8 years I suspect there will be a dearth of really good used EVs on the market, Teslas, Volkswagens, Fords, and Toyotas included.

But on the price you make a good point. That will come down over time as more and more companies make good EVs.
Fair points.

I wrote that some three years ago, among a series of rants (I don't recall the others that accompanied it), moved to extreme annoyance, and after looking at the initial result, decided to replace the initial language to tone it down a bit.

Today I tossed it into the HN submissions queue following an earlier item on similarly obnoxious and undiscoverable UI/UX, and was surprised to see the item take off. Planning which HN submissions will succeed is not a high-probability endeavour.

The best way to read the language is "yeah, the author was pretty annoyed when they wrote this, but decided to tone down the effect without removing all references to that annoyance entirely".

I've written highly invecitve-filled pieces elsewhere. For public or private consumption. It's when I stop any swearing that feedback (and usage) is quite likely to stop -- the outrage is a measure that I still care. Users past caring don't remain long.
I just saw a video of a woman getting hit by a bus because she had her headphones in and looking at her cell phone crossing a crosswalk.

Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.
I don't think so. wikipedia.org used to have a mild downweight on it, the same one HN has on most major media websites. A few months ago a reader emailed and asked us to try removing that. There seemed to be enough randomly interesting Wikipedia submissions that we agreed to try it. Randomly interesting is sort of the highest good on HN, so on the whole I think it's working. We tend to moderate so there's no more than one on the front page at a time.
I found this really intriguing, and unfortunately can't understand the linked video in Swedish, but I'm really confused about how they did this with the huge amount of physical infrastructure that would have needed to change. After all, there are a lot of road features (e.g. many styles of ramps and turn lanes) that aren't symmetrical, so switching sides would have required a ton of construction. How did they accomplish this so quickly?
Brain 'Shields' Itself from the Existential Threat of Death
It's been fantastic for the 400 people that own more wealth then the entire country.
It was probably better because at least you were doing the best you could with what you had. There was much self discovery just by living your life.
> Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for.

I have met many, many people who gladly pay for Office (specifically, Excel) or Visual Studio, so much does it increase their productivity. I'm not one of them, but I'm not an accountant and the code bases I work with are small and don't require VS's incredible tooling.

There are also adherents of the cult of Visio, but I honestly can't fathom what they see in it.

Microsoft can be faulted for many things, but the reason it is so successful is that it made some really good products that still haven't been surpassed.
It has always been an iOS best practice to keep object sizes so that half an item visible if an area is scrollable, so to let the user know there’s more below the fold.

Since the first iPhone I never found them breaking this guideline. Not so badly at least.
> I think they used to just write your credit card details on a piece of paper.

Why would you allow anyone to do that? :O
The tipping system in practice artificially inflates the wages of service staff so I've never really understood the outrage around it. It's true that tipping drives away customers but that's because it artificially inflates the wages of service staff. It's still a net benefit to the service staff. It maybe is a negative to the restaurateurs and back of house but certainly not the service staff.

The article portrays tipping as sexist but the institution acts as a mechanism to redistribute wealth from men to women. It's true that white women, young women, and attractive women get tipped more and they will put up with mistreatment to get tipped more but it ultimately smacks of attacking a system for being imperfect more than because it's bad. The alternative model you see at fast food restaurants is hardly less demeaning for women and definitely less profitable. If one ever succeeded in stripping away tipping it would only serve to keep more money in men's pockets in an attempt to end the sexism of tipping.

I also strongly, STRONGLY dispute the idea that leaving 30-50 percent tips is the best way to redistribute wealth if charitably inclined. It seems more like a notion to make newspaper columnists seem woke and generous than something that actually is an efficient way to do good. The advantage to tipping is the social stigma essentially forces people to compensate service staff better than they normally would but you're never realistically going to pressure people into paying 50% or even 30% regularly.

On the more positive side I do agree with the authors notion that the racial bias in tipping is rather extreme and unjustified. A third smaller tips for black drivers is pretty hard to justify and simply being aware that it happens is good knowledge.
Just a fun fact: my father had to go to the hospital by ambulance that day to take out his appendicitis. So for my own sake I'm glad it was so well planned!
Introducing Facebook News
Interest-driven communities online paired with censorship lead people to increasingly radical points of view. Before social media, people were forced to interact and get along with people with varying points of view. Now, we choose to isolate ourselves into groups of like-minded individuals where dissent is silenced, leading people to believe that extremism is normal.
Yes, I followed the link and saw that mentioned. I did see that film and really liked it!
Who needs scrollbars when I've got my trusty PgUp & PgDn
Google's Pixelbook Go Is Weird, but Holy Crap That Battery Life