skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A relevant letter sent to the New York Times in 1975:

---

Dear Sir:

Your newspaper frequently uses the term "Palestinian" to describe a section of the Middle East population which is Arab, to differentiate it from Israeli Jews. As the holder of a Palestinian Identity Card and a Certificate of Discharge from a Palestinian Unit of the British army, I find this practice annoying and certainly untrue...

We Palestinian Jews wore the uniform of the British Army, and on our shoulder epaulettes the single word, "Palestine" in English. We tried to get permission to wear Hebrew insignia, fly the Jewish flag and be recognized as Palestinian Jews, but-no, Palestinian meant Jew and Arab, and who cared if there were fewer than 3000 Arabs as compared to 36,000 Jews in khaki? In British Army nomenclature, the equivalent of a GI is BOR, meaning British Other Rank. We were formally known as POR, Palestinian Other Ranks.

So we fought the war as Palestinians, set up the Jewish Brigade as Palestinians, and I'll be damned if I agree that only Arafat and his assassins are Palestinians.

As a Palestinian, I was arrested by the British on suspicion of smuggling immigrants into the country. As a Palestinian, I had the honor of commanding the 329th Palestinian Company of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME - all Jews). There were no equivalent Arab units. Once a British general said to me, "Migawd| I have so many things to dislike you for, for being a Jew, American born, a Palestinian-and you don't even know how to handle a knife and fork!

So cut it out, please. Call them what you will, but not Palestinians.

Yours truly,
Joe Criden

---

Source: http://afsi.org/pamphlets/PalestiniansKahn.pdf
I'm rather disturbed by the end of the first video when one of the fellows say "That's gotta be some pigs. Oh, we're gonna have to go kill 'em kids".

I understand these creatures are hurting the livelihoods of farmers and such, but this casual disregard for life and gung-ho attitude toward the hunt is a bit unsettling. Especially since the young ones are being introduced to it.

I'm a bit of a hypocrite; I've done some fishing, but I don't consider this to be terribly sporting.
A lot of people are opposed to HTML, CSS and JS in email messages. We do not want email to become this very complicated thing like the web has become.
> If you down vote, can you explain why?

I always downvote comments that contain complaints or predictions about potential downvotes. Your opinions should stand on their own merits, and let the upvotes or downvotes come as they will.
Your justification was another, when the rules apply to me there is a built in special case exception.

There is nothing personal about it, I have no idea who you are, I am sure that you are a decent human being. I have a problem with hypocrisy. In the case of the duplicates you said "no wonder people think HN is broken" because someone submitted a duplicate story...and you did not mention that the fourth submission was yours. It seemed to me that your behavior was just as worthy of a "no wonder people think HN is broken" as the person who submitted the story for the fifth time.
This seems like kind of a silly. The Ubuntu panel he shows there is simple because programmers have hidden all the complexity. Whoever installed the sprinkler system hid the complexity too - they closed the door on the sprinkler control panel. If you wanted it to be simple, you should have left the door closed. You don't need to adjust it. It should have been programmed by the installer to account for seasonal rainfall. Day-to-day rain does not matter at all to your sprinkler programming.

If you want to poke around (literally) under the hood, you don't get to complain about complexity.
"When computers can achieve these things it's not for the purpose of displacing us it's really to make ourselves smarter," Kurzweil says. "And smarter in the sense of being more loving... Really enhancing the things that we value about humans."

Sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking on Kurzweil's part. Does he have any strong arguments for why superhuman intelligence will be chiefly interested in bettering the human condition, without displacing us in important ways? Certainly can't find historical evidence for this, in the way human beings have treated less intelligent species, or even less developed human civilizations.
It's not like they're a climber helping cast.

So why do they carry bags and act as "helping cast" for what you say are low wages? Is someone forcing them?
With current launch technology -- chemical rockets -- flying out of atmosphere takes the most of fuel and oxidizer, because for almost two minutes, the rocket literally stands on flame, fighting both gravity and air resistance. You cannot shorten this time much by speeding up, because air friction goes up with speed in roughly quadratic relation. Aside of fuel and oxidizer, an atmospheric rocket stage has to carry very strong, and thus bulky, engines, to give the whole vehicle Thrust-to-Weight Ratio > 1, typically about 2. Only when you are at, or close to, LEO, you can use smaller/lighter engines with lower TWR.

A long sought after alternative is to launch and go to high altitude with atmospheric engines (thus saving mass of oxidizer) and aerodynamic lifting force (so you can use lighter engines, having overall TWR < 1), basically an aeroplane. Only after reaching high altitude and speed switch to rocket mode, or separate a rocket-based next stage. Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo goes far into that direction, but it is still limited to low-supersonic speeds by using jet engines. The problem is, plain jet engines are not very efficient at high Mach, due to both having to slow air down to sub-sonic speed and thermal limitations.

The next logical step is to use scramjet engines, which perform in high supersonic (`hypersonic') flight regime. This is technically challenging, because you have to work with high supersonic airflow inside engine (hypersonic gas behavior is significantly harder to model than at the usual subsonic), and also you have to maintain steady flame in its hypersonic airflow.
I lost a ton of respect for google when they hired Kurzweil, and more when I realized they put money into the singularity thing. Didn't they realize that Kurzweil will tell them what they want to hear for free, too?
I think that they deal with this problem. Doesn't a modal dialog popup if an email is being slow to send (and you hit the close button on the tab)?
> That's what being a child is all about.

That may be true, but it does not exonerate her from any wrongdoing. Just because some kids aren't cognizant of what is appropriate or safe to do in certain situations doesn't mean that those things aren't objectively bad or that they shouldn't be discouraged.

She did something that was clearly against school policy and created a dangerous situation. She might not have had the foresight to realize how dumb it was, but that doesn't mean that it was ok to do.

(And believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of students aren't inclined towards harm, and are aware, like everyone else, of the explicit or implicit bounds on what they can do. I've never understood where the perception of kids as oblivious troublemakers with no notion of nor respect for basic social norms and the law.)
What a great blanket policy, regardless of the rest of the comment. On the accounts I've had downvote privileges with, I've reserved them for cases where the comment doesn't contribute anything or is disruptive to the discussion; no wonder I get downvoted a lot, there must be a lot of people misusing downvoting as you are. And yes, I'm aware of the guideline. That you've turned a guideline into a blanket downvote-all is pretty depressing, particularly since I didn't complain or invite, as the guidelines specifically say.

I made a request since I've left comments before that have hit the toilet bowl rather quickly, merely because I went against the grain of this sort of feel-good philanthropy. There was no other reason to downvote those prior comments other than disagreeing, which I think is misuse of downvoting. I've already accrued more downvotes on the comment than there are followup comments, so people are ignoring the request anyway, and probably not even making it that far in the comment before clicking the button.

I wish pg would implement a feature where a downvote costs you a karma point. That would be great. Between refreshes I can watch every comment I've left in this thread lose another point, because someone comes through and blanket downvotes everything I've said. Which, obviously, I interpret as trying to shut up (now that graying has been implemented) an opinion that people find unreasonable, rather than letting their own opinion stand on its own merit, as you say, as a reply to mine.
Definitely not the same crowd. It's still a 4 door sedan. They're competing against the Panamera not the GT3.
Thinking Things Through
Just an off-hours thought.
I thought the whole idea of arbitrage is that it's risk-free! :)
Is it really unconventional though? Tab for navigation is the default behavior for HTML form inputs and contenteditable. I can't think of a website that I use that has input boxes that have tab do indent actually.
I have used those exact sprinkler system controls and can attest that they are absolutely terrible.
Admittedly, I do not understand this position. With all due respect, you're not living in reality. The reality is that email already is this "complicated thing like the web". The proliferation of myriad screen sizes from mobile to tablet to desktop, and current industry trends with respect to "responsive design" dictate modern front-end developers to adapt and mimic as close to desktop-level support as possible.

For those that do, in my opinion, this type of mentality can be viewed as short-sighted and non-constructive to the platform as a whole.
Nest folks, once you are happy with your thermostat product please pivot to water heaters. There is no reason why I heat the water in the tank up throughout the night. I think that my household demand for hot water is fairly predictable with spikes in the morning for showering and in the evening for dishes and laundry.
Printable 'bionic' ear melds electronics and biology
Thanks!

For which operation are you suggesting to use add() method? As far as I can see (and I just walked in so I might be overlooking something) you want to set data (overwrite) if it exist.

Add() will fail if key already exist (which should be the case under full load) and you will end up using set() anyways.
From the company's website:

"IT IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW TO USE THIS PRODUCT IN A MANOR INCONSISTANT WITH ITS LABELING."
"For bonus points it would also check Google Maps and compare how green my lawn is to my neighbors"

How's that going to work when the imagery isn't real time?
Right, I agree with you. It's easy to imagine an affiliate rep who is incentivised by affiliates doing well, i.e. they get paid based on affiliate sales. You can even imagine some ebay affiliate reps being "ok" with a description of how they're generating their hits because they're incentivised by the affiliates doing well. Until someone upstairs figures out what's going on. Then, of coure, the affiliate rep is completey clueless about what happend and is shocked that someone would do this!

What a scam both ways.
Sorry but you're totally missing something if you think you can compare to a Mac or 'PC' of it's time. Not only did it have a lot of special peripherals but the entire OS and environment is what made it special.

Like Apple today, you have to look at the entire package. The difference being that Apple mostly targets the general consumer today while NeXT was targeting a more advanced and smaller but richer market back then.
Direct link to the demo for the impatient :-)

http://drum.jupo.org
Said too much? Everything you said could have been learned by a lurker on Black Hat World.
After you get one you'll realize that even thinking about a gas station is a huge inconvenience. If you use a Tesla for your daily drive it is basically like it runs forever.
tesla roadster
Since I wrote memkeys, maybe I can clarify a few things.

First, dropping packets matters. If you see only 30-40% of your traffic you can't guarantee that you have enough data to know what your hot keys actually are. This is especially true when you are interested in (for instance) sorting keys by bandwidth usage. You might have a key that gets half as many hits as the hottest key but is 4x the size and causing network link saturation. In this case, depending on how much data you're able to capture, you may or may not even see this data point. Also, the follow-up comment from corresation about patching memcache doesn't make sense to me.

Second, this was no 'jab' at etsy. I know the etsy guys incredibly well and we're all friends. We've collaborated on work in more than one occasion. The jab comment seems like unnecessary speculation. The comment about seeing how memkeys affects performance is of course spot on. In this case, one thread will peg a CPU core for packet capture but besides that will not be CPU intensive. Since it uses packet capture, memkeys doesn't actually interact with memcached directly so the impact should be minimal. We used it at Tumblr.

Third, fixing the packet loss issue in mctop wasn't feasible as the problem is with ruby-pcap not with mctop. Additionally, while Tumblr has plenty of ruby code in production we don't generally use it for building 'real-time' applications. There are better languages for the job.

I built memkeys because it solved a problem we had, and was fun. That's it.
You never have to "refill" a Tesla in the conventional sense if you charge it overnight like your phone. Also, HOV lane is awesome. It is the future. Also, if you switch to an E-9 plan (in CA) your overnight charge costs $0.03/kwH so that is essentially 1 gallon of gas in cost = 500 miles of travel.
The problem here is that the definition of "legitimate" can be very, very different, depending on if you're talking to A or B.
>Are you guys prepared to contribute to the legal funds of everyone who is expelled and charged with crimes for unfair reasons?

Hell yes. We should get involved. Every. Single. Time. This stuff thrives on people just shrugging their shoulders and moving on, reminding themselves to keep their heads extra down. If we made a stink every time, there wouldn't have to be many times.

When you donate, or even just take the time to get involved, think of it as raising your own taxes just a smidge to actually make the system better.
This screenshot was taken on my dev box which has plenty of other activity happening. On a production memcache box, seeing 1Gb/s, I see ~2% packet loss.
Interesting post, but oh my god, the styling on this site is hurting my brain.
Welcome to 4 years ago?
According to pg, it has always been OK to down vote comments you disagree with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> I've already accrued more downvotes on the comment than there are followup comments, so people are ignoring the request anyway, and probably not even making it that far in the comment before clicking the button.

You can make whatever requests you like, but people are not obligated to accede to them, and I'm letting you know that such requests are generally counterproductive.
I got http://◳.com/ when I noticed these inexplicably-valid Unicode ranges in the IDN spec. But that seems to be on its way to being fixed, sadly.
Blew tons of stuff up when I was in middle school. Didn't blow anything up at school, as I didn't want to, you know, get in trouble.
I don't think that Google Voice will get shutdown. Google needs a unified communication product, tying Google Talk, Voice, and Hangouts together.
What if someone was hurt by this incident? How would this change your outlook on the situation?
Do you start making GCs immediately?
Does it run on Linux? There doesn't seem to be any mention of that on the downloads page.
I know I designed the styling mostly to appeal to myself, but serious question: what's wrong with black text on white background? That's basically how books have been printed for hundreds of years.
Welp I got, Notice of DMCA removal from Google Search
I run a CI website, the complaint was via MS and the site looks like it migrated untouched from GeoCities years ago and hasn't been updated in 3 weeks.

I don't want trouble so I complied with the request and filled the google form out and took the site down.

Anyone else get something like this? Is this the end of it after filling out the google form?
I came really close to getting into cookie stuffing back in its heyday. I'm really glad I didn't. No one gave a second thought to it 5 years ago. I never once saw the words "fraud" and "cookie stuffing" on the same page.

Around that time I worked on finding ways to do untraceable cookie stuffing. Bouncing people through SSL to kill the referer, using Flash, etc. I even found a security hole in IE that gave me access to cross domain iframes. That was killer because you could load another site in an iframe then use JS to click an affiliate link or manipulate the page, making it appear completely legit.

Luckily it never went past research. I registered a domain and planned on creating a cookie stuffing service but never finished it and never did any actual cookie stuffing.
Don’t build. Compose
Have you thought about switching to a tankless hot water system?
I am a bit suspicious about the NRA. I wonder how much they are controlled by arms manufacturer's interests.

I would agree with you that the curtailment of rights is offensive. The recent attempt at weakening Habeas Corpus and various assaults on the Presumption of Innocence come to mind.
But the point is it shouldn't feel like you are going "under the hood" to simply change sprinkler schedule. We still INTERACT with Nest without the need to go under the hood. If you simply "closed the door of sprinkler", you can't interact with it. Nest hides the complexity and provides simple interface for the user.
I made a request that if you downvoted you explained why. Thank you for heeding my request. You and someone else have already mentioned that merely saying the word "downvote" in a comment is an insta-downvote trigger, which is completely inappropriate since I made but a simple request that you seemed to handle just fine. Your extrapolation of the very ambiguous guidelines into mental rules for downvoting people is disingenuous and harmful to discussion, and you are not the only person that does it. It's one of the diseases endemic to this community, and it was only made worse by pg implementing grayed-out comments. Now it's just an opportunity to censor.

I'm glad you consider my opinion preposterous, because that's an opportunity for discussion. I'm annoyed you think that because my opinion is preposterous, I must be trolling. That's the biggest example of groupthink I've ever seen; "he's way out in left field, he must be here to disrupt the community for his own sick pleasure!" No, people do disagree with you for what you consider to be preposterous reasons. Just look at the gun control debate. There are preposterous things on both sides of that.

My underlying concern here is that we were called to this girl's attention via international media, we're relying upon very little actual demonstrable evidence, including media statements and a police report, and we've already made the determination that the charges were unfair, people in power should apologize and be voted out, etc. The girl changed her story once in the police report. That's cause enough for me to say 'hm, I'll wait for the facts.'

This sort of thing segues into a bigger, disgusting trend of people on the Internet donating to causes like this so they can philanthropically feel good about themselves. The girl didn't even ask for a legal fund, potentially might not need one, yet here we are. Calling the person who prefers to take the long view and wait until all the facts come out a troll.

Yay, Internet.
I downvoted one post. I'm not blanket downvoting everything you say. That is an odd accusation.

EDIT: the accusation in the parent seems to have been removed without comment.
I had an account when pg left that comment. That was five years ago, long before grayed-out comments were even implemented. Now, if enough people disagree with a comment, it turns gray and is never seen again. Which means the only comments that will survive now are the ones that everybody considers agreeable enough to upvote or leave alone.

There's a word for that. Several, actually. Because of that, I now think that pg is even more wrong than he was at the time.
I'm pretty sure the most common reaction to this will be "Wait—Harper Lee is alive?"
The thing about Ray Kurzweil is that he's basically entertainment, in the same way William Gibson or George Lucas are entertainment. He excites and inspires the lay population, but is ultimately pretty weak on the non-fiction part.

There aren't any scientists that are saying, "hey, no, that whole advancing technology thing sounds like a terrible idea!" Of course that would be awesome. The reason Kurzweil gets ragged on by the scientific community is because when it comes to specific claims and technical details, his batting average is terrible. His books are notorious for making technical statements that are just simply wrong. One of my favorite graphs from "The Singularity Is Near" is a plot of linear versus exponential growth with a point labeled on the exponential curve, "the knee of the curve". He was trying to make a point about how exponential growth looks slow until it hits some "knee" and then it takes off. Hey, anyone, what's the derivative of e^x? Exactly. The neuroscience background he brought to "How to Create a Mind" was first-year grad student at best.

Kurzweil is a director of engineering at Google, not the director of engineering as per the article, and Google has many of them. He is an entertainer who attracts attention and sometimes asks interesting questions. I wouldn't worry too much about specific technical statements he makes today. He's way out of his research area of OCR and text-to-speech.
Are you saying that your appeals to SCOTUS were heard both times or that they were merely considered and later rejected?
In general, there's a good reason for heating the water overnight: electricity is often cheaper at night, and (on a national level) it means that electricity demand is spread more evenly over the whole 24 hours.
>Except that he has been building leading-edge artificial intelligence systems since he was a teenager and studying those practical difficulties you mention for decades,

Except that you can do all these things and still be prone to wishful thinking.

Especially if there was a traumatic event involving, say, the loss of your father, an event that makes you obsessive about your mortality, eternal life through tech et al.

Linus Pauling even had two nobels, but he was saying BS about Vitamin C. And Wilhelm Reich was a smart guy too, until he got lost on his own make believe world. Ditto for Nash, ditto for Godel, Howard Hughes, the list goes on.

Genius and insanity are not that far. And merely-brilliant (which Kurzweill is) to obsessive wishful thinker, are even closer.

Especially if you have an audience of ex-hippy rich Californians that like to hear your transcendental techno-religious jive.
Glad to hear Nest is still around. Last I heard, they were getting the thermonuclear treatment from Honeywell's patent attorneys. Was that resolved recently?
Agreed. But specifically for lawns, I actually wish someone makes much cheaper artificial turfs. Good for aesthetics, better for the environment.. saves hassle time money and water.
'Flagged for removal'
If they were investigating him, they wouldn't want him to stop the illegal behavior until prosecutors had a good case. If they turned off the cookie stuffing, it may have prevented the criminal case which would make the civil case harder.