skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe replacing the moderator hell/slowban system with a feedback system to improve commenter behavior instead of infuriating commenters and scaring away controversial people.

I've been banned a few times simply for strongly expressing an opinion contrary to HN ideology. I probably will be again for even bringing it up.
That's a very moving tribute to a great boss. It's too bad that he wasn't able to stop the decline in his empire. Perhaps the personalization didn't scale. In the end, he's remembered and respected more for the personal connections than the professional heights.
Those are not things we cannot say though. Most people I know well think US prisons are a human rights crisis, eating meat is ethically unjustifiable (but delicious), and choosing to die is plainly a human right.
Is there any evidence that Asian men are under-represented as founders?
EVERY language is "relatively sane" if you only "stick to the good parts". That argument is basically a tautology.

As for the logic of using a single language throughout your stack, I would argue two points:

[1] It's a myth. If you are a professional software developer, you are going to learn multiple languages... and if you're a GOOD software developer, then this excites you rather than bums you out.

So you're using JavaScript on both the client-side and server-side. Okay, how do you get information from your database without learning SQL? Just stick with MongoDB as the only datastore you will ever use? Document stores are great for the things that document stores are great for (another tautology), but suck horribly when you try to shoehorn them into situations calling for a relational database.

What about the HTML and CSS knowledge you already need to work on the client-side? Do those "not count", because a JavaScript developer usually happens to know them? Nonsense. Doing real work requires knowing multiple languages, because different ones are better suited for different domains.

[2] I would argue that the skills and considerations required to do non-trivial work on the server-side are generally different from those skills needed to do non-trivial work on the client-side. You may be smart and/or experienced enough to master both domains, but you approach design and coding issues differently in those domains.

If you take a developer who is senior on the server-side, but is so junior level on the client-side that he or she barely understands the DOM, then they will struggle at first in the other context. Vice-versa if you take a senior client-side web developer and throw them into the backend world. You're going to need to learn completely different skills, quickly. I'm not convinced that clinging to your "home" language really speeds up that process, rather than impairing it.
Also, I couldn't use Snip.ly on itself! But maybe that's on purpose :)
But are they IBM subsidiarities rather than IBM USA?
> node is different, in that bizarre though js may be, if you have to use it in the browser, there is a kind of logic to using it on the server as well.

I don thinkt that makes any sense. Should we also use js to implement the OS for the server?
If js is good for server-side use it, if not use something else.

My main issues with php is that I dont trust the language and standard libraries to behave as I expect. There are simply to many strange type conversions, silent errors and strange behaviour going on.
"If corporations are so evil why has their pay fed my family, paid for my house"

If crime is so evil why has its pay fed my family, paid for my house
Interesting. Reading about tetrachromatic birds and infrared-vision snakes couldn't help but wonder if there is an animal out there with ability to (naturally) sense the whole spectrum. Mantis Shrimp has however, a bee-like compound eye and I guess it suffers from the same resolution-penalty.
It can not be used with good intentions.

There is never any advantage for the users who click on the links.
> Is it really faster than CPython like for like?

It is a mixed bag. There are times where PHP is faster because it is closer to C, where as more python is written in Python. I once ran into a situation where it mattered that PHP's file_exists() is much faster than python's os.path.exists(). I have run into other cases where CPython is much better, such as python's heapq crushes a hand rolled PHP priority queue.

In practice PHP tends to be quite fast, because the standard solutions are pretty unambitious like thin wrappers around CURL, rather than actually implementing HTTP in php.
> It can give people the confidence to do things they should absolutely avoid doing

This is a popular criticism of the system for which supporting evidence is never provided. I'm not saying it doesn't have this effect, but I see no reason to assume it does, any more than having seatbelts in a car makes you a more reckless driver.
Native 2048 application for Android
Looking at the store - it's frustrating how it seems like HP is the only company that makes the kind of machines I want to buy, and I loathe HP hardware.
I also think you're overreacting, honestly.

I don't think I've ever in my professional career observed someone being feverish and flushed and assume that it had something to do with sexual tension. Men just aren't that observant.

More likely, I would assume you were either sick or anxious because of some work-related conversation. Neither of which is a reason to be concerned vis-à-vis office politics.

Also, can I offer a suggestion to your problem? Couldn't you make up a little white lie and tell your coworkers that you had a very minor medical condition that resulted in being feverish and flushed often but that there were no other serious effects? No need to name anything, but that should take care of your worry about getting an email every time you sneeze and also deal with your concern about constantly having your obvious symptoms be misunderstood.
"it just so happens that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male"

Yes, and? For example, best programmers are overwhelmingly white and male, because majority of programmers are white and male. (Not sure about race, but it's probably true in Western countries). The majority of people interested in founding technology startups are probably white and male, and therefore the best people for starting a technology startup are white and male. You comment implies that it's wrong to state that the best people are overwhelmingly white and male, if you don't imply that, please make it clear.

If women are as skilled as men in, say, programming, then majority of best programmers are male.

>2. The VC ecosystem has some pretty systemic biases and prejudices (this is not to say that startup people or programmers or anyone is particularly evil; in fact, almost everything has systemic biases and prejudices), and as a result the current landscape does not reflect the best possible set of founders, startups, and opportunities.

There's a third possibility: women and non-whites in Western countries are less interested in applying for venture capital. If that is the case, then in an equal world venture capitalists should invest less in startups founded by non-white women, because the majority of startups seeking venture capital are founded by white males.

The overall point is that you need to fix the root cause, not the effects of the cause. As long as women and non-whites are minorities in groups of people such as tech students, you should see less women and non-whites in tech student related phenomenon, such as technology startups.

This reminds me of all these communities like "AngularJS women", who try to get more women into AngularJS. I think that's pointless. Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men, you'll find that 50% of AngularJS developers will be female.
How is that bigotry?
Jinx :p
It's worth noting that the XSS vulnerability ("A user could inject scripts into the npm website via the README and license fields") assuredly exposed a whole slew of easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities, and the community should feel very lucky that such an obvious vulnerability was in the wild for so long without being exploited.

TL;DR always use a templating engine that makes you think about XSS and don't allow unsanitized user-provided HTML through raw.
I read this as "There are women who would make good founders. If we can find them and nurture them, even if it's more work for us, we're still going to make a lot of money by doing so."

In fact, you could almost look at this as a startup-ish idea - finding an under-served niche, and making money from doing what nobody else is doing.
I'd argue that it becomes a pretty relevant misunderstanding when an innocent man (as far as the accusations go) sits in prison for a year. If someone can't practice law effectively (such as if they erroneously prosecute people for crimes they did not commit), then their ability to practice becomes a danger to society.
Imagine a solitary actor in a large corporation who is make a choice between x and y. She is presented with the precise set of inputs like emails, voice calls, water cooler discussions which lead her to choose y. She is not forced to make the decision, but it comes naturally, quickly. Now imagine the result of that decision y being fed back into the corporate decision making structure. Thousands of people all "naturally" coming to their respective conclusions y', y'', y''', ... etc. This is corporate culture and history.

Now imagine some external driver of change appears on the horizon. How will the company respond? How will individuals within that company respond? I don't think it is so clear how or why people make the choices that they do.

In terms of right and wrong, the law identifies the act, but justice identifies with larger patterns; it is elusive yet tangible.
A good one from the oatmeal: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
I'll take this one step further.

Television news, at least mainstream TVnews in USA, is a totally stress/fear inducer purposely delivered in the most dramatic and usually shallow way possible, so you stick around for the commercials and at the same time the elists influence the viewers' political decisions.

Almost everyone would be better off without it as it exists today.
I think there's other forms of hostile AI too like the algorithms that determine what advertisements to show in order to pollute your mind with intentionally-injected memes.
ooh, ooh! Unlambda!

```s``s``sii`ki
`k.*``s``s`ks
``s`k`s`ks``s``s`ks``s`k`s`kr``s`k`sikk
`k``s`ksk
Financial institutions aren't inherently bad, but the ones we have are bad.
Heck I've got two old laptops with practically dead batteries. I don't use them at all. Both have XP licenses; though I ran them with Linux, I since reinstalled Windows on one so it could serve as my "sacrificial Windows machine." I doubt I could even get $100 for them on Ebay. If I wanted a new computer anyway, then absolutely I would take them to the MS store and get the $100 if they had some decent machines in the deal.
I didn't realize how much these guys once made during the bowling golden years. I'm surprised they haven't managed to make more out of this with livestreams, but I would wager the average bowling fan is probably up there in age and isn't really cued in to online streaming.

Interesting article all the same. Thanks for sharing.
Neat, but I would worry using it would annoy people. What's the ideal use case you imagine?
I bet if you polled the US national population, you'd find the opposite and by a strong margin.
Are there cameras capable of taking pictures in a broader spectrum of colours available for less than a small fortune? I'd like to see photos taken infrared - ultraviolet 'compressed' into our red-blue range.
[IANAL]

<In the US> If it's a religious organization, no. For example the Southern Baptist Convention can freely and openly refuse to hire atheists, Hindus, Catholics, etc. Incidentally, your local United Methodist Church may run a charitable food pantry and still refuse to provide services to Muslims and Jews...and yes, donations to the program are tax deductible.

BTW, It's just as well you are offended. You would struggle to fit into workplace culture.
An even more charitable interpretation might be: We can gain insight on how to manage fully autonomous rule-based systems (AI) by looking at existing semi-autonomous rule-based systems (Corporations, Governments).
Sure it can be. What if I want the people I shared the link with to see my take on an article or something of the sort.

Thinking in absolutes is never a good thing. Maybe -you- could never do anything good with it.
Witty 10 Years Later
And Ruby, and Rust. It's close to universal.
In that case, I agree it's pretty pointless. IBM can still be subpoenaed (secretly, even) by the US government, and the NSA has been happy to work with partner agencies overseas to tap datacenter traffic in foreign jurisdictions.
Ahh - this stuff always disappoints me. It's so simplistic to suggest that animals like bees see just like us, but with a different color scale or something. The different wavelength sensitivity is one thing, but the entire experience of vision would be fundamentally different for an insect - from the basic optics of ommatidia to the faster perception of time and a dozen other things. Nautilus is a good site but this type of article I can simply never take seriously - like right-brain/left-brain stuff, for me it feels too transformative of the facts to be really informative.
Thanks for the news NYTimes
Cool weight loss picture
Let's not dilute the point.

The article states that the financial industry* is the "hostile AI" not all corporations (in fact, it clearly states that even the hated "energy" corporations actually provide a product - even if that ).

Having recently re-read Dan Simmons' Hyperion series (sci-fi humans vs. AI masterpiece), I could almost see the analogy perfectly - finance is key to almost every part of our individual life, business and even political machinations. And in each, the big finance outfits are impervious, indifferent and have their own goals outside of their stated purpose.

* I'd expand slightly to include all of FIRE - finance, real-estate and insurance
I should have stopped reading here:

"Most non-PHP developers judge the entire language by bad code snippets 'written' (mostly copied and pasted) by amateurs for PHP 4"

The old "stop hating on the only language I know! It doesn't have flaws, there are just newbies using it!"

There is plenty wrong with PHP, to this day. When people criticize PHP, they're not usually talking about PHP 4. They're talking about 5.4+. There's some seriously lunacy in the core language. Some of it is there for legacy reasons, and some is brand new.
AFAIK in Haskell it's not a throwaway variable, a pattern with _ will not create a binding at all. I don't think Python does this, maybe Go.
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This is a great demonstration of a feature I didn't know existed—using Dropbox to save application-level data. I'm sure I'm just behind the curve, but there are probably a lot of us back here. Nice move, DB.
But I can't actually run orchestrate.io in my own datacenter? So I don't have data lockin (in the same way that i can select * out of oracle), but I am locked-in to your service?
Job Control Language - Old timers love this. The rigidity of it fits the mainframe philosophy.
You don't fix bad behavior with bad behavior.
We Aren't the World (2013)
Even in Nordic countries "normal" is working for a living. They have big social and governmental institutions that have a lot of money passing through them and they manage to do that relatively efficiently. But, they don't have a complete disconnect between wealth creation by normal means (owning productive property and/or working) and consuming that wealth. The government is just more involved in the process.

If most people work, pay taxes and use the "free" public transport you still have a situation where most people are both funding the transportation and using it. Consumers & producers of stuff.

These futuristic ideas about AI doing all the work while most people are unnecessary creates a completely different jar of pickled fish.
Minimal Responsive Grids
I really like this as well. Sure it could be used for evil, but so can a zip tie if used for the wrong reasons.

Already thinking of a ton of ways this can be used. Don't love that you have to sign-up for this but I suppose it is necessary.
Sure, and that would suck. There isn't any aspect of force that I can make out. I'm seeing it as 'minimum system requirements will change and I don't want them to.'

We've seen studios release DX11/Vista+ games with fallbacks to work on DX10/XP.
Brandon Philips Explains etcd
Microsoft has always reserved the right to read your Hotmail
I agree that any language is relatively sane when sticking to the good parts, and even that is a stretch with JavaScript.

The code sharing benefits are very real, while backend developers may need to learn a bit about the dom whereas frontend developers may need to learn a bit about sockets / file handles whatever, having a shared language (and libraries) is immensely powerful.

I work on a clone of CouchDB in JavaScript, it also works as an (immature) fully functional server side clone running 90% shared code.

The most used libraries in npm are shared between client and server, it has very real benefits
I'm honestly not sure if I misunderstood OP's argument or if you did. I understood his argument as such:

1) Our current economic system is already a form of AI. Using the wikipedia definition, it is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. Humans that are in this system are inputs in the environment. They may have individual agency, but cannot direct the system as a whole.

2) The "success" that this AI is maximizing is not currently in line with optimizing human interest.

3) Instead of theorizing about how to make sure a future AI system is in line with human interest, we should look at the current dominant AI and attempt to improve that.

All three of those premises can be argued, and I've come to reasonable arguments on both sides just on my own with a few minutes of thought. But I think those are the premises to argue.
Going a bit higher up the stack from where you are at it's a perfect example of the real problem being the US Patriot Act which required the NSA to spy in ways that were not in alignment with their prior charter. In terms of spying itself, everyone is fooling themselves if they think other countries aren't engaged in the exact same activities. Snowden's leaks simply brought what's been going on for a long time by a large number of governments into the public light.
A fairly minor but prevalent one is speed limit laws. I personally feel most speed limit laws in North America are ridiculous. In almost every situation it is safe to drive significantly faster than the posted speed, so it seems fairly obvious that there's something wrong with the law itself.

Now, in this particular group I expect that isn't terribly controversial. But it can be a very unpopular opinion in some circles for two different reasons.

1) It's the law. You want to break the law?

And the somewhat more reasonable one:

2) Nothing is more important than human life. If driving slowly can save even one life, it's worth it. By advocating an increase to speed limits, you're valuing a few minutes of your time over people's lives.

Now, for one thing, it has been demonstrated by numerous studies that increased speed limits do not necessarily result in increased accident rates (in fact, often the opposite). But even leaving that aside. Say that an across the board increase to speed limits of X%^ results in a Y% increase in fatal crashes. For some sufficiently (very) small Y/X, would that not be worthwhile? It's callous, but it seems to me that it must be true. (I mean, look at the extreme case. Driving at any speed is much more dangerous than walking, but we do it anyway since it gets us places faster.) I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable saying so in a lot of peer groups though, nor without all the preamble.

^Not that that would be the most logical way to do it of course.

Edit: I should clarify that I'm speaking of main arterial roads and highways here, not residential streets. At least in most of Canada, almost all non-highways have speed limits of 50km/h, regardless of whether they're a residential side-street or a major 4 or 6 lane road. Most highways have limits of 80km/h, a few 100, and the highest I've ever seen is 110. In good conditions, most highways could easily be safely traveled at at least 120km/h. I don't think it makes sense to set speed limits for the worst case scenario, and ignore all the efficiency that could be safely gained in most driving conditions.

I haven't done a ton of driving in the US, so it's possible the situation differs there more than I was aware.
Usually in these discussions we use the term "Unfriendly AI" instead of "Hostile AI". That gets at an important distinction: these AIs don't want humanity to die, it's just that they don't want humanity to live and they're presumed to have the ability to steal all our resources for themselves. Humanity still dies, but only incidentally. The author discusses this point a little but I think it's important enough to put it front and center, in our terminology.

It's interesting to think of corporations as being Unfriendly in this sense. The analogy isn't perfect, though: humans make up a corporation's computing substrate, so they're forced to value humans more than the classic Unfriendly AI would.
> and intentionally keep them vague enough that if someone gets out of line we can lock them up.

(Is this a joke? I honestly can't tell.)

That may be what you'd expect in a despotic regime, but in a free country (which is what the US aspires to be), laws cannot be vague, and vagueness is grounds for a law to be found unconstitutional on its face. Individuals must have adequate notice as to what conduct constitutes a crime and what doesn't. Otherwise it's impossible to know if what you're doing is legal or not, and you can find yourself thrown in prison just for being unpopular.
As much as I might want to agree with some of them, they fail the 'time' test. We've used prisons for a while, same with eating animals.
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Be very careful what you wish for;
you might get it.

I've seen far too many women working very
hard, initially quite successfully, to be
"more like men" but too soon encounter
agonies of the damned, failure, and even
death. Be careful. Be very careful.

Suspect: Mother Nature long ago filtered
out from the tree any women so easily
distracted from being strong limbs on the
tree. Motherhood is not inferior; the
hand that rocks the cradle rules the world; good
parenting is the crucial, most rewarding,
and most important job in the world;
what men do at work is not superior to
what women, and essentially only women,
can do with motherhood; everyone on HN
had a mother who did a lot of important,
hard work quite different from success
in the world of work; what men do at work
is to bring home money for what is really
important, motherhood, family, home, etc.
For a woman to concentrate on a startup
is to neglect motherhood and, thus, to
confuse means and ends.

Darwin will have the last word here: Currently
in Western Civilization, the average number
of children born to one women is less than
2.1 which means Western Civilization is
voluntarily going extinct. In Finland the
average is 1.5 which means that in 10
generations about 30 Finns will become
1. Finland did well fighting off the
Swedes, Russians, and Germans but now is
losing out to 'new' ideas on what women
should do.

Some science is quite clear: Starting in the
crib, the girls pay attention to people
and the boys, to things. That difference
continues. Girls pay attention to people
because that is crucial for motherhood.
Boys pay attention to things because that
is crucial to the world of work. Don't
confuse the two.