skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
wow, minus 4 karma. Hell Nazis don't need to threaten my family, I will turn evil for karma.

I do think that being a Good Person is far more than not simply being evil. I say this not as a Good Person, willing to wait to be sure everyone else is on my side before I speak out.

I have a lot of empathy for the priest who wrote that famous line. And I suspect my fate would be similar, if pressed.

I'm feeling a little upset by that. A twenties spent fighting the government and campaigning to change laws, now a middle age settled to rubbing along if my family is left alone. Will still turn evil for Karma though
There may be limits, depending on your definition of "logic", but there is no part of the incompleteness theorem that exempts the particular type of computer that happened to evolve over the last few millions of years. There is no spark that is fundamentally unreplicable, despite being replicated every time humans reproduce. Art, love, beauty, and morality are parts of our desires that don't correspond neatly to the idea of self-interested maximization of material wealth or whatever, but there is no rule that an AI must have a simple objective function: one could be built with such goals or without them, with useless ones (paperclip maximizer) or weird ones (e.g. complete disregard for the well-being of the self).

Hopefully if we ever do build some super AI (I'm not opining on any particular time frame in which this might happen, just on theoretical possibility), it will share a variety of our values, and will therefore want to include such values in any AIs it builds, and so on. But values are fundamentally arbitrary - look at the variety of values in human cultures, and consider how much more alien we should expect a nonhuman intelligence to be.
Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research
How is this possible, without Apple bot showing up in my access logs? Would they disguise it as a WebKit client? But then, they should also respect the robots.txt, and I've never seen anything but known crawlers in there.
So you're saying that nobody benefits unless they sue the other person?
TRO LLC : Short equities, long cryptocurrencies and software exploits
Yes of course that's what it's due to. But those laws are made for people who need/want traffic to stop so they can take their time, which is understandable. But when you're willing to wait three seconds on the curb for the one last car before a large gap, but you have to turn your entire body away and pretend to daydream just so that it won't needlessly stop, sensibilities have gone too far in the other direction.
If you are able to share, what does the browser give you here? Why not standalone?
If I hired some people to click Adsense add on somedomain.com, could I get the site owner banned? Or do the clicks have to come from the same IP as the site owner?
A Gossip App Brought My High School to a Halt
In Defense of Scrum
regret all you want. this is NOT a gender issue. It's a classic disgruntled employee issue. it happens all the time, just with less media attention.
I'm not sure this is as much of a problem as he makes it out to be - if anything, we should be disturbed that the merger is being allowed to go through in the first place. Separating out some customers to prevent a monopoly is a good thing, if anything, and has been done before - when Verizon acquired Alltel, they were required to let AT&T buy the North Dakota portion of Alltel so there wouldn't be a Verizon monopoly here.
I didn't really have an opinion on this before, but now I do. I generally wait until I feel like most of the facts are known before I form opinions, and now I have formed one.
The point is valid and one I hadn't thought of: would employees be truthful knowing that what they say will be reported to the company?

I like to think that I would, but none of us know how we would react until put in that situation.
ABS allows you to take maximum advantage of the traction you do have, but it doesn't magically improve your traction. The problem the GP is referencing is that the driver (be it human or computer) operates the vehicle using some sort of model for the maximum available traction. (Some) Humans are able to notice when it is snowing, re-tune their model and drive at an appropriate speed. It doesn't seem impossible that some heuristic could be invented to do the same for a computer driver, but I don't think anyone has demonstrated that heuristic yet.
Grace Harper explains it best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8
I thought the debate was about polymorphism. It's apparently not worth including because...? It's not already in the language spec? Because the people who advocate it are using the wrong tool? Surely there's a better argument than this.
Plucky.io – Automatically crawl your website for errors (WIP)
Can anyone share context here? This post mentions a post from last week, which itself references something from last month. What allegations were made, by whom, and where?
1. Moore's Law is not an ironclad law, it's an observation about improvements in integrated circuit transistor density. Given that there are not that many node shrinks remaining before we hit the fundamental limits of our current technology, scientific discoveries will be necessary to continue increasing transistor density into the far future. It is absolutely not a given that Moore's Law has to continue until the Singularity can occur, although it isn't impossible that it'll be around for several more decades either.

2. The most powerful hardware in the world is useless without software. Improvements in AI theory don't follow Moore's law, and there is no reason they should. Maybe your super-fast computer can run machine learning algorithms on a huge dataset, but it's not clear machine learning alone is sufficient to produce something on the scale of the Singularity. Anyways, strong AI is a very difficult problem, but in no case I know of has the limiting factor ever been the power of the hardware (except maybe for neuronal simulations trying to emulate the activity of a human brain).
Finally! Google Hangouts had it since,like forever
(c) a load balancer can often understand a server that's down, a server that might end up doing I/O while holding locks probably wouldn't be detected.
its an atypical case of upset ex-employee. most ex-employees are not harassed by the CEO and his wife.

also, most ex employees don't immediately attempt to summon a torch wielding mob by baiting with the "misogynist culture" card.
https://mip.li is an interesting bookmarking site that I think a buddy of mine would sell.

http://www.uptimebot.com - I bought the domain that has plenty of backlinks, etc.. re-branded it and have failed to actually launch it.

http://www.backlink.org - Cool domain with an interesting business model idea/plan but no development done here yet.
> Back to square one on this one.

I don't think so. Maybe that's the sentiment here among some HNers, but the industry at large reacted differently. Most importantly, it raised awareness to the fact that some women may feel unsafe or uncomfortable in a work environment even if their mail coworkers and bosses don't feel they're doing anything wrong.
I'm in SF, the tenderloin is a neighborhood here.

The priest is the her in this sentence.
Judge’s ruling spells bad news for U.S. cloud providers
You're bending over backwards, why would the OP make up a story about sending in their driver's license? If, as speculated, the ID was photographed poorly, the support person could have just said "we need a clear scan" straight off. No muss, no fuss, no disclosure of sensitive details.

I think it's apparent that the CEO is lying in their excuse here.
Yeah, and there aren't a lot of women at GitHub. It would be quite easy to figure out who was making a particular complaint.
The fellow people over at Reddit have alerted me to the fact that the Google car is actually still breaking the law (while being a tremendous improvement over the idiots that normally operate cars):

Turning Across Bicycle Lanes 21717. Whenever it is necessary for the driver of a motor vehicle to cross a bicycle lane that is adjacent to his lane of travel to make a turn, the driver shall drive the motor vehicle into the bicycle lane prior to making the turn and shall make the turn pursuant to Section 22100 [general turning regulations]

The car must be in the bicycle lane before turning. You can not turn by crossing over the lane, and if you couldn't get into the lane before, you will have to wait to get into the lane and then turn.

This figures in nicely with the people here saying we should disregard cyclists because they constantly break the traffic laws. Are you always in the bicycle lane when turning with your car? Don't claim this is a surprising rule and not generally known; try cycling some time, you'll find the traffic laws are setup in a way that often makes it impossible to travel efficiently, safe and legally.

(If I can just add this: traffic laws for cycling are the ultimate bikeshed. Imagine a bikeshed committee, where the people on the comittee have no need for a bikeshed and no concept of how people use a bikeshed, or why. In Germany, up until some time ago, they regulated the voltage and energy source for bike lights.)
Also the fact it was a company hired investigator. It's in the companies best interests to hype their impartiality. Here's hoping a news organization will do some reporting and find out if this investigator has the record claimed, even if it only verifies it.
The first 10,000 users
Actually I think commit logs in this case are good evidence. You can't just rewrite git history without having everyone in on it. It's not foolproof (the company could have mandated that everyone drop their local versions, or the branch with the reversions could have been shared by a small number of people who were willing to conspire), but it's very strong evidence I'd say.
The statements made by Yolanda Lewis in this article are disturbingly racist.

> Tech companies, Lewis said, "do not want to employ Americans. They import labor from overseas, pushing for H-1B visas. Check the job boards. They basically say, 'H-1B Visa. Americans need not apply.' For years, women, blacks and Latinos have been kept out of the tech job market. Now white men are being forced to train their replacements."

What does the h1-b visa have to do with Asian Americans? Apparently she believes that only women, black, latino and white people can count as "american".

Also, the idea that "Asian Culture" has a particularly "deep work ethic" or dedication to eduction is confirmation bias. Asians who immigrated to America were a self-selected group of highly educated people who aspired to a better life.
If every company were run with as much thoughtfulness, talent, and passion as Chris Wanstrath has, our industry would be a lot better for everyone - women included.
Did you miss the part where the CEO resigned?

"The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub’s CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office. There were also issues surrounding the solicitation of GitHub employees for non-GitHub business and the inappropriate handling of employee concerns regarding those solicitations."
Do you need to separate Tolkien from his work? I like consuming Tolkien-related media as much as anyone on HN, but there's little denying its racist and sexist overtones.
Just put apache or nginx in front of it and let that handle auth.
> it will merely search through a search space you will have to determine yourself

What makes you think "human imagination" is any different, qualitatively at least? Yes, our minds have a humongous search space at their disposal: what comes through our sense organs, the processed memories of our entire lives and the ability to consume information in formats that are very hard for current AI systems to make sense of (ambiguous written sources, like most of the world's literature, ambiguous communication in form of conversations, art etc.). Add this with the fact that we can all communicate and the search space becomes as big as the minds of the entire human beings alive (thoug admitedly, you have very pool bandwith and availability of access to this amount of information), plus the transmitted pieces from the ones before, and that this space is ever expanding, and you get the "miracle of human imagination".

...but a human level AI will have access to the same thing (by definition, because otherwise we wouldn't call it "human level AI"), so the same kind of "imagination" but augmented by 10...0x times better connectivity and access to it and everything related.

Also, the search space is fixed for human minds too, it's called the universe, and at least if we accept the scientific-objective world view, we don't make it any larger by imagining things (if I imagine a new particle, it doesn't just pop into existence out of my imagination). The only way to defend a difference between "human imagination" and "artificial imagination" is to go against the science based and objective world view.

EDIT: typed "intelligence" instead of "imagination" at the end, sorry...
it's interesting how public opinion is always right (even thus it generally has none of the facts), and public opinion is also always looking to accuse 'guilty until proven innocent' corps - if possible, the ones that have been actually nice and caring to the said public.

Be it GitHub, Mozilla, what not - the last weeks have been particularly sad.
If only there were another woman to whom very similar events had happened at GitHub...someone well-respected, like, I dunno, the very first hire they ever made...if only she had an incredibly similar story to tell that ended with her leaving and then winning a settlement from the company for the abuse she suffered...OH WAIT

"We've confirmed with a GitHub employee that "the wife" is in fact Theresa Preston-Werner, making her husband complicit in covering up (or at least condoning) repeated allegations of harassment and abuse at the company he helped create. We're told this is certainly not the first time the Preston-Werners have treated a female employee this way: Melissa Severini, the company's very first hire, was allegedly paid to sign a non-disparagement agreement after being victimized by Theresa Preston-Werners and subsequently terminated. Other employees have been pressured to do pro bono work for Theresa Preston-Werner's own startup, Omakase."
(From ValleyWag, March 17th)

According to Severini's Twitter feed (as of early April), the "investigator" never contacted her.
http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Taxing_Rewrites
Feels directionally correct.
Same here. Hangouts always seems to turn my aging laptop into a fireball.
What's interesting to me is that "last mile logistics" is essentially a commodity business. But there are two very common trends in the space that don't quite make sense to me:

1. Treating delivery drivers as "independent contractors". This seems to be a very common approach, with all kinds of plausible motivations (limiting liability, making variable demand handling easier, being able to call your service a "platform", keeping headcount cosmetics appealing for parent VCs, etc). Historically, delivery driving is a usually regulated and often unionized industry, so I wonder if this approach will scale. There are also often distortionary impact of these contractors on overall regulated wage industries (hint: your postmate probably does not make a living wage for the time spent being a postmate). Viewed from the lens of potential acquirers, if your "efficiencies" are based around not paying drivers in the same way they have been historically paid, that is not something I need to acquire.

2. User acquisition seems to be at a premium - quite a few of the delivery-on-demand businesses in San Francisco have been running generous new user and user referral discounts recently. It makes sense if their goal is to increase user rolls, but I find that most of these services have limited, if any, lock-in effects [a]. Obviously, in order to innovate on delivery-at-scale, companies must first achieve sufficient scale to be able to prove out new ideas. But, from my peanut gallery seat, the user acquisition strategies appear to be driven more by the "acquire users first and monetize later" strategy that happens when many similar VC companies are competing for the same users. Amazon/Google/etc don't tend to get excited about acquiring you for your user base, unless you can demonstrate high brand value or user loyalty, which seems particularly challenging in this industry.

So, my $0.02 is simply that platformization followed by paid user acquisition seems to be the template for this industry, and yet it does not make sense to me.

[a] I have heard recently of a local, "last mile" food delivery start-up that is approaching it's vendors with exclusive sales agreements. I am not sure how effective this well be - the business from whom I heard that also found the request completely ridiculous.
... and heck, it gives us a reason to go back to the Moon ... or at least, send more probes, etc, there, which themselves might help give more reason to go back to the Moon.
Trivial examples are terrible as evidence to support a point. Trivial examples are generally good for pedagogical purposes, which doesn't really fit with the OP.

For example, the OP mentioned that using a stack in Go requires casting from `interface{}`. But this is patently ridiculous. Most people who need a stack in Go just use a slice: https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/SliceTricks --- Is this a bit messier and limited than a container type suited to stacks? Yes! But it gets the job done the majority of the time. Therefore, it's not as big of a problem as the article leads you to believe.

Not all things require clean polymorphic container types. Sometimes you can get by with less. And when you need more, you're going to feel a bit of pain with a less expressive type system. It's all part of the trade off. But it's not good to represent this as a scenario where it's all just bad stuff all the time.
Titanfall Titan Class Option Thoughts
> (What I really want, which is another story, is a terser way to use knife ssh with queries, so that I can ssh around by service name and environment, but I haven't gotten a chance to write this in a fast enough form)

Curious how that would look?
How is it not a gender issue when the "disgruntled" employee claims she was harassed because of her gender?
You're acting like one of those people who say that we don't have all the evidence on global climate change yet. There's no mystery about what causes motor vehicle collisions. Here is a huge report from the administration to Congress on the causes of motor vehicle collisions.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811059.PDF

The majority of crashes occur in daytime, in clear weather, while the car is moving in a straight line. You'll note that substantially all of these causes would be solved by a computer-driven car.

"""
About 41 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were recognition errors that include inattention,
internal and external distractions, inadequate surveillance, etc. Of these, the most frequently
occurring critical reason was inadequate surveillance that refers to a situation in which a driver failed
to look, or looked but did not see, when it was essential to safely complete a vehicle maneuver. This
critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 20 percent of crashes. Internal distraction as a critical
reason was assigned to drivers in about 11 percent of the crashes.
About 34 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were decision errors that included too fast for
conditions (8.4%), too fast for curve (4.9%), false assumption of others’ actions (4.5%), illegal
maneuver (3.8%), and misjudgment of gap or others’ speed (3.2%). In about 10 percent of the
crashes, the critical reason was a performance error, such as overcompensation (4.9%), poor
directional control (4.7%), etc.
Among the nonperformance errors assigned as critical reasons to drivers in about 7 percent of the
crashes, sleep was the most common critical reason (3.2%). The effectiveness of vehicle-based
countermeasures used in mitigating the effects of various driver performance, recognition, and
decision errors could be evaluated using this information.
"""

You'll note that "vehicle problem" is the critical pre-crash event for only 1.2% of crashes. Therefore if the computer _only_ solves the sleeping driver problem, and even if it is twice as bad as humans at handling vehicle mechanical failure, society is still reaping a net benefit. But, of course, computer-driven cars can solve nearly all of these causes of crashes: inattention, misperception, distraction, sleeping, driving too fast for conditions, and on and on.
Doing all the right things won't guarantee survival to age 100, 80, 60, or even 40. I think about it like this: We're all born with a genetically determined maximum life span that is unknown to us. Our environment and our choices cannot extend it -- they can only shorten it. It's great that your friend did all the right things, because he would likely have died sooner if he hadn't. Ultimately, he got a raw deal, and I wish medical science had been able to do better for him. There are a lot of dedicated, smart, honest people working to improve our understanding of disease and its prevention so stories like your friend's will end at age 90. n=1 experiments are useful for hypothesis generation, but they can never answer a non-trivial question.
Benchwarmer: Dribbble for Chrome Tabs
> So we have a python/ruby replacement with very old patterns (I think manual checking errors ie.).

Before using Go, I have always programmed with "modern" languages that use exceptions for error handling. So the concept of only doing manual error handling was new to me, but after a few months of golang I love it now and exceptions in python started to really annoy me.

In Go, I'm forced to do error handling right after every single call that will possibly return an error. While I thought that the resulting code looked ugly and repetitive, the result is a much more focused and intelligent error handling.

If i wanted the same granularity and robustness of error handling in python, I'd have to put a catch all try..except block around every single call .

Exceptions are a good time saver in stateless request based programs (like HTTP/web stuff) where it's sort of accetable if one request fails. I could just not care so much about detailed error handling, the worst that could happen is that i don't catch some error and the wsgi wrapper will catch it and return error 500 to the client.
But building daemons in python is just plain painful. If I don't want my program to crash at some point I have to reckon that anything can raise an exception I didn't think of.
I have been writing fiction in my spare time on and off for years (work as a web programmer). I think the skill sets of programmers and writers overlap in interesting ways. To me software is about creating an interconnected system and a story can be looked at that way too. The parts that compose the machine are different, and the intention is different, but there is something about it that is fundamentally the same.

I primarily write novels, so I can't really share one here. :-) But I have just created a tool to help me with my writing craftsmanship. Maybe other writers on HN will find it useful: http://writerkata.com.