skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can stop talking about right and wrong if you like. But the rest of us are comfortable using it for moral terms. If you think those things need a stronger epistemological basis, you are welcome to work on constructing that.

> all opinions deserve a hearing

If you believe that, then I'm sure you're out working for making sure the voiceless and downtrodden get their opinions heard. In addition to your time here arguing to make sure socially dominant groups get their already-familiar opinions heard yet more.

I don't believe it, though. Here are some people expressing opinions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eckford#/media/File:L...

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WBC_20051202_sacco-to...

I don't think racist or homophobic opinions need to be heard more. That is not to suggest taking away their right to speak or publish. But their rights do not override the rights of other people to speak in response, or their right to freely assemble.

To think otherwise is to confuse the standards of a particular kind of academic discourse with a much broader set of dialog. Major social change doesn't happen only through polite disagreement. That's especially true when the social changes are about the relative power of groups, and the way powerful groups maintain dominance through silencing people they don't like.

America isn't free because we petitioned the king and he said, "Gosh, your points are reasonable." We fought. The slaves aren't free because the American South said, "Oh, now we see that these folks are equal." We fought. Women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement: all of it involved a lot of shouting and major social unrest.

Whatever you intend by it, applying your argument to any of these would have aided the continuance of oppression. And that's exactly how many people apply your argument today. So you can keep making it, but it's not going to convince me; as much as I like civil dialogue, I like civil rights more.
If the utilities drag their feet, their could be reasonably good micro/neighborhood/apartment complex-level solutions - $100-250k of batteries on a loan & small buy-in per-unit, and the batteries & smart-system can optimize the buy/sell process around historical/current usage & prices & storage levels.
If I had been born 10-15 years later I might have held that opinion too. But I was born in the early 1970s and I have seen computers, mobile phones, Internet and a few other things go from not being a clear consumer product to where the consumer sector completely dwarfs the corporate sector.

I'm not really disagreeing with you: right now it doesn't feel like 3D printers are a typical consumer item.

But experience tells me that this intuition is probably wrong.

As for "who needs it right now" I usually ask people if they own a plunge saw. Most people don't, but a lot of people do. In particular carpenters and DIY'ers. 3D printers are still unfamiliar territory for most people, but that'll change rapidly as they become better and cheaper.

In the future, as they become cheaper and better I don't see it as impossible that manufacturers of physical goods might use 3D printing to distribute spare parts and accessories for whatever they sell.
Open office plans lend themselves to more serendipitous interactions between people.

Open offices with the inevitable Loud Howard from Dilbert lead themselves to serendipitous interactions? Do they? Throw in Angry Dude, who goes through a Model M keyboard per month as well. You get interactions all right, but it's not the productive kind. The serendipitous interations happen in coffee kitchens, a fact that the best architects already know.
idk if you can make 150 burgers an hour someone can probably pay you 3-4

the markup on fast food is like 1000%
Whole Brain Emulation is far off, even putting in moore's law, because we still are far off from understanding the brain. Yes, optogenetics and the connectome are going to bring us a long way there, but at the end, we have to understand that the brain is far to plastic to really know at any time point what is going on.

Experiments with macaque motor cortex (M1) provide a great example. When you cut off a finger or toe and record from M1 at the same time, you can watch the synapses change in real time. The remapping of M1 in the monkey starts the second that the nerves are severed. This remapping is poorly understood as it stands. Typically, the brain will allow innervation of the areas the control the other digits into the now useless area where the missing digit is. Even more interesting is when a pair of monkeys were stolen by anti-vivisectionists (The silver spring incident, I think [0]). When returned, the monkey's M1 had totally remapped from it's original state. Hippocampal neurogenesis [1] is also very poorly understood as it is today. Why our brains make new neurons and mostly for the more short-term memory centers in the hippocampus is a mystery.

What I am getting at is that we do not understand our own intelligence from the standpoint of it's mechanics enough to emulate a brain near at all. It is a looooooong ways off. To truly emulate it, you have to know that it is a moving target, and therefore any emulation is a moving one as well. One that has to live in a body that you emulate in a world that impinges on it. Trying to take the mind out of the body is impossible as well as trying to take both then out of the world. The results would have no meaning.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring_monkeys

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis
> For what reason? Isn't the gripe exactly with the fact that it's not implemented?

How should it be represented in the type system? There's no clear answer to that question.

The type of a function is `(Args) -> Ret`. `->` is basically an infix type constructor with two type parameters; it's basically sugar for something along the lines of `Func<(Args),Ret>` (except there's no actual type named that). The arguments list here is actually just a tuple, and functions with named arguments have an arguments list which is a tuple with named fields (since Swift supports that). Given all this, I don't see how default parameters could be crammed in. At a syntactic level, you could say something like `(a: Int = default, b: String = default) -> String`, but when you realize that the arguments list is a tuple, a "tuple with default field values" is a nonsense thing to try and construct.

Also, more generally, a function with default parameters is actually a family of functions, one for each valid combination of parameters. But a function value is a single function, not a family of functions. When you think about it like that, trying to return a function value with default parameters makes no more sense than trying to return a generic function that hasn't been instantiated with concrete type parameters (e.g. you cannot say `func foo() -> (<T>(x: T) -> T)` or anything along those lines). Function values must be a single concrete function, not a family of functions.
Introducting Kontena – Application Containers for Masses
The pendulum seems to swing on this issue every 20-25 years on this issue so it makes a lot of sense we are seeing so many articles about how the open plan is terrible now.

Wait 20 years and there will have been a big transformation in the workplace with more people working privately - likely with the addition of more work-from-home/remote arrangements. But there will be a push again at that point with new articles written about how people are typing away without any personal contact and how 'insert early adopter' is the devil and how they are crushing the souls of their workers.

Smart workplace design appropriately accommodates the needs of workers for the types of work they do as well as the needs of the worker as a human.

Total cop-out answer, but it really comes down to balance between communication and privacy.

I think workplace design needs to keep in mind a variety of factors, and they cannot always be optimized totally for the company itself or totally for the individual employees... which would be an impossible notion anyway.

We rave about how fast companies can scale up from small startups to have hundreds or thousands of employees, but I'd love to see that work in the Bay Area with all staff getting private offices. Quickly build more highrises? Not likely.

Not all employees want - or need - private offices in the first place. And even if there would be a benefit to providing them, maybe the company doesn't feel like optimizing individual productivity is the most important thing in the business.

All that said, there is likely a decent overlap in the Hacker News Venn Diagram of people who loathe open plans and people who start companies. I've wondered why we don't hear about more new companies who have adopted a privacy-first office strategy. Surely it would give them an edge in hiring those staff who desire such workplaces.
What rom do you use as a base?
Cubicles are horrible because they also don't deal with the worst aspect of these office spaces, which is visibility from behind. They typically have the worker facing a wall, not backed by a wall facing out. Cubes are to claustrophobia as open-plan spaces are to agoraphobia.

That said, comparing open-plan offices to cubicles is like comparing horse shit to pig shit. They're both low-status office arrangements and it's amazing to me that programmers tolerate them.

I actually don't think that open-plan offices are used because they're cheap or because they're effective (which they're clearly not). They market well. So much of the current "tech industry" is about marketing and the open-plan frat-house environment looks busy and vibrant. It just also happens to make for a terrible place to work.
Yeah, but it's cheap.
I find working from home to be the best out of all three choices. I'd never go back to working in an office, cubicles, open office space, whatever.

If your business structure is so terrible that you can't manage a remote team, you're probably not that great at managing folks onsite either.
Ask HN: Raspberry Pi on an international flight?
I will be travelling on an international flight form London to India very soon.So I would like to know if someone had any issues taking PI on an international flight and should I keep it in Cabin baggage with me or in the checked in baggage. BTW, I am an Indian. Thank you.
That sounds like a much more humane way to manage addiction, but I'm interested in knowing what more effective ideas are out there for stopping the on-ramp into addiction, and what the off-ramp is. Even with better management, it seems to me like addiction still will have great social cost.
At the same time, you can always claim that "the community isnt doing enough" because "enough" and "the community" as so ill defined that you can always castigate "the community".

It is a complete waste of time.
Site attempts to raise a million for charity via advertising
This site (similar to MillionDollarHomepage) is selling a series of advertising blocks in order to raise money for charity.

pyramidscheme.link
Google repatched the new old auth bypass vuln
Amazon EC2 + SES + nodemailer + HELO [127.0.0.1] direct is flagged as spam now instead of hitting the inbox. Apologies to anyone that lost access.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/
https://github.com/andris9/Nodemailer
I think this has been a discussion going on for a long time now. What I believe to be true is it really depends on the person. If you're someone who is self-conscious then yes you'll feel like everyone is judging you all the time. If you have the ability to stay focused on your work without being around colleagues then you should be allowed to work from home.

I've worked in open offices, offices with high partitions and from home. When I work from home what's stopping me from opening up news or playing video games? When I work in a partition and I need to talk to another engineer face-to-face I can't just glance over to see if they are available. Open offices lets me be around my colleagues and inspires me to focus on my work and get access to help promptly when I need it. I don't give a damn if they see me in a snuggie or sleeping under my desk.

I believe the real problem is the lack of choices. You should be able to choose the kind of environment you want to work in and not feel like you're forced in a situation you don't like. I think it's wrong to say "open offices are destroying the workplace".
It's instructive to me to compare Zionism with the process of the invasion of the Americas by Europeans.

The majority of European invaders of America desired to establish new nations where old ones existed, wiping out, marginalizing or assimilating the existing ones, and creating societies where White Europeans were dominant, and which existed to preserve White European culture. This is equivalent to mainstream Zionism.

Now Einstein was a Labor Zionist. Imagine a European who roundly condemned the atrocities of European invaders of America, but supported them because he believed that ordinary Europeans and Native Americans had more in common than they had differences, and there were no real barriers to living in peace in a socialist democracy. Rings kind of hollow, doesn't it?
Yep. Open-plan benefits are few and far between and to me just feels like forced teamwork and socialization. It certainly depends on the industry/team but most of the time, people don't need to chat with each other all day and instead need to just get shit done.

I remember getting interrupted by jokes or background chatter or just physical movement from people walking around but the worst is how easy it becomes for people to ask minor questions that were far better suited for email/chat. Lots of communication can be async but this setup actively encourages interruptions so we can all "collaborate".
You can't get off the grid completely unless you are a) willing to suffer some downtime occasionally, b) way overbuild storage as compared to typical needs, or c) have your own backup fossil fuel generator.

Any way you cut it high availability costs money. If you expect the grid to handle backup for you then you should expect to pay them to do so. TANSTAAFL
Thankyou, the judgment in a lot of these comments really bothered me.

To me, this is the pertinent question: if people are homeless "by choice" - meaning they had some other option - why is our society structured in such a way that being without shelter and security seems like a better option than the alternative? How could things be different so that no one would "choose" to be homeless?
Check your monocle
> There is no information about the landslide, except that it occurred on 1st April 2015 at Zarechnyi.

Doesn't look very real. I think it's a fake.
Here’s a Quick Way to Reach $20M Valuation for an App
You state the following as a given, which is exactly what your parent says is wrong.

>Most net metering programs take solar from a home when the grid is facing its highest demand and energy is most expensive for the power company. They then provide a credit to your bill in watts. With a solar installation, you're drawing energy at night, when the grid basically wants to give away power to keep things balanced.

Do you have a source that states production from solar meets peak demand?
Thanks for your advice on how I should spend my time, but I think otherwise. If you would like to fix the hypocrites, you are welcome to do so. I think the way to fix that is reducing the power imbalances so that the shitty opinions of formerly dominant groups are irrelevant to the currently downtrodden. As I mentioned elsewhere, I value civil dialogue, but I value civil rights more. When the two conflict, I am ok with some incivility in the service of fixing bigger problems.

>So is not interviewing black job applicants because they are more likely to have received a poor education. But we ought not to do that because the heuristic is often wrong and the individuals have no ability to control what box you put them in when it is.

No, we ought not to do that because it reinforces a major societal oppression of black people. If you've ever run a hiring process, you'll know you use all sorts of possibly-unfair heuristics. The point of hiring isn't to be maximally fair to every individual; it's to get good people while not contributing to negative externalities like, say, America's centuries-long history of being shitty to various minority groups.
Point taken with respect to to the original article, but it's definitely not just a well-off white people problem. Here's a different view from Crawford County, Ohio:

"Nestled between major urban hubs, Columbus and Toledo, Crawford County, with 47,000 residents, a median household income of $32,000, and a broken-down industrial base, is a sitting duck. As jobs and hope have left town, stress has mounted dramatically. “There’s never a day that we don’t see patients for depression,” says Crawford County physician and coroner Dr. Mike Johnson."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/a-high-for-less-eas...
Even if that's the case, quantity wins where quality fails. Imagine what you could do if you had so many clones of yourself that you could monitor every website, every forum, every person logged on IRC, 24 hours a day, giving each one of them your complete undivided attention.

(Not that I'm taking an anti-AI stance. Machines do what we program them to do, that's a tautology. If there is risk, it's from user error / intentional terrorist action / AI upsetting distribution of wealth, not from some kind of magic skynet event)
Pavlok Receives Investment from IncWell Venture Capital
Why Not to Try to Learn Everything
Why crowdfunding changes the world
It all depends on the culture and dynamics of the workplace I think. If everyone keeps their voices low (I don't mean whispering, just not booming), and are concious that when people have their headphones and have a look of deep concentration they shouldn't be disturbed, then it really is not that bad. Then again, I'm the sort of person that prefers to work with a bit of background noise rather than in deathly silence where each tiny sounds causes me to jump.

It also sounds like the writer works in a place that doesn't really need much inter-person communication on an hour by hour basis. As a software develop I find being able to quickly ask those 5 second questions invaluable, questions I wouldn't necessarily have bothered to ask if I had get up or send an email.

> Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

It takes a certain amount of self control to avoid this; just as it takes self control not to spend your entire day browsing HN...
JavaScript Linting: What Developers Need to Know
HTTP/2 and a Faster Web
Right. But he's decided to turn this into a pissing contest of "who has the cheapest possible toilet paper"

But that's not the comparison at all that people make. The comparison is, based on what normal people buy... Toilet paper is cheap enough that people just buy it whenever they see it. Like at their local grocer. Where places like Costco win is that almost everything is cheaper than your local grocer... And for things that aren't strictly a better buy, it's more convenient than running all over town to find a better price. The fact that they are competitive at all on price with an ultra cheap retailer like Walmart is amazing. But they definitely offer better quality than Walmart on just about everything.

The reasons I hear from people who don't have a membership even though they live within spitting distance of one is that they think the membership isn't worth it. Or the selection is bad or whatever. But my point is that the membership almost doesn't matter because you'll probably recover the cost inside of two or three trips and the selection, while isn't fantastic, and doesn't always have the absolute highest quality on the planet, are usually of high quality and thoughtfully made. It's clear after doing there for years that the buyers who work for Costco really try to hit a good price to quality ratio and that's where all the value comes from.
Could you just setup thousands of solar panels in a field you own and demand money from the grid? Seems like a easy return on investment, depending on the cost of panels/equipment

This depends on your jurisdiction; in the UK you can put up to 4kW on an inhabited building and get a subsidy. Larger installations require pre-approval.
Send your proposal in response to the Broad Agency Announcements (BAA) that the agency puts out.
You are assuming that search will keep on growing beyond an asymptotic limit. It could very well be that we will soon reach a point where search is good enough for most people.
I have said it before here, but the best office layout I saw was at Autodesk HQ in mid 1990's.

EVERY single engineer (or was it every employee) got an enclosed small office. One office per employee. Full height glass wall between the hallway and the office. Big enough for a desk, chair, 2 chairs for visitors.

Oh and one more thing. Maybe because I work in IT but what is it with installing AC related machinery ABOVE/NEAR the server room (like ceiling)? The machinery makes SO much noise in the office.
Ah, seems I misunderstood your parenthetical and responded thinking you felt Gates et al were "inside" (I should have followed the link for that bullet before commenting as I just assumed it was to Gates' argument).
You're missing the point. BASIC can print "hello world" much easier than assembler can, but that doesn't make BASIC a better thing to write an operating system in.
yeah it's basically turing complete if the turning machine is allowed to be hand cranked
The Washington Post got it wrong. One-size-fits-all rules applied to teams containing a variety of people are destroying the workplace.
The grid is built on the assumption of a few central points producing almost all electricity. This creates a grid focused on distributing away from those points. A more distributed and fluctuating producer situation will need more distribution between different branches of the network than the current infrastructure can handle. It will also require extra power generation that can be started on demand when the power production is lower (due to clouds, night, etc). This requires a lot of extra capacity that will get very low average utilization and therefore be very expensive due to being expensive to set up.
The premise of human being replaced is all well and good, but it seems like you're assuming the superintelligence will do a better job. A paperclip maximizer may be able to deconstruct us on a molecular level, but that's not a thing for our light cone.
Neat find. Interesting that it "First appeared in ... 1977".

Furthermore:
"Computer scientists are in fact engineers of abstract objects ... we are toolsmiths building for others to use."

I along with several friends and family holding degrees in CS consistently run into misunderstandings about what we do, can do, and are capable of doing. Dijkstra is fabled to have said it best as "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
That grammar tho! This guy seems like a native speaker, do CFOs actually use "its" instead of "it's" and "your" instead of "you're"?

That said, all of this business cat stuff is way over my head. I have no idea whether it's interesting or not.
I currently work in an office made of small-ish rooms, each with 5 to 10 persons in an open floor plan. The people sharing a room are in the same team. I don't think I could go from this to having a private office, the cold and quiet loneliness would be depressing. I love the banter that comes up while waiting for a test suite to complete, and the ability to quickly do some pair programming or have an impromptu team meeting. At any time, we can simply turn around to face each other instead of the desk.
Where would you categorize human minds in your taxonomy of learning algorithms?