skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer.

If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service.

I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.
The Darker Side of Google and Open Source: Taking Without Attribution (2010)
A lot of people in this thread have moral qualms with slot machines. I know I did. However, I have since been heavily involved in the industry (not of my choosing), and have been able to better understand it. The slot industry is not the epitome of evil.

1) Slots can be fun- Most people think slots are bad because they are "addicting". They conclude that these machines are addicting in large part because they themselves can't wrap their heads why ANYONE would spend so much money on a game without some serious mental disorder. But that completely ignores the actual voices of the users (who slot designers actually talk to). Players actually enjoy the thrills of winning AND losing. We have to come to grips that what others consider fun is sometimes beyond our realm of imagination. And just because we don't understand the thrill of their experience, doesn't mean the machine is tricking them. I don't see most people confused when their 75 year old grandmother doesn't like Call of Duty.

2) Spending lots of money on slots isn't necessarily a symptom of addiction- I have met so many people (Completely normal, wealthy people) who have a limit of spending $30/day on slots in their spare time. That is, they spend around 10k/year on slots. Anyone seeing 10k/year would think that this person was addicted, but they don't measure his/her background. Slot players tend to be older, they tend to spend on little else (they don't go out to bars!), tend to have a good amount of free time, and tend to have a good bit of savings. They - of all people- should be allowed to play slots if they so choose to. Obviously the money society spends on slots would be better used to feed some starving child or build some fancy new lifesaving technology. But that's more of a critique of capitalism, not just slots.

3) Casinos don't target gambling addicts- Of course slot makers do basic A/B testing of their games. But it's not like casinos put ads outside of Gambling Addicts Anonymous meetings. They target people in general, and gambling addicts will always find a way too them. When do we start placing the responsibility on the end user?

4) Is the rate of problem gamblers (gamblers who spend a lot of money and can't) who use slot machines higher than the rate of alcoholics? Shopping addicts? Drug addicts? Do you suggest banning alcohol because some people can't handle it?

5) Casinos and slots are heavily regulated by what they can and cannot do. Moreover, taxes on casinos do go to fund problem gambling help, schools, and a lot of great other things.

In the end, unless you actually take an effort to learn how to enjoy slots, you won't understand why people like it. And because of that, you will just vilify the industry. Eerily similar to the war on drugs.
IMO the technology industry should be focusing less on maintaining the status quo, where they are constantly and continuously dependent on VC to bootstrap businesses, and more on figuring out how to make it easier for brand new businesses to bootstrap themselves into existence.

Sure it's more "glamorous" to be wooed by VC firms, or to even get in the door, but IMO it skews priorities and is probably one of the main reasons there's such a high rate of failure in technology startups.

In today's environment, the real essence of what it means to "build a company from the ground up" gets lost in translation.
I like the idea of Lambda. I have some linux binaries that I would like to run on demand. I wonder if this is possible.
An encyclopedia with any remote claim to being thorough will inevitably have to cover some controversial topics though.
I definitely think it would be possible. I find it interesting to think about eyesight in the same way -- even though an image is projected onto our retinas, there's not a little homunculus looking at our retinas to see the image; it gets translated into electrical signals that our brain interprets. There seems to be a great amount of plasticity in the brain that lets us remap senses and view tools as extensions of our bodies.

There has been some prior work on using depth cameras for navigation for the visually impaired. For example, a smart cane can detect objects beyond its reach and give haptic feedback. Microsoft Research did some work with putting the Kinect on a helmet and giving audio cues for navigation (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/184208/VisionForTheBlind....). What I'm interested in is taking that sensory input and making it less immediate by giving it a memory -- letting it build up a picture of an environment rather than needing to point a device at something in order to know something about it.

One big issue is figuring out how to sonify depth information so it's useful. One simple approach is to do a sort of sweep across each frame from left to right, letting each row of an image correspond to a certain pitch. I don't think this is a good approach, as it seems very vision-oriented and is likely to sound just like noise. Maybe if someone was using it from birth, but for relatively fast training I doubt that approach. Other approaches do more interpretation -- Microsoft's work detected faces, walls, and floors, giving each a distinct sound for greater recognition.
If the reader can't see the semantic markup, then what's the main purpose, and how does this purpose justify the additional effort required, both to implement this system in a standardized way across journals, and by authors who have to tag their citations with this semantic markup?
Don't bother, it's a classic dishonest flamewar where both sides does their best to smear the other side. Nobody cares about the issue anymore (they can't even agree on what the issue actually is).
Betz's law arises from the fact that you can't very well stop air dead after you've extracted energy from it - it has to keep on moving to make space for new air. (Otherwise pressure would build up indefinitely, a clearly non-physical situation). So it applies to all such devices, rotors or no. (It doesn't apply to fluids because fluids don't compress, but that is a completely different story).
Thank you for being straight forward with your criticism. I can't say I disagree all that much. There is a legitimate other side which would argue that your stance is too paternalistic. E.g. where do we draw the line as a society to protect ourselves from ourselves? Alcoholism is a terrible and wide spread disease. Should we outlaw pubs? I'm not arguing for one side or the other, but merely that it's a rather complicated issue and the arguments on both sides should recognize that.
The Void Brings Virtual Reality to Life
The author did selectively show us his conversation with Google. The author mentions this:

> Here’s a subset of our conversation with Google Support:

(emphasis mine) My reading of it was that the author appears to further denote where the conversation is snipped with ellipses:

> Google Support: Unfortunately I don’t have control over that right now but I can look into it for you

> ….

> Google Support: I looked through this, and it seemed that one of the issues was a lack of an End User Agreement (EULA)

Regardless, the blog author is trying to make a point. Removing irrelevant content is something the author should do (in my opinion), to keep the post to the point. Besides,

> How do we know that the author didn't selectively show us his conversation with Google?

…we of course have no way to verify that this is the actual conversation that took place. We assume, on good faith, that it is.
I would argue that the prolonged debate between well-educated and well-respected economists on the topic of government spending[1] indicates that reasoning alone does not lead to a single straightforward answer on the topic.

Since reasoning alone doesn't lead to an obvious answer on this topic, then I would argue that yes, you do need evidence to back up your claims.

> "do you think there's no limit to how much of other people's money governments can spend?"

It's obvious that there exists such a limit. However, the existence of that limit doesn't do anything to help us determine what amount of government spending is the most efficient.

The claim that:

1) There is a maximum amount of government spending possible

2) Therefore, the current government spending is too high

Has the same flaws as:

1) There is a maximum velocity that we can travel (c)

2) Therefore, the current highway speed limit is too high.

[1] For example, there were a large number of respected economists that weighed in on both sides of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Solving Sudoku with SQL (2010)
There's always something to read. I don't know what else to tell you. I also don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to learn how to handle a shovel before starting the digging.
If you don't want to login you can get most of what you're looking for here -- the content used for the finals (questions) along with the solutions.

http://codecon.bloomberg.com/2015-finals
One thing about tries that's really nice is that you can transparently combine nodes to turn it into a DAWG.

Especially as you can do it on-the-fly. Memory usage is getting excessive? Stop and do a suffix combination pass until it's decent again. Otherwise? Don't bother.
Some women are perfectly capable of toxic pedantry and bickering. So are some men. Whether you attract these types and offer them a haven in your community is a matter of how you organize and regulate your community. From a decade of experience in organized free software: Dealing with identifying and handling toxicity is one of the toughest scaling problems volunteer organizations face, in general.
> That's a sexist statement.

It's a realistic statement. Or would you deny the obvious, that Wikipedia would be better off (less bureaucracy, more openness, less bickering, less toxicity) if the community was more gender-balanced and included less misogynist neckbeards?

It's not exactly news that organizations were women and more progressive types are in charge fare better: https://www.fastcompany.com/3033950/the-future-of-work/why-t...
Whoa, thank you! Fixed almost every of them. Hope it is better now.
"Safety"? Coming from your ilk, which calls all dissent "harassment", that's a terrifying and ominous word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety

Mean words on the internet put nobody's life at risk.
Another thing:

Some languages allow escapes before everything else. Looking at you, Java. So either you need to do a pass beforehand to unescape them, or unescape characters (and in the process do error handling / etc!) on-the-fly.
Thank you for the kind words.

It is quite terse indeed, mostly because it was written as a basis for my 30 minutes talk on JSConf Budapest. I guess, I'm going to eventually cover this topic in a greater detail.

Thank you for advice!
It might also help to have the option of using libc's malloc rather than jemalloc.
Curiosity? :)
Since the end of the space shuttle program, NASA has little/no role in launching military & spy satellites. United Launch Alliance is the primary contractor.
more like Frankenwebsite, white page if no javascript for a simple blogpost... pass
> 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue.

You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.

I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
Posting something on HN about Apple without knowing the history of the conversation here won't do much to you except maybe a downvote.

Posting something on WP using the wrong sort of dash might have your changes reverted and hours of work tossed in the garbage followed by weeks of fighting with self-righteous poorly socialized neck beards who bury you in hopeless bureaucracy on the off-chance that your work will be reinstated. All solved much more easily if the WP editor simply changes the dash like they wanted and everybody moved on with their life.
So the backend becomes a repository of small lambda-modules.. on a testing perspective, that's pretty cool. I agree that it could be the next big thing as new libraries leverage that.

Basically, there's no more "Platform as a service".. there is just "your code" that gets executed whenever. You can upload a new module without touching the other modules.

Something worth exploring in my next hackathon : )
Pretty much. Anything that you can compile on the AWS Amazon Linux AMI will run on Lambda.
You should be able to do that as described here : https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/running-executables-in-...

Note that there are some limits regarding the size of the zip you upload [1].

1: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html
I think we can easily agree that any community is better off without misogyny, but in order for Wikipedia specifically to be better off without it, it has to have a problem with it in the first place. [citation needed] on that, I guess? Is there a track record of incidents you can point to?
Why unlimited vacation policies are a bad idea
I just read that article and I've lost at least 10 minutes out of my life that I'll never get back. It's amongst the worst links I ever followed on HN.
You are down voted because you dodged the question. The question is a positive, not a normative one: would you believe it if someone claimed blacks were secretly deficient in the way you claim Asians are?

Also, do you have any stats suggesting that the black student with a 520 sat is likely to outperform the Asian with a 780? If I present stats showing that blacks underperforming their sat and Asians over perform, will you favor pro-asian and anti-black discrimination? If not, your reply is a bit dishonest.
I have a hard time believing this applies generally. I've learned from 20+ years of the public getting on the internet that desire is so strong that it leads people to believe they deserve to have every desire fulfilled. You might just have exceptional children.

I mean I got in a little discussion on this very site where people insisted advertising is equivalent to force. That's clearly wrong, but it is also fairly illuminating.
The other news here that I hadn't seen elsewhere: when and why did MetaMed fail? That was an idea I would like to have seen succeed. Is anyone else working on that?
Ask me anything! :-)
Even better is "See all those commercials in TV? They're all created by people trying to tell you what to do. You don't like being told what to do, right? So why let a stranger who just wants to make money off you tell you what to do?"

My parents gave me that speech when I was 5, before I was allowed to watch any non-PBS TV. It was remarkably effective; I just tuned out all the commercials, because I knew they were people trying to sell me things that I didn't actually want before I saw the commercial. It got so extreme, at one point, that my mom had to go the other way and say "Y'know, it's okay to spend money once in a while."
WP and the Wikimedia foundation continue to ignore their internal problems and instead focus on gathering data that shows what everybody already knows, then trying to "solve" it with irrelevant projects that don't even begin to nip at the edges of the issue.

We're years in on the issue and WP keeps asking like they don't have any idea what's wrong, even though likely millions of words have been bled on the topic. The only people who don't seem to understand it is WP themselves and the only conclusion one can reach is that they're doing it on purpose.
Como funciona o Bower
Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they are the problem
I bet those robots won't run on gas.
This makes me think that Amazon should build a service that acts as a virtualized "pre-fork worker model" server (a la [g]unicorn) and transparently scales WSGI/Rack/etc application processes across machines.
I think you're the one missing something; namely that while the TED talk cites Milwaukee as a bad flag, the author (Whet Moser) of the linked article (which embeds the video) describes his disagreement. Hence the "too" in "I like the Milwaukee flag too" means "as Moser does", not "in addition to (other flag)".
But my search is specifically about Wikipedia process. Those half million words are not about dashes as an encyclopedic article, those words are people bickering over, for example, "Mexican–American War" versus "Mexican-American War" (at least 20,000 words just on the hyphen / dash in the title).

Once you've ploughed through all that can you transfer your new dash-knowledge to other articles? No, that other article will have its own thousands-of-words long discussion about the correct dash to use.

That's bad enough, you can probably ignore dash types and let other people sort it out.

But it's a great example of how Wikipedia fails. Any discussion is won by the person who has the time to win.
Why would you ever want to experience performance problems?

The obvious answer to experience those problems is to setup your system the same way as the people experiencing the problems, same h/w, s/w config, etc. You can look at the configs of people reporting problems on forums, in bug reports, etc.
I do accept that it is a complicated issue, and realise also my own attitude towards poker machines is that of a reasonably-sophisticated gamer who could never see the point in playing such 'games'. I also, perhaps fortunately, have a friend who works for a company that tests poker machine motherboards to make sure the results are 'as expected' and that they payout as per local legislation. His explanation of the statistics and 'under the hood' mechanics of how the machines work were quite eye-opening to me, and meant that the chance of me playing these machines dropped from 'maybe one day' to 'never'.

I would reason that, same as for alcohol and other drugs, there should be more money directed from profits towards support for addicts. I realise it's not a good idea, in general, to be overly paternalistic in general; my statement was made more from a personal point of view in terms of what work I would or would not be involved in.
Ask HN: Reinventing the wheel, good or bad?
I frequently find myself in a situation when there is an existing library, framework or something that can do the work I need with a few lines of code, but instead of using existing and well tested tools, I'm creating everything from zero.

Is this a good or a bad thing?
This is very interesting but a more detailed tutorial and documentation would be really handy. For example I haven't figured out yet if there's any other (than destroying) way to stop the track.
It's really just a more fine-grained PaaS, not significantly different than a bunch of tiny Heroku apps (the ~1 second cold start time is significantly better than Heroku's though)
I find the hypocrisy especially interesting given that a few years they demoted Chrome for breaking a paid link rule. It certainly seems like this is another blatant broken rule by the Chrome team - not that it's their fault because they were probably never told about the rule either.
Protecting Corporate Interests Is Equivalent to Ensuring National Security
Sound advice! Thanks.
The original title is "FBI Spied On Activists Because Protecting Corporate Interests Is Roughly Equivalent To Ensuring National Security", but it's too big for HN.
This Is the Official Music Video of Pop Band Called Sleeping Sunset
Thanks! I think 1 and 3 are the ones I'm researching and finding answers for. As those I think will eventually lead to a yes or no!
Google et al. make money from advertisers, not from "addicted" people clicking on cat videos on Youtube. If you can't see the difference from the slot machines business model, I don't know what to tell you.
Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed [video]
I still don't understand what kind of standing the Arduino brand stealers (formerly Smart Projects, first manufacturers of Arduino) have to take over the brand worldwide.
A normal encyclopedia is curated by a relatively small amount of people who are able to reach a consensus on a controversial topic, as opposed to random strangers on the Internet with an opinion being able to edit things.
Just brain storming... could another possible solution be to create a public list of hashes of well known scripts, and then write a small `sh` wrapper that verifies that hash of the script it's about to execute?
shouldn't the spam filter be looking at content and not the IP from where it is posted ?
It actually doesn't put much of a hard floor on anything. The minimum amount of money you can have is still zero (temporarily). It does put a minimum on income, but not necessarily income after prior obligations.
Solving the Data Extraction Problem in 10 Lines of Python
If the environment the lambda-modules run in isn't PaaS, how would you categorize it?
No worries! I happen to spend a lot of time designing REST APIs.
After reading some reviews of your game; you are morally irresponsible. Free advertising via 2015.

"What a scam Double down Casino is. It's designed for the player to fail with low odds of winning. I've bought probably close to $100 in chips the past few months. Just bought $8.00 today to play the American Idol Slot machine and money was gone within 15 minutes. This is ridiculous. It's not like I'm winning real money back but rather looking for some entertainment. I could have paid that and enjoyed a movie for 2 hours. Will never buy another chip again and warn everyone against doing it. They get you hooked before long. I would rather go out and buy a computer casino program for $20 bucks and have endless entertainment. This company is raking in a fortune and giving nothing in return !!!!"

Do I think you are a bad person--no. Do I feel too many people take advantage of the poor, depressed, and uniformed--yes. Do I feel people rationalize their behavior in the sake of money--yes.
Prohibition is a failed war
https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/compute/nodejs-packages-in-l...
Ya, you don't always get discovered in acting school. But you should have the dream while you are there.
That's a good point, thanks for bringing this up. From now on I will think of Evan as an asshole rather than a psychopath.
You mean like... a package manager?
I think it is 100 concurrent requests per account. That is pretty low IMO. I think it was intended for things that are CPU intensive and short-lived. If it needs to pull from a data store and process, it likely isn't a good idea for lambda to begin with, right?

I agree, it is only really useful to use like this for certain scenarios.
I've been looking for something like this for a while. I find it extremely hard to understand an open source project just by looking in the code. Where to start? what are the flows? ...etc.

Nice post, as an ESL, your English didn't bother me at all, it seemed normal to me. Maybe push a bit deeper on the technicalities.