Tilde built a server monitoring daemon with Rust and it's low resource and doesn't crash. Tilde thinks the Rust community & its resources make it easier to teach to new team members.
I suggested it because it'd help other people not waste the time scanning the paper for the same minuscule amount of not-that-interesting content. But at least it gave you the opportunity to contribute your interesting comment. Yeah, man!
> I wonder if NYT can help other news websites by making their code open source?
Hey! I, and a number of other news nerds have been encouraging FOSS for the past decade or so. And in fact a number of major open source projects have come out of news related projects, including Django, Backbone.js/Underscore.js, Rich Harris's work on Svelt.js, and a whole lot more.
Most often the problem with local news organizations are operational constraints. The news biz has seen a huge downturn over this same period of time. Most orgs, both on the reporting side and on the tech side are super strapped for people-time.
It's not enough to have FOSS software, you also have to have folks doing devops and maintaining systems often at below-market salaries.
Nah, the paper explicitly states that their system is not recurrent nor convolutional:
> To the best of our knowledge, however, the Transformer is the first transduction model relying
entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using RNNs or
convolution.
Nothing about OpenAI actually addresses any real world problem. So i have a problem with their rhetoric as much as their research agenda.
Nothing they're writing about addresses any of the real world problems with how AI can or might be applied in society. They're a non-profit research lab with no clear agenda and no clear connection to how they plan to interrogate the world which seems like an important part of the equation if you care about outcomes.
So, irrespective of subjective judgements, please explain to me how any of this is supposed to help anyone?
Or, alternatively, how isn't this just free R&D for industry unshackled and unconnected to ethics or society?
I think the thesis is that most cutting-edge work is siloed in R&D departments of big players. OpenAI hopes to ensure the power of AI will be out there for any kind of organization to benefit from. Under the assumption that a more democratized AI capability is less likely to lead to an adverse outcome than a highly concentrated one.
I'm not sure I buy it, but that's what I think it is.
So does Hacker News. A major differentiating feature between Hacker News and Reddit was subreddits, and that has resulted in substantially different cultures (for better and worse).
Yeah, this is a narrative challenge in reporting. Often skewedness of a data set is a(n important) piece of background context, and figuring out how to get that detail into a story without being like AND HERE IS A BIG CHART WHICH YOU WILL NEED HELP INTERPRETING is non-trivial.
Yeah, i'll serve as a counter-example if you'd like.
I've been on the site for a long time, and there are things i love about HN, and many many things that i strongly dislike.
Blind-spots for politics (either with a capital P or lowercase p) is at the top of the list of things i think are fatally flawed with this community.
Especially since this community started as both software AND entrepreneurship, i find it unreasonable and untenable to claim that politics are dissociable from the topics discussed on this site (it is, at the very least, undeniably capitalist).
If you are building organizations, you cannot be agnostic about politics. Your organization will have politics, and you as a leader must define what values your organization has and how they are to be implemented. [for brevity, i will skip over the discussion of the value of diversity in organizations here]
And at this point if you think that i'm shifting or moving the goalposts away from software, i'm happy to bring it back. Especially in a space where you care about your users, and their user experience, you must meet them in their contexts and consider their needs. Those are also not devoid of politics, and there are even business decisions on which user bases to serve and why, many of which should not be devoid of policy and politics.
Lastly, perhaps we'll retreat to "well threads about explicitly political topics devolve into shit shows", and i'd even probably agree with you, but the question is... so what? Just agreeing not to discuss these topics, some of which directly pertain to the development and productization of software just means that the mistakes that software orgs make won't be called out in HN. No one will learn from them here, and that seems like a big problem, especially for a community which folks come to in order to learn how to build software and organizations.
Agreeing not to discuss politics is not a solution to the problem being described. I'm not entirely clear what the correct solution is, but this is definitely not it.
I don't think the idea was to permanently not discuss politics. I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be.
Further: I don't believe that technology is dissociable from politics either. But I don't have to believe that to think that the political discussions we have on HN are unhealthy and unproductive.
'ubernostrum took issue with my comparison of technology and woodworking, because, I suppose, woodworkers aren't upending the housing market and converting tens of thousands of W2 employees into 1099s. That's fair. But none of us think that means that r/golang or r/haskell should host discussions about Facebook's fakenews problem --- so it's clearly not the case that talking about technology obligates us to host all possible political discussions.
Ultimately my problem with politics on HN is that the discussions are vapid. The best recent example was the Google research project on quantifying and manipulating bias built into machine learning algorithms, which immediately attracted a flock of trolls hijacking the thread with claims that the mere concept of bias was "PC".
I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN.
I think the idea was to artificially stop political discussions for a week and then diff that week to the preceding week, to try to get some clarity about what the right guidelines should be.
Correct, and with no intention of banning all politics outside of that short artificial period. I wish I'd read this a few days ago, because it's a great way of putting it.
> I'm fine with political discussions so long as they aren't allowed to be a device with which any troll can shut down any conversation on HN.
I think I covered that in my comment upthread? To me they're in the same category as software patents: fine in principle (unless a post is just ranty), but maybe err on the side of flagging the more politicized variants for this week.
Yeah. <3 your motivations, but i think this is just doomed to stifle important/legit conversations.
The idea that it's not possible to be thoughtful and political at the same time (and thus we should just cut out all/most the political stuff) is disheartening.
The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness.
I'm deeply ambivalent with this as an experiment. I hope it achieves what you're interested in without compromising the things I worry it will.
It's just for a week, so even your worst-case scenario isn't too bad. I did see someone complain that they might not get to argue about Trump's Secretary of State though (which sort of proves the point).
> The problem isn't the politics, the problem is the lack of thoughtfulness.
Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness. I don't know if it's impossible to have the two together, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible at scale.
> Politics is tribal, so we're talking about something that profoundly undercuts thoughtfulness.
Politics isn't always tribal and many people on HN are capable on thoughtful arguments on politics. HN suffers from the "LKML-effect". Few people can or are interested in following the linux-kernel mailing list, so naturally it only gets attention when Torvalds is screaming at someone. It's the same with politics.
When "diversity in tech" became more popular on the Internet it would get flagged off HN repeatedly. Some stories would get through and thoughtful discussions would start, but people quickly learned (maybe without knowing it) that if you just flame the story it would hit the controversy algorithm. So people would submit more sensationalist stories so it could get more upvotes to counter the flags and flame. Now the level of discussion is set and people don't mind how they express themselves on the topic.
If instead HN would have owned the issue and moderated it heavily it would increasingly have gotten better. People would have learned that flagging or flaming wasn't a good idea and those with more reasoned arguments would formed a critical mass to self moderate comments.
Programming is often tribal, yet there aren't a lot of flame over things like Erlang on HN. Because even if not a lot of people know Erlang, we haven't alienated all the Erlang programmers. So Erlang stories are generally advanced enough to not attract bad arguments and even they would someone would presumably challenge it.
Yes, there are political stories that aren't relevant and/nor thoughtful. But those aren't the stories that could, presumably, be categorized as "fit for HN" anyway. But by just banning entire segments of political but relevant stories is letting the "unthoughtful" people win at the cost of the thoughtful ones.
It might not be relevant enough to fight for discussions about Trump in general. But are we going to avoid to talk about e.g. surveillance, like we always have, just because the president is controversial? That would, if anything, be changing HN.
[edit: removed speculation about dang's opinion, since he responded]
But personally I think all of the topics you mentioned are likely to lead to flame wars in the comments about Trump, considering that all three are likely to be significantly affected by him once he takes office. Discussing those topics is still valuable, but unless there is some important development in one of them in the next week, taking a break seems pretty harmless to me.
I'm not dang, but I'll take a stab at it. If the tech aspects dominate, it belongs on HN, even in this week. If the political aspects dominate, it doesn't belong on HN this week (and maybe never).
In practice, that's going to be grey. But it gives a kind of guideline that may (or may not) be what the moderators are trying to do.
This seems like a dramatically misguided attempt to rectify conversational tone.
You can't de-program or disregard people's politics, it's shot throughout everything. Politics frame the foundational approach to recommending policy, how we make decisions and the stories and topics we care about.
It's important to find common ground and ways to discuss topics in spite of politics, not deny the fact that politics pervades everything.
