jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
But that puts it under espionage not "whistleblowing", we don't call a N. Korean scientist that defected to the west who spills light on N. Korea's nuclear program a whistleblower, we call him a defector and a spy.

Intelligence Agencies act on the behalf of their respective nations, there is nothing surprising about the US spying on the EU and vice versa.

As we already know the extent of the collection programmes the NSA operates i really do not see any real value in spewing more and more content about it, especially things that start to touch on the operational know-how of such programmes.

As much as we don't like the Americans spying on us there are far worse nations out there that i would actually fear if they will ever gain even a shred of the capabilities the NSA and some other western allied nations have.

Sadly this incident will be a very bad thing to whistleblowing in the long run, good luck passing any whistleblowing protection laws in the US (and many other countries including in the EU who took notice) any time soon.

While i do respect the sentiment behind Snowden's leak, I do actually have a bone to pick with how it was executed. There were NSA leakers before him, there will hopefully be some after him that will speak out when a line is crossed. However grabbing which ever documents you can put your hands on, and then seeking shelter in what is now a defacto hostile state isn't really responsible behavior.

Just few years before Snowden we already had an NSA leak from which the "secret interpretation of the FISA act" fiasco was made public. Snowden could've made the same effective impact with a handful of slides, not 1000's of documents (if not more, some numbers which were flying in the early days of the leak pointed at anywhere between 50 and 250 thousands documents) of which many probably contain actionable information which i would dare to say puts the EU as a organisation, and you as an individual at more risk than anything the NSA will ever did or do.
The ethical necessity of addressing global human suffering, which an AI would be supremely equipped to do, let alone the incredible gain in wealth and power that goes along with it, makes it incredibly unlikely that any entity smart enough to develop AGI would try to keep it a secret for any large span of time.
It’s the same as WhatsApp in some extent - always promised that they wouldn’t give up your data while they gained traction and then get acquired by Facebook and get forced to.
Don't forget Apple pressured Telegram to remove rooms or be banned.

This type of pressure on centralized systems is exactly why it is unethical as technologists to suggest people centralize the internet.

When you choose to send friends to centralized systems you are voting for the internet to have all the problems and advantages of dictatorships.

When you support open decentralized protocols you get the problems and advantages of a democracy.

Dictatorships can move fast and make sweeping changes. Look at China.

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage are all examples of centralized walled gardens, aka dictatorships. They are all doomed to be co-opted into doing something you don't like at some point and you will have no recourse.

Meanwhile we have decentralized systems like like HTTP, SMTP, and Matrix. Yes they move slower, are more fragmented, need long periods of carefully discussed and rolled out protocol changes and many implementations and servers to all agree on those to function. Decentralized control is messy, and good UX takes longer to materialize, but that is how the internet was built, and how we kept it from being controlled by a single ISP/Browser like AOL.

If you want a modern e2e chat protocol that lets you use any client, server, operating system, or architecture you want and take your social graph with you when you change your mind on any of those things, where no one single entity can change the rules of the network
for profit or other reasons... you are looking for Matrix.
It wasn’t so long ago (less than 10 years, perhaps more than 5) that HN was full of similarly bad comments
It's not in bad faith. Many people legitimately confuse morality and legality.
I don't like the idea of government having full control of these services.

I believe that we need fully decentralized system, much like the e-mail, but realtime and E2EE. Sadly, it seems to me that we're taking the opposite direction. Just few widely used messengers, all of them are centralized, some of them have E2EE, but who knows for how long - EU commission seems to like the idea of breaking in. No matter what their intentions are, I didn't sign up for that.
I use Telegram long before it became sort of mainstream and I haven't regretted that decision for a minute, minus their outages that started happening once every few months lately and are worrying.

Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.

Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.

Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.
I don't think there's much validity to this conservative persecution complex when you subject it to analysis. There's a difference between what feels to be the case and what is.

Social media are about emotional impulses and endorphin triggers, not rationality or reality. Conflating the two is undermining societies across the world.

The American right isn't being censored in general. It's a vehicle for disinformation, to a somewhat greater degree than the American left. It's mainly that disinformation that's being censored on social media. In other media: those are as segregated between the two parties as they have been for decades.

As far as de-platforming, review bombing and the like: it's not the right being excluded, it's anyone who doesn't conform to the fringe left's concepts of orthodoxy and political correctness. You know, the "woke" crowd.

What happened at the Capitol was not the result of mass de-platforming and censorship. It was the result of ideological self-isolation, ignorance of historical context (among other things) and blindly parroting partisan talking points without exercising critical thought. This has been happening since Vietnam, before social media or even the Internet were invented. It culminated in the election of Trump, the emergence of Proud Boys, BLM and Antifa, the state of particularly the GOP and yesterday's events.

For all the so-called differences between the two sides in American politics, they share a surprising amount of traits: ideological bubbles, authoritarian leanings, tribal sentiments, demonising the other side, distrust in corporate media and feeling oppressed/disenfranchised. There's at least a hint to the shared American subconscious there.
> They are completely unsuited for multi-monitor workloads without an eGPU.

I use an Intel MBP13 inch with two external monitors and it works pretty well. What am I missing?
Awesome feedback, thank you.
Creativity is expressed in many forms, and if it were not for computers, my creative talents would never have been realized. I develop video games from the ground up, and these games wouldn't have come to life if not for computers.

To answer the poster's question however, I'd have to say my creativity is stunted by the myriad of distractions in my life. Within eye-shot right now I see 5 screens. 3 of them are turned on. If I were in my office, double it.

Sure I can control these distractions, but I choose not to because I think I'm addicted to constant info and visual overload, white noise, and a desperate need to be entertained every second of my life. Just being honest.
someone DDoS'ed the chat again, site is down :(
The idea that gas stations and restaurants have to be regarded as "sketchy stuff" seems quite sad to me.
What do you mean by "refuse to show willingness to fix or even acknowledge the problem"? Do you realize that two of those issues were started by core contributors?
I really wish the pipes.digital project was open source. It could have really gone somewhere. Without it being open source, it seems to have gone the way of yahoo pipes itself. : /
Never used it myself. I did engineering back 30 years ago and we learned in the engineering graphics course how to design nomographs which are similar to slide rules.
> NB The novel "Arc Light"

Ah! I read that '95, and recently got to wondering what the title was. Could not think of it for the life of me.
Have you taken a look at the GC documentation (http://nim-lang.org/gc.html)?
I don't disagree but I suspect that proliferation of components within a monolithic app is roughly comparable and leads to similar maintence burdens.

If I'm right then the microservice model has one major advantage over the monolithic app model, which is that if things stop depending on a microservice you generally can tell because eg logs are empty or instance utilization is zero or whatever.

With components in a monolithic app there are tools in most languages to find dead code but I've not seen them used regularly in many teams (especially startups) and they are often less helpful in that they can tell if code is no longer referred to at all but not if its just in a code path that is no longer executed.

My gut feeling is that this leads to dead microservices being garbage collected more reliably than dead code.
"Micro" is relative, keep in mind PC's and Macs were once "microcomputers".

Microservices (as described by Amazon, Netflix, and Thoughtworks) are effectively indistinguishable from Bounded Contexts (from Domain-Driven Design).

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/BoundedContext.html

They're all about effectively decomposing large applications into independent teams and runtimes.
That's an obsolete notion. You are not going to duplicate a 128-bit high-entropy number. Not in several lifetimes of our sun.

Your notion is interesting. Anything that automates the client-side is good. People are terrible at managing a security contract 'by hand'

{edit} really, this superstitious notion that random numbers are 'not good enough' is embedded in our programmer culture. Folks continue to use lame solutions instead of just buying into the uuid-as-foolproof-identifier. It totally eliminates whole classes of problems and bugs. And you should be more concerned your computer will be hit by lightening, become self-ware and win the lottery 7 times, and molecularly reorganize into a teacup, before that uuid will be duplicated anywhere/anywhen.
A fingerprint is a good username and ridiculous as a password. This excellent article captures my thoughts pretty well:

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user...
I think the real issue is that nobody[1] really cares about ad-hoc networking, especially in anything linux related. I recall times when NetworkManager team, back then the only "nice" tool for wifi, outright claimed they don't ever care about ad-hoc (or even static IP).

Similarly, barely anything appears to support ad-hoc, and I am not sure if many current users recall that it exists at all…

[1] an obvious hyperbole, but that's the feeling I get
Don't assume that the robotic solution will look anything like the human solution. A fitbit does not look like a "robotic personal trainer" and a roomba does not look like a person with a broom.

I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into the fire. All with human oversight, but a reduction in the number of humans involved or in harm's way.

This reduction in manpower is the pattern - e.g. supermarket self-checkouts still have some human staff, but to troubleshoot and supervise.
Interesting. I can definitely relate. As an author of a proprietary application written in web technologies, it's easy to be envious of compiled languages.

This is my recipe for minification:

1. Apply a convention where all class properties and methods have to end with a trailing underscore (it's trivial to make an Eslint rule to enforce it)

2. Use 2 minification tools in following order: Closure Compiler (simple optimizations mode), then Terser for best output.

3. Configure Terser mangle.properties.regex: /_$/

4. If it's a desktop app, use Bytenode for Node.js processes (cannot be used for the renderer)

I also consider creating a tool to mangle string literals if they match a pattern. I.e. all string literals in the code that end with __ would be mangled. The benefit is that all internal event names and what not will not be visible.

Yep, it's not going to hide it completely, but it's just that much harder to RE and understand when there is pretty much nothing descriptive in plain English left in the code (except error messages and third party libraries).

Also I had this idea a few years earlier in a previous application where I did not use a module bundler. It was good old ES5 with files merged with Gulp and using prototype pattern. For those who do not know, prototype pattern is essentially like a class, but it's properties and methods do not have to be enclosed in one block. I did not implement it, but theoretically, it would be possible to create a mixer that would take all these prototype classes and their properties and create an output where all properties and methods from all classes would be output in a completely random order, all mixed together. Though looking back, it's probably not such a bright idea, as it would be possible to create an AST program that would reorder the methods back in place.
I found that the mere presence of a baby was enough to scare my cats away.
Thanks for this. To put it another way -- if you're unwilling to object to causing suffering to other animals because "that's what they do to each other anyway", you lose the ability to make ethical objections to murder, rape, etc., when they're being performed by humans.

We know that other animals don't have the same evolved talent at empathy and compassion (and ethical reasoning) that humans do, so we don't expect them to become vegetarian themselves. The fact that humans are capable of these things introduces a responsibility for us to use them rather than ignoring them.
From status page: Initial indications are pointing towards another power outage. We are now working on bringing Linodes up as soon as possible. We will continue to post updates as we have more information.

http://status.linode.com
Most interesting libraries in the PHP space happen in framework-specific ecosystems with little interoperability. Having a generic PHP library ecosystem under Apache Software Foundation governance could be the solution to this problem.
So all I need to be a great programmer is just stop sleeping and bathing. Thanks HN!
superfluid has functionality for commercial (with IRS-reporting, per jambo) and non-commercial efforts. So it handles both the barter exchange and favor-bank sort of model. -The IRS has exclusions for non-commercial services.

superfluid:p2p is international, superfluid:business is US-only, for now.
I don't whether the error you introduced is intentional or not, but 120 * 0.8 = 96, not 106.

Another way of thinking about this is that 1.2 * 0.8 = 0.96, so it is a four percent pay cut. (This is true for any situation like this and can be remembered by the difference of two squares formula from your early algebra class -- (1 + r)(1-r) = 1 - r^2, where r is the fraction raise/pay cut.)
you're drawing a parallel of unequal magnitude.
Realistically seeing-eye dogs are not that common and plenty of jobs allow you to distance yourself from any potential dogs you might run into.

There's not too many jobs where a dog might end up right behind you for extended periods of time in an enclosed space.
Agreed, very good news though I'm left with the same question. It doesn't inspire that much confidence, but the recent embrace of Flutter from Canonical leaves me hopeful even if Google did drop from active lang / framework development, it wouldn't be left to dry.
Thomas lives in a weird alternative universe where logic works differently. His dissents are always a trip.
My theory is that inequality is simply the result of globalization and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

If you had build the most successful retail business, in 1900 you would own the market in your town; in 1950 in your country; in 2020 you'd own the world (or a big part of it). The opportunity is just a lot bigger now than 50 years ago and that trickles down.

Also technology enables goods and services to be produced from everywhere; that means countries compete globally. Many 0.1%ers had to overcome global competition to make the money they're making. In addition, more and more of them can do it from anywhere (def true for entrepreneurs starting fully remote startups, for instance).

So there is both value and necessity in having to compete globally to attract the entrepreneurs and highest producers / best talent. Does it mean 0 tax? No. But it does mean you have to have reasonable taxes and offer a good product (security, laws, culture, talent, whatever it may be).

It also means you don't offend your best 'customers' all the time. All this talk about how 0.1% people essentially unfairly stole their way to their success won't want to make anyone pay more or stick around to higher tax place (city/state/country).

As a government you first want to be efficient with tax money; be reasonable with taxes, even if higher than average (but within the competitive ballpark); show appreciation for the people that end up paying most of your taxes; and stop talking about inequality as being exclusively a bad thing and a result of tax policy.
Geoff Dyer's Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room is one of the most disappointing books I have ever read, and it is even rather appalling. The title makes the book seem ostensibly about Andrei Tarkovsky's great 1979 film, and Dyer does say a few remarks about it. But then he starts drifting off into anecdotes that have nothing to do with the purported subject of his book, like the time he had a threesome with two women. Ultimately Dyer’s book feels, well, parasitic on Tarkovsky. Dyer is using the Soviet auteur and his film to lend prestige to his own writing that few would consider otherwise.

I wonder if we get such a writer once a generation or so. I have felt the same about some of Marguerite Yourcenar’s work which ostensibly responds to another artist's work but without actually illuminating it much, instead just serving to boost Yourcenar's own profile.
Can these small countries who offer the low rates stand up the US sanctions and tarrifs apparatus. The US has alot of strings to pull to make these tax havens cooperate. Thats a nice export industry you have there, would be a shame if something were to happen to it wink nudge.
Would have to be tested in court.

Certainly, the fact that competing encyclopedias exist, and have for hundreds of years, with > 99% identical entry names (but of course, substantively different content), and that predicated not on any given invention or IP but rather the common use English language, would, I think, make the judges rather reluctant to rule differently even should there be 100% match in entries.
> Not after this precedent, which says that APIs are free

No, it doesn't. It says the "fair use" doctrine covers copying an API's "task calling" system, i.e. nomenclature and ontology.
Yeah because Ill never buy food and housing until I die because my currency is deflationary. That logic is so tired. Also the fact that you can convert US dollars to investments instantly instead of consuming basically extends the same situation, yet we still spend when we need to.
If you want to maintain compatibility with existing JavaScript, you kinda have to support the complexity of variadic functions and multiple return types; otherwise FFI would be required to use JavaScript. It seems this a convenience comprise TypeScript makes.
We ended up paying more (not much more at $20/shot "MSRP" apparently) but I think a greater part of that was contributing anonymized medical data. Statistical data on: groups vaccinated, positive test results, treatments in case of infection, etc. is worth a lot. That would also explain the swift deliveries, despite making that stats deal fairly late in the process. (early 2021)
I'm pro density but the densification process really trips core parts of people's psyche. We're human beings.

It affects your _home_. You've lived in a place for 10 years and suddenly you have no privacy because a big block of units gets stood up looking right over you. Or they block your sunlight, build right up to the boundary, or your quiet leafy neighbourhood just isn't quiet anymore and that's after you lived next to a construction site for 6 months. These things can have impacts on people's relationships as well.

Of course the world changes, such is the price of progress, and _usually_ those affected can afford to wipe their tears with big stacks of cash.

But I don't think it's fair to characterise all NIMBYs as just greedy, a lot of people just want to live in the neighbourhood they thought they were buying into.
I think it is different traditions and etc.

I'm from the midwest. When I worked my first 'real job' I worked with some folks from the east coast. They could be very blunt and harsh to my Midwestern ears.

Right until I realized that when they speak to you that way they're really engaging you and seeing if you'll respond in kind in order to demonstrate how certain you are about what you said.

The right words with the right emphasis and it was all "Well Tom seems to think..." and they're on board with you.

Took me like 12 months to figure that out, that and them kinda hassling me was a sign of respect ;)