skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maintaining a residence also requires labor. In the robocar future (that is, before the handyrobot future that surely will follow) perhaps it will be thought to require more labor than driving?

It's disappointing to imagine HN voters being so censorious as to downvote perfectly topical mentions of prostitution.
Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men
Wiretaps generally do not come with time-machines that can resurrect past conversations.
It's Time to Stop Extracting Data for BI on Hadoop
Sure, but the Supreme Court also uses narrow implication-following. Existing rules or precedents generate another precedent. And society is doing the same thing with path-dependent adoption of technology.

As computer scientists, we know this can only lead to eventual contradictions. Old concepts are subsumed with new definitions in different abstractions. "Plan to meet up for dinner" used to mean a face-to-face talk when you bumped into someone on the street or, later, over two direct analog wires that were equally ephemeral as long as nobody was a priori recording. Now it means digital messages that are automatically stored indefinitely.

The right to privacy should apply generally to each definition, but when you analyze with local reasoning of course the latter message is voluntarily stored on a bazillion servers and sent over tapped fibre.

Which is why I gave some other concrete examples. Do a plain reading of the 6th and 7th amendments, and wonder why a speeding ticket does not result in a jury trial. But follow the path of legal reasoning that got us to the present condition, and you can see how the ideals were subsumed and discarded.
Google Bends to European Pressure on Right to Be Forgotten Rule
It's not frightening at all. This is the standard nation-state insouciance.

To see how out of touch governments can be, I think there are two stories, both unfortunately of a military nature.

One is Eisenhower's trek across the US in the interwar period, the thing ( along with the Autobahn ) that inspired the Interstate, and the story of the squad-level light machine gun in WWI, especially related to the Lewis gun.

Machine guns were not embraced until the Germans showed how effective they were in WWI. This really happened. Commanders were optimizing for damage per bullet long after they should not have been.

Be wary, but don't be frightened. I at least find it relatively easy to conduct my affairs such that I don't have to live in fear. So it can be done.

At least consider the possibility that the Snowden and Manning stories are stories about people who really didn't think it all the way through, if they didn't want to be hunted. There's an element of martyrdom and hubris to those stories.

In a way, much of the Nixon cases were about interpretations of telephone technology and wiretapping roughly 100 years after the advent of those technologies. The timescales here are glacial.
There needs to be another word in that mantra: "repair".
It's going to be interesting to see how the people, ignorant about the additional memory overhead required for a multi-process architecture, will respond to this. My guess is that they'll find another single process browser or revert back to the old version after they've thoroughly finished criticizing the new Firefox version for the increased memory bloat.
Just the app, but without any warning. You get the picture and then boom the app crashes.
Yes. There was a level of quality and thought put into the systems that I haven't experienced since.

Just to provide some more contrast... Just about every other system had to be rebooted daily or every few days.

The problem with VMS was the hardware. Eventually the pain of being on slow, expensive machines allowed other companies to take more share. By the time the Alpha systems were ready, the Pentium (and soon Pentium Pro) was suprising every OS vendor.
> Those "consumer variation bullshit startups" are providing a lot of value to people. It's easy to forget how much less fun day-to-day life was even ten years ago.

I think this is highly questionable.
> Barely anyone cares about online privacy.

I suspect you are confusing not caring about privacy with a feeling of powerlessness mixed with a general ignorance of any alternatives (which might not exist in some situations). The meme that people want to give up privacy in some kind of barter for services is just projection and wishful thinking in most cases.

https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...
Yeah but those steps should be part of the normal build process. If you have to use weird tools (e.g. autotools) to generate your "real" source code, I'd say the problem is those tools. Also. Seriously. Autotools? In 2016?
The concept of "base" impulses and a hierarchy of value in body functions (intellect is "high", reproduction and digestion are "low") is a terrible remain of late Victorian / early Fascism periods. We are not holy souls trapped in a dirty world of temptation for the benefit of some higher power: we are (social) animals who evolved to be smarter and more flexible than all other animals.

A lot of the problems in the current culture wars are due to this idea that sexual activity is just vile. This generates repression, which generates anger and misunderstanding on both sides. Maybe we should try giving a bit more respectability to these "base" impulses, and learn how to live with them openly, rather than trying to pretend they don't exist.
Somewhat disagree. I instantly understood the metaphor.
God, their government is retarded. During all the oil years, when even fast food employees were making bank, they handed out extra money to everyone through both low taxes and actual handouts. Like, Albertans literally receive checks from the government in the mail a couple times a year. Now that the easy oil money is gone, they decide to gouge people to make up the difference. And since there isn't any easy oil money keeping them there, everyone who can afford to will leave. Why not tax in the rich years and ease up in the lean years? That would be too logical for Texas North, I guess.
> separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.

Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal.

The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.
Or else, more generally... people are usually rather terrible at separating out "your behaviour is wrong and needs to be fixed" from "you as a whole are a terrible human being". People often define their identity by their actions, and to claim that those actions might be problematic is to attack their identity.

Even where blame is explicitly not placed on anyone, people tend to go on the defensive as soon as you point out that their actions have unintended or un-thought-of consequences.
A pet peeve of mine:

Scenario:
Finished requirements, analysis, design; completed development and testing; in UAT; Production deployment: 1 week away.

Customer: Hey this field name does not exactly represent what we want to convey. Can we change its name quickly before we go live?

Eager Novice (who is unfortunately in front of the customer at that moment): Oh yeah, that's just a small change in the Customer model. I think we an get this ready and unit tested in 2 hours.

Customer: Great. Lets git er done!

Project Manager (wary of customer and afraid to rock the boat on an already shaky project): Sure we can do that.

Grizzled Veteran/Grey Beard (who for some reason wasn't consulted on the change request): Hmmm....have we done an impact analysis of the change? What are the downstream impacts on code that references this field? What do we need to do to propagate the change to the db? What about the seven or so Web Services that are impacted by this field change? How long does it take to do a regression test? etc...

Net effect: 2 Hrs initial estimate given to customer; 4 Days worth of work in actuality; Production deployment moved down a week..
These are all interesting points but I think they're not going to matter much. I think that whatever device most people carry around to communicate with in 2030 will be unbreakably encrypted by default, even against attackers so advanced that their quantum computers are handheld.

Forget about what random developers do with crypto. I agree: generalist developers will probably never get reliable crypto right. But they won't have to, just like they don't write their own TCP congestion control algorithms. Every programming environment available will provide unbreakable crypto by default without asking. You'll have to go out of your way not to have it; it'll be like raw sockets, where the environment sort of looks at you weird for even asking.

There are UX issues with strong crypto, but:

1. They're getting sorted out quickly.

2. They tend not to apply to the simplest and most common cases, which are actually the ones that matter most to public policy.
This needs to be a larger effort, one hosts file updated hourly or any regular interval which we just configure to fetch and update through a cron job and forget.

Would love to see some project like that.
You mean like tape recorders?
Distributed Time Travel for Feature Generation
Adding a script that builds the project from “maintainer state” and referencing it in the README may save you some aggravation.
>>That article is almost a year old now.

Not much has changed, at least as far as running LXC/LXD using something other than Ubuntu as the host os. Not LXC's fault exactly, just the underlying set of requirements, kernel/systemd/etc patches, assuming you want the unpriv containers and systemd based containers to run.

Technically, you could find and apply all of those to Debian, Redhat, whatever, and use them as the host OS, but it wouldn't be a trivial effort.
The Prettiest DevOps Initiative Starter Guide You've Ever Seen
Digging down into the details is one of the best responses to absurdly unrealistic schedules.
Functions in Elixir
Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention.

Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs!

Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.
This is such a weird argument. You clearly can be compelled to produce private documents as evidence. A private document you wrote is in the exact same sense self-testimony. I don't doubt that you can conjure a first-principles argument that the law says otherwise, but the reality you'll end up in won't be the one we share now.

I got snarky because of the "sir" in the parent comment. I SAY GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR.

Totally fair game to ding me for doing that, though.
In 2006 Facebook was all about college. I remember you could even list your classes right on your profile and get grouped with people taking your same classes.

But you're right, "blogging for normal people, restricted to friends and family" sounds like it will always be Facebook's core offering.
Excellent response, thank you for your thoughts.

I like the idea of empathy being a bridge between two sides-- closeness helps in building that bridge. If the sides are way too distant, the bridge will inevitably collapse into the abyss. But if the bridge itself is made of strong stuff, constructed in good faith, then absolute closeness isn't so big deal. So long as trade of ideas can safely go back and forth across that bridge, in equal measure. I might be stretching a metaphor a bit there.

Feedforward is indeed quite powerful between two receptive parties; the last time I got a peer review the person I was doing with did it to me, which made me all the respectful of him.

"empathy is the ability to bring someone close" indeed!
Is there any public "how to" about Gerrit? I've interacted with it a few times for Go codereviews, but not frequently enough to get comfortable. Really simple things like finding the "submit comments" button I have to spend five minutes finding every time.
You are conflating the rightness or not of the article itself with the rightness or not of Betteridge's law applied to the article. As Betteridge himself explains [1]:

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that
any headline which ends in a question mark can be
answered by the word "no." The reason why
journalists use that style of headline is that they
know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t
actually have the sources and facts to back it up,
but still want to run it.

When you have an article like this one which uses the question style of headline and then answers the question "yes" it is not a Betteridge headline even if others might argue that the answer should have been "no". Even if the article answers "no", it still isn't necessarily a Betteridge headline if there was actually some reasonable question over whether the answer was "yes" or "no".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Going to join you in this rant if you don't mind.

> Most can't tell their manager that it will take 2 weeks to parse a CSV because the source data is shit and they have too many other things they are working on. So they stay an extra 6 hours in the office and get called a rock-star until the day that they opt to go to their child's school play instead.

Ugh! For real! I had this happen to me recently. I have trouble telling people "No", and pushy PMs who also happen to be my friends means that I often bite off more than I can chew, and have to either "be a rockstar" (which you start to realize isn't such a compliment), or deliver late / fail to deliver.

So I just started being a dick about it, and it works for me. If I say no too politely, it's really easy to convince me to change to a yes. My turning point was when discussing a project that was much more complex than management assumed it would be (I'm compelled to link the relevant xkcd [0]), and I already felt overwhelmed on my current projects.

The discussion was something like "Ok, how about by this date? What about by this date? What if we dropped these features?", I thought for a moment and responded "Ok, look. I can promise you any date you want, and we can shake hands and leave this meeting. But I'm telling you the reality is I can't do it, and it won't be done. If you'd like to take some of my other projects and move them into the will not be done category, we can talk. I'm only saying this because I don't want to agree to a deadline and then be constantly thinking 'Oh well, that's the date I'm getting fired.'"

I'm very lucky that everyone here is really nice, and realized how stressed I must have been to react like that. So we've reprioritized some things and are beginning to outsource some of my more menial tasks that took up a lot of time.

Didn't really intend for that story to have a point, just venting something my non-dev friends don't relate to. I guess the point could be that the problem isn't just caused by bad managers, or bad dev estimates, or bad process, it's a little bit of everything, and the ratios are different for every company or person.

[0] http://xkcd.com/1425/
...and the big issue facing society is, how much of that is really programmable? Shall we chemically sterilize men on one end of the spectrum? Or sequester women in convents on the other. Which in-between ideas are really practical, and which fly in the face of a million years of evolution?
Combined with the traditional sorting techniques, computer vision and AI are improving to such an extent that sorting probably doesn't need to be done by the consumer anymore. It will just take awhile for all the infrastructure to catch up to this reality.
TCP checksum and TLS checksum/macing both have use case. Not every protocol built on TCP supports TLS. If TCP checksum is broken, we have to fix it. So I agree with below delusional is too strong. If a simple checksum is buggy, how can I trust anything about said TCP protocol implementation? How can you reassure other data integrity implementation isn't buggy? This bug isn't really about whether TCP checksum is weak or not, rather, just a bug which I suppose most people ignore.
A radical plan to destroy time zones
I find it a bit disturbing that people don't realize that a court must have the power to gain extraordinary access to information in order to pursue application of the law. This is necessary. I'm sure it's hell on Earth when you are subject to it, but I can't think of a way around it.
Unconvincing. English people would have expected a cluttered website in the 90s (remember Yahoo?). I think Japan is just behind the times.
Ironic that most of the replies were '+1's
Since Apollo, NASA has been suffering from too large projects. It's a spiral: once a project grows beyond a certain size, failing would be politically catastrophic. Hence the project must have even more tests and simulations, and the time table and cost move to the right, and it gets even more risk averse. The vicious cycle.

Instead if there were small enough missions and failure was tolerated as an unfortunate part of the process, progress would be a lot faster, and new technologies could be attempted etc.

This was the whole Faster Better Cheaper approach. Small teams of highly competent people, quick iteration, little bureaucracy...

Pathfinder/Sojourner was a FBC mission. It had a freaking webcam there. :) Opportunity/Spirit were somewhat bloated and the latest Curiosity rover was already a relatively traditional megaproject. Naturally there has been science instrument maturation etc as well, it's not a one sided story, but it is important to understand.

Look how many launchers SpaceX has developed and how much it has iterated, while NASA has worked on SLS. Sure, SpaceX has crashed and burned plenty of rockets and test vehicles on the way. It has changed directions dramatically. But looking as a whole, it has made large progress.

There is some kind of spectrum here. Of course if you launch deep space probes for 20 year missions, you test differently than for a launch test vehicle. But if you had many of those space probes as well, it wouldn't be so catastrophic if some of those failed.
We're at full employment in the sense that workers seeking a job can find one, but wouldn't that figure not count those "prideful workers"?

Consumption must grow at the same rate as production, right? So either can be the limiting factor on economic growth, and investing at a rate that doesn't match consumption growth is wasteful (it would be better for the economy if that money were expended on consumption instead), no?
Primary reason I switched back from chrome to firefox couple of years ago is for memory usage actually - got really tired of browser eating all my ram (with every extension and tab adding more and more usage).
And no, i rarely actually have enough free ram - it goes to better use.

I hope firefox handles this better than chrome - any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing?
An elegant eBike with a stunning step-through frame
I only semi-regularly tar my dotfiles and dotfolders and then move the archive to an external drive.
I take a pretty extreme stance when it comes to these arguments: That social contract of which you speak, is routinely ignored and shit on by Federal, State, and local authorities when it suits their interests.

For them to play loosey-goosey with it and expect the normies to abide by it without question is ludicrous.

Cases of mistaken identity, action based on bad information, and people losing their lives or being incarcerated incorrectly as a result are in the news every day.

So, IMO, they're not entitled to fuck all anything ala this "social contract".
Forcing your sexuality on somebody else in a context other than one where they desire it is terrible, whether or not sex is a good thing in general.

Sexual activity is awesome, when it's between two people who both actually want it. I think you'll find that most of the people you're vilifying agree.
Assuming the kill switch is competently used, would you rather than happen or be shot by a SWAT team?
NHTSA says autonomous driving systems can be considered as “drivers”
He isn't very fond of HN / Y Combinator as well. His article "Y Combinator and the Negative Externalities of Hackernews" (2014) http://danilocampos.com/2014/09/y-combinator-and-the-negativ... and the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163
But there isn't an (at least widespread) equivalent of crypto for phone calls. So not really comparable.
You could easily catch that within the method though. But in general I think throwing an exception on memory allocation failure is much better than the alternative, which is - in practice - assuming it succeeds and segfaulting.
The relevant question is how well Firefox compares to competitors like Chrome (which uses multiple processes). Even despite this new overhead, it wouldn't be surprising if the numbers were very competitive.
>Can you explain why this would be a moving tax?

>Obvious, property taxes only apply to the fraction of the year that you own a place. Are you worried about the overlapping period where you have the house on the market but haven't sold it yet?

The proposal was to create a property tax that phases out once the owner has lived there for X period of time. Naturally, every time you sell and move you then reset this clock, so you'd pay the property tax only if you keep moving. The most monetarily rational strategy is to buy and hold forever if at all possible.

In short, the only way to trigger this tax is to move.
ah, makes sense. I am on 44.0.1 right now. I'll try the dev edition, thanks!
> I'm not sure who you're arguing with, but I don't think it's me.

Those quotes are from you...

And coupled with the general tone in majority of your posts in this thread... it's painfully clear you fundamentally believe the government not being able to intercept and access all private electronic communications the world-over is a major problem...

Taking this to it's logical conclusion, you support weakening, backdooring, or somehow subverting generalized end-user encryption in order to "aide" law enforcement (to whatever end).

This is an absurd stance for anyone who works in technology to take. The government is not just kicking around the idea of banning/backdooring full-device encryption, but even run-of-the-mill encryption such as SSL/TLS because it can be used to mask communications just the same. In this world, you wont even be safe purchasing goods online, let alone conducting banking, etc. It literally is incompatible with the technology we need to drive today's world.

So please get off the "government needs this to stop bad guys" high horse and come back down to reality. There is not a world where anyone is safe without strong encryption.
> The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first.

I have absolutely no idea how GitHub could have lost sight of this simple fact.
How to Name a Product: An Enormous Step-By-Step Guide
San Francisco is cyberpunk