skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[1] has this quote "Net neutrality serves all Internet users – rich as poor – by providing equal access to diverse content online. We support net neutrality, and believe it is crucial for a healthy, free, and open Internet." and "The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open Internet."

But the offering of Wikipedia Zero clashes with the idea of net neutrality.
I wonder how many commenters here work for/with big tech.
Reddit.com/r/math
I agree with you. I can often hazard a reasonable guess at what people are typing or writing based on the sound, and of course, hearing the touch tone sounds of a phone makes it relatively easy.

Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.
> can someone explain succinctly what they like about fossil over git?

Think of basic github functionality packed in a stand alone, self-hosting binary with a really good CLI and integrated help, ticketing, users and web interface to manage most of that, do diffs, create zip/tar archives, patches, change repo properties. It can also work in a client/server fashion, somewhat similar to subversion, but it's a distributed VCS instead so every client and server retains a full copy of the repository. The repository is replicated instead of sharded, so if you clone it you've got all the branches, all the tickets, everything but the unversioned content, the users, the settings and the css themes. Thus, your backups are equal to the number of clients in the event that you somehow manage to damage the repo on the server (which is just a repo where everyone syncs). It's also very easy to pick up without much wading through the manuals, something I always find myself doing when using git. Every command has a `fossil help <command>`. Most of the functionality is also usable through the web interface. It just works seamlessly on multiple platforms.

> Are there certain types of projects where it just works better for you than git?

Smaller projects, as in not Linux kernel sized. Projects where you don't throw a myriad of binaries in the VCS; there's the `unversioned` command for that. Projects where you have a relatively stable team, not a lot of random outside collaborators like on most succesful opensource projects on github. Projects where you'd want to self host or maybe keep private. I also use it on servers for configuration versioning.
the same applies to the dollar, which is useful, only not the cheapest, fastest or most anonymous...
My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share:

I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find

- social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives.

- the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks.

- big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user.

- games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts

- the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.
Amplify sure lives up to its name...
So they are useful too?
Any specific counter-arguments? I work for one of them, and it sounds about right to me.
I think it would be very interesting to have labs run detailed A-A studies to investigate these kind of things.

"This kind of mouse we raised under these conditions, and we changed nothing, but they varied in these ways over time"

I often wonder whether the variables we check against are actually as independent and subject to the central limit theorem as we assume.
Sorry what I really meant was that "I think we're probably still figuring out the actual cause of why the rats behave the way they do"

In general I don't think it's as simple as being one way or the other, some people certainly seem to innately feel they were born into the wrong gender, and just want that set right, while there seem to be other people for whom it seems to be fluid, that want to be able to choose and change. I don't see it's much of any of the rest of our business other than we should make them welcome in society just like anyone else.

As far as it being a 'social construct' I think the whole thing that "people with XX chromosomes must be women and people with XY must be men, or alternatively people born with penises ...." is obviously a social thing - likely tied to rigorous western sex roles and trying to force people into them - other cultures have provided places for people with differing genders - Fa'afafine, Hijra etc and traditionally treated them differently than in the west ... so yes definitely a 'social construct'
It's like the old school media is trying to manufacture negative opinions of the new school.

It very much feels like this. I mean, maybe I live in a bit of a bubble as a techie, but I just don't see people (even among my very non-techie friends / acquaintances) saying "Wow, WTF is wrong with (Google|Facebook|Amazon|Microsoft|Instagram|Snapchat|Uber|$Whoever)?" OTOH, plenty of those same people are very critical of (CNN|MSNBC|Washington Post|NY Times|Fox News|ABC|NBC|CBS|etc).

Honestly, I am starting to feel like this "tech backlash" storyline is fabricated and phony. Dare I say... #FakeNews? :-)
My addiction to coffee involved no poor choices, I don’t regret it and it makes me a better person. Lack of it makes my performance much worse, I get a migraine with vertigo and vomiting.
Japan launches its first quantum computer
It does make me feel better!
I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember. Most days I don't even notice it, it probably helps that I listen to music for 12 hours a day, but even sitting in a quiet area without music it's not intrusive unless I focus on it.

Oddly enough though, it really flares up when I'm stressed, especially if it's emotional or relationship stress. I'm not sure why that is. It never really gets "bad" in that it causes me distress, but it gets very noticeable.
The article is great and gives context. Maybe use a service like Pocket or a proxy to open the link?
Construction is becoming more and more specialized. There are many machines that need to be operated, together with regulations it requires high skilled people.
Yea for sure, definitely my least favorite part of traveling there.
I’m not so sure the role of what we’ve let become called “tech” is as neutral and inevitable as you make out.

There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.
When a Developer Says, “We Can’t Do That…”
Being mildly hung over is ok, but having had a joint just under 2 weeks ago isn’t? Who does that policy serve? It’s stupid.
> Why was this only worth 100K?

Gotta be careful dealing with company like Uber. At some price point they might just hire hitmen to kill you instead.
In person I use a thumb drive. You could encrypt the credentials using PGP and send it to a coworker if they are remote.

Sometimes I just go on google hangouts and share my screen if I'm feeling lazy.
Yeah, epic in how fast it got fixed!
Ironically, that is a class of drug you can be on legally, and still work.
Network effect. Try buying MDMA online with Dogecoin.
I agree with everything you're saying except the paper wallet.

This insanity surrounding: "store your fortune on a piece of paper under you mattress/buried in your backyard/etc" has got to stop. Pay coinbase to do that for you.
1. Even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition.

In fact, if net neutrality regulation creates additional compliance costs it might actually reduce competition by increasing the barriers to entry for new ISPs.

2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses.

However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field. It wasn't necessary in the past. Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit.

The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
Liquidity is the most important property of the cryptocurrency. Faster transactions, anonymity or lower fees hardly matter if there are no places where I can spend the currency. Or if I sell services with it, there are no customers willing to pay.

It is a huge chicken-and-egg problem, but looks like Bitcoin has solved it at least some level, since it is accepted on quite many places. We might start seeing services and merchants adopting other cryptocurrencies as well, but currently those alternatives don't seem that widely adopted.
Are you suggesting that the NYT is faking its own editorial view point?
GSF Accelerator to invest $1M in five tech startups
I have the impression that in many people's head, Git == GitHub.

There are other hosted git services, and it also not super hard to set up a repo manually, on a server or even locally.

I agree Git may be too complex for some people or projects, and Fossil can fit better there. But Github is not the issue, as it can easily be avoided.
> If you got all your information from this article you would be surprised that, for example, 82% of Americans have a favorable view of Google.

Really? All the article says is that "some" people have developed more critical views of tech. Is that not true? It's not just the NYT. Look at HBO's Silicon Valley. Did you see the way that tech companies were criticized in the Senate over Russian election interference? It's everywhere.

Also, if you're going to call into question the motivation behind this article without actually criticizing any of their points, I hope you won't mind me pointing out that your bio says you're the founder of Parse and of course worked at Facebook.
A Consumer’s Security Vulnerabilities in Open Source Software
The Loss of Net Neutrality Will Screw the Common Man
This is different from Net Neutrality though, this is tied more to applications instead of sites
What security bug? It was a corruption bug.
Maybe this problem should also be viewed from a different perspective. This companies are using the internet connections we pay for, for communications we didn't really allowed. They should be forced to pay us for the unauthorized use of our internet connections, and obviously for our data. if the costs where high enough this kind of "hacking" would just stop.
Sure, to be pedantic about it, but the point of "not breaking userspace" is not a technical nitpick on browser extensions.

It's the guideline from Linus and for a good reason. It's impossible to base work on shifting sands.
How do loot boxes compare to all the different kind of booster packs out there in terms of gambling? I feel there is little difference, should they then be banned too?
I laughed.

You’re a beekeeper in the making. Awful puns seem to be part of the industry. One local company replaces the word ‘be’ with ‘bee’ in every instance. It’s horrid.
That concealing was a year ago. Now discovered by an internal investigation and disclosed. CEO has been different for a few months too.
>If you believe gender is a complete social construct

IIRC the nature-nurture studies show that nature is atleast 50% of the cognitive result on growing up. Atleast since the studies also binned a lot of stuff into "nurture" without much consideration as long as it's not nature. It might be more.

Thinking that gender is a purely social construct is just backwards to everything we've discovered in modern science. People can be gay because of their upbringing but most of the time that is just how they are. Same with transsexuality, it's mostly how people are not how they want to grow up, which should receive utmost respect. (though on the other hand, if CRISPR advances more we might have a "gay cure" and a "trans cure". Especially the ethical debate of a "trans cure" would be interesting)

> Some of this feminist/transhuman thinking, [...] are not rooted in reality

Luckily not all feminists. My sister has been one of those hardcore feminists but after having a situation in which she had to decide between getting a good grade and fighting for injustice against women, she changed her attitude that she should not fight against injustice like that if she can't uphold her principles in all situations.

Her reaction to this study now, relaxed, would probably have been different a year ago. I think a lot of people might react badly to the study and I'll keep an eye on it.

Reactions to studies are a study of humans in of itself already, observing the acceptance of data by a specific group can tell a lot about a group. Like pheromones can tell a rat a lot about a person.
The fines are indeed substantial: up to 4% of annual turnover. On top of thay they can force you to shut down the service in question until remediated. For an e-commerce company that can be even worse than the 4%.

Being fully compliant with GDPR is a mountain of work even if you thought you were doing all the right things before.

In practice, small companies/ start-ups might not be audited / reported / pursued very much but: a) you'll never know and b) at least all the big tech and e-commerce companies are smack on in the sights of several data protection and competition(!) authorities already. We're all scrambling to be compliant in time.

Source: first hand account from running the GDPR compliance project in e-commerce company.
> ... whether we should allow corporations freedom to function without public influence over their activities.

We don’t.
I've been using Typora to make my todo lists. It's a markdown editor. Super simple to type, and you can really got some professional looking layout, with headings and titles quickly too. Recently they built in a file browser. Open one file in a directory, and it will show you all the files in side panel. Which in my case are just todo lists for day of the week. But it could be any type of notes. Highly recommend it.
I am torn between my desire to see the numerous legitimate criticisms of the tech industry given deeper consideration and irritation at the eternally lazy way David "Applebee's salad bar" Brooks tackles anything.

The "destroying the young" thing is especially tiresome. Every new thing has been destroying the young. That's true at least as far back as the novel [1], and probably back to prehistory when elders complained that fire was making kids soft, what with their "cooking" and their "warmth".

It's also deeply self-defeating of him to be complaining about the lack of "cohesion" and "focused attention" in a sub-1000-word opinion piece that tries to make a half-dozen points, none particularly well. And all that in a daily newspaper, which is built to contain small amount of a great variety of things, and which makes a lot of its money from distracting its readers with ads. [2]

[1] e.g, point 4 of http://mentalfloss.com/article/52209/15-historical-complaint... and https://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/when-novels-wer...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/business/media/new-york-t...
I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another.

The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better.

So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.
How many escape do you use per board? I’m just knocking some together and can’t decide - we are early in the flow and I’m filling boxes at an alarming rate (first season).
Lazarus APT Uses an Android App to Target Samsung Users in the South Korea
Considering AMD has lost increasingly large amounts of money every year since at least 2013, I'd say AMD is pretty expensive.
Couldn't you say the same thing about any commercial web platform? Like AWS?
At yet half the republican members of congress can wax poetic about the glorious, revisionist, legacy of the southern confederates and their lovely Yankee killing generals with a glint in their eye and not a hint of scandal...

I don't know how it's gonna happen, but I think the Dems really need to get to a point where they could accept someone with a history like GWB and his "youthful indiscretions" as a candidate. Purity is a hard thing to find in the world.
It's "Red Dwarf"[0] returning, I tell you. After an unfortunate close pass to a black hole that stretched it a bit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf
That's silly. Uber has a revolving door with Google and Facebook. Nobody is getting screwed, or it would not work to hire people away.
I've always thought ROS was largely meant for prototyping. An http transport layer for all nodes (even on the same machine) doesn't seem like the right choice for a production system.
PlayerUnknown’s Battleground to get China release via deal with Tencent
Jeeeez you wrote hdminer in 2010...that is... being suuuuuper early in BTC! Congrats on sticking with it all the time! (Just realized I read that Whitepixel article on your blog a while back, awesome content!)
I'm sure they correlate: but the thing with correlation is that you can have correlation even when there are whole classes of situations where the relationship doesn't hold.

On the same os +drivers I'd be willing to believe that this measure is almost certainly useful (even there, it's not 100%). But it's exactly the kind of thing that a different way of, say... compositing... might the implementation to work a little differently, such that you're comparing apples to oranges. If BitBlt simply gets access a little earlier or later in the same pipeline and hey presto: you've got a difference in software that is meaningless in reality.
They Lied – It’s Not a Sprint
> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks.

This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors.

And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.
> Here’s how the hack went down: Two attackers accessed a private GitHub coding site...

I am wondering what private Github coding site stands for? If it is GitHub Enterprise, then how those hackers would even access it from outside of the uber network? Does it mean that they had access to Uber's VPN as well?
> Comparing the tech industry's effects to the tobacco industry is a bad joke

Nah. Even people in the industry are starting to wake up to the ethical questions that come with making addictive products. E.g., this thoughtful piece from a game company on why they're abandoning the free-to-play model:

http://www.clickerheroes2.com/paytowin.php
Yes, it's terrible. Make sure none of the following list apply to you or anyone you care for.

>If you’ve ever taken antibiotics, had a vaccine, a blood transfusion, dialysis, an organ transplant, chemotherapy, bypass surgery or joint replacement, you have benefited from animal testing and research. In fact, practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals.

>Many diseases that once killed millions of people every year are now either preventable, treatable or have been eradicated altogether. Immunizations against polio, diphtheria, mumps, rubella and hepatitis save countless lives and the survival rates for many major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs and the design of sophisticated medical devices and surgical procedures.
When I was a kid, compuserve, aol, even msn later were all walled gardens. It was shocking when compuserve opened up gateways to the fledging web.

The open network existed as "normal" for maybe a decade.
Innovecs Is Leading the Way in Big Data Application Development
"I can guarantee you Google protects this data more securely than your carrier does."

That's not true at all. My carrier falls under strict EU privacy laws and regulations, Google - doesn't.
There’s definitely a schism along the fault lines you describe. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a “TERF”, look it up.
Rodent rights! Future generations will judge us harshly on flippant animal experimentation.
During the dial up days, the last mile connection (the phone company) was under heavy Title II regulation.
Why does it matter who initiated it? The correct answer either way is To not get sexually involved with subordinates. There is no moral ambiguity here. It is wrong to abuse a position of power.
It's become really easy to see when NYT has decided to push an agenda. The Trump/Russia thing, for a while. "Tech is evil" for a while now, too. It wouldn't be as annoying if they didn't promote themselves as a bastion of truth with marketing lines like "Independent Journalism. More essential than ever." Much of NYT is editorialized storytelling, not independent journalism. Sometimes it's overt, but more often it's subtle by the simple selection of what stories to publish and which to not. I feel like it didn't used to be this way and it has become worse over time.
> I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another.

This is a good way to only hear opinions you like. Maybe try to work on feeling less personally demonized by people talking about an entire industry and it's effects on society?

Also, we in tech throw stones at literally every other industry all the time. We're out to disrupt everyone else's industries, remember? We can dish it out but can't take it?