skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a great illustration of the fundamental problem with libertarianism.

> [C]lassical liberals don’t think corporations are any more altruistic, so we propose to carefully sequester them from the source of special privilege: government. What Cooper seems not to understand (though he seems close at times to grasping it) is that corporations would rather not compete; they’d rather appeal to “the sovereignty of nations,” which, as we have noted, is their originator, to hobble or outlaw their competitors.

The glaring omission in this analysis is that government, while it is one potential source of special privileges for corporations, is not the source of special privilege. Simply keeping government out of the affairs of business will not prevent corporations from reaching positions from which they no longer have to compete.

As we've seen countless times over the last few hundred years, corporations can reach such a position quite effectively without any help from government whatsoever, by driving their competitors out of business (monopoly), or by colluding rather than competing (oligopoly), or through other means of imperfect competition. And when that happens, there is only one actor with enough power to free up the market again -- government.

Asking (as the article does) for government to "confine itself to the protection of individual liberty" is, therefore, a call for society to accept these market failures as effectively un-fixable. (Which is perhaps why libertarianism is such a popular philosophy among those who run the corporations that would rather not compete.)
> Threading gets a lot of bad rep
> not because "kernels suck at it",
> but because person making such a
> statement wrote their program as
> an exercise in lock contention

Well put.
I'm going to have this printed on a plaque and hung above my desk.
He's a good representative to show how Facebook actually are politically bias to some degree, where they absolutely shouldn't be. I'm sure there are examples of similar actions to the 'left' also, and if there aren't now there might become in the future when the political winds change.

I think Cruz played his role as partial acknowledged politician very well.
I’ve been working on https://www.sanitycheck.io for the past 18 or so months. It started as a project to archive Google Search Console data - but now the most useful part to me is the SEO change testing aspect.

It’s a tool I use myself every day on my own sites - which is something I’ve found critical to keeping up progress on side projects.
I mean it has plenty of utility.
Brokerchooser- Compare, choose, trade
All these issues -- potential physical and mental problems -- you cite apply to other professions as well. Why treat prostitution any different? Obviously there's a need for this kind of work. Why not make sure that at least the workers doing this kind of job enjoy the same protection as other workers?
> They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it

Feynman was only speaking for himself there. It's been 25 years since I read that book but I thought he described some of the efforts by Einstein, et al. to prevent the bomb from being used.
>Anyone could replace it, there is nothing actively stopping them from doing so.

Sure there is; all of the people on FB already. The fact that the software can be replicated is not the only consideration. If, in practice, they have a virtual monopoly due to user lock in then it's a reasonable debate to have.

I'm certainly out of my depth on the legal end of this, but your definition is far too simplistic.
Are people more likely to do something that is safe or is dangerous?

We can make similar arguments for all illegal activities. Why don't we make murder safer for the murderers? They're going to murder anyways, so we might as well keep one of the parties alive and healthy. Why don't we just give thieves all the free money they want? They are going to steal anyways, so we might as well make it more convenient for them.

In short, why have rules with negative repercussions at all? People are going to do 'wrong' anyways, so let's instead of doing something negative to them, make it as positive an experience as possible.
I am male and expressed an opinion that prostitution should be legal. But I have no desire to ever actually use such a service personally.

My opinion is based largely on the fact that there are plenty of women who want to do this, or particularly enjoy it, as well as the unfortunate cases of people who feel they have no other choice. In either of those cases, punishing the people who are in this industry is wrong.
deng has pointed out to me that "downvote to disagree" is in fact a valid thing to do on HN, per the site guidelines.

I agree with you, though, that it's better not to do so. A downvote is one bit of information (literally). An intelligent comment expressing the reason for disagreement is much better.

Even for factually incorrect comments, evidence of the incorrectness is better than just a downvote.

But for personal attacks, axe-grinders, and trolling, sure, downvote them. Absolutely.
if num_active_processes is much larger than number of cores, then your software architecture is wrong and you're just stress testing your OS's lock primitives and CPU's TLB logic.

Lots of threads/processed blocked on stuff is ok. Lots of them all wanting to run and be CPU bound is bad design
If you're an engineer, it seems like you work at Netflix, right?
The concept of assignment only makes sense in a context with a time axis. Computation has a time axis (location of the instruction pointer) but math does not.
"Tech companies shouldn't have pushed the coolness factor so much and instead let people continue to think tech was for nerds"

This. Right here. I'm convinced this is why we typically don't see this kind of culture pollution in areas of tech where the barrier to entry is still fairly high, requiring an amount of skill and dedication that these people are not willing to invest.
> I wonder who exactly the opponents of sex-legalization are trying to "protect". Trafficking victims? They will be vastly better served by a well regulated workplace. The sex workers themselves? I think this article debunks that myth.

To play devils advocate,

* Regulation does reduce the risk, but reducing the risk may also increase the amount. Similar to legalizing drugs making them less dangerous but also more common.

* The article doesn't debunk the other position, as the sex workers interviewed may not be representative of the majority. That is exactly the claim put forth by the proponents, in fact (whether it is true or not, I don't think we can tell).
Unless you're suggesting that nobody I interact with in real life is worth "associating with", then that statement has never been true.
Also, I definitely can relate to today's onion video:

https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-st...

I think this (parody) video does a better job of capturing employee sentiment than any Business Insider article.
Zuck actually deflected that one well, and didn't have to elaborate unfortunately (or the Senator was ill prepared). There's a lot more to facebook ads than just "we show ads". To which degree do they sell out users' info to the advertisers?
>It's fine to choose to have a kid.

Thanks for your blessing. It's everything else you said )moreso the way in which you said it) that's wrong.
The body is an especially intimate part of one's being. To denigrate it to be another's tool is no different than slavery, even if one receives financial recompense.
Wow there is no pleasing you?

I bet you bitch and moan about privacy concerns with a tin-foil hat.. and it's because you are using services for 'free'. But when a paid alternative is suggested which by definition would have more resources to put toward your privacy you bitch about that too??

Way to have it both ways...
Modified gravity theories don't fit all the evidence, such as the distribution of mass in the Bullet Cluster [1] or the large-scale structure of the CMB [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Cosmic_microwave_b...
Is it the html <keygen> tag v2, done right?
> Coming soon, Facebook Pro(TM)! Literally putting a price on your privacy.

I imagine that will play out like Apps on iOS and Android that you buy the Ad-Free version of only have have Ads show up a year later.

You buy your privacy and they change the ToS sothat you're not.
I was always a fan of these nihilist security questions:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/nihilistic-password-secu...
Part of it (I suspect) is that while Equifax's issues were egregious and woefully under-responded to, it still is essentially one thing...your FICO score and the info that feeds it, that was the main loss/breach.

To a lot of casual consumers, that still feels fairly attenuated from daily life.

FB on the other hand, is something people willfully interact with and hold 'private' conversations on and divulge personal data across a spectrum of areas. It feels more visceral and violating.
Anyone who doesn't think Facebook has a monopoly should read "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel. Seems people are missing some of the basics.
"Hate speech" and "objective" don't belong in the same sentence. It is a subjective term open to interpretation, which is why it's dangerous.
The real way to tell if there is a substantial number of employees and potential employees who feel this way is looking at Facebook compensation vs similar companies. If they have to offer more money for similar work then that means that there are a substantial number of people who don't want to work for them. If they are offering similar money, then that means that the people who don't want to work for Facebook are not a significant number of people.

The compensation will tell the real story apart from all the publicity and attempts at spin.
Let's just ignore all the women who want to do this work, to protect the few who didn't want to but felt like it was the only way to make ends meet.

But yes, I am sure people generally agree that the women who don't want to be sex workers should have other options (or be made aware of options).
Nothing. The general public doesn't care, only us nerds on websites like this do and when you think about it, it's a very sad and disturbing reality.
I don't think I've heard of this before; I'd love to watch it if you have a link!
>virtual monopoly due to user lock in

But users aren't locked in. They have not paid a yearly fee which still has 11 months left, they don't have to pay a fee to leave, and they don't have to pay a fee to join the other network.

Users can come and go as they please, and there are alternatives they can use, if they choose.

If they don't want to use the other network because their friends aren't on it, that's just their choice, not "lock in".
Punishment is a legitimate disincentive. Are there going to be fewer prostitutes when it is safe and easy? If the field is inherently injurious to women, why should we incentivize women to become prostitutes in any way?
> there is nothing that makes it a monopoly. Anyone could replace it, there is nothing actively stopping them from doing so.

While I don't entirely agree with this line of argument, it's usually argued that there is in fact a very massive cost in attempting to do so and that Facebook has a very large moat with its network effect. It's very difficult to unseat an entrenched & dominant company in any field first of all, second you need large amounts of capital to compete in such a set market. You have to change the minds of practically every adult American and switch them away from a product they already know and are comfortable with (that is also 'free' to use), that's beyond difficult.

Look at how much capital Facebook raised pre IPO, you will need more than that to unseat them; no venture capitalist is going to give you that (which is why nobody is seeding Facebook competitors with billions of dollars, despite the fact that they'll earn $20 billion in profit this year; it's the same reason nobody is seeding Google competitors by the thousands).

> I'm sure for decades the Ford Motor Company was thought of as a Monopoly... and then they went bankrupt

Ford Motor Company has never gone bankrupt. Perhaps you're thinking of GM, which has been dominant in the US over Ford since 1932.
If it is a password to a bank account or a brokerage account I would love to be able to set the system up to only be able to reset my password in person at a branch or office. Charge me for the reset if you think it's too expensive to have that service for free.

For other passwords people should just write them down and store them in a safe place (like in there desk at home).
I don't see the problem. Once you've registered with your messaging service, like WhatsApp, you're sending messages to people not numbers.
You're conveniently ignoring the mass witch hunts for nazis and other folks with wrongthink.

It's a valid concern.

EDIT: The downvotes kind of illustrate my point for me. There are a lot of people, especially with Twitter pile-on culture, that get lumped in by lefties as being nazis, misogynists, or whatever, and then this gets repeated by others until they're stuck with the label.
> The field itself is inherently destructive to all participants.

This is the language of moralizing, not of problem solving. You aren't interested in making anything better; you're interested in making sure everyone knows how "bad" you think this thing is.

The thing is: no-one's arguing there's badness here, just over what the bad and not-bad parts are. You aren't going to convince people that it's all bad, going about it the way you are, though.
Sorry, but now you've lost me.

You say -- to paraphrase -- 'the True Feminist only speaks what's good for women and only I decide what's good for women'. That's not an argument, it's a dogma.
The fact of the matter is, they may not actually care about you. Especially if the money is tight, employers are rare yo actually reward investment into the company.
I thought the issue was that foreign actors were able to use Facebook to push for their candidate of choice, not that Trump was "unapproved" (why do you use quotes? that phrase doesn't appear anywhere in the comment you're responding to).
System Design Practices
This article is arguably fake news. To support their claim they cite a few tweets and one line from a NYTimes article which is barely related. I love Hacker News but lately this place has had a bit of a singular focus... It seems to me that the ban on politics should perhaps be extended to a softban on Facebook news.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-facebooks-employees-crisis-... has actual sources, and comes to the opposite conclusion.
"The latter has more implication on damaging a person's prospects of living productively in society"

Does it though?

If someone wanted to destroy you they'd rather have your psychological profile than your social security number.

The worst someone can do with your social security number is have some collectors (who legally can't collect money from someone who doesn't owe it) bother you.

The worst someone can do with your psychological profile is undetermined at this point, but it looks to be much much worse.
This is a deep misunderstanding of IQ. As the product of two MENSA-ns, I can say with good faith: While high-IQ people do seem to have more varied interests than average people, IQ doesn't so much as govern interest as govern processing speed. One of the original purposes of IQ was selecting for fighter pilots -- fighter pilots with higher IQs means that you have fewer deaths, because they are able to process and react to stimulus faster than others, and they are better able to process the spacial information given to them.

The best analogy I know of for people in tech, is that you should think of it like having a slightly faster processor with slightly bigger caches. You're more able to manipulate things in your head (thanks to having a bigger stack), react to stimulus faster, change focus easier, and so on.

Someone with a lower IQ is capable of the same tasks, but they are likely to need to expend more effort and time at achieving the same result. From observation I can say the difference is mostly marginal.

As a personal, anecdotal example: One of my parents is in the top 1% of the population, the other is in the top 2% of the population. I have observed many times that my parent in the top 1% will come to a revelation, and voice it -- and as they begin voicing the first syllable or so, the same revelation occurs to the other parent. It's quite amusing. [I feel I should add -- there are cases where the roles are swapped, but that usually only happens when their attentions are focused on separate things].

EDIT: Also note that having a high-IQ doesn't magically make you less-susceptible to bad teaching or incorrect explanations. There exists a sub-society of MENSAns who were told by their tutors that they were slow and stupid, and that they would never amount to anything, and who have low self-esteem and other problems from being told such things.

EDIT 2: An example of someone in science with a low-IQ (of 98), is Julia Robertson, known for her work on Hilbert's tenth question, and her work in decision theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Robinson
I'd also want to see the link, if available!
> Why is the FB leak getting more attention and momentum that the Equifax hack?

Mainly because the news and other mass media feed on recency. Equifax is yesterday's news.

Also, Facebook is actually a concept in people's lives, whereas Equifax is just a kind of hidden parasite that large numbers of people are affected by, but do not interact with directly.
Also Visual Basic.
Other professions are legitimate needs. Such as soldiers, police, firefighters. A society needs them to function well.

Prostitution destroys society. It breaks up families. It leads to fatherless children. It spreads STDs. It teaches men to treat women as sex objects. It denigrates sex in general to pleasure instead of its main purpose of creating the next generation.
Approximately $1,000, with some variation due to individual choices and variation, on the US side of things. I can’t speculate as to what it costs on your side of things.
Considering these developers usually work with people in time zones west of them this is actually the expected time. 11AM would mean 7:30AM German time. Which would align much better with the German dev hours and make working together smoother.
Yeah. When CDs first came out for the PC, you could suddenly have all this neat digital stuff at your fingertips that was effectively not practical to download at any decent rate. You could also start getting photos scanned for the first time.
Usually it's a mix. Then you try to spend as little effort as possible on the chores, and focus you energy on the part you enjoy.

If you literally don't enjoy what you are doing at all, no productivity optimization can help you.
Probably has something to do with the frequency of how often people consciously use Facebook. Maybe they have comparable amounts of data, but Facebook puts a lot of effort into making you think about it all the time.
This was my first reaction as well, but I've met people IRL that seriously believe that the Equifax hack is more important than Facebook's tracking.

This is definitely a discussion worth having.
You still don't support Bitcoin Cash local wallets, and you still don't support any kind of local wallet that is more than a single address. Come on guys, it's been months, this is basic stuff.
Not very widely-- it's not really necessary for 4K@60 over many standard links, and 8K is very rare. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3187336/displays/more-high-e...
Did you get to 500K by switching the jobs/companies? I wonder how you negotiated such number, or maybe they offered it right away?
I hope Sam realizes that living this lifestyle is not possible for anyone in a traditional 9-5. Most people I know don’t have the luxury of thinking about what to work on, they have to get up, go to work, come home, and do it again in order to even have a place to sleep. Every restaurant Sam eats at is staffed with people working 80 hours a week just to stay above water.
Your premise only exists in a simulation where humans aren't human, where instead they're robots that think solely rationally and are not inconvenienced by anything. That's nearly the exact opposite of how people behave.

When you're actually dealing with human customers and users, it's nearly impossible to convince them to switch once they're comfortable with a product or service. Those people have to be tremendously inconvenienced to do so, while simultaneously being presented with a great alternative - often it requires a 10x-style superior product that isn't just great, it's a huge leap over what's already available.

Switching costs are immense with Facebook. If you have 100 friends on there, and you're the first to abandon their network and move to a new social network where none of your friends exists - that's a huge cost for the average person. It may or may not be a cost to you, it is an immense cost to most people. That also applies if you attempt to maintain profiles on both networks, it's a time and annoyance/inconvenience cost, people hate such.
Even if someone wants to do something, that doesn't mean it is good for them. We as a society should not incentivize people to do self harm, even if the person chooses the self harm. It is essentially incentivizing women to commit suicide.
Thanks! And thank you for deleting this as well. There was no need for my comment to stay open to discussion once it was addressed. No need to give us all more space to go down a rabbit hole.
Depends on the dialect. It was mandatory on the Sinclair BASICs, for example (ZX81/ZX Spectrum), but optional on the Amstrad (Locomotive/Mallard) and BBC BASICs. A quick search suggests it was optional as early as "MicroSoft"'s Altair BASIC: http://swtpc.com/mholley/Altair/BasicLanguage.pdf

As someone who learned first on a ZX81, I'd always assumed that "LET X=5" was the canonical form, and that "X=5" for assignment was just a shortening for convenience.
Gravitational Quantization in Planetary Systems, Galaxies, and the Universe
hehe, you are right, I can only see it now tho
New research shows successful founders are far older than the Valley stereotype
His line of questioning as to whether or not Facebook asked new hires their political affiliations was also very unprofessional.

He knew the answer (no, because that's so clearly egregiously illegal) but wanted to make the insinuation.
Cambridge Analytica was more of a "oh, WE made that bomb?"
Because Equifax was a hack, Facebook's situation was WAI.

Your bank putting a bad lock on the safe is different from the bank creating a back door where others get a red carpet to the safe.
Instapage Raises Series A
> I agree, secret questions are dumb... but what are the alternatives?

Unless you are running a system intended as the users primary email provider, 2FA + email covers basically all the things that “security question” auxiliary passwords are used for, with both better usability and better security. For high security cases, 2FA + in person recovery may be more appropriate.
Tesla’s popularity is always surprising to me. They seem like a really shitty company to deal with.
Don't you think that should be up to the owner of that body, rather than you?
LMFAO.
Are we really supposed to take this seriously? Are they stupid, or do they think we're stupid?

Of course there are foreign powers that demonstrably buy (not steal) US elections. Israel observably does with AIPAC being the most notable. I'm sure plenty of other foreign countries do the same to a greater or lesser degree. Does anyone really think the London financial elite have no influence on US elections?

It's funny how all of these globalist shills suddenly get nationalist when it comes to Russia because of Trump.
Show HN: My winter project, BlockLike.js, an educational JavaScript library