skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Words are important. Diversity is important.
Changing words like "meritocracy" does not improve diversity.
It is the illusion of diversity, a feel-good opportunity for well-intentioned bystanders.
The true intent is for a small group of highly politically motivated people to gain more control.
The governance documents are about control and changing those documents means a shift in control.
The movement we are seeing here opposes meritocracy on political principle, as part of their worldview.
It does not stop there though.
They believe the only answer for "diversity" to put them in charge, beginning with government documents that reflect their radical worldview, see FreeBSD Code of Conduct.
Even if you support diversity, you have to realize these people do not care about diversity or inclusion, they are little authoritarians who want more power to dictate what people say and whose opinion matters more/less based on immutable characteristics.
We cannot allow authoritarians with such warped views of the world to seize control of key open source projects.
I would hope and expect that, at least, they would need a separate court order for every modem.

Also, chances are courts would deny them such orders on the grounds that it would be easier for about everyone involved if the FBI just asked the router’s owner to restore its firmware (why would the FBI need a court order against foo because bar hacked its modem?)
History suggests that every time a political entity chooses the winners and losers in a market that bad things happen -- usually in the form of a small number of increasingly larger companies capturing the market.

Google and FB (with their small army of lawyers) can afford to jump through all the hoops to make the regulators happy while "a small Belgian newspaper" will probably just get steamrolled.
> No, for being annoying about it.

Annoying? But to _whom_? You? Because, as everyone knows, you are the final arbiter when it comes to the interpretation of my comments.

> Because you went and decided to call out an English speaker, who was writing English, on the "incorrect" spelling of an English word? Sure, in Serbian it might be "Milanković's cycles", but in English it's Milankovitch.

Yes, because it's wrong. The romanization / anglicization of the name in Serbian Cyrillic is Milankovic. The form with "-tch" is simply wrong. You can go ahead and argue that the erroneous form is now well established, but I don't buy such argumentation. I strive to correct that.
Alternatively, LowEndSpirit.com will do you the same transfer for about $5/year. It's NAT ipv4 but that's fine for VPN (you get some ports forwarded) and has native ipv6.
I think this bit from the email is the most important:

> To sum up:

> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.

> -The word “meritocracy” itself has become a bone of contention which is unhelpful to us.

> -Meritocractic principles remain highly desirable and should be explicit.

> -We should also acknowledge the importance of measures we take to debias how authority is distributed.

In particular, note the second and third points. The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy". Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?
Agreed. Or perhaps leave the original subject line intact (and free of scare quotes).
Historically, hackers from Bulgaria been identified a major source of computer viruses.
That's the "€20M Or 4% of global revenue" question
> Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

I know this is well-intentioned, but so is most authoritarianism. We don't want to go down that road. Your personal preferences don't get to become law.
you sound like a conspiracy theorist. it is changing an inappropriate word, not shifting control over the entire company Mozilla. i doubt you care about diversity or improving the quality of the open source project
What control do you feel these figures will gain by removing the word meritocracy, specifically?
Ask HN: Resources for Updating JavaScript Skills?
The last time I did any heavy lifting with Javascript, jQuery was mandatory and Backbone and Mustache were hot. (So, yeah, only about 5 years ago.) But with a new side project requiring a modern front-end, it's time to get up to speed on the modern ecosystem.

A grasp of the absolute basics should be all I need to be able to research and learn the rest as the need comes up. What are some good practical introductory resources on the following topics that are aimed at a reasonably experienced Javascript developer and that won't take more than an hour or so each to grok?

1) modern javascript package management

2) React

3) ES6
What is "the service"? Why can't personalized ads be part of my service? I can how selling personal data isn't part to the service, but the ad content displayed to a user is.
How GDPR Kills the Innovation Economy
After reading the comments in the linked google group it seems like the issue is that they just need to more clearly define (and perhaps more fairly) what ‘merit’ is.

Each team/role should have this clearly defined to eliminate bias/subjectivity. Also by clearly defining that, you help escape a meritocracy where ‘authority’ decides what ‘merit’ is behind close-doors (which isn’t really a meritocracy).

Instead of abandoning a meritocracy because it has implementation issues, why don’t they just fix the problems?
right, so they split up for 16 years, and then circumstances unforeseen bring them together again for one last stand. I don't see a problem here!
Life and death on a superyacht
>The first line of Mozilla’s governance[0] states, “Mozilla is an open source project governed as a meritocracy.”

>The use of the term “meritocracy” to describe communities that suffer from a lack of diverse representation is increasingly seen as problematic: it proceeds from an assumption of equality of opportunity.

Is there evidence that the assumption of equal opportunities does not hold for Mozilla? It seems to me that they went to great lengths to ensure equality of opportunities.
Patrick Finch is a high-level strategist for Mozilla, has been there 8 years.
Play trivia and donate the prize money to a cause you believe in
I'm not sure whether you think a line of JS calling out to load a remote procedure would have been extraordinary, a root via a browser would have been extraordinary, any remote rootkit load would have been extraordinary, or whether the fact that it used to be possible to root Windows seems extraordinary. I'm no expert but none of this seems extraordinary to me. Things was loose in those days.
It's multiple things:

- the pattern library, a set of design guidelines (http://www.patternfly.org)

- Patternfly Core, the HTML+CSS implementations (Bootstrap-based)

- Framework integrations for React, Angular 1 and Angular-NG.

They're currently working on pf-next, which will no longer be based on Bootstrap and feature a new design.

(Disclaimer: not affiliated with Red Hat)
It is hard to be meritocratic for Mozilla when their C-levels get half million US dollars of salary in cash and fly on chartered business jets
So like a CEO, that is liable for all violations employees do that they've not managed to put on someone else?
I have had this problem with multiple commercial streaming sites on two different TVs from two different manufacturers. I’m a little dismayed they haven’t worked this out yet. Not everyone wants to string speakers. “Left” and “right” don’t mean much in some rooms.
I came from Java and don’t really miss anything most of the time. What you get out of the simplicity of the libraries and raw productivity more than makes up for the lack of OO features (which are abused and misused more often than not in static languages anyways). I don’t need an actor model, and I don’t miss Futures or RxJava stuff either. Channels and goroutines are plenty good enough for the vast majority of use cases. If the type system is really so bad that it basically doesn’t exist, I must be a godlike programmer to rarely have my Go code do something I don’t expect. The end product has always been stable, easy to read, and easy to debug in my experience.

Perhaps if we were to rebuild the ecosystems of each platform today things would look differently, but Java has so much baggage and shitty library APIs that it’s almost as if everything were written to abstract ideas with no regard for the human programmer using the final product. Even if your assertion that Go is the jankiest language after PHP aid correct, it basically doesn’t matter because it’s ecosystem is much more pleasant to work with than Java’s.
What about the millions of people who don't care about competitive gaming with strangers?
I love to hear about people like this. I have been wanting to set up a research lab for years. My only fear is that my abilities might be faded by the time I have the ability to spend all my time in the lab. No matter what though, we truly live in a time of near magical material science.
Elm is extremely opinionated and bottlenecked by one person. It’s great for the specific usecases it was designed for, but it gets tedious once you start interacting with external code and the outside world. The development cycle is slow and communication from the dev team is sparse. Some would argue that the slow deliberate, development pace is a good thing, but I was personally turned off by the fact that compiler bugs (and even documentation spelling mistakes) would stay open for months or years.

I know somebody is going to jump in and tell me I’m wrong, that they’re using Elm in production and it’s the best, etc. This is my personal experience from using Elm on several side projects and also in production at my last job.
Ask HN: Advice – Career Move Out of Wall Street into the Entrepreneurial World?
I've been within the financial industry for now 20 years dealing with trading technology and operations, 18 years with the same Wall Street firm.

The culture has changed over time and not for the good. We are now more concerned process and governance and not delivery. It used to be a culture of high performing team. Now it's all about having a meeting to meet and ensure that feelings don't get hurt.

All this has led me to reconsider what's important in life, family yes! And maybe start something of mine.

What advice would you give as I take the plunge into the entrepreneurial world.

thanks
They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34.

Wow.
Is anyone aware of similar sites for other cities? Would be interested to see Tokyo.
The GDPR privacy law happened, and all I got were these lousy emails
Can you give evidence for this assertion? I feel like it could contain some type of supervirus which may wipe out the human race. I feel like Zombie overthrow would be bad.
Gluconeogenesis is not the same thing as muscle catabolism.
Whilst all the articles seem to be accessible if you know the exact URL, the homepage only shows the latest stories and there are no links to different news categories.

Also, the articles seem to be missing links and the videos are not available.

If all you want is the text of the articles and you only want the latest stories, the EU experience is probably great. But if you want more, you're probably going to be disappointed.
The post cites "Gender difference and bias in open source" as a supporting evidence, but it is super unconvincing.

The study found, in the study's own words, "Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s". They still conclude bias against women (not men)! They have their reasons, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. For more details than you probably want, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exci...

Meritocracy may be problematic, but the proposition needs better evidence than that.
The WRT54 is dog slow by today's standards. My residential Comcast service is faster than it can handle; my max down almost doubled when I swapped my WRT54GL for an AC3200
Sure-thing principle
This is the suggested modification:

"Mozilla is an open source project. Our community is structured as a virtual organization. Authority is primarily distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they show their ability through contributions to the project. The project also seeks to debias this system of distributing authority through active interventions that
engage and encourage participation from diverse communities."

While it removes the word "meritocracy" it clarifies and validates the exact manner in which meritocracy is being promoted: "members as they show their ability through contributions to the project". While there is a debate to be had between the two formulations, the current HN title seems misleadingly editorialized for two reasons:

1. It is a proposal by two members, yet to receive ratification from the organization.

2. The suggested change still emphasizes the principle of meritocracy without using the word.
Let's say you get "a" tries to succeed. You'd expect equally talented candidates x, and y, to have Pr(x|a) == Pr(y|a).

But what if y only had "b" tries, where b<a? What would y have to be to make Pr(x|a) == Pr(y|b)? Our intuition seems to say that there will be a lot of variance in Pr(y|b). But the candidate's skill hasn't actually changed, just we aren't measuring it with the same fidelity!

And that's all there is to it. If you no longer assume everyone has an equal chance to show their skills, then the meritocracy isn't actually working as intended. Good "y" candidates are getting ignored for worse "x" candidates, just because "x" candidates had more chances.
Why exactly do people contend that meritocracy somehow clashes with diversity? The implications being made by suggesting the two be mutually exclusive are frightening.
Do you think people which get really upset by word X representing entity Z will not get really upset after a while by word Y representing the same entity Z?

This is quite literally how euphemism treadmills start out.
>Is it worth fighting that, or can you just use different words for the same thing?

Today it's "meritocracy". Tomorrow it's "talent".

It will never be enough.
What respect? Saving additional metadata?

I totally get your point. But my product already focuses on privacy. Saving any kind of metadata/communication data is more than I do now.
When it cropped up here a while back I don't remember anything seeming problematic with FreeBSD's new CoC. What's the issue with it?
Not that in common law, some warranties cannot be evaded, such as the goods being fit for use.
The article also talks about a black hole accreting at a rate of 1% every million years that is 'currently' 20 billion solar masses.

It is 12 billion ly away, which means, if it really does continue getting 1% larger every million years it's actually ... 143,719,397,330,047,128,616,744,826,647,657,321,145,325,176,127,225,856 billion solar masses at this moment. (if the compound interest calculator is to be believed)

I really hope that's not true.
Democrats Go All-Out to Avoid Disaster in California House Races
fake editorialised title, please change to original
I frequently use the old reddit design (as in old old) because the new and new new design both suck a lot on mobile in terms of speed.

There is nothing native about a website which has actual lagging while I scroll when the previous version could do it just fine in desktop mode.
I have. Using Opera mobile tho.
It doesn't. I can't explain falsity.
> It seems that the only support is from internal RH devs

That's because it's an internal RH framework. Red Hat happens to open source most of their stuff, so they put some effort into marketing PatternFly, but it's still mostly used by themselves.

That being said, the people on their Slack channel are extremely helpful!
What is the process between this complaint and a fine / order to rectify?
It translates to 'worker'

It's a made up word. If it translated to 'worker' he'd have just written 'worker' in Czech.
What if it is a personal website, not affiliated with any corporation?
An Open-Source Ruby Gem for STEM Projects
How is it not differentiable in its logarithm? The function is just f(x) = sin^2(A * B^x), for some constants A and B (A encodes the data while B just determines the precision). The function itself is infinitely differentiable, so its logarithm will be infinitely differentiable everywhere except where f(x) = 0. However, it's not zero at the points that matter, and in any case we can avoid the issue by just adding a constant.
It wanted me to sign up when I tried. Haven't in ages.

Wikipedia incorrectly states that Lancia only sells in Italy (see for example http://www.lancia.fr/mopar or http://www.lancia.de/mopar). Also makes no mention of the modern Flavia (re-badged Chrysler 200, but sold as a Lancia nonetheless in Europe). It's a bit like not mentioning the Mercedes-Benz X-Class because it's based on the Nissan Navara.
Meritocracy, like all words that reduce to "good thing", are always troublesome. No one ever claims to be a "bad thing"ocracy. The issue is the opacity of the concept of merit. How do you distinguish being a meritocracy in some good sense from insisting you are a meritocracy and thus poisoning any discussion that you are not one?

Using words to maintain a culture has a sort of Newton's third law. It might push you towards striving to be "good thing", but it also pushes back, making people resistant to the idea that you aren't striving for "good thing". This is an inescapable fact of how humans hold values.

Better words are the ones that aren't exclusively evaluated by humans. These are things on which people can agree there exists an impartial measure of the thing. There is no such measure of merit. Merit is an undecidable value at best and an incoherent one at worst.

So, counterintuitively, "good thing" words to describe values are kind of bad. It is easy to construe acknowledging their badness as thinking the underlying concept is bad. I think that is happening in this comment thread. I think rewarding people with trust and responsibility based on merit is a great idea! I think it is detrimental to the cause to codify that in your mission statement.
> -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge evident bias in representation in the project.

I don't see the connection; it is a well established fact that no two people have the same opportunities, regardless of country. In one country you might see large differences between skin colours, in another the prime opportunity differentiator is parental income and so forth.

Therefore you would expect that differences in opportunity (which are infinitely greater than innate differences in ability relevant to software engineering between the various popular subdivisions of humanity [1]) more or less transfer directly to the composition of meritocratic organisations.

If that statement is meant to imply that an actual meritocratic organisation would closely track the composition of the general populace, then I'd say that it fails to acknowledge bias in society, because then the assumption backing the statement is society already providing equal opportunities, which we know is patently false.

[1] Just because something is statistically significant does not mean it's relevant; effect magnitude must always be considered.
I read 0 emails and unsubscribed from all of them. This is what GDPR policy makers intended to happen, right?
I’ve rarely seen a website load so fast on mobile...
Overfitting.
Finally seeing the Squidbillies episode from 2010 in real life
We use unnatural tricks to lower the cost of production, the production of a luxury (read: not a necessity at the levels being consumed) that is very natural resources intensive to produce; to say nothing of the pollution produced by production.

The lower cost increases consumption; using more resources, producing more pollution. That is contributing to health issues in those who consume it. The lower peoduction coat is eaten up by medical coats.

It sounds like a terrorist plot.
> The real issue here is that some people get really upset by the word "meritocracy".

Clearly you have never dealt with a white man who is better off than certain women, or people from ethnic minorities, and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better and invokes "meritocracy" all the freaking time.

I have. And I'm a half-Asian male - I can't imagine what it's like to deal with that jerk if I were a woman or an ethnic minority he didn't consider inherently intelligent (yes, really - he was actually surprised I was upset at the things he said because he wasn't talking about me, as if that was the reason for me to disagree with him).

When the word "meritocracy" is used to structurally shut down debates of sexism and racism, it is no longer about meritocracy.
Ahh okay, I get it. This is pretty accurate. I do think they arrived to that from different places though. PHP being more about getting shit done and iterating quickly, and Go having the opinion that the wrong abstraction is worse than no abstraction at all. In Go’s case, it’s more of a reaction against the overuse of abstraction and GoF patterns in C++/Java/C# IMO.
Modern CMake short tutorial and best practice
If the exploit wasn't put there intentionally, then we're talking about a bug in the software. Do you really want liability for software bugs? The consequences of that would be substantial. Imagine if Apache or PHP were liable for their bugs used on websites across the internet. The projects would shutdown immediately.. no one could fund the potential liability.
Source: The extraordinarily large amount of PCs I fixed for people during that era.
Solving the GDPR Crisis: A bootstrapping entrepreneur’s take
As someone who comes from a minority group, I absolutely want to be judged on the technical merit of my contributions and not my skin color, gender or genetic background.

Implying that people who aren't white males can't succeed in a meritocratic environment is racist and condescending. I don't see how this helps diversity one bit.
Really? People who interpret 'meritocracy' in a narrow, little known historical context, as being a conspiracy against miniorities, rather than it's currently accepted form, sound like conspiracy theorists.
Interesting, just when the "post-meritocracy" manifesto was published, Mozilla changes sides on meritocracy :

https://postmeritocracy.org/

authored by Coraline Ada Ehmke who is already well known for their activism in IT and open source with the contributor convenant https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ . Coincidence? or consequence?
That's funny, you expressed confusion just two post back about whether you are doing falls under GDPR :)
The improvement is that the function can represent any plot by adjusting a single coefficient, whereas a polynomial approximation has a number of coefficients equal to the number of points in the plot.
I think the concept is "a purely-meritocratic system cannot be achieved without equal opportunity". This is because one's contribution to governance is proportional to their merit and to their opportunity to express this merit.

For a concrete example, a programmer in Seattle has much higher opportunities than the same programmer in rural Burundi, so he can put the same effort into much more work, and ultimately be much more relevant in supposedly meritocratic governance.

However, the original post is not concerned with opportunity due to geographic location or access to technology, but rather to a bias where code submitted by programmers with a feminine username and profile picture is approved less often than average. Note that the linked study does not refer to Mozilla explicitly, though.
They clash. You either have a meritocracy or diversity quotas; you either choose people because they’re competent or because they are of a certain sex/race.