skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep writing paragraphs to respond to topics like these, but every time I find myself just linking to @aphyr instead, who put it so much more eloquently than I can.

https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_ubyrb0

Paste:

Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings, with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct impact on those humans.

For example, color schemes determine whether color-blind people are able to quickly scan active vs inactive options and understand information hierarchy. Font sizes and contrast ratios can make the interface readable, difficult, or completely unusable for visually impaired people. The sizes of click targets, double-click timeouts, and drag thresholds impact usability for those with motor difficulties. Default choices of interface, configuration, and documentation language embed the project in a particular English-speaking context, and the extent to which your team supports internationalization can limit, or expand, your user base.

With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. The choice to minimize the thought you put into those decisions does not erase the decisions themselves.

At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome, or render the community inaccessible entirely. These too are political choices. Your post above is one of them.

There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion. Consider: you wish to take only the best developers, and yet your post has already discouraged good engineers from working on your project. Doubtless it has encouraged other engineers (who may be quite skilled!) with a similar political view to your own; those who believe, for instance, that current minority representation in tech is justified, representing the best engineers available, and that efforts to change those ratios are inherently discriminatory and unjust.

Policies have impact. Consider yours.
Or you could design your application to not need all the bells and whistles and complicated shit that modern front-end web UIs throw in. 90% of pages could be static HTML. Probably 95% of "web applications" could be a set of forms with post-backs.

If I'm trying to make a thick-client, I'd rather build it in a language and platform that I don't have to fight quite so much.
lmao. so you're basically saying they made u mad because you think changing the word meritocracy discriminates against the ultimate oppressed group, White Males
Totally agree. Just found a few more from the Wikipedia page about Kernighan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

The Elements of Programming Style (1974, 1978) with P. J. Plauger

Software Tools (1976) with P. J. Plauger

The C Programming Language (1978, 1988) with Dennis M. Ritchie

Software Tools in Pascal (1981) with P. J. Plauger

The Unix Programming Environment (1984) with Rob Pike

The AWK Programming Language (1988) with Alfred Aho and Peter J. Weinberger

The Practice of Programming (1999) with Rob Pike

AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd ed. (2003) with Robert Fourer and David Gay

D is for Digital: What a well-informed person should know about computers and communications (2011)[12]

The Go Programming Language(2015)[13]

Understanding the Digital World: What You Need to Know about Computers, the Internet, Privacy, and Security (2017)
They're "proposing" to transform from rule by Engineering, i.e. meritocracy, to rule by HR.

Why am I feeling a sudden urge to read Animal Farm?
When taken with the main goal being compliance, not money extraction, yeah.

It remains to be seen if that ideal is upheld, and what kind of creative workarounds and ideals companies will try to explore.

As with any regulation or law, it has potential to be overbearing, favor incumbents and/or end up doing the opposite of its initial intentions.

That's the nature of anything society tries to do, though. If it doesn't work right, change it later.
If the sample sizes differ you should use a statistical test not just the variances
What's the big deal with using mingw?
Fair, I should've said that the market is only weakly incentivized.
The Stylus extension is great for that. Firefox's style editor lets you test CSS edits in real time. Then copy those CSS rules into Stylus and the browser will remember them. I use it to turn off all CSS animation too.

If you block all JS and CSS with umatrix, you can still read articles by pressing the "reader view" button in Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...
It's actually a pretty popular opinion among high performing minorities (at least the ones I know -- yes anecdotal). Sadly it's a position entirely absent and forbidden in the debate around this.

While I'm not one for identity politics, I have to say there's just something weird about watching wealthy and powerful white (usually) people debate this issue and completely ignore the voice of those they are supposed to be "sticking up" for.

For me the end goal looks like an attempt to remove the tool I and others used to make social and economic advancement (legitimate skill and hard work) and replace it with some sort of cherry picking of individuals from above. It's definitely something I'm not comfortable with.
I don't think the US can constitutionally adopt a law like this. Just the Right to Be Forgotten by itself violates the 1st amendment (and the EFF opposes it as it's generally used in Europe for censorship .. as we saw recently with the pulled NPR article).
Thanks for the recommendation. I read harry potter. It was great. Not sure what I learned about 'diveristy', though.
These people thing changing the code of our institutions works, specifically by giving them more power, that we can rid our institutions of the worst aspects of human nature: racism, sexism, xenophobia.

We can and should combat those aspects for sure, but we are also giving into another aspect of human nature: unchecked power and control, which will almost certainly lead to abuse. There is also no evidence that this will improve diversity.

It's just to make people feel good and put a few radicals in charge who want to dictate everything.
good choice. great series
Is there no laws w.r.t. negligence that can be used to punish negligent actors? If a door manufacturer is negligent in their construction of the door and someone gets robbed as a result, in violation of how they expected their door to work, is there nothing currently in the law that could help them?
can someone explain how would this make consent popups go away? I think consent popups are here to stay, what this lawsuit may change is what buttons will be on them
That sounds like a useful job to me - so long as said duct taping is conducted within a framework of strict architectural control...
They can always show the same ads as in the print edition, which are targeted to the demographic based on the content instead of targeted to a person based on their browsing history. It may not even be the case that they have less ad revenue.
> We had to engineer our food supply to keep up with what is needed to feed everyone.

Nah, not needed. It's only because people eat so much meat.
Okay I might have interpreted your words a bit too harsh and I have to admit that especially in the case of sqlite I am disappointed too that there is no easy way to built cross platform builds for projects which use it ;-)
Or, if you want to be highly amused:

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/unlocked-episode-76-...
It's very easy to tell just so stories like this, and there are a number of plausible ones. That doesn't make them correct. For example, we don't know how antibiotics kill bacteria. All the models such as impeding crosslinking of cell wall and the bacteria bursting from turgor pressure? All wrong. Still taught, but entirely wrong. We don't know how antibiotics work.
I think it feels different, at least to me, because "don't be evil" doesn't signal any value about how I would be treated if I worked at Google. We often evaluate such value statements by empathizing with the people affected. Everyone here wants to be evaluated on their merit. Everyone thinks they're meritorious.

So it's easy to see opposition to the word "meritocracy" and, putting oneself in the shoes of a member of the Mozilla org, feeling mistreated. On the other hand removing "don't be evil" doesn't feel like Google is going to start mistreating people I empathize with^.

^ I feel that way for different reasons :^)
How long have you used the Internet with that opinion?
The main point this article makes is that GDPR strengthens the Tech Oligarchs (Google, Facebook, etc.).

"...it’s clear that GDPR, while well intentioned, has already delivered a massive and unexpected externality: Instead of limiting the reach of the most powerful players operating in the world of data, it has in fact achieved the opposite effect."

"Put another way: You’re quite likely to click “I Consent” or “Yes” when a GDPR form is put in between you and your next hit of Facebook dopamine. You’re utterly unlikely to do the same when a small publisher asks for your consent via what feels like a spammy email."
From the paper: "Thus, the construction shows that even a single parameter can overfit the data, and therefore it is not always preferable to use a model with fewer parameters. "

Yes the author was clearly trying to make a point.
Good lord, what's that, 10 plugins?! Sure, we nerds could do that, but god help normal people! :(
Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012)
I agree with almost all of your substantive points, yet I find this post tremendously unhelpful.

If you cared about communicating effectively and changing minds, you would watch out for overheated language. It seems like you’re falling into the same trap of self-satisfied browbeating that you are accusing others of.
Suppose:

1. There exist some quality “merit” with a random uniform distribution across the population.

2. Some systems used to measure merit are biased for and against different subgroups of the population.

3. People obtain power and wealth based these biased measurements.

4. Subgroups with more power and wealth expend resources optimizing their performance on the tests, further biasing the results.

5. The winners in this system label it a “meritocracy”.

This story rings true to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean merit-based systems are all bad. They can still provide lots of opportunity to the poor who have enough aptitude they can still beat the test despite the bias. Other systems may have worse problems.

In practice, organizations like Mozilla still have a competitive merit-based hiring process even if they say they oppose meritocracy. They might attempt to apply a correction to unbias the merit measurement. Getting rid of the trappings of meritocracy might make it a more welcoming place to work for everyone and raise the total merit (even if there’s no way to measure it).
Not all business models are legal. If the companies don't want to abide by the rules of the EU, they can opt not provide services to people in the EU.
Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo here on HN.

But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why haven't people punished those sites by going elsewhere?

My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service provider.
Looks great -- putting it on the list!
Desert Bees Have a Secret: How to Survive a Decade of Drought
Is this trivial, or am I missing something?
Bio-inspired ultra low-power neuromorphic computing engine for embedded system
Free services existed before megatracking. Advertisements will go back to being targeted contextually, which will raise the value of views on "Tom's Train Fan Web Hub (and camera reviews)" at the expense of "Zuckerberg's Universal Website for Everyone." Look at Duck Duck Go for an example of advertising that is contextualized only with the current page, as opposed to the entirety of your personal history.
> When writing the Swift function, I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about how to write it. Should I use >>== or .flatMap()? Should I use my custom Result here at all, or should I stick to standard Swift and return NSError?, or maybe Bool with an NSErrorPtr? This was my first time using Result<Void>, and I started asking myself if I should create a typealias for that and maybe a helper function for the slightly strange looking success(()). The var bothered me. It always feels like a hack in FP, like you’re not smart enough to do it right. I wrote a different version that didn’t have a var. That duplicated self.cleanup in two places. So I started working on a new function that would let me include the conditional in the functional composition. I made and re-made a lot of choices.

This has basically been the entirety of my experience with Scala. Having too many options - including just writing Java without semicolons - is ultimately not great for my own productivity.
that's quite the stretch since the TCP 32764 issue was unique to sercomm routers, which is a Taiwanese router ODM. they write the firmware and create the hardware, then rebrand the UI for however linksys/netgear/whoever wants it.
Low-Level Date Algorithms
Furthermore, they can adjust their business.

The GDPR does not outlaw ads. It only makes using the worst types of ads difficult or maybe even impossible.

And that‘s unequivocally good!
The actual youtube metadata extraction is performed by the awesome ytdl-core library https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl-core https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl-core

For local work, https://www.npmjs.com/package/ytdl is a CLI powered by the same module. There is also a python-based youtube-dl command https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ that supports a ton of sites
It kind of seems like cheating, the same way Tupper's formula is cheating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_fo...

Edit: Dammit, userbinator's post below also mentions this an hour ago. :P
While it may make sense as a simpler option for less security-critical stuff, I don't think it will ever be as secure. The virtualization helps, but you are still decrypting documents on an internet-connected machine.
Site is down, but they've got a github project for everything

https://github.com/colobot
https://github.com/colobot/colobot

And a wikipedia article to help too, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot
When old reddit goes away, there will still be this:

https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv

I think there needs to be a movement to bring the WWW back to basic, readable, low-JS, animation-free, content-based sites.
> Just put up a paragraph explaining why you need that email address, an unchecked checkbox if you want them to agree to send irrelevant emails, and you're done.

Oops, seems you’ve forgotten about the “right to be forgotten”, and several other requirements. Better prepare yourself for those >$20 million fines — how dare you negligently handle personal data, college software engineering student!

I’m all for strengthening privacy protections and punishing bad actors in this domain, but designing strong regulations that don’t have seriously bad unintended consequences, is a really really difficult task. I’m not necessarily saying it shouldn’t be done; just that I don’t envy the jobs of those trying their best to do good for the world via regulations without accidentally destroying some really good things.

It may turn out that GDPR has few unintended negative consequences, or it may turn out the harmful side effects are far more severe than anyone predicted. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Personally, I wish there were a technical solution to privacy concerns — something akin to DRM, but applied to each individual’s personal data to prevent it from being used in unauthorized ways. That’s about the only kind of DRM I think I could really get excited about :)
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that advertising needs to be based around tracking your every move to make the best or most effective ads. Domain relevance is still one viable path in some cases.

The rise of adblocking and the ongoing arms race from that would prompt innovation and change eventually.

I don't think we need to underestimate the advertising industry's ability to route and innovate around regulation and irritated consumers.
Holy shit. As a Canadian who moved to the US, that was quite surprising.

Homeless people in big American cities are everywhere. In the couple of large Canadian cities I lived in, they were present, but not nearly as much. I guess Canada is better at hiding the problem.

I'm mostly surprised though that the Canadian social safety nets don't prevent it from happening more. As a kid my family was.... "not doing well" (understatement), and we were able to bounce back up and avoid becoming homeless reasonably easily by using every program imaginable (it took a lot). In the US, we would have been screwed. Yet those numbers...
Go has never been a single implementation language. It had a GCC backend since the start.

GC (Go Compiler) has very peculiar characteristics: for one thing, it's written in Go itself. Another important thing is that it's very fast. That was an objective since the beginning of the Go project.

Finally, comparison with Java GC (garbage collection) are quite nonsense as Go has a very different allocation pattern than Java software.
A solution might be to change the hiring process to test FP concepts instead of OO, or to use a lisp- so users do not need to learn a complex type system in addition to FP.
> Not all business models are legal.

But why make this one illegal?

We can make wedding planners illegal if we don't like them and then just say "not all business models are legal.

But that doesn't explain why. Why stop people from engaging in a transaction that both sides consider to be a win?
> ... and thinks it's because his being white/male makes him inherently better ...

Could you clarify how you reached this conclusion about someone specific, as opposed to a generalized fear such a person might exist?

In many years in the tech/engineering business I have never seen anyone express such a sentiment, despite having worked with more than my fair share of unpleasant people.

Presumption of competence, or obliviousness to one's own advantages are certainly present in the community. But I have not seen anyone express such supremacist ideas before.
Is a devops engineer who builds some microservice as a FaaS deployment in AWS just a 'duct taper'? Amazing to see someone say "taking existing things and creating something new is a bullshit job". That's a pretty insane position.
> At the community development level, your intentional and forced choices around language, schedule, pronouns, and even technical terminology can make contributors from varying backgrounds feel welcome or unwelcome.

The proposal is not to make Mozilla more diverse, nor would it accomplish that.

The proposal is to change the language to make Mozilla seem more diverse to people with very explicit radical views on diversity.

This will actually have the opposite effect of reducing diversity and only serves to empower the people with the correct views.
Meritocracy means your elevation within a group is not influenced by your ancestory, wealth, socail status, who are your friends with, how much you were/are-being oppressed, charisma or twitter followers.

The group has a mission. You help with mission, you go up. You work against the mission, you go down. Thats meritocracy.
>Could you source information on this? This speculation on GMOs being bad just cause of gene modifications is by itself unsubstantiated.

Isn't the "we modified hundreds of thousands of years of evolution with cool tools with surgical gene altering power not had by farmers before", while science still doesn't have a clear picture of nutrition and human metabolism, and did so in a few decades, and with a profit motive that has been shown time and again to make companies to make hasty decisions and sacrifice quality control and even bypass safety regulations, side the one that should prove that it's safe?

I guess, someone warning merely inspired by basic precaution for the new and relatively unknown elements being passed over to consumer in the case of radioactive substances used in commercial products and sold all other the place, was also making an unsubstantiated claim. Until someone else substantiated them...

https://io9.gizmodo.com/seriously-scary-radioactive-consumer...
So what exactly is the overall outcome that people (in the support camp) are expecting from GDPR? Obviously targeted content and advertising is not going to stop. But maybe the 0.01% of the population that wants to opt-out of targeting or download their data can (BTW most of this was already possible with most big players)? And they want this at the cost of much higher cost of compliance for hobbyists and startups? And what does all this mean in terms of net gain to society?
> Wind and solar is actually pretty easy to throttle back in principle; wind turbines need to have braking capabilities anyway in order to handle high winds

Also, many wind turbines are variable pitch: the angle of the blades can vary, so the controller can put them in a less efficient position to reduce the turbine power, or "feather" them to produce no power (the brake is also used in this case to completely stop the rotation).
They don't; it's not their problem.

I think addressing social discrimination is a great mission. But organization needs to focus, and can't address every great mission. Social discrimination is just not the focus of Mozilla's mission.
Quote from the covenant link:

> People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.

Watch out, they are coming for Linus :)
I guess I'm missing it too.

action(x) = a if x

= a if not x

Does action(x) not just equal a?
Because "in the EU, personal information cannot be conceived as a mere economic asset: according to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the processing of personal data requires protection to ensure a person's enjoyment of the right to respect for private life and freedom of expression and association".

https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/publication/16-09-23_...
This is just a trick of language though, because their single, hundreds-of-thousands-of-digits-of-precision “parameter” is really just a way of packing an agglomeration of other parameters into one bit bucket.

If you could take some construct and decompose it further into a bunch of independent components that separately account for the prediction behavior, then the number of parameters was really the number of components (or something close), and not “one parameter” artificially because of the way the separate parameters were packaged and decoded.

So even on this intended point, the paper’s result doesn’t really matter. In a Kolmogorov complexity sense, this “one parameter” model is more complex than many multi-parameter models that represent shorter programs, which is a way of saying this “one parameter” model is not really one parameter.
Apple recently gave up their self driving shuttle and told Volkswagen to do it for them. So yeah...cargo cult and tunnel vision.