skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm actually glad to see the conclusion. Everybody wants to censor what they don't like. There are people who believe free speech is not the ultimate value, but rather to protect people from 'harm'. In this case 'harm' being ideas they don't agree with.

The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.
Designing Drones Using Evolution
You're doing it wrong, not Google: You're blocking the wrong bot user agent. You want "Googlebot", not "Google". Google documents this...
Thats not a publicly traded company though right? My point being “it just has the highest market cap of a public company in the USA right now” is misleading.
The presentation seems quite balanced.

Probably not the spin that Breitbart was hoping for.
Intelligent self-critical and/or masochistic penchants of the community, I'd guess :)
Snapcrap lets you take pictures of poop on sidewalks and report it to the city
Take up running. Running is about learning the power of decisions, because it's one long, agonizing decision to better yourself. With every step your body tells you to stop, and it's up to you to choose not to stop.

That's what worked for me. I was terrible at procrastination until I took up running. Now I just apply the lesson I learned from running:

Every moment is a choice.
And you can have the same issue the author said in the article by requesting access to home directory and running the exactly the same command as the author wrote.
"Makes me wonder why her writing does so well here."

Yeah, that was funny to think about. I've only seen so many articles. Her write-ups were mostly technical dodging politics a lot. The back and forth, downvote mobs, or whatever kick in with politics on certain topics or views due to community's biases. If she stays away from that, then she can still be really popular.

Whereas, she just now admitted something that could be in the red zone for some portion of HN community in terms of benefiting, but not sharing, in FOSS. It's simultaneously a response that's understandable or folks might sympathize with for the portion that is concerned about toxic behavior in general FOSS and/or toward minority members in particular. Still a grey area in potential reaction here.

I find it fascinating to watch how these things play out. Regardless, her posts about spotting problems, solving them, and keeping them from recurring were pretty awesome. Most of us will probably still respect her regardless of how much she's embracing or dodging online communities.
HN seems super strongly opposed to Google providing censorship in China. Do they feel the same way about Google applying it to the rest of the world?
Strangely, the one thing that worked for me doesn't appear to be on this list:

The resistance to starting a task is geometrically proportional to the SIZE of the task.

So I try to break everything down into tasks that take no more than a few minutes. I wouldn't have tasks like "Write FooBar architecture document", but rather "Write FooBar intro", or "sketch connection diagram on paper" or "copy connection diagram to Visio/Draw.io".
I just finished skimming the whole thing—did Google just trick Breitbart into publishing propaganda for them? (I'm reminded of the Valve "employee handbook.")
So I suppose that header = (struct header_t*)(block - 1); would be UB then.
I like your route. Another thing to point out about just fire-and-don't-care-if-it-hits contributions is you still can take credit for them. You put your effort in, you improved the software as you see it, you benefit from that even if they don't want it, others can benefit from your fork, and (if branding) you can even highlight your improvement in CV or resume.

So, you and/or others might benefit from them taking your contributions. You and/or others might still benefit when they don't. You can't control what they do anyway. So, might as well set it up so you and others can benefit either way.
> I don’t know what the solution is.

Decentralize all the things.
>The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.

I agree with that. It would help if these companies stopped seeking "virality" and "eyeballs" or whatever metaphor you want to use of user engagement and "notoriety/reward".

Otherwise, this is exactly the same argument China's (or Russia's) censors would make. Absolutely not different in any way.
I agree, assuming that it's real. (Which, considering Breitbart's history, could not be the case.)
I caution against latching onto the title and making assumptions. The bulk of the content is analyzing where the current censorship position came from and the conclusion is for Google to be more open with their stance and also be more equal with applying it.

As for the why:

Why the shift toward censorship?
- User Demands
- before, In the absence of rules, bad behaviour thrived
- now, Appease users, maintain platform loyalty
- Government Demands
- before, Governments were unhappy to cede power to corporations
- now, Respond to regulatory demands, maintain global expansion
- Commercial Demands
- before, It’s impossible to neutrally promote content and info
- now, Monetize content through its organisation, increase revenues
- before, Advertisers were wary of unintended placement and endorsement
- now, Protect advertisers from controversial content, increase revenues

As for the conclusions:

Don’t take sides
Police tone instead of content
Enforce standards and policies clearly
Justify global positions
Explain the technology
Improve communications
Take problems seriously
Positive guidelines
Better signposts

Most of the document is non-controversial. There are places where it can be seen as obviously left leaning, but there are also places where it acknowledges that sometimes the right has been treated worse:

“[Richard] Spencer doesn't get to be a verified speaker; Milo gets kicked off, but I know
plenty of pretty abusive feminist users or left wing users,
expressing themselves in exactly the same way
that the right is being penalised for,
who are permitted
to perform certain kinds of speech. That’s going to get Twitter into
Wow, I got the opposite view of them while observing the same occurrences. Back when US federal law prohibited the recognition of gay marriage I would be taxed much more than a straight person. Google had a policy of paying gay employees who suffered from this discrimination the difference in pay. Sure, the policy is "left leaning" but it gives me the impression that Google is the absolute best place to work as a talented person no matter what minority I belong to.

As for the military contracts and China expansion I have reservations but I would hardly call those "left leaning."
Zener diodes have coupled quantum noise that travels at c [pdf]
That is true. But there are ways around that. Including documentation on how to build it locally is pretty standard. And hosting prebuilt binaries with package installation for targeted platforms is also pretty common as well.

With interpreted languages with language-specific package managers, you have to:

1) Install the language

1a) Possibly have to install a language version manager (rbenv, pyenv, etc)

2) Install the language's package manager

3) Install the CLI utility via the language's package manager

Here's the order I think CLI maintainers should strive to making their utilities available:

1) Install via OS package manager

2) Install via prebuilt release with OS-specific package, from hosting site (GitHub, etc).

3) Install from source

4) Install via language-specific package manager

5) Install via curl | sh :)
Can you give more information on Soylent being fraud?
They're definitely not the most reputable news source and many of their opinion pieces definitely step into fake territory, but I think outright falsifying an entire document like this would be a very extreme move, even for them.
Check out figure 11 -- it doesn't look like instrumentation noise.
When shit started hitting the fan with the Linux CoC, my boss indicated that it was a shame that the CoC was being used as a tool for political revenge.

My response was to wonder why there were so many grudges? The CoC is for certain acting like gasoline on a fire, but I don’t believe it was the spark.

Glad I never really bothered to try interacting with that community in the first place.
So basically HN is subverting copyright laws because of misguided moderation principals.

Way to go.
The Neuroscience of Consciousness
I just skimmed the article, so apologies if this was covered.

The article suggests people will use these predictions to spend more time at home before leaving their bus stop. If that is the case, what happens if the prediction says their bus will be, say, 10 minutes later, but then that bus catches some lucky breaks with lights, heavy traffic unexpectedly clears up, etc., and the bus makes up 5 minutes of that?

People who relied on the prediction could miss their bus.

Is there a mechanism to address this?

The only one that I can think of offhand that would cover almost all cases would be if the predicted arrival times are also sent to the buses, and if the buses arrive ahead of the prediction they wait until the predicted time before leaving.

You wouldn't want to do that for all predictions, though. Maybe only predictions made within 10 minutes of the original scheduled arrival time are binding, or maybe only predictions made when the bus is within three stops of the stop in questions, or something like that.
Well, given that it's done by Google employees of course they'll want to continue to wield their power. For example, they mention "regulation" as a punch-line, IOW, the assumption is that regulation of any form is bad.
Oh, I agree entirely. My only qualm is that in terms of online dating, people have essentially no choice but to submit themselves to systems where the inner workings are either not known or poorly designed. Yet, it's what everyone uses, and to abstain is to drastically reduce one's exposure.

The way Tinder seems to work for example, the broader an appeal you have, the higher your score. That can really suck for LGBTQ people depending on what gender they're looking for matches with.

An openly bisexual male for example, will be met with a huge score penalty due to all the left swipes from women that he isn't concerned with in the first place. Most could be vastly less attractive, or in some geographies even bigoted. The women he is looking for however, have a lower chance of seeing him because of the score hit. It's perverse incentivization all around.
Yeah, honestly I don't think Breitbart and similar can really play this as negative for Google when it acknowledges many actions have been taken even against right wingers unfairly and encourages "Don't take sides" as a top point.

The biggest thing to complain about would probably be the title... they couldn't have picked a worse title.
Funny you mentioned Operation Wolf, this is a game I really like and still play in the emulator from time to time.
I think you mean the video of Google executives showing partisan behavior at a meeting. If so, it's on this page:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

The group hug at 0:16:50 is seriously creepy. Grabbing your coworkers is considered inappropriate or worse in normal American workplaces.
The motive isn't to "punish." It's much more basic than that: I just don't want to deal with the toxicity of the community, and the best way to accomplish that is to not engage. Once I engage, I will probably need to spend mental cycles dealing with it.

> The whole point is freedom and sharing code that transcends arbitrary human defined barriers.

I think this is both an admirable view but also a naive one. Code is built, maintained, modified, sold, bought, and used by humans, so at the end of the day code is a human endeavor, and that means you will never escape having to deal with other humans in the process of writing code. You might have more or less pleasant interactions, but (at least before the singularity) code doesn't exist outside the context of human interactions.

I've personally constantly sought ways to spend more time coding and less time dealing with people, but my efforts have only reinforced the bittersweet message that the code I write is both more effective and more useful when I engage with people more. So at some point I just embraced the human element of the craft. But that comes with managing my emotional and social energy, which also means avoiding communities I don't need to be a part of.
Breitbart wouldn't benefit from faking it. If they did fake it, they would have made it look much more unbalanced whilst justifying more censorship.
at least some of the toxicity in a community around an open source project is due to the pressure the participants feel in maintaining both their own professional reputation and the viability of the project, and there are positive ways to engage with the core committers that will create goodwill all around.

I hope people consider the potential of playing the long game when engaging with a community. Yes there are assholes in the world but they frequently move on to other pursuits, or just die, and after they are gone it's just amazing how excited people are to get things done.
I use the MBTA buses sometimes to get from my house to the nearest train stop after which I make a transfer to another bus. A real time map of the bus locations would be 100x more valuable than just a prediction.

Same with the train - I use a website that shows the exact locations of all the MBTA trains, and I am able to accurately predict how long the train will sit outside of the Alewife station (which is infuriating BTW) based on the number of trains currently at the platform. A prediction would not be able to take into account this domain knowledge and would be completely worthless.
I suspect that Google search has become even more functional while it appears less. Often now I'll search for an exact phrase and use quote marks but it will return results that only contain parts of the phrase. I think there is still a way to have the function of quote marks or the "+" but it's hidden behind some menus or other commands.
I recommend Ken Burns' Vietnam series to put McNamara's statements in Fog of War in context.
Truly senior programmers use integers to represent money
The Unknowable Fallout of China’s Trade War Nuclear Option
When I find myself procrastinating, it’s usually because the problem feels to me like some combination of unclear and overwhelming, in the sense that it will take a lot of mental energy to even get started and then I’ll have to maintain focus for a long time after that.

What helps me a lot in that case is to break the problem down into simpler pieces. Then the first piece doesn’t seem so bad, and then I’m rolling.
For people criticizing this approach as a selfish one:

Fixing toxic communities is work. While it would be a public service for the author to do so, she is under no obligation and probably has a day job and a life that take priority.

I praise community-builders and community-shapers and code-sharers and code-reviewers to the heavens, but I'm not going to knock someone who just can't be bothered to do all of that.
iPhone Xʀ Haptic Touch gesture recognizer
That's a nice example of sneaky subversions. Many examples. I do want to emphasize even more that subversions with low consequences will look like most common, vanilla stuff you will see. Most of them won't make UCC since they look too accidental. Article included a common source of problems and subverison opportunities: replacing == with = or other way around. Few would bat an eye when that could just be a finger slip of a hurried programmer.

The other part of things is you don't want to just introduce the defect. It's better to meaningfully improve something so the contributors' image stays good despite problems. So, you want to improve it for performance, readability, or something like that. Then, make sure most of your contributions don't introduce problems. A high-quantity, mostly-positive contributor is a much better saboteur since the bad stuff is both (a) tiny portion of contributions and (b) stuff others screw up on. Therefore, it looks like random defects not worth blocking that contributor.

The fact that things like Linux kernel have hundreds of vulnerabilities a year isn't helping. The baseline is way worse than any saboteur would be contributing. Such insecure-by-default projects make their job much easier. Hell, they can look pretty skilled only adding a few vulnerabilities to a project with that many.
Not really. It'll have the same result as literally every other revelation in the media.

The side completely, 100% opposed to any restrictions on speech (including "policing tone" as outlined in this presentation) will see this as corporate meddling in people's expression.

The side that supports speech regulation will see this as a structured plan to curb the kind of speech that's considered "harmful" or whatnot.

This presentation doesn't contain anything outside the current ideological dichotomy, no original or unorthodox thoughts or ideas.
How this founder went from sleeping at Changi airport to making $42m a year
*Who wouldn't* imagine something like this?

I think the point is that, if you click through a checkout funnel, you should try to keep at the front of your mind, a musty, industrially lit concrete warehouse, and not the graphical elements presented to you within the DOM of an HTML page.

The quote attempts to paint a gloomy picture, but honestly, I don't conceptualize anything more terrible than a Home Depot. As a geek, I've loitered in the unfinished environs of warehouses for longer than might be considered practical, and never found it to be torture precisely. But, you know, some people get really uptight about uncarpeted indoor expanses that don't have windows with fashionable dressings to draw closed.

Not sure what it is about planned interior decor, versus unfinished construction. Some people tend toward comparisons of urban blight, versus parks and recreation.

I will say this, though. Fuck open office floor plans, for entirely different reasons.
Why couldn't you have just put a reverse proxy in front of your java?
Can’t see it happening when a large portion of the population insists that climate change isn’t real.
I honestly did not understand a lot. For example,

> If the universe is negatively curved (like the surface of a saddle) then the fluctuations would appear smaller

Smaller than what? Than the undistorted ones? But how do we know how the undistorted should look like?
310 BTC Challenge
You are a wealth of information on this topic!

I'd like to talk about one of the things you said earlier:

> Had strong enough systems to exclude free loaders

It does seem like one of the challenges of any "pure" commune would be feelings of contempt for people that you don't feel like are pulling their own weight. Care to talk more about that aspect? What are the systems that you've seen to prevent that?

I feel like you'll never stop some people from "free loading", like if someone is just lazy and does the bare minimum and the quality of the their work is always pretty low, but otherwise they are a great person and a lot of fun to be around - how do you handle that type of situation?

Is it more about creating systems that measure their output and make sure its enough? Or creating systems that prevent other people from feeling contempt towards that person?
Underpinning the whole question of censorship;

“Under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
tech firms have legal immunity from the majority of the
content posted on their platforms (unlike ‘traditional’ media publications). This protection has empowered YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to create spaces for free speech without the fear of legal action or its financial consequence.”

Censoring content is suspiciously like editorializing content, and steps social media a lot closer than they want to being publishers and not platforms.

Proceeding with censorship seems to carry the risk of losing immunity under Section 230.
I don't know where you got "left leaning" from unless you're bending over backwards to be fair, they are if anything centrists which makes sense since they're Google. For heaven's sake, the slide about conversations of free speech, I see establishment centrist media pieces on the same plot as Breitbart and WorldNetDaily. An equivalent would be listing the Young Turks or alternet.
The article does mention your trick:

> My solution was to approach a project by turning it into as many tiny steps as possible. That way I could get a few really easy wins under my belt. For example, each step would be a task such as "Search for ______ on Google" or "Have a conversation with ______." Crossing things off your to-do list gives your brain a happy little dopamine hit, even if the tasks are tiny—it keeps your motivation up and your excuses down.
The monopolists becoming ever more aggressive censors, is the strongest argument there can be for ending their monopolies. Once a company acquires a monopoly over a critical means of public information distribution (search, social, etc), their policies of restriction formally become censorship. They've become an impediment to functioning democracy.

Freedom of speech is too important to leave to the monopolies of Google and Facebook to decide what qualifies and what doesn't.
So we're all supposed hope and pray Silicon Valley elects to honor free expression?

We need a new internet
I have been reading a Micheal Faraday bio. It's such a great story. This guy had zero mathematical knowledge and just loved tinkering. And purely through hundreds and hundreds of experiments developed such an astounding intuition of how so many things worked. I am quite sure he would upvote your comment.
Lauren is actually a "he". (I met him once, probably in 1981.)
>there is a danger in consumers taking the short-sighted approach and buying the A.I. which is most likable.

There are far more dangers than just that, but what if you've been brought up by an AI that taught you the self-control to avoid them?

The AIs will fight over their ability to influence you. The hope is that the ones that use truth and reasoning will have an advantage, but there will always be the groups that are stuck in some fantasy.
Can you access google photos through other apps on an Android phone? On mine all I can see are my local photos, even in something like Hangouts.
You obviously don't read Breitbart.
this is how private warez torrent sites work

It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state.

This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly.

Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic."

But they're also alive.

And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.
You position sounds incredible uncreative to me. The article says "we need people working on that". Your response is "blocking won't work, thus software can't help". Someone else already commented that it might does, indeed. But I'd expect there to be way more stuff that might help. Just one thought on the spot: look at fitness or weight loss helpers. They use tons of psychological tricks to motivate you. Tracking alone could have a huge benefit, both to show what's wasted ("you spend x hrs on reddit this week. Instead, you could have y") and to measure improvements. Just imagine what other options there are.
>> What if linux was kept in a private repository to punish those he didn't agree with?

What a wonderful world that would be.