skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usage of the word "toxic" is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine. I see it used all over the place recently to describe groups of people who, while they may exhibit some unfortunate traits, will not actually cause you to get sick or die. More often than not calling people toxic feels more like a way to write off people with whom you disagree or who you simply dislike.

This isn't to say that people in e.g. the open source software community don't behave badly. They absolutely do behave badly. But rather than just labeling someone toxic and assuming that everyone agrees and shares your definition of "toxic" - I feel that everyone's interests would be better served by actually describing 1) what exactly the problematic behavior is, 2) why it is bad, and 3) how to behave better.

TL;DR I find usage of the word "toxic" to be toxic. :)
Working in an open office where the main language is your native language: you spend some cognitive energy tuning it out.

Working in an open office where the main language is a language that you understand well, but not natively (my every day life in Germany): you spend a ton of cognitive energy tuning it out, because your lizard brain insists on having that surrounding speech parsed first, just in case it has something to do with your work, because every so often, it absolutely does.

Working in an open office where you have absolutely no comprehension of the language (two weeks in Seoul): amazingly productive, because the lizard brain doesn't even bother.
I don't think that these services take carbon out of the air and turn it back into fossiles.

I guess that they mostly finance re-forestation. Then, you have to ask yourself:

Would the new forest happened anyways and they are just taking your money as a bonus? Is the new forest going to be permanent or will it be removed and re-forested again in 30 years?
What works best for me is to meditate during the inevitable downtimes - compiling, training, uploading, downloading... Find beauty in the scrolling logs. Take a look outside. Before you know it, you'll be excited about the next important thing you can do while waiting on the first. Also makes for a much happier work day!
What's so wrong with an "Expert" title suffix?
The vast majority of all restrictions on a child’s behavior are simply enforced by their parents.
Isn’t it currently akin to a library membership ? Or at least that’s how I would put it if I was a service owner.

You also won’t get irl memberships transfered by inheritance, so the debate will be short if it goes this way.
I don't know if taboo is an accurate description but I agree that we don't seem to be talking about this issue honestly, on either side. Every manager I've ever had claimed it was about saving money, but when pushed eventually admitted it wasn't really about money at all. It's like everybody is afraid to talk about what it really is about.
I don't really buy "unrestricted free speech is worth letting people die over". Sure, censorship can be harmful, but if the best argument your can put forward is a slippery slope, thats not particularly compelling.

Hypothetical harms are generally less harmful than real ones.
Yes, but they don't always want to hear a negative result, e.g. in Iraq wargaming: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/21/usa.julianborg...
You seem to be very confident that you can so accurately judge whether someone is "alt-right"(a nebulous label, at best) that you can censor them preemptively. Where does this confidence come from?

Further, does espousing an anti-democratic idea make someone alt-right? How sticky is the label? What if you did it 10 years ago? Especially with how much of our lives we record nowadays, an accusation like this becomes an easy-to-wield cudgel to shut down political opponents. This rapidly leads to a race of gotchas, where we look for anything that lets us cram someone into one of the "bad" labeled boxes(racist, sexist, alt-right).

Lastly, how effective is the censorship you are proscribing? Can you achieve total censorship within the scope of a democracy? Does it actually inhibit the spread of the ideas you loathe, or simply put them out of your sight? What about the radicalization you are causing by censoring these people? You haven't convinced them to stop, you've just muzzled them publicly, but they can still create private clubs and gatherings. What problem have we solved after implementing this censorship?
"they give the EU additional excuses to try fine Google billions extra to enrich EU coffers"plus the part where they say that Google is great at privacy makes me think the author is very much out of touch with reality.

I've seen it with Google employees here on HN too: they're so invested in everything Google that they can't understand why anyone would have an issue with their endless data collection and surveillance of the entire planet. Any lingering doubts are probably buried when they think that all thing considered they do have a very cushy life at the company.
The hacker's guide to uncertainty estimates
http://bfy.tw/KHrk

Maybe this one - https://www.staples.com/Adesso-SlimTouch-USB-Wired-Desktop-T...
So are plumbers in Kensington (an expensive Borough in London). Wealthy businesses and customers pay their staff a lot regardless of the job.
My point is that programming per se articles are minority and often end up burried. And when they are here, they tend to be limited to few topics popular also among those who don't use them. That is not sort of content one goes for here, whether by men or women (which is not complaint) so it should not be used against anyone.

I will add that it is and should be ok to write your thoughts about communities and processes and culture and pop tech etc even if you don't write technically technical articles. Such blogs are pretty normal in programming communities. These things actually matter for those who deal with those communities daily. Moreover, Linux community prides itself on being tough and not caring and pissed off all the time on each other, so really, demanding that whover is commenting on it is nice to them and not pissed them off is odd. As far as linux community standards go, this article is remarkably nice - the only way to make it less nice is to keep opinions for yourself.
Things have gotten worse over the past 20 years though.

The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
It's possible for every coder to be committed and the system as a whole to be a disaster due to poor integration or even decisions at the contract or legislative level.
Something I've found very helpful at breaking the habit of going to HN/Reddit/whatever when I start waiting for something to finish running - set up a cronjob that checks what time it is, and if it's within working hours, it adds a bunch of sites to my hosts file, pointed to a server I control. It also grabs my current todo text file, and formats/pastes that into the index page of that server. The page also does some light shaming. Outside of work hours, it removes those host file items automatically. It helps in those cases where you reflexively visit a time waster without really meaning to.
I only skimmed the first page of the linked paper and got a bad vibe from the arguments it tries to establish against the validity of Special Relativity. I looked through the author's list of past publications and that proved enlightening: he published a lot of papers in Apeiron, a lesser online journal edited by people who are known in the community to support fringe ideas.

And another thing caught my eye: a paper by Cahill from 2006 which claims in its title that variations of the Michelson-Morley experiment show deviations that are caused by gravitational waves. The abstract of the paper goes on to explain that these waves supposedly have much stronger effects than predicted by BR because their physics are completely different than what GR describes. This claim of detecting gravitational waves (a decade before the massive LIGO effort made its first detection) alone shows that the author is "out there".

Take what this guy reads with a big pinch of salt. He seems to be on a crusade against relativity and the notion that space is not absolute.
>>You say it first, then someone has to take you to court, where you have the opportunity to defend yourself.

What if you say it and someone is seriously harmed or dies as a result?

The fact is that we have prior restraints for all kinds of things because we realize they are dangerous and have the potential to cause harm. I don’t see why speech should be different. Words can kill.
I believe I was the appropriate level of civil given the context, so I shan't be more.
It would be great if a superior alternative existed but other search engines don't come close. I love Google Search and imagine every internet user in the English speaking world does.

What are the issues with Google search (other than privacy concerns) that are talked about at length?
"I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community"

SmartOS has close to 15,000 packages and growing[1], because it uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is also used by FreeBSD. Since the Joyent engineer responsible for this is also a pkgsrc developer, pkgsrc now has full upstream support for illumos / Solaris based operating systems. It also means that SmartOS has full access to FreeBSD's software library, which is a wealth of software: unless it's Linux kernel specific or extremely badly written, pretty much anything you can imagine on GNU/Linux is available on SmartOS. For those few isolated cases of badly written software, one can always run a Linux (lx) branded zone inside of SmartOS at bare metal speed[2][3].

[1] https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.h...

[2] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/LX+Branded+Zones

[3] https://docs.joyent.com/sdc6/working-with-images/list-of-sup...
Sometimes, brain function is actually to blame for procrastination, and not attitude or perception of the work before you. When I‘d slept too little, or am going through caffeine withdrawal, my procrastination goes through the roof. I‘d just rather sleep than do anything productive then. My anti-procrastination toolkit is:

- Like you said, going for a walk (activates beneficial genes, helps circadian rhythm)

- Stop caffeine as soon and often as you can. Sometimes situations force me to use a pick-me-up, but I try and stop the day after.

- Go to bed early (10PM ideally)

- Vitamin D, Magnesium, etc. also check out near infrared therapy to improve mitochondrial function

- Moderate exercise (overtraining has a bad net effect on nearly everything, so stop if working out makes you feel worse; if you have a heart rate variability monitor, you can use that as a metric for overtraining)

- Small talk (works for me to „wake the brain up“)

But really, 90% of the time I just have to sleep more. The others are just hacks to keep me going if I can’t get enough sleep (sometimes not easy with 2 kids).
I’ve heard many gamedevs make specialized allocators for some of their code (the most being arena allocators)...
Future of Google Kubernetes Engine: On-Premises
Show HN: Plotting and 2D/3D UI
Or even the standard memory allocator provided by your system. I'm pretty sure this article was meant as a way to understand how malloc works and not as a high-performance replacement for the one you're currently using.
Ask HN: How do you make a decision between different startup ideas you have?
How do you make a choice of which one to pursue? What are the things you check?
It seems that the author of the research is not happy with Bloomberg's spin on the story: https://www.servethehome.com/yossi-appleboum-disagrees-bloom...
Military is the pet project. It's the only form of public spending with broad support even from anti Federal government people.
Inside the Optical Scanner
> Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.

Exactly. You can spread doom as much as you want and it won't help. You won't get a critical mass to listen to you. They won't change their behavior based on some event that will most likely happen in the far future. Sad, but true.

As a species, we don't have a history of planning and preventing. Instead we have always been adapting to change as things happen. This is essentially the same.

If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

Imagine the outrage if Google stored user data in a datacenter run by a company controlled by the Chinese government.

Apple pulled an amazing PR coup in convincing us that they somehow respect privacy more than Google.

Not to mention the iCloud celebrity photo leak caused by not using 2FA to protect user data; only to prevent fraudulent credit card transactions. Maybe this is more a question of not being as skilled at cloud services than something deliberate, but it makes no difference to users whose data leaks.
> it took far too long for Sony to add two-factor authentication to PSN, despite the service’s massive hack in 2011. Microsoft added two-factor to Xbox Live in 2013. It didn’t hit PSN until 2016, five years after the personal details of 77 million users were potentially exposed to hackers.

Enabling 2FA isn't go to stop hackers from accessing user data if the hackers hack Sony (what happened before). I fail to see the connection between 2FA and Sony being breached.
Censorship alone is not evil. The problem is, once you have infrastructure in place to make it easy, it will be abused. And if that infrastructure is centralized, the stakes for abuse are much higher. It's the same old problem of "who regulates the regulators". Rather than the issue being about "censorship bad / free speech good", I think the heart of it is: There's simply a lack of confidence that tech giants like Google are part of a larger system with checks and balances, and they appear to be making unilateral decisions behind closed doors.
Why you have (probably) already bought your last car
No they got shutdown https://www.wired.com/2011/08/zediva-preliminary-injunction/
>>The way to combat false ideas is with truth

This is extremely naive. As the saying goes, a lie can go around the world before the truth can finish putting on its shoes.

edit: maybe rather than downvoting (which is a type of censorship) y’all should provide a response.
That’s the point. That used to be enough. Now just giving your child access to a computer could seriously tamper with their mental health
As a European I have to admit that the American model is vastly superior. Europe had laws to protect "civilty" even before the great wars. American democracy is also more successful in general.

Europe just had the "luck" that censorship didn't become very necessary. In some places it was used extensively and those places are no more today.

And lastly, stripping someones voice implicates directly stripping someones dignity.
So, what is the purpose of a Product Manager at Google?
IBM’s Machine Learning Accelerator at VLSI 2018
Considering that we aren't sure that the mathematical equations that govern fluid dynamics can be fully solved in 3 dimensions, I don't buy your statement that weather forecasts would be solved easily if we could just figure out if global warming is happening.
Well there is a lot of false information out there about climate change and it's probable influence on the planet. Things have gotten out of hand with how polarised this issue is. Many people on the right don't believe in climate change. A little of this is because the time scales were off in some early predictions such as An Inconvenient Truth. This was a good wake up call to many but it also exaggerates the rate of change to the point that many of the predictions should have already had massive negative impacts. This leads people to think they've been lied to. Screaming at them and telling them they're ignorant climate change deniers does little to encourage this. To think they don't care about the survival of the human race is not accurate. They just don't think it's at risk. IMHO the truth without the us verses them stuff is the key. I think 13 Misconceptions About Global Warming by Veritasium on YouTube is a perfect example of this. Yes it's easy to get mad at people when the fate of the world is on the line but that's not as productive as trying to understand them and reaching out to them.
If you want to be a member of many of these platforms, and you're a target of that offensive material, you do have to tolerate it. The racists use the platforms tools to find you and hurl it at you, and then the platform gives you little to no recourse to even ignore them outside of not using the platform.

Your advice only works when you're not the target - when you just need to walk past and avert your eyes from what's being said to someone else.
That's a fair point. I think we inevitably end up in a discussion about free will if we try to pin those words down. That part of the last sentence could have been written as "thinking what values are important to you".

But yes it's just rephrasing. I explained myself in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17524210
It's the opposite for me. I'm a musician so I wear earplugs all the time, and find them very comfortable. But in an office setting, they cause me anxiety.
But none of it explains why the author says the current changes taking place in the Linux project reinforce her decision not to participate in Linux.

I can't speak for the author, so I can't explain that to you.

What I can tell you is that virtue signaling is vastly more common than people actually doing the right thing and nasty behavior frequently gets a great deal worse during periods when people are very visibly and openly trying to publicly address the problem in some manner.

My observation is that a common outcome is the metaphorical guillotines come out, people on their high horses behead all the bad guys, pronounce themselves to now be the good guys in charge and then business as usual follows.

So, for example, if the issue is sexism, terrible evil asshole sexist pigs take the fall to be promptly replaced by more men, not a mixed gender group of leaders, and you hear a lot of smack talk about more women being in the pipeline and someday this will result in gender parity while nothing really changes. But you should be nice to the new men in charge since they beheaded the bad guys and, clearly, in twenty years this will pay off for women.

If the issue is racism, well, clearly, racist white supremacist assholes get removed and are promptly replaced by new white people who will obviously treat people of color better -- someday, but probably not today, but you should believe they are the good guys. After all, they were so kind as to behead your enemies.

Etc.

If you are part of an "oppressed" group, you eventually get burned out on watching all the white guys fight over which white guys are less evil while no one actually does much of anything to genuinely include women, people of color, etc. And you don't really care to get in the middle of this mess knowing that none of these people actually has your best interest at heart and every last one of them will be happy to trample you underfoot in service of convincing virtue signaling.

Some of the most vicious fights are the ones about how to be respectful and well-mannered. Those frequently get ugly real, real fast and only go down hill from there.
https://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2018/07/05/rap-shee...
> I drive a pickup truck so I'd like to reduce my impact

You could...drive it a lot less :-)
What a time to be alive :)
I honestly think there is no way we can zero emissions in that time. But I'm hopeful the rate of technological progress can out pace our predictions. I'm also hopeful that we may one day find a means to reverse the problem through Geo engineering. People are far more motivate when the problem is already at the door. I just hope it's not too late by then.
You don't need to fix a toxic community to just submit your patch. Just submit it, and if they don't want it, they don't want it. But at least you've done the bare minimum of giving back. If they want to tell you to fix your code formatting or something, or make your comments less phallocentric or whatever and you don't like it, don't make the changes - but you still ought to submit the patch.
In their defence, deciding you're going to require new tests for all new additions in a pretty effective way to get out of the 'there are no tests' situation. I recently heard something along the lines of "don't bother adding new tests, this project barely has any tests anyway" about a project where I have been trying to increase test coverage whenever I have to make a change in recent months. With that attitude it's no surprise the project barely had any tests...

Naturally it is not a reasonable request when there is no existing testing infrastructure yet.
No, there's no reason to do it in private. If you look around there are plenty of people who publicly fork code bases and work together independently of the original project with no drama. It could be they just want to go in a different direction, or to play, or didn't like the original group etc. They own their repo(s), get to decide who's invited in and if they even have a forum/mailing list/whatever. Been that way for decades.

That's not to say there aren't very public forks of important projects: they happen all the time. (just a few: Emacs/XEmacs, GCC/EGCS, FFmpeg/Libav, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS) If those who did the fork are right, the new project tends to supersede the original. And when there's a fork because one or more of the controlling personalities is an asshole, it tends to be public, noisy and messy. Note: the Linus/lkml thing barely moves the needle on this scale. (i.e. it's public, but there really hasn't been a lot of noise or mess to date.) Also, Linus is a complete gentleman compared to some of the situations I've read about.
If the renewable energy isn’t displacing what would have been non renewable energy use it doesn’t matter. A glut of renewable energy ends up making gas cheaper which means gas gets used more for things that it wasn’t economical for before which means we’re exactly where we started.
Decentralizing the web with Beaker
That drop looks like what I would expect if you do not include Clojure in the lisp numbers, despite not having a separate category for it.
Or I could buy carbon offsets and still maintain my hobbies that are much easier with a pickup.
Perl 4 ... the good days :)

I guess require-ing files all over the code and using the global scope for everything and using globals or even a global hash and having functions read and write to that hash is something to be regretted. Not that C is much better.

I have maintained and ported Perl 3 and 4 to Perl 5, I must say the existence of PHP3 made sense after that :)

There was that trick using goto and exit to simulate functions that people writing Perl 3/4 loved. Was it done for performance reasons ?
This seems a bit like the Y2K problem. Even if we collectively get our sh*t together and manage to avert the worst effects of the crisis, there are always going to be people who will wonder what all the fuss was about.

And conspiracy theorists will have fodder for the next 50 years.
For what it’s worth, when i switched phones my Authy app went out of sync. It was a work account so I just had my boss reset my 2fa, but if there isn’t a way to re sync you may be out of luck.