skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You see Praetor, we don't know that he didn't think a bad thought."

This insistence on attributing maximum malice is part of the problem.
It is a phone. If you need uninterrupted productivity, use any other type of personal computing device.
It's amazing that calendar invitation spam isn't more prevalent. The times it has happened to me have been incredibly infuriating because declining means a response to the spammer and ignoring can leave it on your calendar.
"At the telelphony-infrastructure level, it’s a supremely difficult problem that lacks a short-term fix because the underlying protocol is hopelessly insecure."

This is only partly true. Technologically the solution is difficult, but it's easy from the social side as carriers can blacklist the smaller carriers that allow this fraud to take place.

The real problem is that everyone except the consumer benefits from this. Every phone company in the chain from the scammer to you takes a penny out of the scammer's profits.

At this point these scam phone calls may be nearing the majority of the phone calls placed in the USA, so it's going to be a huge financial disruption to the carriers when they have to give up their game.
do you iive outside the U.S.?
Seems we haven’t figured out how to draw the correct distinctions between what are clearly different types of businesses.

If Patreon is a gallery or art market or auction house, and Reddit is a Café, what is Cloudflare? Are they a toll road? Private highway? Something else?

Likening any of those businesses to the closest brick and mortar equivalent is probably futile, but bear with me a moment.

In the real world, businesses generally do business on their own terms. If they don’t own their own property, they lease it, and the municipality they are in zones the land and enforces certain regulations. There might be a couple of other factors, the United States has determined race to not be a valid criteria for whether you allow them into your public facing establishment. Mostly we don’t allow sex segregation, but there are exceptions here too, like with public baths.

A Café owner has an enormous amount of leeway with who they will do business with though. By and large they can ask people to leave, or to not come back so long as the determining factor isn’t discrimination against a protected class. They can compare properties, including landlords, neighborhoods and zoning regulations. If they want to target a particular demographic, it can be as simple as making the menu bilingual or playing a particular kind of music.

Now if someone builds a private road on their own property, that is their own business, but if they build a private road under contract to the city and charge people to use it, that is the city’s business. They can’t tell Nazis not to drive on that road anymore than the city can, assuming this city is in the United States anyway, but a Café owner could absolutely tell those same Nazis in that same city to not come in. Wouldn’t even have to give a reason for it. That’s fine, cafes exist everywhere and if you wanted to open one that catered specifically to Nazis, the law isn’t going to stop you.

I think we have knee jerk reactions when it comes to services like Cloudflare or Patreon disallowing certain people. To be honest, I tried to make a good case for why they should, but my best isn’t a particularly strong legal argument. Cloudflare and Patreon didn’t lay the cables that connect my home to the rest of the Internet, my ISP did, with a charter from my city.

Cloudflare and Patreon are businesses that work better when there is a critical mass of people already using them. They work best at-scale and don’t leave a whole lot of room in the market for competitors, Cloudflare much less so than Patreon, so in a sense they almost feel like utilities or like they should be.

They’re not utilities though, or cafes or galleries or any of that. They are private businesses though, so in that sense they are a lot closer to the Café owner than to your ISP or electric utility or the nearest private tollway. They might be hard to replicate businesses, and the people they are kicking off might find it hard to build a parallel alternative that sticks, but that is life.

That said, I much prefer businesses that are consistent in their policy enforcement practices than ones that aren’t, that is just good business.
The 26th IOCCC has now started
But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched.

Worse, they count videos that auto-played on the page after you scrolled, then walked away from the computer to get a beverage.
> One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.

For the little guy there is no practical difference between a government service and a homogeneous oligopoly. I believe that given enough time these services would get regulated as infrastructure and hence banned from refusing customers, just that our legal framework is too rigid to adapt to the fast pace of technological progress.
Or we could actually fix the problem and make the do-not-call list laws much stronger and put some enforcement behind them.
There are apps that do exactly that, e.g. NumberShield for iOS. Blocking calls from numbers with the same first six digit as mine has substantially reduced the amount of robocalls I receive.
Isn't this exactly what Android already does?
It's always good news for Bitcoin!
Nah, everyone disagrees with each other on what constitutes assholey behavior.
The solution is easy, managed languages for 90% of the code and C++ for the remaining no-excuses full throtle execution speed, while offering reasonable safety for arrays, strings, out parameters, enumerations, lifetimes.

Not everyone is running Solaris on an ADI enabled SPARC.
Two years later: not looking back. It's not that bad, just get a set of bluetooth headphones and stop complaining.
Apple provides a fix: get an Apple Watch and make your phone silent. Then you get a notification on your watch which you can suppress by placing your hand over it.

I make this comment in jest because obviously this is a very user-unfriendly "solution" unless you planned to buy an apple watch for some other reason. However I do use this feature.

As for the post's comment that dismissing the call leaks info: I don't know what the predictive dialers have any understanding of this -- if you simply refuse to answer it's simply a disconnect. I also doubt they keep stats on calls that go to vmail, if you accidentally do that or if you refuse to answer.
Apple added hooks a while back so that 3rd party apps can interject into the call process, and I've been using https://hiya.com to do that and block scam calls.

I have it set to disregard suspected scam/fraud calls, so they never ring my phone.
Golang's time formatting seemed odd.

Now it looks like genius.
Humans exhibit herdlike behavior when investing, too. It's why the term "contrarian" exists (a person who bets against the herd).
Since the phone companies are too busy trying to build content empires rather than working to improve their core competencies, it's time for Apple to step up the call-blocking experience at the OS level.

The addition of a call-blocking API was a very good first step, but the time is fast arriving when robust blocking patterns will be table stakes similar to what basic email spam filtering is today.
> or zero, which indicates either end of file,

EOF is not zero.

It cannot be, because it must be outside the range of `char`.

On my (linux) system, EOF happens to be -1.

This is explained in in the first chapter of K&R.
It sounds like he's also referencing the old and tired racist tactic of arguing that they don't hate black people, just the ones who are "acting like niggers", and turning that argument back on the people who use it.

(Also, the use of slurs isn't verboten period. It's still - so far as I can tell - within the bounds of publicly-acceptable discourse for people with the correct political views to refer to black people with the wrong, conservative views as "niggers" and every other slur. Possibly even whilst threatening violence against them.)
Not a solution, for obvious reasons which have already been covered. These alerts show up on your other devices as well. Furthermore, your bias aside, the fact is that phones are the primary productivity device for hundreds of millions of users.
I don't think C++ is actually that complicated. However, I do think C++ tries to use way too many different permutations of the ()[]{}<> characters. Once you try to stuff too many of them into the same piece of code, you end up having to read code twice, once to figure out what the braces are for, again to figure out what the code is doing.

As an example, the < and > characters may indicate comparison (< and > in boolean expressions), a template declaration (< and > with a comma separated list following a function/class name declaration), a template specialization, an operator overload, an object access via pointer (->), a bit shift, (<< or >>), and possibly writing to a stream (<<).

A less egregious example, [] might be used to indicate indexing into an array, indexing into an object via overloaded [], declaring an array type, or declaring the captures in a lambda. While you can figure it out contextually, it's often irritating to have to figure out context first and then interpret the code.
> "Veteran status is also protected under employment discrimination law, and military service isn't an innate attribute"

I'd say being a veteran is, once you're a veteran you cannot change that about yourself. You could decide to not become a veteran, but you can't unveteran yourself.
Hear hear. An interesting corner case is when the call is from your exact number.

I wonder if the keepers of the POTS (plain old telephone system) can start putting in safeguards to curtail the ability to fake your source phone number. I get that there are myriad instances where this is above board and even necessary, but nobody's proposing any changes.
Spending $5k to put Zimbabwe on Street View
To reinforce the grand-parent point: the services are free to put the line wherever they please. It's literally their private business.

If you want a service with more inclusive tolerance levels, sign up for such a service (and not Youtube), or found such a service (and try to make it viable).

The problem is, of course, centralization. Network effects make a few successful services kings of a market, so "everybody" wants to be represented there. This puts such a service in a position of significant power. People actually vote them into that position of power by their continued patronage; this is their free choice, even if not always well thought-out choice.

So, if you want less powerful centralized players, use decentralized services where you can, help fund, build, and spread them. Think Facebook vs Mastodon. (Unfortunately, in music space, there's no decentralized analog to Spotify or Bandcamp.) Internet itself is such a decentralized platform, just not on the application / business level. Good thing we still have it, at least.
I use callblocking software to mitigate this robokiller. It costs 2.99 per month but I get signifiantly less robo calls and it allows you to put custom answer messages for the robo calls.
I definitely have some sympathy here. Always feared that the fake news hysteria and bot farm panics and what not seemed like they were leading up to a potential crackdown on alternative news sources, sites and services. That any attempt to crack down on fake news will basically take out dozens (or hundreds/thousands) of legitimate alternate sites in the crossfire.
Joke is usually a lie in disguise

-Alex
That would be a problem for me as plenty of people I know have the same first six digits as they were allocated to Verizon Wireless about 20 years ago.
Plato and Object Oriented Programming (2010)
Do you think "Southern Poverty Law Center" has only valid evaluations of who is "racist", i.e. do you think that they can't be wrong?

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/04/19/the-splc-has-...

"Ayaan Hirsi Ali" ... "is the Somali-born activist who was a victim of faith-based genital mutilation. Her friend, director Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim extremist who then stuck a knife in van Gogh’s body with a note that said Hirsi Ali was next. She has since written two memoirs and a book offering ways to reform the faith."

She was listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center's "page listing “Anti-Muslim Extremists”." I'm absolutely sure Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong there, similar but even worse than calling Salman Rushdie an anti-Muslim extremist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali
The problem is, "intolerance" is an arbitrary distinction, especially over time and especially now. In sites like Patreon, Youtube, or Reddit which apparently presume to operate as a free marketplace to identify, discuss, and promote ideas, censoring those which merely hate (rather than actively condone actual/specific acts of violence) sets the precedent toward greater and more arbitrary censorship (whether people that condone it acknowledge it or not). As the goalposts shift, more 'reasonable' and, let's go with your word, 'conservative' ideas begin to be denounced and censored.

Your argument 'not the right to be heard' does not apply in the context of shutting down users with controversial ideas on sites like Patreon and Reddit because visitors have ample space to not seek out the quiet 'ranting racist'. I have yet to experience people being thrown out of a bar, restaurant, or business because their conversation included racist or controversial topics.
Mr. Number does a pretty food job of blocking known robocallers and 'neighborhood' callers.
If using a recent version of Apple's calendar, you should get a "decline but don't notify" option.

Another workaround is to make a new calendar, transfer that appointment to the new calendar, and then delete that calendar.

It shouldn't be necessary, but here we are.
Is this not a rephrasing of the GP's position? To "signal something, not to inherently accomplish something" is to be insincere in one's virtue (and therefore, at least on some accounts, to fail to act in accordance with virtue).

Edit: That probably sounds more confrontational than I mean it to be. Rephrased: I think 'claudiawerner nicely exposes some of the flawed reasoning behind characterizations of "virtue signalling." What advantage in understanding do we gain by divorcing "signal" and "accomplishing something" that is not covered by either (1) (unsubstantiated) insincerity, or (2) sincerity that we don't find objectionable (the "Alternatively" clause)?
thats the joke
A possible protection could be: person can emit, every N minutes, a high bit cryptographic checksum of the previous checksum plus the last N minutes of recorded video.

Send that value to the 'forever', public registry in the cloud, AKA some combo of Twitter, Facebook, GMail, FastMail, AliMail, etc.

To be fabricated, it would have to be done in something approaching real time. Not absolute safety, but a seemingly easy step in that direction.
Tapping Decline is not a great option because it actually tells the robocaller that you’re with your phone and are annoyed by the call, information I’d rather not give.

Call me paranoid, but I take it a step further and absolutely believe whatever cold call company is calling knows when my phone is moving, or I am around it. I am the type of person that doesn't carry their phone all the time, I usually keep it in my home and work in barn next door, but I notice I don't have many missed called from bullshit numbers. Not saying all, but the majority of these calls are coming when I am around my phone. Anyone else experience anything like this?

edit: lol to ianlevesque quick paranoid response, but start paying attention I dont think its too far fetched. I imagine some code that has some sort of delay to wait for the phone to move or what so long after it is moved to then start to ring. Its not like there is anyone on the other line half the time or it will just hang up. I dont understand robocalls at all.
well shoot. i shall do so.
It's not a phone to me, it's a pocket computer with shovelware telephony that I'd rather do without. Just give me a data pipe, I'll figure out the voice communication part.
> Proponents of free speech are pro free speech as a general concept and principle, beyond what protections are afforded under American law today.

You certainly don't speak for all of us (re: "beyond").
Photos China Doens't Want You to See by Photojournalist Who Vanished in China
You can do this, just set your phone to Do Not Disturb and then set it to "allow calls from my contacts"
> It didn't though, the "Mme" part stands for mademoiselle, indicating it is a woman. Therefore they weren't pretending to be a man for the purpose of getting a paper published.

The specific claim I was addressing is not that one had to pretend to be a man to get something published, the original claim is, once again, that it was difficult to publish under your own name as a woman, as quoted several times now:

> This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman

The comment that it was customary to use a husband's name preceded by Mme. thus does not negate this original claim, if anything it reinforces it.
I like in the UK and get maybe 5 robocalls a year. I'm not at all cautious about giving out my phone number and I've had the same number for at least 10 years.

Why is this such a problem in America but not elsewhere?
Or send to Google Assistant screening. It's the best feature ever but they need to open it up to rules for automation (i.e. all unknown numbers from XXX area code).
Have you tried Hiya? That works for me...it’s called “Neighbor Scam Protection”.
yes, just send non-contacts directly to voicemail. then i might actually answer my phone once in awhile.
> So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.

Having more foundational internet infrastructure and services controlled by the government (which IS bound by freedom of speech rules) would also solve this issue.

But the ironic thing here, is that most of the right-leaning people complaining about being kicked off platforms, would oppose doing this.

They also oppose private platforms being told how to behave by the government, as it happens, they're just complaining in this particular case because here that works against them.
I mean actual instances where this happened: " companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims" and no one cared.
> Or they are afraid of loss of revenue/capitalization if an online activist group launches a shame/smear campaign?

This, pretty much. They see their established niche as that of hosting a well-defined, 'harmonious community' of creators, and if this requires "harmonizing away" some of these creators due to their slightly bothersome political stances, then so be it.
Yes, you are paranoid.
I personally do not use one editor for everything. To each their own.

Emacsclient would solve this issue for you though.
I expected more too
> It's formal. It's not insulting.

It can be both. Many do consider it insulting.
What a weird argument. Just because it can receive phone calls doesn't mean that you shouldn't also be able to be uninterrupted if you like.
OK with that line too. Guy's a douche.
It is a mobile computing device that happens to be able to take calls.

"Smart phones" are "phones" in only so much that they can make phone calls. I've used my smart phone to make a call one time in the past 8 years. For me, it simply isn't a phone.

Most of my peers use their mobile computing devices to browse the internet, schedule things, and play games. Very, very few of them use it to make phone calls and those that do are calling family or their SO a majority of the time.
The title is "Why don't I take military funding?" not "Why you shouldn't take military funding".
Business itself is inherently amoral (not evil, just lacking any sense of morality one way or another). Businesses don't refuse particular customers out of a sense of social justice - they do it because continuing to service their customers harms their reputation, and thus their business. I know I don't want to do business with businesses that tell me fascism is just "speech", and I'll go to their competitors instead.

And I'll free admit, just so the purists can get it out of the way, that I think there are types of speech that should not be socially tolerated. Hate speech shouldn't get public protection. Shun me for it if you like.

From these two things, I find that businesses refusing to do business with the likes of Stormfront, or this "radical anti-feminist", or whatever, is a very good proxy for social standards. Why? Because like I said, business is amoral. It doesn't care about hate speech. But when that speech is so repulsive that businesses worry about the general public, their other customers, punishing them for supporting it, then that's a good point to say "No, this is not acceptable".

And to be clear, I'm drawing a line about the freedom to not do business with someone - not a law to punish speech. I'm not saying throw them in jail for speaking in hate. I'm saying that it's not good to require business to provide a platform for their hate.
Let me state some things which I think are true:

1) A vast majority of developers hate '.mjs'.

2) In 5 years, most developers will have moved to import statements and stopped using CommonJS' require().

3) Importing from a directory using index.js is both common in popular projects, and a useful way to organize code like components.

4) We've already been waiting years for a standard solution and many of us are getting annoyed at the delays.

5) With transpilers the norm nowadays, it seems NodeJS could make a clean break from the past and simply provide tools to help convert older projects.

Am I assuming too much?