skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
During the Cold War, the primary thing that distinguished the US side from the USSR side was that, while speech by USSR people and people sympathetic to the USSR (like, say, CPUSA) was published in the US, publishing speech sympathetic to the US in the USSR would get you arrested.

It seems like the US has become what the USSR was: companies who publish speech from people in Iran or Crimea are now violating the law by doing so. Moreover, in cases like this one, already-published material is being destroyed, in a way that wasn't practical in the USSR, due to technological limitations (though they did try — famously Beria was airbrushed out of official photographs). The US doesn't yet have massive prison camp systems full of political dissidents — but then, for the first couple of decades, neither did the USSR.

This is a crucially important reason to move away from centralized and proprietary systems and onto decentralized, peer-to-peer, secure, free-software systems.

Learn from history.

(Edit: previously I gave Noam Chomsky as an example of someone sympathetic to the USSR, but that is at best debatable. The Communist Party USA, now in its 101st year, is a much clearer example, one that published continuously throughout the Cold War despite US prosecutions of its leadership.)
No, if anything individual trees do start to become emitter as they age due to low growth and decay, how ever in forests old dying trees are quickly replaced by new ones.
So what are you doing about it?

(I was once talking to a friend over beers, ranting about some politics I was unhappy about. And he asked me: So what are you doing about it? Of course, I wasn't doing anything besides complaining, and this made something click in my head. All of my self-important opinions were worth nothing if I couldn't be bothered to do anything about them. I think about this a lot and it has changed the way I see the world.)
there are a lot of comments on this thread about the moral hazard of pharmaceutical advertising. i think the arguments against such advertising largely hold water, but i’m curious; what are the arguments for it?

can anyone substantiate an argument for why consumer advertising for prescription medications is good for patient outcomes?
Technology products are indeed part of the sanctions affecting the Crimean Peninsula, Iran, Syria, and North Korea (if I remember correctly).
It is, but considering the estimated $1T market and all players having some exponential growth-looking curves (IIRC) the difference is pretty insignificant.

I'll hold on to my stock in all these companies for a bit longer. I don't think there'll be any losers in this race.
People currently shy away from making images where the current hacky method gives bad results (because nobody likes making ugly images). If implementations were fixed, they might not.
This is great! What about licensing? Can I use the generated "drawings: in games?
Does cryptographic imply decentralized?
>The Crimea peninsula is now cut off from number of products and services, as US law forbids companies from providing services and exporting goods to the disputed territory.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_that_applied...
“We can’t stop the highest energy cosmic rays, however. They penetrate the walls of any spacecraft.”

I was gonna say, we better bring spare parts with us, but imagine you just installed a new eyeball in your skull and it was full of dead pixels when you fired it up.
The decision to go with a headers-only design is only required if you want/need to provide templates.

Furthermore, it's ignorant to conflate headers-only libraries with a problem or a shortcoming.
The only mistake was that it took GitHub so long to block the account. The Crimea sanctions[1] aren't new but they do pretty clearly cover GitHub:

> prohibition on the exportation or importation of goods, technology, or services to or from the Crimea region of Ukraine

[1] [PDF] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...
> Complex things being more expensive than simple things is a non sequitur?

No. The statement "Fusion reactors are MUCH more complex than fission reactors." followed by "So, just comparing volume is being very favorable to fusion." is a non sequitur.

> And I wasn't talking about an exponent there.

Your compared power/volume ratio, implying that cost is proportional to volume (otherwise, the comparison is pointless).

I pointed out that the different operating principles of fission and fusion reactors suggest cost proportional to volume^(2/3) for the latter (which of course implies that there is a size beyond which a fusion reactor will be more cost efficient than a fission one).

The 2/3 is known as an exponent. I believe exponents are part of the K-12 math curriculum, and definitely propaedeutic to nuclear engineering.
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. raises $120M in outside funding
That's exactly the reason why we need to decentralise Github, that's way too much power for a corporation.
It's either not a linear scale with the 1 or 4 core benchmarks or just plain incorrect. Treating it linearly results in the paradox that at stock the 18 cores each run significantly faster than if 1 core were running. This is the opposite of what the boost algorithm would do. The quad core scores seem reasonable though, just mildly lower per core than the single core bench.
The Influence Sociale Networks
Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation
They would have blocked _all_ Russia if they hadn't learn from history.
Sadly, US companies are more and more unreliable, but not for technical reason, not for economical/business reasons, but for political reasons. Sadly, it looks, more and more, like "America First" will shift to "America Alone".

Hopefully, it will require other countries/organisations to build alternatives and not rely on the US. These new players will grow stronger, on their own market, building their success on US defiance. And might be someday US competitors (hello Baidu, Tencent and co.)
Here is the relevant executive order: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

And the most recent extension: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/OFAC-Enfo...
Does that make it better?
It’s an excellent place for hucksters to thrive with pseudo-intellectual optimism. Like clickbait it’s always - a mix of some highly accessible topic with something either surprising, controversial, or in some way challenging the norms.

They’re not all bad obviously but it’s not a good place for reasoned, moderate, and calculated predictions, which is the plane where most science or businesses live and die on. When your big ideas hit reality.

Theranos probably had the best TED pitch around, if they ever did one.
How is this a violation of her "Freedom of speech"? Google is not the government. The Bill of Rights protects us from the government, not private enterprise. I feel I'm surely missing some key detail.
Wow it's surprisingly good
According to this[1] the azure number ($11B) is an estimate as it is all apparently reported under the umbrella of the larger "commercial cloud" number -- so the CC number includes o365 but the azure estimate apparently does not.

30+ vs 11+ though, is still a very impressive lead.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-cloud-providers-2019-aws-m...
Google feels more like a wealth-generating engine than a raging gasoline fire. Why would you want to dial that back?
I'm not proud of it, but I worked on SharePoint at CERN IT. Some examples of how dysfunctional it was:

- When asking about version control I was told that if I really wanted to use it I could have Visual SourceSafe 6.0 or something from way back in the nineties. It was basically CVS 0.1 alpha with a GUI, and I ended up learning Git instead.

- I made sure all my changes worked on Firefox, because that's what I knew the physicists were using. My boss wanted me to support IE only, and after a heated discussion the quote which always haunted me was "We don't care about the physicists!"

- A colleague lamented about having spent about a year developing some uber-flexible interface in SharePoint which would've been an order of magnitude simpler in other content management systems.

The rest of CERN is completely different, as indicated by cernguy.

I left a year into a two-year contract, and I'm happy to say I've not worked on a Microsoft platform ever since!
It's a meme to make fun of Americans in "flyover countries" for not having passports. People who have only lived in the place they were born are made fun of for not being traveled, and therefore not cultured.

Is it a surprise then that more and more people want to travel in order to signal that they aren't an uncultured, passport-less hillbilly? The key thing to note here is that someone who does not have any regard for their environment and other people will be the same whether they're in Kansas or in Paris. Often, they'll be even worse, since it's not home that they're trashing up.
Here is the link to the actual report:

https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aax35...

People should try reading the actual science instead of some journalist's cherry-picked take on the science. It's also interesting that Disney ("evil media corporation") now controls NatGeo.

As Bill Gates recently noted, climate alarmists are more of a problem than the "deniers." Here's a story from the BBC this week titled, Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736

This is getting ridiculous. The submitter, in this case, appears to have issues with civility, and is obsessively submitting climate related articles for an account that's less than 60 days.
Surely that only means coffee + water is not as good at hydrating you as plain water, not that it actively dehydrates you.
The problem is that Apple intentionally crippled the XR so that they could more easily upsell people to the XS.

This punishes users who want to replace their iPhone 7, since Apple simply doesn't make a good phone in that price bracket anymore.
No, it just makes it a geopolitical reality that you have to somehow punish Russia when it mobilizes ground forces and forcibly annexes pieces of land. Don't forget that Russian-backed insurgents literally shot a passenger plane out of the sky[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
In theory the Team Leader could fire the other devs in the tribe (even senior ones, just not the Tech Leader). In practice it appears that the Tech Leader has a lot of influence in firing a dev. In case of disagreement, the last word, I assume, would be from someone higher up (the CTO).
That makes the assumption that these alternatives would give up access to the US market in order to serve sanctioned markets like Crimea, North Korea, or Iran.
Why is it that Germany makes the best industrial machines and industrial manufacturing?
This has nothing to do with free speech - the sanctioned account was able to open an issue on GitHub complaining of the way their account had been handled. The account is the victim of a trade embargo, not a gag order.
What's interesting isn't the fact that they "make" more from AWS, it's that AWS gets premium margins where their store is running right at cost (and has been, basically forever -- it's their thing, sorta).

The interesting number you left out was the non-AWS revenue, which in 2018 (too lazy to correlate with today's announcement) was $230B, literally 30x higher. AWS is a tiny drop in the bucket, no matter what the profit details say.

Which then prompts the question of why AWS gets that kind of margin, when it would seem like a pretty commoditized field at this point. Linux VMs are an open and very portable deployment platform. You can get them from any number of top tier providers and a huge horde of little ones. You'd expect to see a ton of competition driving prices down, but we don't. I genuinely don't know why.
Fox predators, aging, and/or direct competition (fighting) could be an interesting lesson in dampening feedback to reduce those oscillations.

Simulating grass carrying capacity, other herbivore competition, different predator niches, etc all further increase stability / resilience to change.
What does “decentralize Github” mean?
This is a bit off topic, so choose not to answer if you want, but can you link me evidence of Chomsky being a USSR sympathizer? From what I've read, he's a Libertarian Socialist primarily, which seems to be the opposite of the totalitarian regime that the Russians ran under the Soviet Union.
Hm in my limited testing of not looking at the screen and selecting as randomly as I could I was surprised to find it not end 50/50

Not enough trials or is there something else going on here?
Spidey-Sense
There’s no arguing it - Korg did the mini-synth thing before Teenage Engineering. Actually, Korg, Roland, Moog and Waldorf (among others) all did it before Teenage Engineering.

As a musician and synth lover, I don’t know anyone who uses the TE gear as a serious musical equipment. They’re widely considered to be in the toy or novelty realm, except the OP-1, which is saved by being absurdly expensive for what it is.
You are drawing a very long bow.

People can, and still do with much regularity, publish criticism of the USA, the US government and the US president.

The NY Times has even published op-eds by Putin himself.

This is about providing commercial services. It has nothing to do with free speech.
It is not quite as easy as you suppose. The Bank Holding Company act of 1956 (as amended in 1970) places any company that owns 25% or more of a bank under the regulatory supervision of the Fed. The holding company rules for Broker/Dealers (investment banks and retail/institutional brokerages) are less airtight but not insignificant.

I worked on Wall Street for years, many of the them on the business side. Fed supervision is no joke.
sanctions like these only alienate (otherwise mostly pro-democracy) people from US/West.

Do impose sanctions on individuals who are associated with the rules of undemocratic regimes. But punishing whole populations (especially if they don’t have a democratic voice in the matter) is dumb and immoral.
I don't think Noam Chomsky has ever been sympathetic to the USSR, he just said that the US was not much better than USSR.

For example in that speach he clearly states that USSR was a a flawed totalitarian system from the start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4

(he has in fact also stated many times that his political views were indeed censored in the US)
I'm less worried about a capitalist democracy like the USA than the EU in this regard. The EU is an undemocratic construct where moralist positions far outweigh the EU's own interests, so it's much more like the USSR than the USA could ever be.
But many people prefer routine and automation.
Routine helps avoid wasting time and mental efforts by staying alerted to how exactly you feel at all times, not to mention the ease to misread your feeling.

I can only speak for myself, and find it really challenging to reliably evaluate my hungriness/thirstiness. If I can get hungry just by looking at food, or if I end up eating way too much because I've thought I was hungry (I wasn't!), then how on Earth can I possibly rely on such elusive indicators?
> it essentially shreds the fabric of society

This is intentional. You shred the fabric of society, then you can let companies sell all of it back to people and tax the value.

No tax revenue when your Auntie cools lunch for the neighborhood kids.
Just Landed: Thin LTO Across Rust/C++ in Firefox for All Platforms
Why do they sanction Crimea (victim) instead of Russia?
curious as a layman who is exploring music maker hardware: what’s the difference between this and a monome? I’m interested in input devices that give you the freedom to both compose and improvise for live shows.
Fast Parallel Testing with Bazel at Databricks
It feels like we've reached the end of the old land ownership model. If you were destroying something on your land that supplied my breathable air, I would have no choice but to stop you, even though I recognize your right to the land.
No, but I think you'll agree that saying tears in a piece of paper "cryptography" is a stretch. It's not cryptography in the same way that a stamp or wax seal isn't cryptography, unless your definition of cryptography is "any method to protect the confidentiality and integrity of a document".
Surely you can see the difference between blocking someone from publishing Chomsky and forbidding US companies from "doing business" in those places.

Meanwhile for decades I remember many software EULAs saying things vaguely equivalent to "don't use this software in Cuba", etc. That is what I would compare this to.
I'm from a US-friendly nation but I get terribly sad when I hear things like this.

Contribution to the free software world should transcend where someone is from whether it be China, Russia, Iran or whatever new "enemy" our leaders decide.

As much as I dislike Facebook for privacy related reasons, maybe it's time that more tech companies setup a Tor Hidden Service and not ask where people are from.

Could this be used to protect them against having to implement sanctions against various countries if they don't actually know where their users are from?

It would also make blocking those websites difficult by repressive regimes too. They could implement the ability to upload a private PGP key so email notifications can be encrypted end-to-end, Facebook also allows for this.

The impending bifurcation of the Internet is something that I hate to think of, but it seems something a lot of governments are hell bent on, particularly with their insistence on "backdoors in encryption". One country's back door will be another country's vulnerability.

Now I think I will go and and donate to Tor Project to make myself feel better.
this punishes people who live in Crimea
Something tells me Russia is not particularly bothered by the inability of people in Crimea to use GitHub.
I don’t think it’s commoditized. AWS has moved past being just EC2. Virtualization is a small piece or the picture, and building and operating DynamoDB or S3 or SQS are all very tough tasks.
We've evolved with this rate of radiation and are adapted to it. It's even possible that we need it for something.
git is already decentralized. You can use it easily without github.

This restriction is from the U.S. Government, not a "corporation."
I would say he was much less "in favor of the USSR" and much more "skeptical to harshly critical of US military and business interests".
For me, that means having all the features of Github available in p2p.
>"Location, location, location" has got to stop being the reason people choose a city.

Why? I want to live where I get to do the things I enjoy. I would say most people I know prefer temperate, low humidity weather, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, beaches, mountains, lakes, good water quality and security, etc. The places that have these features will cost the most, since more people will be bidding up the price.
That's not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes ex-engineer managers are the worst kind of manager due to their own misconceptions or arrogance.
That's called a third party negative externality. Even libertarians are fine with state intervention.
people could commit to a box in another legal regime? Which is a viable option now but requires a smidge of additional overhead.
Conveniently,
you ignored everything I wrote after the comma:

“just because of the comparatively open press in Hong Kong + ubiquity of cell phones”

Of course I remember Tienanmen. And I’m also aware of the Uyghur camps. It’s no surprise that a country as authoritarian as China will be violent. What’s surprising is that it’s being violent in an autonomous territory with many Western connections.
SFTPGo: A Full Featured SFTP Server in Go
> It is ridiculous that header-only is considered an advantage.

Why do you believe it's ridiculous? Being able to integrate a third-party library by just adding a few source files to your source tree is as simple as it gets.

> The state of C++ build tools is very poor, and it is harming the language as a whole.

This assertion makes no sense, particularly in the light of this discussion. Installing a headers-only library is a solved problem, and even template-heavy libraries such as Eigen are already distributed and installed quite easily with standard linux package managers.
I agree with the idea, but wonder if that really hurts the right people. People in Crimea get both annexed and punished on global market. Russia gets access to what it wanted and gets no real punishment.
Have you actually been to Crimea? Because I had and still have lots of relatives there (I am originally from Ukraine).
I have zero doubt that overwhelming majority of people there (easily over 70%) want to be with Russia instead of Ukraine
It was a joke, lighten up!
Because Crimea is a defacto Russian state now and for the most part a large portion of the population and the current government is participating in it.

The sanctions are for the most part per the request of the Ukrainian government.

If Catalonia becomes a separatist state tomorrow and Spain and its allies sanction it everyone in it will be under sanctions regardless of who or what they support.

This is what happens when your sanctions are geographical in nature.

No one has the capability to validate if a person in Crimea is a Russian supporter or not.

The idea behind the sanctions is in the end to make the life of the populous sufficiently difficult so they will rebel.
Why do we always have a comment like this completely missing the point about Github? If git was synonymous of Github, Microsoft would not have spent 7 billion to buy it, there's a lot of features on top of git. And for me, whether it's a decision of the US government or Github does not matter much.
Dockerizing Ruby and Rails Development
That always happens on HN. Someone linking to interesting content in threads is a common way for them to hit the front page later.
Do you think there could be a substantial time lag in that case though? Sure, some movies become hits with no marketing, but DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Ana Margo Robbie have been everywhere to market a movie with stellar reviews and a top director. Maybe that is a poor analogy. I’m not in the pharma industry, but to me, I’d hold my doctor accountable for prescribing me something I saw in a tv commercial, or not doing the legwork to understand why it could be a beneficial drug.
It's all part of the yak shaving necessary to finish a thesis.
Must I do all your research for you or are you capable of using Google? Just search for "misled fisa court". Quote from The Hill, which is among the top links:

"We know the FBI falsely told the court in the first application warrant that it knew of no derogatory information about the dossier author, Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence operative who worked simultaneously as an FBI source and a Clinton campaign opposition researcher. In fact, a senior Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr warned the FBI that Steele was desperate to stop Trump from becoming president, and other evidence showed Steele had been leaking to the media in violation of FBI rules — all derogatory evidence weighing against Steele’s credibility.

Further, we’ve learned from congressional testimony of other FBI officials that the dossier’s contents had not been corroborated by the FBI when it was used in the FISA application — even though the Woods Procedures mentioned above required that only corroborated evidence be used in support of a warrant request.

And, finally, we know from sources that the FBI had other evidence suggesting the innocence of two Trump campaign aides it targeted — Page and George Papadopoulos — that wasn’t provided to the court."

End quote. The net result is, two of Trump campaign aides were under clandestine counterintelligence surveillance based on fabricated information that the Clinton campaign paid $1.02M for to a foreign agent.