skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox.

America's puritanical urges result in more self-harm than anything else. So much of the way our nation is structured is based on some ancient idea that you have to live clean and work hard in order to get to heaven. That is combined with a sense of justified sadism: if we catch someone not living up to these ideals, it is appropriate to punish them, and appropriate to take pleasure in punishing them.

The War on Drugs was never about public health. It was about 1. controlling minorities, and 2. moral superiority. So there's absolutely no surprise that a health-based approach is showing better results than a punishment-based approach.
From an Irish perspective, this is actually quite clever politics from the Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Ever since this potential trade deal was announced, he has been getting it in the neck from the Irish beef industry, who are quite powerful and stand to lose a lot if open access to EU markets is given to Brazilian and Argentinian producers. So I can't imagine he would lose too much sleep if the trade deal was in fact cancelled because of this.
I'm not making any statement about "small and mid sized California companies". I'm talking specifically about Google. The more time I spend away from there, the more I realize what an incredibly unique place Google is (or perhaps, was).

> I think it's typical when you have smart but insecure people which is most software engineers.

The distribution of "techies" has changed dramatically as everyone else in the world discovered how much money was in it, but this couldn't be further from the truth as far as classic tech culture goes. Perhaps they were "smart but insecure", but it manifested as a hyperindividualist, chaotic marketplace of ideas culture, precisely because you could be fairly confident that the people you were talking with were intelligent enough to handle disagreement without thinking of everyone as heretics, infidels, or faithful to the dogma.

It's the mainstreaming of tech, and the influx of people more in thrall to social conformity over independent thought that's tempered tech culture's famously anarchic tendencies. (I know this is a little reductive but I don't want to write an essay in a single comment. If you have a particular complaint about the way I phrased this, I'd be happy to clarify).

I should note that, to the extent that I'm focusing on the left's abandonment of liberalism, it's because I am and always have been a left-liberal, and most of my milieu has been as well. I hope it's not controversial that the right is abandoning liberalism too: I just don't have exposure to spaces where they're culturally powerful enough to illiberally enforce their dominance.
Agree, "most" was a bad word choice, "some" is probably better.
I think this comment is actually spot on. The web is, quickly, devolving into an unusable mess because of all these F paywalls everywhere.

I would wholly support a policy of no paywalled articles on HN.
Nope. As I said, if you need a transport layer to connect arbitrary peers over the Internet, TLS is exactly what the doctor ordered and it already exists. Already studied, already got libraries that implement it, already got test frameworks, everything is in place. An alternative even if it was technically no worse (which isn't guaranteed) and available today (impossible) doesn't have those things.

> You can do PKI with plainkeys.

Nope. A PKI specifically involves the binding of keys to identity, that's what the certificates are for. You don't have to have X.509 (though I'll argue you might as well) but you need that binding.
Tolerance is not inherently a virtue. Sometimes tolerance is moral weakness.
Yup, and Google is letting those people know that there may now be consequences for their disruption. If those people still think their disruption worthwhile, they're free to proceed.
Why don't we form a new WTO, without China or other dictatorships, and only allow in democracies that are liberal or liberalizing? There's no point in opening our arms to China if they aren't moving on the right track anymore towards becoming a free and fair society.
Eh, I live in Portugal and while climate change doesn't help, I also don't think that's the biggest cause of our large fires, we mostly just suck at managing the forest - we depopulated the interior without having a backup plan.

The fires in the Artic and Siberia, that does feel like the end of times :/
>I'm in Canada and the things Trump does and says are still present in conversations nearly every day.

I'm not sure what you mean but generally in my life... I actually don't have a lot of "political" conversations every day. More often than not, none at all.
People move here and the economy is growing because of tech. Do any of these employers support the city of Seattle’s policies on allowing people to openly shoot up in the streets?
British Columbia New Old Growth Protections More Symbolic Than Symbiotic
I fail to see why a blimp could not be designed in the same way as a weather balloon with a highly expandable skin. They already utilize bladders extensively. You would have to suspend your payload / drive unit below the balloon the same way a weather balloon does, but that's not a deal breaker. This seems like a materials engineering problem more than a design engineering one.
I don't think you need a single device. Just bots with virtual numbers.
I have a feeling that many of the activists who were just protesters alongside those big names didn't quit their jobs to pursue of lifetime of pure activism. I'm not sure why having a job precludes you from being political.
Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit Cards
Often reality doesn’t fit the narrative, comrade.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority." [1]

That effect and illusion has really been amplified with Twitter and how the news media uses a handful of those loud voices as though they're the dominant or established opinion.

Combine that with the fact that the most intolerant don't budge, while the majority is flexible.

1) https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Have a look at dnsadblock.com. The mobile app is not so great but I'm getting there.
...wow. Just wow.
Sounds like a typical story of how one changes. First it's everyone, then everyone but Mark, than everyone but people who remind me of Mark. than it's no one but Ben.
I think you may be incorrect about GMOs actually being more sustainable, as they have a pretty major effect on biodiversity by encouraging higher use of pesticides and insecticides[0]. A great example is the effect they have had on the population of monarch butterflies, mentioned in the linked source.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_co...
Washington State is one of the heaviest users of legal marijuana: https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nation-and-world/sewage-t...

I doubt we will ever reach Portugal's low levels of use, but people can lead happy & productive lives while having chemical dependencies.

The UK's war on drugs and party culture surrounding ket and others is kinda sad to watch :c
Display some kind of sketchy image (I think it was a hairy ballsack?) and a mild rant hating on the HN crowd.
Yes, but often they did that by simply living with some mold and rebuilding every few years. Just because they could live with it didn’t make it ideal.
Nginx lacks nginx_http_perl_module, nginx_http_lua_module, and many other modules that I wish it had out of the box. This is why I end up installing openresty instead on most boxes.

Postfix lacks OpenDMARC and OpenDKIM out of the box, which are recommended for almost all non-satellite mail server installs these days. Granted they're not native Postfix modules, but they're so important that I wish it had them out-of-the-box.

Same is true for caddy, certbot, and several other tools I use often.
I know that this didn’t work out in the past and the result were not hurt feelings, the result were millions of murdered people. I know that tolerating intolerance is not solely to blame for that, it probably didn’t even play a major role, but it did play a role. And that‘s why I want to avoid making that deadly mistake in the future.

Yeah, deciding when it is ok is then a hard problem but I’m willing to accept that.
Other countries should indeed have put in financial effort to make sure this ecosystem is preserved. It might be too late now.
> “You’ve got a guy shooting heroin on the street, and the cop is supposed to say, ‘You O.K.?’” grumbled one law enforcement officer in Seattle. (In fact, an officer would typically confiscate the heroin, admonish the user and move on.) Some residents worry that when the city ignores its own laws on the books and tolerates people openly abusing narcotics, it takes a step toward incivility that will eventually result in chaos and crime. There’s also a legitimate argument that the threat of prison is sometimes necessary to motivate users to participate in treatment programs.

What non-drug user would want to live in a town where someone shooting heroin in public is not removed from the street? I know I wouldn't.

I'm not saying lock em up and throw away the key but you can't just move on and pretend nothing happened. If you're going to provide treatment in lieu of jail time then it needs to mandatory.
Latin culture is about taking vegatables and turning them into bricks to be consumed with soft cheese.

>called Romeo & Juliet, one of the best food names ever created

The same format here is called Postre Vigilante "whatchman's dessert")

In Argentina in addition to membrillo there's dulce de batata!
Gloucester, MA has been doing this for at least 4 years.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jmaxj7/this-new-england-t...
Do you have any statistics to back that up (violence rate)? I don’t feel like anecdotes make for good conversation here.
When has the US tried to influence Brazil to stop the deforestation in Amazon?
Best Canon Tripod for DSLR
Texas weather isn't uniform because it's a very large place
What AI Can Learn from Romeo and Juliet
I was a bit surprised the economist used the word absurdly actually. There are several incidents happened before China's aviation authority made the demand:

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/08/21/cathay-pacific-pilot-w...

This pilots announcement happened before July 26.
The book I'd recommend most would be Age of Ambition for an understanding of China from the inside. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap has a lot of good bits on what the tin says but also how bureaucratic promotion and governance within China works.

For geopolitics I thought Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century, *
Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, and The Rise of Eurasia* both had some value but I didn't find them as enlightening as the previous two.

EDIT: Oh, and China Airborne had some great insight into where China's technological abilities are as good as anything in the world and where it still has catching up to do. Or at least the state of play as of 2012.
Extremely cool.
> there is a study or set of studies which shows that, for software projects within a certain broad size range, a team size of 5-7 gets the project done fastest, and that larger teams not only take more man-hours for the same size project but more calendar days

I'd like to read those studies. Do you have a cite?
> it's become something that we send disenfranchised young soldiers from poorer economic backgrounds to

I know this is an article of faith in some political circles. Promising poor kids money for killing Those Other People is the only way military service makes sense.

Just FYI, this isn't actually true. US military recruits are more likely to be from the three middle quintiles than the first or fifth. Data here: https://www.cfr.org/article/demographics-us-military
Per The Washington Post [0]:

> A 25 percent tariff on automobiles and a 5 percent levy on auto parts take hold Dec. 15.

That means your car's transmission replacement goes from ~$3k to ~$3200 (due to the additional markup on parts for time, labor, insurance, etc). Not too too bad for the end user, but actually bad for the parts companies, mechanics, tool and die makers, and others in the supply chain. This will be hurting your local repair shop very directly.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/23/china-hit...
You don't wish nginx supported using environment variables in config files out of the box?

I'd argue that lacking a way to do that is a significant hit to usability, and it requires recompiling with the nginx_http_perl_module or lua module to get that feature.
That's an interesting point - especially when it comes to the urgency a lot of people feel when considering climate change.

I feel like part of the partisan leak into the workplace might be due to the lack of responsible governance that most Americans are feeling right now - since the entities responsible for fixing the big problems are out to lunch everyone is feeling a need to try and help solve those problems themselves.
Are there any resources where I can educate myself on this? I bought an apartment in a 28 storey building recently and I was struck with the lack of interest and thought on my questions on natural ventilation and natural lighting. I'm a long way from designing a house but I'd definitely want to educate myself on topics like how do you guess the air flow direction, what direction is the sunlight going to be during what months, what about rain fall, what are good insulators you can use, etc. you get what I'm getting at.
> Then more people live in the suburbs, but you need a car to get from the suburbs to the city.

Your assertion ignores the fact that network coverage means nothing if the time to traverse the network just to get from point A to point B is much more expensive, time-wise and economically, than simply using personal transportation to get to where you want to go.
... this is probably news to people actually living in Seattle. (Edit: the title was originally, "Seattle Has Figured Out How to End the War on Drugs")

A place where meth heads attack people with pitchforks in the street a few days after being released from prison on a suspended sentence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-accused-...

Not to mention our random piles of used syringes, which are often found in parks where kids play.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/more-than-3...

Here's a syringe pile after cleaning up a homeless camp north of Seattle:

https://2qibqm39xjt6q46gf1rwo2g1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

I'm all for decriminalization, but Seattle's current approach is to decriminalize not only drugs, but a host of other actual crimes, like public intoxication, public camping, shop lifting, harassment, etc.
What about all the people who aren't running around with pitchforks who have been diverted out of the addiction to prison pipeline?

Would you rather be paying $100,000+ a year/person to judge and jail them for the crime of being addicted while poor? (I've yet to see people entering that pipeline for the crime of being addicted while rich.)
The reporters designation of "figured out" seems to stem more from the fact that the solution fits his own view than any actual real evidence. There is mention of the difficulties such lax policies has brought to the city, but they are waved away as being "growing pains" toward a new utopia.

I can't say, living here, that I feel that the problem is solved. I view the needles outside my apartment as evidence to the contrary - though I suppose I'm an ignoramus for thinking that.

Simply strolling through Pioneer Square or most parts of International District paints a significantly different picture. One can dine at a Chinese place on Jackson and look out their window and see junkies peddling stolen goods at the bus stop. The non-enforcement of so-called "petty crime" used to fund drug addictions is egregious and continues to undermine the already little sense of community there is in this city of transients.

What I'm trying to say is that while I appreciate the difference in approach from the traditional one, I do believe that there needs to be an honest discussion about the limits of rehabilitation. More research on the subject, as it relates to Seattle, shows that there are many, many, people who take advantage of these lax policies to abuse the system, hurting others who actually need help.
The calories for McDonalds small/medium/large are 230/340/510. I don’t know how many individual fries each size has, but it seems like they do substantially jump in portion.

The drink size is about how much you’re able to take away from the restaurant.

It’s true fries and drinks are higher margin items than sandwiches for fast food restaurants, though.
I worked at Google for quite a while, 2005-2013, and even then, the internal political discussion was pretty toxic, but a lot smaller in scope since there are far fewer people.

It sounds like the work culture at Google has rediscovered the emergent factors which gave rise to the traditional cultural strictures against talking about money, politics, and religion.

Good science is repeatable. Given that Google is arguably an intellectually friendly environment, where more people than average understand how to talk in ways that get closer to truth, the inadvertent experiment conducted by Google over the past 15 years or so should hold a lot of weight.

It only makes sense that they're cutting down on something that has turned toxic. It's a bit disappointing to hear, since I personally enjoyed the occasional, honest discussion with smart people of other viewpoints - these good discussions made the much larger number of ridiculous ones, bearable.

It sounds like the overall cost-benefit tradeoff supports Google corporate's decision. (There were externalities beyond the discussions themselves.)
> I mean, what's MORE worth talking about than human rights, the environment, history, etc.?

Talk, when you have no ability to act, is just arguing and helps no one.

What's more worth talk about? Things you can actually act upon.
We all want to stop the fires, but the fires are the same as they ever were. This isn't about the fires, if it was, the sanctions would have taken place already during Dilma or Lula's government:

"As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years." [1]

[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra...
Interesting. I was looking into reselling a few things on the side on Amazon just for fun, but found it nearly impossible to find any product that wasn’t blocked for third-party sellers from selling.
Where I grew up, the saying went "there are three things you don't talk about in polite company: money, religion, and politics." Where I used to work, I found out someone I worked with a lot didn't support gay marriage. I had a really hard time working with them after that.

Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of trying to make work a social hub. It's great to say that we should be able to discuss anything with anyone, but the reality is that we're not all perfectly mature people and we can't handle it.
Looking for Abstraction in Medieval Art
Not all the instructions for modules have to be loaded into the instruction cache, that can easily be prevented with runtime config.

My original post was bourne out of frustration with nginx not having nginx_http_perl_module out of the box. If it's never loaded in the config file though, it never has to be loaded into memory at runtime.
You're arguing that right-wing points of view are the only ones that can harm people or cause violence?
No, I'm arguing that most large, "professional" companies would not have allowed employees to create create chat groups whose sole purpose was to discuss politics or any other non-work-related topic (whether on mailing lists, Slack, or whatever). In doing so, Google was treating its employees more like adults, which is the opposite of what a previous comment in the thread was suggesting.
I'm genuinely struggling to understand here, because on one hand you talk about tolerance being a difficult thing where we should tolerate the viewpoints of others. On the other hand you're expressing that saying somethign hateful might have political and social consequences. But I was under the impression that, in your view, saying hateful things and recieving a social consequence as a result of your hate is a sign of an intolerant society.
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Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection
Nobody should be having that discussion at work, but sadly that discussion does occur. It mostly occurs behind the back of "Alice" so if you ever hear that type of talk it is your job to report it to HR who can investigate. No one should have to fear for their safety when they come to work.
We don't have sufficent funding of social services to provide navigation teams and counselors to all of the visibly homeless (those you see on the street), never mind the thousands living in their cars in Seattle (the invisible homeless).

Seattle is doing what it can, but we need state and federal action to go further. We can't single handedly solve the severe wealth stratification that is worsening day by day :c
Haskell. History of a Community-Powered Language
McClatchy is a dumpster fire of a newspaper company.
Yes. I was 16 or 17 when it was at its peak, thus unable to sell without my mom’s permission. The e-trade account was a custodial account; the shares belonged to me but the account was controlled by my mom. When I did sell years later it was for $45 or something a share.
The problem with this approach, is the belief that punishing the expression of a belief, extinguishes the belief itself.

Looking at world politics right now, I don't think that approach is being very successful. It just fosters a narrative of oppression and persecution of those who want to rebel against the prevailing norms of discourse.

> It is also not too far off from many views that I have personally seen, especially when you begin to imagine the legal changes involved to implement those views.

I think it's also important to be careful to avoid hyperbole.

It's easy to from "I don't support government run healthcare" to "WHY ARE YOU MURDERING ALL THE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T AFFORD HEALTH INSURANCE?" with no nuance.
This is counterintuitive. If you emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the dominant viewpoint, thereby reducing diversity. If you don't emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the people who can do the job, which is almost certainly more diverse (to the extent the pipeline doesn't suffer the aforementioned political biases).
ABCs? I don't understand. What does that mean?
"Granny Smith"
Judging from the comments there are basically two stereotypes of people in this discussion:

1) The people who "just want to do their work". While they might care about the ramifications of what they're doing they don't think about it actively while working on it

2) The people who care A LOT about their ethics and try to respect them in whatever they do

I guess both sides are important and the way Google phrased these new rules doesn't seem to exclude either side but "banning politics at work" surely isn't good for type #2 and, by extension, the company at large.