skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being a "Build-Release Engineer", essentially the sysadmin of the development tool chain, has existed since at least the 90's.

But the roots can be traced to the 70's (the PDP-11 had the compile-link process).

If you were really smart and could program in Assembler they called you a "Systems Programmer".

In the 80's, the PC revolution fostered debates over how much centralized control IT should have.

There was a long-standing debate in computing as to where the software should live (that is on a server or at the client level).

This debate was settled when Google invested heavily in making the browser a powerful and stable platform (think about Javascript in the 90's vs. today).

So the modern situation is server=cloud and client=browser. This creates a demand for people who understand how software is built/deployed/maintained in this environment.

So we slap the Devops label on it and pretend we understand what's going on.

But it's really a debate about how long the current status quo will last before it's subsumed by something else.
@defertoreptar reminded me of this:
Rich, Broke or Dead?
https://engaging-data.com/will-money-last-retire-early/

Calculate the odds your early retirement plans succeed, fail, or you die and it doesn't matter.
I know of no theory predicting porcine aeronautics :). In any case, the point is that it is not impossible that what you consider very unlikely is exactly what happened. So we wait for all the information before making judgements.
Right now, they don't generate revenue when the basket is only: USD + Yen + Euros.

But it is designed so they can switch those out for Gov bonds, corporate bonds, real estate (REITs), etc.
1. Anaphylactic shocks also cost them money. And they can also limit access to drug-based treatments if they don’t find them justified.

2. Tonsillectomy, physiotherapy... are you really unable to come up with some examples of surgical procedures and other physical and mental therapies not based on drugs?
Full tech report of UK 9th August power outage
Warcraft III was the start of RTS genre downhill, all that micromanagement of heroes made it pseudo-rts, it was probably where Blizzard got it's WoW idea.
It's not uncommon to have heart attacks, does that mean there is a safe level of cardiac arrest?
> Evil vs. non-evil being not that clear is not a problem.

Evil isnt the same as immoral, excepting a subjective interpretation of equivalence. Whats worse is a lack of standardization (or even distinction) between terminology to describe behaviors (eg pernicious, evil, immoral, corrupt, dangerous, et al). What is evil to you is certainly not the same as what is evil to me...much less how a legal doctrine is worded. It is a HUGE problem that people dont agree on what constitutes undesired action.
I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode.

Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.
Higher-kinded types: the difference between giving up, and moving forward (2016)
The tweets are a good follow-up too, since the article only said that sources had told them that Taylor Moore had been fired, so it's good to see his confirmation and additional info from him personally as well.
Yea, I read that. But where does the basis for those comes from? Other unverified claims by the Houthis themselves?

They are in power merely 4 years, no evidence of any tests in Yemen (so they developed this without testing at all?), all this time being involved in a war, barely any imports etc.

Sorry, but arguing they have these capabilities requires just a bit more proof.
Some of the most talented engineers I've met were older men and women. I think companies that don't value them won't do well in the long run.
If they want to have one single blade move back and forth, that's cool, but this seems like a bafflingly complex way to do it. What's wrong with a normal linear actuator? It's powered by a regular electric motor (something right in Tesla's wheelhouse), can be built very reliable, and is plenty efficient. There's no reason to build the Space Shuttle when people just want an electric car, and won't be able to tell the difference under the hood anyway. Maybe they want as many solid state components as possible for durability? Talk about diminishing returns...

No, my guess is that this is to lock down the patent so they own it (and as many other even vaguely plausible concepts as possible) and can wield it in patent battles with other automakers. More charitably, you could look at it as clearing as much land as possible so that 10 years down the line their engineers are minimally encumbered by patent concerns and can build whatever they want. Typical corporate R&D, and not particularly deserving of a Car and Driver fluff piece.
The considerations part of developing an operating system can be viewed pretty well in the mailing lists of Linux Distributions (and other OSes, but less so because of the fewer stake holders).

The decision making processes are influenced by different cultures: Debian aims for a very stable system with no breakages at least within a major version, Windows aims for close to endless backwards compatibility (hence the bloat), while Apple designs its systems with more of a "move fast" attitude (hence the quick proliferation of new features).
Nothing indicates that Facebook would have a better track record in controlling monetary policy (which is admittedly pretty hard), and at least central banks are under clear regulations and guidelines.

Furthermore, Libra would have incentive to move the policy towards further profit for the members, while central banks have incentives to stabilize the economy.
No, half of KSA's oil production capacity was not taken out by a $100 drone carrying a grenade.

That's like saying you can bring down a massive skyscraper by hurling a lit match into its generator room.

Yes, in theory it can hit the right spot at the right time to start a massive chain reaction, but the odds of that actually happening are impossibly low.

Now multiply by the number of facilities that were hit, and it's the odds of winning N different lotteries with N random tickets.

No, this was done with far more sophisticated military-grade attack drones, backed by robust Command and Control system.

Very likely it was done by the HESA Ababil drone that Iran is known to have supplied to the Houthis and was involved in prior Houthi attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Ababil

Not the sort of drone you can buy on Amazon for $100.
Your comment was "Chomsky covers your exact comment quite thoroughly here." Is it really that far a reach for someone to see the attached video as a low effort stand-in for their argument given that comment?

If you just wanted to post a Chomsky interview video, I of course have no issue with that.
It's almost the opposite [1][2], and it's not surprising actually. People tend to forget what malaria is: it's an epidemic and it is not caused by the Anopheles, it is spread by the Anopheles if there is a pool of contaminated humans to feed from.

That's why you have anopheles in almost every all European countries (including Russia) and also in the US[3], but no malaria, because the epidemic was eradicated there.

[1]: map of the African population: http://www.utl-morlaix.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/afriqu...

[2]: map of malaria prevalence in Africa https://www.populationdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Af...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anopheles-range-map.png
Maybe if I was having unrelated problems at my job, me personally, I might consider trying to start a Union so as to make my employer terrified of firing me.

I’m saying thus not theoretically, but a buddy just the other day was joking-not-joking about doing that at his job.

So who knows?
>Facebook is the most powerful private entity on the earth right now

No it isn't, not even close. At most it's the third most powerful tech company, after Alphabet and Amazon.
I always think it's a bit incongruous to see them on the cockpit windows of airliners. Sort of like having a vacuum tube power supply for your computer.

(Two other solutions exist. One is spinning the window, you'll see it on ships. The other is making the window hot.)
Just because you don't agree with my analysis of our culture doesn't mean it's misinformation. Helmets reducing the risk of head and face injuries doesn't mean that biking without a helmet is inherently dangerous. Nor does it mean we should force people to wear them because we insist on treating adults as children in America. American football is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
> How much of the profit was illegal and how would you go about quantifying that?

I mean, I haven't done a criminal investigation of the Sacklers, so I'm the wrong person to ask.

But on general principle - if the goal is to use fines to disincentivize future criminal behavior (which seems reasonable to me, but it's not the only factor at play in setting fines), you should treat all profit that was related to the criminal behavior as criminal and not try to reverse-engineer "How much money would they have made if they hadn't done this crime." Otherwise you're still incentivized to try 10 different legally-questionable strategies and keep the profit from the 9 that were found to be on the other side of the line.

As a concrete example, if Google's copying of Java interfaces were ruled illegal (and to be clear I don't think it should be), then an appropriate fine is (some multiple of) all profit from Android, not some attempt at retconning how much money Google would have made if they had used something other than Java or waited for OpenJDK.

(That's a fine, to be clear, not damages. Oracle's damages should be calculated by retconning how much they would have gained had Google kept the laws, and nothing more.)
The whole court case will be about the plausibility of the company's performance claims. So, responding to the root comment: yes, the company very much needs to establish plausible reasons for firing.
I like it. Chinese factories that match US EPA standards can import tariff free.
This was < 2 years ago
Raspberry Pi Museum inside my drawer :)
Why replace a simple but essential thing that works (i.e. current wipers) with a more complicated one that it will have lots of additional ways to fail?
A couple of times, although I don't remember / know if it was "human factors" or otherwise. Both cases were primarily about letting someone see something where it was dangerous to be, although the first was about the head-mounted cameras and the second about the head-mounted displays.
You clearly don’t understand the history of the American labor movement if this is what you believe.

Unions in America have been both conservative (e.g. AFL) and radical (e.g. IWW). The radicals were crushed by big business and the US government, while the conservatives are still around, but haven’t fought back enough against the continuing assault on American workers because of this inherently conservative nature. Their strategy has always been to make the labor movement in America part of the establishment, but the corporate grip on America won’t let gains for employees last without a continuous fight. It’s greed by companies, not workers, that makes labor relations so adversarial.

What you perceive as “greed” by workers is workers asking for basic rights on the job. Why is it wrong for employees to ask for their share but right for companies to ask for as much as they can? I see this far too often on HN and I believe it’s a symptom of how corporatized our society has become.

Unions don’t just fight for higher wages, they fight for dignity and respect on the job. That means workers get a say in their conditions. That’s a good thing for both workers and companies—even if companies are too blinded by greed to see it.
There is an enormous difference between making ethical decisions and being prosecuted which this advocated for.
What do you understand the consequences to be?
Life's Most Precious Gifts?
Why not Google then, too? Corporation of evil and all that. Or, right, it is too big to fail and it's privacy destroying applications are so useful and nice...
How to Make Wealth (2004)
It's a company-wide issue, and it can be observed from the outside too. Existing products improve at a rate that is significantly slower than competitors (with a few exceptions). And I'm not referring to feature creep, but fixing obvious gaps and issues that the company would have been aware of for years (or more than a decade in some cases).
All I know is that high intensity light could revolutionize large-scale 3D printing.
Speaking of diversification, what’s Houston’s plan?
And they did a half-baked attempt too.

"Hackers use distributed protein based machine learning to invent a sport the establishment hates"

That's better click bait. Sounds like a VC worthy business plan too.
🧰 Developer’s Toolbox: Selection Sort
Sweet, hopefully we can get some footies games going, I always thought it was far more enjoyable than dota.
I think it was since after changing it I got the job.
This article was posted to HN yesterday or maybe the day before: https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...

It looks like unionization wasn't the only point of contention. In particular, a segment of Kickstarter's workforce conflicted with company leadership over an "Always Punch Nazis" comic book kickstarter project apparently made in reference to violence against Richard Spencer. Employees pressured leadership to reverse this decision.

The Slate article mentions that some employees saw a union as a means to exert more pressure over leadership on these sorts of decisions:

> Afraid that they would be dismissed next—and that they didn’t have enough leverage to pressure Kickstarter over ethical issues the next time there was a disagreement—employees started discussing a union. Since March, the organizers haven’t requested recognition from the company nor have they held a staff vote through the National Labor Relations Board. But the topic has been ever-present.

My guess is that the company leadership doesn't want to be associated with this sort of promotion of violence against purported "Nazis" and took note of which employees were most vocal in drumming up support for keeping the project. While there is a far left segment that likes this kind of content, most people are adverse to promotions of violence - even against purported "Nazis", given how liberally that term is applied these days. Kickstarter probably doesn't want to have to go through employee drama every time this sort of content gets taken down.

Reply to PorterDuff, HN isn't letting me reply to your comment:

The solution is to push back against tribalism, which is exactly what Kickstarter is doing here.
Art and creativity thrives with constraints, this is truly an impressive feat of breakout artistry. It reminds me of that tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon where they reprogram the game to become Super Mario.
>What are the chances of three people trying to unionize in a company being fired in a very short span of time for 'performance' reasons?

I don't know. What are the chances? Did anyone verify their stories?
I don't know either way, but, it's supposed to be in every 201x Land Rover, I think? If you see a hologram projected into a car windshield on behalf of the driver, that might be the tech.

3-5 years, would be my optimistic guess? The tech is getting there (Magic Leap and Hololens), but it's not there yet, and it's not going to seriously accelerate until there's a really compelling consumer use-case / app to go with it.
Well the decentralised nature of most crypto currencies prevent this sort of ban, but a centralised offering from a known entity is a lot easier to block. I would also say it is better to block it, especially with Zuck at the helm, he has proven he cares nothing for regulation or laws in the nation's in which FB operates. At least bitcoin is consensus driven,libra will be driven by Zuck and the tech giants. No thanks.
I don't know you can put it as a percentage.

The generated text might associate with what you type but there seems like 0% goals-as-such, 0% available choices-as-such, 0% dangers-as-such. Maybe you 10% "influence" over the random the thing spews but that doesn't seem 10% game even.

Edit: also, 0% constraints based on either passed actions or properties of things in the world. As others have noted, it will generally respond to the most obvious action of the scene with either a reason that action is impossible or some entirely unrelated.

Perhaps the thing could be trained to give a resource-print-out and then you'd have some idea where hard limits existed.
Well, half the thread here is about the Houthis allegedly defending themselves vs SA. If this is instead a direct Iranian attack on a different state, the story changes.

Once we understand better what happened, we'll know if and how to act in response.
Was it a comment about running a kickstarter for these guys? Cos that's why I checked the comments, and was sorely disappointed :(
> And that's a win, in terms of Malaria prevention.

This experiment was not about Malaria (spread by the Anopheles genus) this is about Aedes aegypti the species which spreads Zika and Dengue fever.
I made no mention of my personal ethics. I said vetted legally. Rest assured your principles almost certainly do not align exactly with the law. You may do something illegal without the knowledge you have. You may have contributed to some illegal because you weren't privy to the sum of the parts.

Which is exactly why this is such a horrible idea.
Not the first time Germany “bans” the “banking elite”...

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Well the US banned Germany from ever having a military so I guess the Germans should at least have the freedom to control their stagnant economy however they see fit, and ban US companies from doing business there if they wish.
Facebook has way more control over the social fabric and distribution of information than Google does. We've seen violence-inciting disinformation campaigns spread through Facebook and rack up a literal death count to the point that governments have angrily demanded intervention from FB with the result of FB shrugging their shoulders and going 'our bad, we didn't hire enough moderators'.
3D Stereogram in Zero Lines of JavaScript
I am enjoying reading through the scattered comments, but there are now at least four posts. This post exceeds others in points, oddly.
What are the chances that 3 of the 435 fired Uber engineers had considered the concept of unionizing as its a general topic now?

With that perspective I think its highly probable of such firings happening in a short time span
Wiper blades fail.

One of the nice properties of the dual-blade setup is that if the one in front of the driver fails during a hard rain, it's possible to lean over and drive looking through the passenger-side of the front window -- at least until you can safely exit a freeway and find a safe place to stop.

Maybe less critical if the car is actually self-driving, so I guess I'm not surprised folks are thinking about this.
Well, on the bright side most democracies are not explicitly about profit-making and/or cost-cutting as their first priority, even if it's the first priority of individual politicians.
In this case, the French were “no match for” the Turks, as they were not able to put up a fight against the Turks.
What do you mean by "OK" in that context?

Based on what it says in the article, it's reasonable to assume that he tried to sell the business as a going concern and didn't find any takers. If I own a business and want to move on (or retire) and I'm unable to sell it, I'd be sorry for the people affected but ultimately have no obligation to keep going no matter what.

If you mean taking that kind of risk is unusual, sure.
I don’t know what the work environment is there, but I know that the work environment for a lot of software developers is pretty miserably: unpaid overtime, constant on-call, layoffs with no severance... they may be trying to tackle some of that.
I don't understand why the article recommends pivot_root. Its man page says that it may or may not change the current root and the current working directory of any processes or threads which use the old root directory, which means it can change the root of other processes! Also, it says that its typical use is for switching from the boot RAM disk to the actual root filesystem. This is an entirely different use case than chroot, and doesn't seem to have any security benefits either.
Libra is meant to be safer and better than a bank. Seems almost impossible to fail, it has 100% reserve backing while banks have < 2% in europe. It supports instant payments even in the most remote regions of the eart. It will be a terrible competitor for banks, if it works. The problem is that it s backed by a conglomerate that is too big to trust.
If that was your take away from what I said, I'd guess you could read my comment infinite times and fail to understand it.
Agreed the standard dose is probably 300mcg, but there’s a reason it doesn’t get sold at that amount. There’s communities that track what the right amount is for them and take that, see https://trackmystack.com
> Trump has perpetrated many chances in law and practice that benefit really wealthy people... These include massive tax cuts for really wealthy people

Basically: no. First, Trump can't make law; he can only sign what congress puts before him. Second, while he can make executive actions, I don't recall any of those that benefit "really wealthy people." But I might just be forgetting, please remind me.

If you're referring to the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" (TCJA), which was passed by Congress and signed by Trump, still no. The US largely does not tax wealth at all; it did not directly tax wealth before TCJA and doesn't after, either.

The only indirect wealth tax is the tax on capital gains and dividends, which basically didn't change under TCJA. You still have 0, 15, and 20% long-term / qualified brackets, with the same additional 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax ("NIIT") for high-earners retained. (NIIT was added under Obama as a follow-up legislation to the Affordable Care Act.)

Those rates and brackets basically didn't change. The top marginal Federal rate on LTCG is still 23.8% and the qualifying income brackets didn't shift substantially.

> and reducing fines and legal exposure for wealthy people

For example?

> He's the opposite of a reaction to reign in wealthy people.

Well, we can definitely agree there :-).
>Look at it this way - aren't corporate profits quite high already?

Are they? What do you consider high?
Fun bits:
* Software upgrade your wind farm to remove bad responses/oscillations
* Software upgrade on trains removed ability for drivers to reboot them (& they intend to keep it that way?!) so hand to send techs with laptops
* Upgrades needed to improve loss-of-mains detection in small generators.
Shouldn't you be applying Occam's razor here? Attempting to make a conspiracy out of an attempt to unionize seems like a rather poor argument.

In this case, the employees coming out with this knowledge have everything to lose because they could easily be blacklisted from further jobs. Kickstarter has no reason to not deny their accusations and has everything to gain from it.

If someone is risking a their livelihood to say something like that, then perhaps we should take what they're saying with a larger grain of truth. Otherwise we'd be saying that whistleblowers and the PR arm of a company have exactly the same weight.
It must not have been a very profitable business if you just shutter it instead if selling it
I wonder if most of the targets are still running Windows 7 and older? I know Win 10 isn’t totally immune, but if you enable all the security options it’s harder to penetrate. Am I wrong?
And it is being used on an industrial scale in a place visited by 16 million people a year?!