skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually the best outcome for the FSF. Unwittingly, the FSF might now need to find a leader who isn't a known weirdo/creep who's "genius" people merely tolerate. This might be the best news for FSF fans like me.
I don’t disagree, but that’s not responsive to my (or GPs) point. GP implied the aggregate is what made it OK: if anything that made it more sensitive (not everyone would bother to aggregate and look up who owns the IPs).
The original email thread is not an isolated incident. https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...

Edit: additional stuff https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20... https://mobile.twitter.com/aprilaser/status/1173750767586426... https://twitter.com/0xabad1dea/status/1172545166953066497 https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025 https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/994267277460619265 https://mobile.twitter.com/quince/status/1172290839369773057
My apologies, that's me mixing up dates of Obama's presidency for some reason. You're right.
This is what success looks like if you charge money for a good or service.
Spot on.

To me the "driving 15 minutes to get a gallon of milk" thing is absurd on the face of it because it's missing that urban and rural life are fundamentally different in a lot of ways.

If you live in the centre of a city, it's normal to live a sort of 'just-in-time' lifestyle whereby you just pop to the shops whenever to grab an ingredient, perhaps wander to a cafe for lunch, etc.

In the country it's far more DIY. You have a big freezer / fridge and food stocks and just sort it out. If you want to cut up some wood, build a cabinet, whatever, you don't go to the community space or whatever, you do it on the land.

And if you do go to the store - well you think about what you actually need to buy. The idea that people are burning a gallon of fuel solely to grab milk is absurd, more likely they just do without it until the next time they're in town, or prepare in advance.
As far as I can tell it’s gonna get IOS13, so I don’t have to worry about that choice yet.
His assumption is actually that smart engineers would chase good tech, high stock price increase potential. They already have good compensation being Facebook/Google engineers.
WeWork is a real estate company and not a software company. They don't have any worthy propriety tech and their business model is collecting rent. How they were once valued at 47 billion just straight up doesn't make any sense.
Because of regulations increasing the costs to being building in anti-growth areas, the only thing builders can profitably produce is luxury housing. Many astute observers will point out that cost per square foot hasn't changed much in the past few decades, though the number of square feet has. However, it doesn't seem to align with what many Americans actually want, which is affordable housing.

Those looking to unload their McMansions in the coming years should be forewarned they may not be demand for them: they're often located far from jobs, offer too much space versus the shrinking family size, and demand enormous upkeep. To an extent, remote work might make the first factor more palatable, but the latter two remain problematic.
RMS's definition of pedophile doesn't include people who feel sexuall attraction on person who has puberty and is sexual maturity.

I think that's a fair definition.

He also argues that 17 years old has ability to consent.

Since I'm from a country of consent age of 13 years, I agree.

RMS don't encourage to violate the law, merely presenting the opinion. This opinion isn't blaming certain group like James Watson and his comment on race and intelligence.

I guess some people aren't civil enough to discuss theoretical problems.
That may be true. But I have no clue where those marketing expenditures go. I do recall reading about major firms realizing that most of their marketing expenditures more or less accomplished nothing.

From a bottom-up perspective, I've read that ad income is typically on the order of $0.01-$0.10 per page view. As a more or less middle-class American, I'd be willing to pay that. Or at least, I would if ad blockers stopped working.

And while that wouldn't be affordable for most people worldwide, I'm sure that there's some way to normalize by user geolocation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if ad payments aren't already normalized by user geolocation.
American house are big because we are rich and lightly taxed. It’s striking to me that the whole article goes without mentioning the wealth difference between Americans and most Europeans. The gap in household disposable income between the US and France is comparable to the gap between France and Latvia or Chile: https://financialobserver.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017....
His point, as far as I can tell, is that in different countries legally define rape in different ways, but that shouldn't change what we find morally wrong.

To extend on what I think he is saying, he thinks it should be possible to say a thing was morally wrong regardless of which country it happened in.

If we're discussing if we think a person did something morally wrong, I'd rather talk about why we think that rather than pointing out there is a law against it (especially when the laws are different in different places).
I think we should be more worried about the control that media (and especially clickbait-worthy online media) can exert over our lives. It's clear to anyone who has done their research, that his quotes were taken out of context or mis-characterised to create a specific narrative meant to fuel anger and drive visitors to the 'news' websites. It's a real shame that we can no longer discuss certain topics without fear of retribution.
Show HN: Making RSS keyword alerts, alternative to Feedly's pro feature
Very unrelated issue - he resigned after the flamewars regarding PEP 572 (the addition of an assignment expression ':='). After it had gone on for a while, he finally used his BDFL authority to shut down debate and approve the PEP, and then resigned shortly after. In particular, he felt that the Python Code of Conduct's requirement for civility was being completely ignored in attacks on him in social media.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/757713/ for background, and https://lwn.net/Articles/759654/ for his resignation letter.
Isn't the reasonable question more - why aren't all houses big?

I don't want a big house because I don't want to have to decorate a bunch of big rooms and don't have a family to house - but I would quite like a decent amount of land, both for the setback and for gardening, forestry, etc.

For the most part, the downsides to having a large home are primarily financial, secondary effects are environmental (we can probably fix the transport issues, but sprawl actually affects ecosystems).

I mean, if you can afford a big old mansion in Central London you buy it and live in it. It seems to me that all the article is saying is that America is a wealthy country.
Unions are generally responsible for the standard being 8h/day, 40h/week. Here is a random link off the first page of a search that goes into this. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep...
Many contemporaries of Walter Duranty knew he was full of shit, but for the NYTs his lies were politically convenient. That time it took them half a century to come clean. In your example with Kavanaugh, it took them no more than a year or so. So if anything, they're getting better.

Certainly some organizations have better reputations than others, and I do trust the NYTs more than I trust Vice. My point in all of this is that when talking of some sort of golden age in journalism, one needs to keep in mind the severity of lies told in the past, as well as the relative opportunity the truth had to surface in different eras. Could the NYTs have suppressed knowledge of the Holodomor so effectively in the modern era when the wrong viral video from some random bystandard with a smartphone can circulate widely without the assistance or cooperation of organizations like the NYTs?
He's being pushed out for decades of being creepy, and especially so to women. At some point you have to say "enough", and that point is always going to look somewhat arbitrary. It's too bad MIT had to wait so very long to do this.
Minors cannot consent because they can be convinced by someone more mature. Here's a simple example: let's say a 20 year old wants to have sex with a two year old. Would you accept that the two year old consented because the 20 year old got them to say "yes"?

The natural next question is, "where's the line?" A 20 year old and a two year old is obviously wrong, but a 25 year old and a 75 year old seems okay, if a bit weird. And yes, not every person the same age has the same amount of experience and maturity.

But here's the thing: the law can't take that into account. The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it. And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot. Just like one day makes the difference between being able to vote, or drink, or get a driver's license.
In they were in Massachusetts, Minsky might have asked, "Are you here willingly, and how old are you?" And he could have received the reply, "Absolutely, I'm having the time of my life with Jeffrey and all the famous people he introduces me to, and I'm 16."

And the sex might then have seemed consensual and legal to Minsky, because even now in 2019, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16.
It sucks to be the female of this species, let me tell you.

When we are minors, we are mentally deficient to be sexual beings. When we are adults, we are also told that we have no control or reproductive choice over what we do with bodies.

I hate to sound like this..because I don’t think of myself as a vocal feminist..I have always considered myself a rational being.

With that hat on, it seems to me that the female human being has no choice or agency and their physical bodies are mere vessels for the male of the species to fornicate, procreate and to be generally unobtrusively abiding by the rules made by the opposite gender.

That’s very upsetting to me.
well it might also have to do with that folks like bill clinton and donald trump were associating with him..
Constructing a situation in which Marvin Minsky somehow was blameless for his relationship with a known pedophile and child sex trafficker and situations directly resulting from that relationship, then projecting the reactions of other people through that situation, is not merely a mistake with words. Coupled with his at-best-real-gross chinstroking about minors, consent, and statutory rape in the past, it demonstrates a pattern. And it's a pattern that, obviously, made enough people uncomfortable as to want to not associate with him--as is their right.

MIT doesn't have to give Richard Stallman a do-nothing job. The FSF doesn't have to give Richard Stallman a (nearly) do-nothing job. Everybody makes mistakes, sure. You make up for those mistakes by doing good and doing right and if Stallman wants redemption, literally nobody is stopping him from going after it. They're just not bankrolling it. There's a difference here.
That’s not his defense. Stallman never disputed the lack of consent of the minor. He’s saying the minor might have been coerced by Epstein to “present herself as entirely willing”, i.e. she _looked like_ she’s willing when she’s really not. Minsky would have no way of knowing.
Really?

You're going to make a moral comparison between a minor traffic violation (not even a primary offense!) and having sex with a coerced child?
It's something that unfortunately needs a name now.
MIT Students Think President Reif Should Also Resign over Taking Epstein's Money
I recall reading some recent stories on how Boomers are having trouble selling their McMansions because Millennial buyers aren’t interested in big houses in the suburbs.

Given the resurgence in urban living, lower birth rates, and higher debt burden among millennials/Gen Z I would predict average home sizes will shrink...
I'm not saying that Washington thought he was right to have slaves. He was wrong to have slaves and it reflects poorly on him that he did. Rather, I'm saying the amount of good he did for this country far outweighs his wrongs.
Cobol: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20962780
Ok but look in 2012 they were running Java and still did key changes
Taking care of a large home is a lot of work. Unless someone is a stay at home person you're pretty much guaranteed to need a maid every once in a while.
The internet _does_ forget though. Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla, a project he co-founded, and now nobody seems to bat an eye at him being at Brave.
Except for the temple in the middle of the island which had a very special room with no windows and locks on all the doors.
Tech industry warns US immigration policy hurts American competitiveness in AI
IMO, the reduced output of a team of specialists vs a team of generalists has less to do with generalists doing better work, and more to do with it being impractical to hire specialists at lower levels of scale - and higher levels of scale are less efficient.

A 3 person engineering team doesn't want to hire a specialist DB admin who knows Postgres back to front but can't code. A company of 1000+ engineers might, because they might have problems that require that expertise.

But any engineer working in a company of 1000+ engineers is also subject to friction resulting from resource allocation inefficiencies, communication overhead, regulatory compliance, etc: the reduced output from those factors has little to do with the specialist engineers doing worse work, and more to do with them working at the size of company that can afford to hire specialists.

(You could make the case that buck passing is an example of resource allocation inefficiencies, as it is often accidentally or purposely enabled by company management, but nonetheless, that's not a generalist vs specialist tradeoff.)
And the tech they do have is crappy, error prone, and inconsistent.

If they could figure out how to do printing without PCClient, now that would be a business worth 47B all on it's own...
What about his less recent quotes?

I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

By my book, it's okay to call that evil.
If coders are liable for a consumers use of the product, will that put other industries producers in jeopardy of legal trouble?
How is this accounting different from, say grocery stores or gas stations? Doesn't most of their revenue flow immediately back to their suppliers?

0.5% of 2.9% is incredibly small; if Stripe/Square raised prices to 2.91% it would more than cover the tax (somebody check my math).
> He's been a good steward of the FSF

Howso? He's held back gcc development repeatedly. He regularly forbids the emacs developers and maintainers to use their own judgement. Glibc as well.

Independent of the current issue, this should have happened a long time ago.
Most Canadians are worried AI is advancing too quickly
The metrics, "rules of thumb", and "conventional wisdom" that apply to SaaS businesses do not extrapolate well to non-software subscription businesses. The main reason for this is SaaS has enormous gross margins, often upwards of 90%. This makes revenue a reasonable proxy for (gross) profit. The margins on physical goods are tiny by comparison, for food often in the low single digits, and subletting real estate is not much higher (if at alL). When profit is such a small percentage of revenue you have to be a lot more detailed in the math for lifetime value, acquisition cost, and so on, and you can no longer rely on simple formulas based on revenue and run rate.
Duh, I knew I should've googled first. That definitely clears it up, thanks!
"Waded in" is exactly the right phrase. RMS is neither a legal expert nor a moral philosopher. Commenting on the definition of assault and the nature of consent is outside his field of expertise and he should have just replied with a curt "I will not be attending".

My personal takeaway is that it's important to understand the limitations of your own knowledge before succumbing to the urge to comment on something.
Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the end of the day.

Millions of workers labor under threat of starvation just for standing up for themselves a little bit. Expressing a straightforward opinion like “it is illegal to work off the clock” or “a 30 minute lunch break is mandatory in this state” can be enough to provoke retaliation.

Why are people so eager to spend so much energy defending a guy who, at the very least, wrote a bunch of inappropriate things in a completely inappropriate place?

What’s the slippery slope here? “If a man can’t rant about the unfairness of statutory rape laws on a computer science mailing list, then....” I don’t know how that sentence is supposed to end.

There are so many more important things to worry about. A kook is losing his platform. He’ll have to shout into the void like the rest of us. Oh, the horror!
The whole world is going to unravel like Mr Oogie Boogie in the Nightmare Before Christmas by the time all the strings back to Epstein get pulled.
“The Thinking Machine” (1961)
I'm a fellow developer. I'm younger and have less resources. What would you be willing to work out in exchange for my assistance/collaboration?
He's not in jail, he can continue on twitter all he wants.
> We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims?

Obviously yes? How else would we know that we are right?
AI show 'The Thinking Machine' is required watching
Saying that Minsky having sex with underage girls would be morally okay is more than tactless - it is immoral.
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Moody's downgrades Hong Kong outlook to “negative” as protests go on
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It is a great metric if you are trying to measure software innovation happening at a company. San Francisco/SV is still a relatively tight-knit community, and engineers move around a lot. A company has to pay top dollar AND have enough interesting work going on to retain top talent, or they will move on.
I don't know how good Box was at conveniently syncing a folder back when Dropbox launched, but I'm guessing that wasn't a strength of theirs, because I know people got excited about Dropbox's pre-launch demo video.

Azure's differentiated value prop in the cloud market stems from Microsoft's strengths, e.g. enterprises who already are Microsoft-heavy are happy to trust Microsoft to also run their cloud, because they can expect e.g. better integrations with other Microsoft products they use.

Lyft and Uber were both inventing the rideshare market when they launched. Lyft probably wouldn't have been funded if it launched after Uber's lead was dominant. (Indeed, there doesn't seem to be another Uber/Lyft getting funded now.)
> while the industry laments

Apple's target has shifted from pro users to the general public.

People don't really appreciate the MacBook, they appreciate MacOs. If GNU/Linux had a comparable user experience, it'd win hands down.

And on that matter, I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 lts and I've been surprised at how well it's working (and how much hardware it detected automatically).
This is a false choice. There are other options and context and content matter.
I wouldn't call that boring, there's still a lot of new technology being used in that stack. I'd also recommend some minor improvements to the workflow (e.g. don't do development work on the master branch) that are easy to achieve and provide big benefits. Also - no mention of backups or DR-planning -- I'd be interested to know what's being used in this area?
Apple study suggests chattier users prefer chattier AI assistants
>Minsky would have no way of knowing.

You are making the same defense that you are claiming "that's not his defense." You both are making the same statement that "its ok, because he didn't know.", just in a very roundabout manner.

If Minsky were tried in US, he would be convicted. Ignorance is not a defense.
GP's point was that social obliviousness is no excuse.
You didn’t address the case where two kids of the same age had sex. If the law cannot take that into account, both are responsible of a crime. Also many states have age difference exceptions as well (so an 18 year old can have sex with a consenting 17 year old); the federal government most definitely has this (4 year delta).
That's not what I see when I click on that link! Just in case we're seeing different page-versions, what does a frozen copy of the Wikipedia page from a third site show? Also "16":

https://archive.is/n3Nfs
The punishment is not the result of asking questions. The punishment is for his poor judgement of where to ask those questions - namely a mailing list owned and operated by MIT on which he served as a representative of while posting to that list.

So your premise is flawed and thus your position is (ironically) irrelevant to the topic.
The comment they are replying to isn't requesting a similar standard to that for accepting a scientific theory—it was pointing out the danger of punishing people for assessing controversial events with an attitude of scientific inquiry.

> he's being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions. These are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry.

And the reply to this is that we shouldn't have such high standards for deciding to punish people in power? If nothing else it's a non-sequitur.

Any my original comment still stands: if you do that, you're going to punish more innocent people too.
> Maybe it’s true but at least one of the accused by her (the famous lawyer involved) has claimed to have evidence that she is lying — or more precisely, exaggerating her story.

Ah, Dershowitz. The one who says, yes, he got a massage at Epstein's Palm Beach place, but it was from a 52-year-old woman named Olga and he kept his pants on the whole time.

I'm sure we'll see his exculpatory evidence any day now.
I remember seeing towers of tubular pods reported on television as being just around the corner in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Perhaps Beyond 2000? In retrospect it was a fascinating idea for the shock value, and clearly intended (by journalists) to elicit your type of response.

As an adult I now understand that America has always had pods--they're called hotel rooms, and countless families live in low-budget hotels across the country, both urban and rural. A single-wide trailer is just an elongated pod. (I lived in both as a kid.)

I think what Americans really object to isn't the pod, per se, but the fact that they're intended to be densely packed in urban environments. Put that same pod in an idyllic, rural setting and all of a sudden it evokes independence and frugality.
>a large fraction of talented engineers have worked at FB or Google

citation needed
Forget the prostitution issue. A 15-year-old cannot consent to sex with an adult. Period.
Oops, I mistook Massachusetts for New York. My geography sucks.
Thankfully, professional cleaners are not difficult to find.