skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He seems to be fond of saying "well, technically" on every subject; regardless of if it is tone deaf.

I don't want to pathologize Stallman, but I have a simmilar tendency, so I will project myself a bit here; and probably go a bit of a rant.

This tendency stems from a way of thinking about the world. Inaccuracies build on themselves, so it is generally best to stamp them out when we can. If the technicality is not actually important, then surely everyone involved would have no problem with the correction. They may be annoyed that they had to spend a few minutes on clarifying such an obvious point.

What happens with the kind of discussion that Stallman entered into is just weird. People seem to get deeply offended by the person stating the technicality while claiming that the technicality is not important and without even disagreeing with the technicality.

This reaction (which seems to be consistent for the topic in question) has the almost tautological effect of excluding an entire class of thinkers from being able to participate in the conversation (or rather an entire class of thinking; some people are more able to switch between modes of thinking easier than others). I am obviously biased in this regard, but I happen to think this does a massive disservice to people who actually care about the issue, because I believe that this excluded mode of thinking happens to be extremely effective at problem solving.

> "If we're debating the definitions of 'rape' and 'sexual assault', perhaps it's better to accept that this conversation isn't productive."

If you are concerned about rape and sexual assault then discussing what those words mean is a vital part of dealing with the issue. It often illuminates the underlying reality as thinking about definitions involves considering the details of what you are trying to talk about, and definantly illuminates the conversation as you do not have different people thinking the same statement means different things. If you catagorically reject these discussions, then I do not see how you can go on to effectivly deal with the underlying issue.
> (Two other solutions exist...

Or using a monitor for the 'windshield' and cooking up some way to keep the camera lens clean.
One of the biggest advantages of investing in digital currencies like BITCOIN is the possibility of making millions overnight. Also, bitcoin makes cross border payments possible, and also provides an easy way for people to escape failed government monetary policy. When some people hear about bitcoin, they think of it as nonsense but it’s simply because they have no knowledge or lack professional guidance/mentorship. Bitcoins can be sent from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. No bank can block payments or close your account. I can go on and on to list the benefits of bitcoin investments but I will pause and let you find out more. Also, If you wish to make profits from bitcoin investments, need consultancy about any digital currency, mining of bitcoin or retrieve stolen wallet, lost passwords. Contact Professor John Hang via his email address
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> Hong Kong is the only terretory I know of governed by a CEO

Many US counties have a similarly-titled head of government.
> they push people away by poisoning the context making it impossible to interact unless you "tolerate" their behavior.

I very rarely comment on these kind of threads, but this quote is a perfect example of an unfortunate epidemic I see ever more often online:

Using vague and virtue-signal-ey language to get away with making a point that - if expressed in plain English - would be instantly exposed as ridiculous (if not downright dangerous).
The City of London has a system not too dissimilar.

Note: The City of London is not the same thing as London. It’s real weird.
It is quite a common case. First you do your scratch make with 800 jobs which maxes out your machine just from preprocessing :) Thereafter you only edit a small portion of the code and recompile a small number of files, which only uses a few cores. It's especially problematic for C++ with all the template instantiations. Some files in our codebase take 40+ sec to compile.
As someone who ran a consultancy for several years, no one wants your last 20 hours. I think you'd do yourself a favor looking for more rewarding employment if you are feeling underpaid.
Here is a piece of information for beginners and everyone involved in cryptocurrency. One of the biggest advantages of investing in digital currencies like BITCOIN is the possibility of making millions overnight. Also, bitcoin makes cross border payments possible, and also provides an easy way for people to escape failed government monetary policy. When some people hear about bitcoin, they think of it as nonsense but it’s simply because they have no knowledge or lack professional guidance/mentorship. Bitcoins can be sent from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. No bank can block payments or close your account. I can go on and on to list the benefits of bitcoin investments but I will pause and let you find out more. Also, If you wish to make profits from bitcoin investments, need consultancy about any digital currency, mining of bitcoin or retrieve stolen wallet, lost passwords. Contact Professor John Hang via his email address
( c r y p t o j a c k i n g [at] g m a i l c o m ) for consultancy and help.
I had the only stable romantic relationship in my life so far between the ages of 18 and 21.
> Perhaps the lesson is simply "hold the high ground".

One could think so, but then about 150 years later the Hungarian chivalry (and pretty much the Hungarian kingdom itself) was annihilated by the same Ottomans at the battle of Mohacs, where there was no "high ground" involved. From the wiki page [1]:

> Hungary built up an expensive but obsolete army, structured similarly to that of King Francis I at the Battle of Pavia and mostly reliant on old fashioned heavily armoured knights on armoured horses (gendarme knights).

By that time the Ottomans had already started making heavy use of artillery (which is also one of the main reasons they had taken Constantinople back in 1453):

> The Ottoman army was a more modern force built around artillery and the elite, musket-armed Janissaries. The remainder consisted of feudal Timarli cavalry and conscripted levies from Rumelia and the Balkans

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moh%C3%A1cs
Tesla misses ‘Safest Cars’ list because its EVs don’t crash often enough
Yea agree, that’s what I’ve learnt in the last few months after years of thinking “this shit can’t be profitable”.
So you are confirming they were fired for trying to unionize? Thank you. It is interesting that the 'going to the press' bit gets trotted out as if that is something the employees should not have done. Companies go to the press all the time when it suits them, but employees using the press as leverage is beyond the pale.

Of course they would go to the press, if retaliation is imminent that is one of the last ways in which an employee might defend themselves. It wouldn't be the first time that the press served to right a wrong, and it certainly won't be the last.

If 20% of the company supported unionization that makes it 150/5 = 30 people at most, 3 of which have been fired in a very short window of time. That's going to help a lot in the inevitable court case.
> I'm curious what language you would consider optimal for writing a parser in?

I've been researching that question, and was hoping someone would reply and point me in a useful direction.
Google is finally changing its algorithm to boost original reporting
In order to establish a union, you'll need at least 30% of the workers signing a petition

Why do you, what's the reasoning behind that kind of law? And to whom do they petition - does the company have to agree, or rather, does the employer have the right to forbid employees from forming agreements between themselves? It sounds counterintuitive when you only need 1 person to start a company, or 2 people to have a contract, and when employers have no other control over who employees meet with and little control over how employees spend money (e.g. 'work dress code').
> I think the point that RMS was trying to make is that using inherently charged and prejudice language against an individual is sensationalist and (as mentioned) prejudiced.

Not only that, but using such language--for example, a term like "sexual assault"--does not tell you the actual facts of what happened. It only tells you someone's judgment. But if I'm going to take the time to form an opinion about some event of public interest, I don't want anyone else to tell me their judgment about it. I just want to be told the facts. I can make my own judgments. But the media almost never tells you the facts; they only tell you the judgments.
The Mercedes wiper didn't simply sweep out a circular arc, like most monobladed cars (including IIRC Citroëns); it used a complex gearing system to vary the blade radius to better cover the windshield's corners. Naturally, this over-engineered system was prone to breakage.

* Photos and diagrams here: http://www.spannerhead.com/2012/11/28/technical-curiosities-...

* A slow-motion video of the wiper in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHtEAMwcWI4

* And a couple visualizations of how it works mechanically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_quBiMLqNoc, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdNu113Ep2U
Science can no more have a learning disorder than binary numbering systems can have a color, books can think. To blame science is a hopeless reification and insane as a murderer trying to claim innocence because it was crime that killed the victim and not them.

We have in fact solved mosquitoes before but I suspect you would like the side effects even less because everyone would. Filling in swamps and wetlands completely, and mass less than selective insecticide sprayings were how it was done before. They did in fact sicken and kill people through side effects via reduced water quality and exposure to toxins but far fewer than malaria even in the short term. Humanity is frankly terrifying when they are angered enough to cause extinctions deliberately instead of through callousness or accident. Genetic engineering /is/ trying the less harmful option.
In the late 1800s the Democratic party under William Jennings Bryan was campaigning for bimetallism, which would cause inflation, in order to help farmers because inflation would make their debts less significant. This is one case of people wanting inflation.

Actually if you look at the history of the gold standard in the United States, and the bimetal gold/silver standard, you'll see that the gold standard is far from a simple solution and it had a lot of problems.

One of the biggest problems: how should the government decide how much gold/silver/whatever a dollar should be worth, and when should that decision be re-evaluated?

Similarly you can look at the economic damage caused by Britain bringing back the gold standard in the 1920s, and also how absurd the Bretton Woods system became over the years as the exchange rates pegged to gold started diverging more and more from economic reality. The gold standard has tons of problems.
Previous thread that I missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20962720
Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.
Boko Haram Is Back and With Better Drones
> Seems like drones preference … local warfare over global warfare on a strategic scale (because to get that cheapness you need to sacrifice range & performance)

It seems relatively straightforward to deliver drones via any kind of existing global scale transit available today (on the one end, C130s, or on the other end, ICBMs?). A predator drone (not the latest tech) weighs ~5000 lbs and the MIRV Mark 5 SLBMs can launch 8x ~800 lb "W88" warheads, for a combined payload weight of around 6400 lbs. (I'm not super familiar with any of this and might be missing something; just skimmed wikipedia to see if I could make the ICBM math work out.)
> Sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm.

I dunno. I see it all over the place.

Look at the US government. Most of the govt. run customer facing services are abysmal when it comes to efficiency (DMV, etc.). From my quick Googling the DMV is unionized. It doesn't end at the DMV either.

I know some types of construction jobs are usually sequential but I don't understand how in any circumstance it can take 2 years to fix 30 feet of road while it disrupted traffic the whole time. This isn't an isolated case either, I see similar things all the time.
Gault (Archaeological Site)
Rather like the City of London then [1] - not the only similarity between the two places. I think the system dates to British rule in Hong Kong, which became partly democratic rather late in the day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London#Elections note: this is the City of London (~1 square mile) not the metropolis.

Edit: ninja'd by louthy and djcapelis
The area in front of my rear view mirror is the only area on my windshield wiped by both wipers presumably because all the sensors are there and they wanted some sort of redundancy.
They were discussing potential impacts on MIT's reputation. That's fair game for an MIT mailing list.

Also, "idle speculation" is not a good term for what they were doing. They were trying to get at the actual facts of what happened, independent of anyone else's judgments about those facts.
You don't have to go to boxing matches to find relevant analogies. You could start with "If I have sex with someone who's unable to consent due to some type of incapacitation, have I assaulted them?".
I suppose that makes sense, although that would make visibility harder. Maybe if you went full virtual HUD helmets, and didn't need to see out at all... although then you might just want to have drones with AI dogfighting capability?

The other thought about legless pilots is the feet I think are used for the rudder control (pedals), so there is some loss of ability to control without using your feet. While I think computers could probably take this over, in the end it does mean two less things to interact with the plane.
Climate Toy
I wish more cars would use the Benz approach. The wipers spray the fluid in the actual rubber lubricating them and keeping you from blinding yourself.
Sometimes rarely I see something that can help me in my job. The recent announcement of v8 Javascript speed improvements was useful to know, and I’d probably not know without HN. I didn’t read the full article but I know if our performance tests suddenly get better when that browser version comes up it might be them not us.
Whoops! Dot io
The book will be released on September 17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_Day_(United_State...
I’ve heard him say he will often post a brief reply to get to the head of the queue then come back later to round it out.
Thanks for pointing it out, and ya its really hard to do. I think you identify certain signals and do the best you can in your interview process to flesh them out, for example:

1) History of working remotely successfully in the past

2) Strong verbal or written communication skills, i.e. ability to explain complex ideas concisely or to break down large ideas into consumable smaller ones.

3) Higher education background, indicating the ability to push through benign task and consistently reach performance goals (c's get degrees)

4) Aligned long term-goals for example, engineer foo wants to hit a certain salary level by gaining an expertise in $tech_x, and at the same time your company has domain experience in $tech_x that could facilitate for your employer

5) Ability to break down past projects in the context of "how would you do it differently with a do-over" or "what are some examples where you mismanaged technical debt"

None of these ideas are perfect, and execution in the interview is perhaps the hardest part. I myself am a college drop out which makes it ironic that I would suggest people with degrees make for better remote workers, but when it becomes a search for signals a degree from certain tiers of universities is too hard to pass up as a hiring manager who just wants to do a good job.
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that
she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was
being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her
to conceal that from most of his associates.

This is a totally reasonable statement and it hardly seems like he's defending Epstein or somehow justifying what was alleged to have happened. Stallman's point is that the legal usage of the term "assault" sometimes doesn't match up with the idea of physical violence that comes with the colloquial understanding of "assault".

Also it seems super weird, distasteful, and immature when, instead of discussing with or further debating this person who said something you don't like, you go tattle on them to a sympathetic reporter. Yuck.
Agriculture may have been humanity’s greatest blunder (1987)
this is confusing social problems for technical ones. proprietary and task-specific protocols are a feature, not a bug.
Towards the end of British rule in Hong Kong the Brits sought to make HK more democratic but were rebuffed by Beijing, as in the 1960s [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-pu...
Pythagorean Prime
How do you even read that as that?

All I said was that 28 people in the company publicly stated their support for a union (there's 42 needed to establish one).

15 of those 28 people were eligible for a promotion or raise. 14 of those 15 received their promotion or raise.

Doesn't look like union busting at all to me, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.

My comment about the press was because the pro-union group is having a hard time getting those 14 additional people they needed to support them and in the meantime have created a ton of bad press for the company, which does impact the assets of the very employees they're supposed to be supporting the interests of.
Probably a good idea to limit the hiring examples to people who have updated their LinkedIn. :) Make the additional exposure a fringe benefit.
Right, my claim is the first crime should have been penalized more harshly, if committing it was net profitable. I'm not involved in prosecuting the case so I can't tell you if any other crimes have been committed.
Deep learning method solves a fundamental problem in statistical physics
The MIT mailing list thread that provoked this whole discussion was pretty indistinguishable from any of the millions of reddit discussions on the exact same subject.
EU has many checks and balances, is governed by Germany and other like-minded countries, and has given lots of guarantees as well as an option to leave. If Facebook decides to discuss on that level, maybe an actual agreement could come out of that.
It's very valuable in building up evidence that naming and shaming doesn't work.

And also gives us a clear count, within a population how many people will continue to do it anyway.

As regulation of news media and social media are being designed, one of the big questions is what to do about that part of the population.

Most of them are triggered and trapping themselves on treadmills that go nowhere. And most of them need help getting off that treadmill.
I usually have a higher bar for vouching. It has to be more than something that wouldn’t be flagged if that makes sense. Mainly because I don’t what my rep to get a hit. Something I think is ok might be a bad comment in the quantum HN mind.
I am trying to outline how you would do this on Linux. I appreciate OpenBSD has different facilities, but this is like telling a Japanese chef that their technique for dry-aging fish isn't that great because you know about an amazing way to roll out croissant dough.

Yeah, it's nice that you have pledge() and unveil() but that doesn't help Linux programs.
Because obviously an instrument backed by foreign currencies will be the solution to capital controls?!
No, since when America practicing functional constituency [0]? It was invented long before 1997 when HK was still under British rule, nothing to do with China, so I think you can take easy with whataboutism.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_...
That's a big problem with build systems based on timestamps, not checksums. Also, unless the build system can see all the inputs to the compilation, there's the potential for trouble.
Companies are buying the American democracy through lobbying and campaign contributions. The disastrous decision of the supreme court called "Citizens United" puts the US in a similar situation as Hong Kong. That's why the flow of foreign money (including Russian money) will not stop to influence US politics in the foreseeable future.
> Should Starbucks be regulated as a bank because they let you prepay for a cup of coffee?

In Germany, you might actually need a permit from the financial regulation (BaFin) if you offer gift or prepaid cards, at least if you store the value online (and maybe some other conditions).
IMO this has to do with Beijing's pushback in the mid 1900s against expanded political freedoms in what I would assume was an anticipation of the end of the 99 year lease on the New Territories [1] and the fact that HK was caught as the middle region in a multi-circle Venn diagram (between China, the UK, the US and other regional powers). They weren't able to really push any one thing too far in any direction without pissing off one of them. So they focused on what they could control: creating an incredibly effective financial center. Corporations in HK don't have nearly as much power in the US as if they pulled to far, someone would come knocking.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/world/asia/china-began-pu...
This is likely because the word "assault" is often used in conjunction with "battery", so there is a very understandable mental association.
Very very cool, though I remain a bit sad about the lack of love from Bliz to Warcraft 2. :(

Previously they said they weren't interested in any remasters because they didn't think anyone would play it.

It's a nice simple RTS game. We wouldn't be where we're at now in the genre without it!
but this is exactly what is happening to people not from the US.
People in SF board rooms deciding what is in our news feeds, and now the same company is arrogantly declaring it wants to play with currency too.
> as if the distinction between prepubescent child rape and postpubescent child rape is at all relevant enough to mention

It is if the distinction between prepubescent children and postpubescent children is relevant, which certainly is the case in our current system of laws.

Furthermore, failing to observe such distinctions makes every single term that describes any kind of activity that some people don't like--pedophile, rapist, etc.--all equivalent; they all just mean "bad person". But that makes it impossible to have a useful conversation at all, because "bad person" is not a useful category if you're trying to figure out what to do about such people. You have to look at the specifics. If you refuse to look at the specifics, then you're not helping to do anything about the problem; you're just virtue signaling. "I think all of these people are just bad!" Okay, got it, thanks for sharing.
> Putting a regular user in a chroot() will prevent them from having access to the rest of the system. This means using a chroot is not less secure, but it is not more secure either. If you have proper permissions configured on your system, you are no safer inside a chroot than relying on system permissions to keep a user in check

Lol. So, all security mitigations ever are pointless.
I am disappointed to see OP responding in this thread but ignoring this question.