skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would you respond if someone said something like:

"The literal-minded personalities we often encounter in the engineering profession are just not cognitively capable of handling leadership positions. They suffer from autism, a form of mental illness, and while they are fit for highly logical and problem solving tasks are not fit for tasks that involve social or political decision making. It's important that they be kept away from positions of influence or outward-facing communication and properly managed."

Would you call for that person's resignation? I sure as hell would.

If Stallman thought UFOs were clearly alien spacecraft or that Bigfoot was a real surviving prehistoric hominid, I don't think anyone would care. If he took some positions that were more politically charged, like denying evolution or climate change, people might get mad or call him names but I doubt they'd call for his resignation from the FSF or MIT over it.

There is no broad based "witch hunt" against divergent opinions, but there is a new-found extreme intolerance for a certain narrower set.

The opinions in question are those that denigrate other human beings or deny them equal rights or dignity, such as the choice to engage in pedantic hair splitting to defend the sexual exploitation of children.

Other well known cases of "cancel culture" follow the same pattern: Brendan Eich apparently funding campaigns to deny rights to homosexuals, a Google engineer taking the time to write a wall of text explaining why women are "on average" less suited for engineering work, and so on.

So the question becomes: do you think it's right for society or our peers to react so strongly to those kinds of opinions? Is there value in debating them?

P.S. As for the extreme reaction: sexual abuse of children and adolescents is fairly prevalent. Statistically it's pretty likely that at least a small double-digit percentage of free software authors and people involved in the free software community are victims. Seeing Stallman go out on a limb to defend or at least apologize for that kind of thing probably angered quite a few people for reasons that are entirely understandable, especially in the context of his past comments about pedophilia. Sometimes it's tough to see what the big deal is when it's not about an issue that directly relates to you, hence the artificial example I wrote up above.
Can you all be more specific about which "talking points" are similar? These companies had to submit financial statements ahead of their IPOs and as far as I know, WE has been a complete trainwreck in comparison to the others. Talking about "talking points" doesn't seem to address any knowledge of what exists in financial statements, it sounds way more abstract like we're trying to say that Uber, Slack, etc. all talk big about themselves but are actually not that great. Like that matters? In comparison to a CEO who has used his position to allow for absurdly corrupt looking deals and nepotism, which was not the case for Uber, Slack, etc.

Just saying, maybe you and the other person could be more specific about how WeWork is similar to Uber, Slack, etc. beyond "talking points" because financial statements are more substantial than how similar companies puff themselves up through PR and branding.
Cool, we're on the same page with "minors cannot give consent" for at least some definition of "minor".

> Is a measure of puberty sufficient to give consent? I am not saying that it is..but perhaps it’s closer to a better situation.

The problem is, how do we measure "sufficient"?

If we just mean people's opinions, we can be more nuanced — for example, I think a grown person who has sex with an 18 year old is just as gross as one who has sex with a 17 year old, but I don't have an exact line in my head as to when it would become okay. Everyone's exact line will differ, and that's okay too!

On the other hand, if the law is trying to measure "sufficient", then we need something objective because people need to know when they would be breaking it. "Puberty" is pretty squishy — for example, do we count when a boy's voice deepens? When he starts growing facial hair? Whereas if we measure an objective fact like age, then if I know that fact I can be 100% sure whether or not I'm allowed to have sex with this person.

I agree with you that age an imperfect measure of maturity, which is what we really care about. But it seems to be the best measure we can come up with that's both objective and correlated.
Yet Google Trends exactly reflects (exhibits?) Google Play data of our app that has 37 million registered users.
> I kinda have the same somewhat fearful gut reaction to these kinds of episodes as a lot of geeky guys do. There's a post[1] out there (which I think originally I found through hacker news) that does a pretty good job of analyzing where that reaction is coming from, and why the fear isn't totally illegitimate

Considering a guy just lost two positions, one of them his life's work, for speaking incorrect opinions and being awkward with women, I would say that fear is quite legitimate!

Thank you for posting that link, because rereading it puts this whole clusterfuck in context.
> He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard

A leader doesn't just keep their head down and stick to whatever the prevailing zeitgeist is, that's what followers do.
Plus there's a page for all their OS components: https://opensource.apple.com. There's also WebKit and LLVM, which started at Apple and are still heavily driven by engineers at the company.
So RMS called Epstein "serial rapist". He declined to call him "Pedophile" and that cause this outrage.
It's not that simple. There are plenty of places where the sets "things that are legal" and "things that are moral" don't intersect. Those are some of the most interesting, challenging questions we will face.

EDIT: And I would submit the offered example illustrates that. Doing two miles per hour over the posted speed limit may not be legal, but it's hardly immoral. Similarly, lying to someone to sway their opinions in an argument isn't illegal, but I don't think that's particularly moral, is it?

Don't be so reductive.
Why is HN so against people who _enjoy_ engineering? Why should I run some run-of-the-mill stack that has enourgmous legacy cruft and just not "fun".
Not every business wants to be sillicon-valley optimized money farm - some people want to do some enjoyable work.
Now he no longer belong to MIT/FSF, he can enjoy his freedom of speech I guess. RMS is and always is consistent. He never bend his opinion and he throw out all the career if necessary for his freedom.
Flutter v1.9: What’s New in This Release?
Steps to Fix WiFi Connected but No Internet Error
"C-x C-c" should become a new rallying cry for valuing technological ability over political beliefs.
I admitted to getting the spirit of the comment in my first one. But the path the comment went down by being so general exceeded the context if Stallman’s point.
Only if its nuclear fusion
When will someone make a Licensing Agreement that strictly excludes the thought police. It's seriously ridiculous that anyone thinks it is important to criticize with a microscope every single thing someone says, some people think out loud it's called discourse. There are quotes from antiquity that it is the mark of someone truly wise who can seriously consider an idea and either accept it or reject it based on its merit, the point being if you can't even bring up something as a topic of conversation that is mentally handicapping yourself.

People will seriously have to reconsider these arbitrary rules when every single word we all say is recorded from birth. That day is not far away.

How Orwellian the situation we have built for ourselves.
Google Trends takes advantage of the Google knowledge graph for deeper understanding of entities and companies. This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term". You can toggle with the menu at the top.
There is definitely a shortage of top tech talent domestically in USA if you consider that USA has more top tech companies than the rest of the world combined. The only way to reasonably distribute top talent to those companies is to either accept lots of high quality immigrants or to move some of them abroad to spread out the competition for talent.
Could we take a break with these articles for a bit? I’m all for redistributing Jeff Bezos’s money, and I'd be happy to have mine redistributed as well if that happened, but this and the Apple App Store algorithm news are so insignificant in the world. We're arguing about if online stores can organize their shelves how they want to while people are dying because they can't afford insulin or drink their tapwater. Yeah, you can care about two issues at once, but this isn't really an issue. I don't care to read the same comment about Microsoft with Internet Explorer every day. Maybe it's unfair to them but I really do not care, they clearly survived just fine.
If the universe is increasingly expanding... Am I? Are my protons getting farther apart or are the sub atomic particles in me getting larger? Or are you all and other celestial bodies just moving away from me? :P
RMS also resigned from CSAIL just now:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/richard-stallman-famed-mit-com...
> don't understand the benefit to Mozilla, but pushing HTTPS + DoH + ESNI

It is to prevent against ISP filtering and censorship.

A lot of governments do it with DNS rather than deep packet inspection in a full-on china style way.

> The biggest DNS servers for application level DoH are going to be run by ad companies and the future of tracking is via DNS (over HTTPS) queries.

Adblocking is better done with things like uBlock anyway. The reason is because you can manipulate the document object model with that to actually block the thing popping up.

Adblocking with DNS is pretty crappy, you end up getting huge white squares and blank popups anyway.
Autonomous Linux
> "the communist state(aka state-capitalism)"

Well at least you show your hand here. "Communism is capitalism when something bad is happening." I would love to hear you layout your definitions of capitalism and communism in a rigorous way.

You've replaced "person doing something I don't like" with "capitalist". Well in that case yeah, not hard to understand how you see capitalism as causing the world's problems.
NEC TM launches second dissemination day on 23rd September in Zagreb
The entire thing is odd. RMS is questioning the morality of the law and the people opposing him are quite literally, unironically, upset because they use the law to derive their morality[0]. More than that, their criticism is based on an intentional clickbait-tier misreading of what Stallman was saying. And after learning this, people are like "oh well, screw him anyway, he's a weirdo." This includes people like Neil McGovern, GNOME Executive Director, who used the opportunity to threaten that RMS leaves or GNOME leaves the FSF.

Living in a country where the age of consent is 16, the oddest thing I find in all of this is that people can hold a straight face while saying that sleeping with a 17 year old constitutes pedophilia but seem to completely ignore that their country tries 13 year olds as adults[1] when they deem it fitting.

[0] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

[1] https://oklahoman.com/article/5580060/13-year-old-boy-charge...
Crazy how wasteful it is. I wonder what genius thought to allocate /8 to every company/organization. You don't need to have PhD in statistics and math to know there's more than 250 companies.
There are so many judgements on both sides, both in these comments and in the articles on the subject that have been submitted, but very little quoting of what he said in context.

Where can I find what he said? Why is everyone talking about what he meant without quoting what he said so I can decide what makes sense for myself?
Or whenever thorium becomes viable
Zomato’s now banking on a visual feast to woo customers
I don't know if I want to live in that world, a full day around people with which any kind of normal conversation is strictly forbidden.

In the majority of my career I've been in workplaces with colleagues, many like-minded but plenty not, to whom I felt I could say more or less whatever the fuck I want. That seems much better to me, but who knows.
Historically, that's more or less true though. Maybe it's a good lesson to know about?
So if I have sex with a consenting 14-17 year old on vacation (the actual legal ages of consent in Europe) people in USA can just call it rape/sexual assault?

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

Stallman has a point, even though he should've steered clear of this by 100 miles. People who don't travel internationally probably have a huge blind spot on this issue...
Why CMOS are only lasting as long as Spinal Tap drummers
Wild that you would conflate a slap on the ass in a nightclub with an underage girl in basically sex slavery being pimped to a 70 year old. And then going to court over it despite all the danger and pain that exposed her to. Do you think those might be very different things?!
>None of these apply to what happened with Stallman

That’s the point. If it were harassment, false accusation of a colleague, etc, it would not be merely expressing a bad opinion. But as you say, none of those apply.

And I think it’s clear I was not raising an issue of what is legal, but of what is right and just, and desirable for a university, for a workplace, for a society.
I wish they'd post the UCRT source on GitHub too.

(Yes I know it can be found in the SDK, but having it as a repo on GitHub would just be so much more convenient.)
Man brings clown to redundancy meeting
The arch wiki actually has a section on using unbound, dnsmasq, pdnsd with dnscrypt:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dnscrypt-proxy#Local_DN...

I do this on my router, and then force all of it over the VPN with a socks proxy.
AWS Ground Station-as-a-Service for satellite communications
> the philistine indifference to Modernism in interwar Britain [..] Tom Wolfe’s ignorant anti-Modernist diatribe From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)

If only people weren't such ignorant philistines, they would like the blocky, sterile, concrete and glass modernist architecture!

Of course these are the same people that usually dismiss criticism with "there are no objective criteria for Art", and in the next breath invent countless reasons why Modernist architecture is superior, and the old styles must be discarded. I do not expect any kind of intellectual honesty from them.
definitely would be an airline pilot or flight attendant
That's fine, but that's not engineering. Bridge designers do not try to build bridges out of materials discovered in the laboratory last month.
Thank you for making this point. It's somehow been mostly lost in the noise of this thread that the main reason RMS's comments are so unacceptable is because he gave this defense (theoretical or not) of someone accused of having sex with a child trafficking victim. Not because he happens to have socially unacceptable opinions about certain corner cases in consent laws. Fortunately in this case, there's a very very bright line, and RMS was way over it.
He’s being against against it because people are currently using the term, saying they are against it, and then making medical decision that hurt people based on that.

This is what he is against. Unnecessary harm due to people worrying about the supposed nonsense of the term.
>If Minsky were tried in US, he would be convicted. Ignorance is not a defense.

He would be convicted if he had sex with her. The evidence that he had sex with her is that she was sent to his room and he didn't report that to the authorities. That doesn't seem overwhelmingly persuasive.
I know I'm replying to the "STL" with vastly more domain experience here than me, but isn't it true that Scott Meyers' book covers just the STL, as originally defined? The only thing outside of the STL as shown in the table of contents is some lessons on std::string, but even that is in context / comparison with vector, an STL container type.

I'm sorry, but effective communication is valuable and it is annoying that your employer continues to conflate the C++ standard library and the STL. Are we going to start referring to the standard library as "boost" a few years hence? That's basically the situation we've ended up in here.
I find this weird. I believe most people who donate to mozilla want to do it to keep the lights on for the browser development.

Now they are simultaneously asking for donations and giving 100 mil away. Non profits donating money to other causes seems wrong to me, I think it would be better if they offered an option Humble Bundle-style to split the money and let the donors choose
What about chinese websites like tmall or taobao? They seems to have more visitors than Amazon, do they have less sales?
I meant to say 0.01ms :(

(Hence why my later part of the comment references “nanosecond region”)

Thanks for calling it out!

Edit:

To say my original post another way, about the fastest I’ve ever seen for a ping time is ten microseconds over a one meter fiber optic cable. That’s 3,000x slower than the speed of light. Fiber optic cable is far more efficient than a Point-To-Multipoint radio which is in a noisy environment (aka cellular), so to think you’ll get within 2 orders of magnitude using 5G vs the best fiber speeds I’ve seen seems crazy to me.
And for "Facebook", Google Trends shows a 71% drop worldwide over the last 5 years. Their Q2 2019 earnings showed a 20% worldwide growth in monthly users over the last two years alone. "YouTube" shows a 45% drop over 5 years. "Google" itself shows a 60% drop over 5 years.

Google Trends can't reliably tell you anything useful about a site's growth or activity. I'm not denying it correlates with your specific app, but that doesn't mean it will work for everything, and it clearly works very poorly for popular services.
Laws are made to apply to everyone, not the exceptional person who is sexually mature well in advance of her peers.

Your argument might well be that the age of consent is too high. That's fine, it's arbitrary. But there does need to be one to prevent all sorts of horrible things from happening.

And no, the laws don't prevent everything but that's not an argument that they shouldn't exist at all.
I think it's pretty obvious from the quote that the specific kind of furniture involved is not the main issue.
Damn. This is the best defence of free speech I've ever seen. Bravo!
No wonder people freeze and change nothing to help the environment since the solutions are too hard to figure out. Who would have known that a paper bag may be worse to use than a plastic one? Or that a cotton reusable is even worse.

But the real got-you is that we can't be sure because we can't account for all variables.
He didn't break the law, nor did he do something worthy of judicial punishment, but that does not mean that he can not or should not be held to account. RMS lost a leadership position, that's all.

And Let's be clear, that is lawful is not necessarily moral, that which is moral is not necessarily lawful.
> it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship.

It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.

If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.

Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.

On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.

In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.

In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.
>With all that in mind, I'm dubious that Minsky could have been approached by a young woman and not had some degree of mens rea. At the very least, Minsky must have assumed the woman was a paid sex worker and recognized at least some possibility that she was trafficked and/or underage. I can't abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.

Lots of famous men of all ages are approached by groupies. Some accept their advances, some don't. I've never heard of any of them reporting the fact to the authorities.
"Taboos" is an oddly mild way to put this. Why shouldn't a person who approves of raping children have to pause and consider "staying quiet" one wonders.
Neither WebKit nor LLVM started at Apple.
Israel's Anti-Drone Industry Takes Off
In a different universe he and his child bride and animal lover etc., could have been accepted just not in this one.

That said: if he held those beliefs and ever acted on them, never raped, never engaged in pedophilia or had sex with a minor or a “willing” animal would it be so bad. He’d just be a crank like flat earthers, extremely religious people, bigots and racists and other fringe members of society what would have been the harm. I mean we went so long already accommodating him and his beliefs...
Maybe Hello Fresh will expand their sponsorship from Youtube Sloggers...
The fact that those are very different things was the entire point of the post you replied to.

Conflating "slap on the ass" with "sex slavery" is bad.

Conflating "sex with an apparently legal, willing partner who later turned out to have not been either legal or willing" with "coercing a child to have sex with you" is bad.
I'm not sure you've noticed, but one of the core authors of this STL implementation -- Stephan T. Lavavej -- has exactly the initials of the project he's working on: STL. This means he's perfect for this job :)
Vice has the full transcript and it's long, which is part of why people aren't quoting snippets. Quoting snippets is not better in this case than talking about what you think he meant.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...

See also:

https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
Life is Beautiful :).

I agree it is a dilemma.
For some problems you can make them aware without raising the anxiety level.
For some, you just have to hide/overcome your own fears and say that it is/things are alright. Sometimes, kids just need that reassurance from the parent, even if they know that things may not be alright.
Neither of these started at Apple.
This is probably apple's continuous integration tests, lazily written to download the whole thing every time someone merges a commit.