skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a sexual harassment allegation from 1985:

>>>When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don't know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he'd kill himself if I didn't go out with him.

I felt bad for him and also uncomfortable and manipulated. I did not like being put in that position — suddenly responsible for an "important" man. What had I done to get into this situation? I decided I could not be responsible for his living or dying, and would have to accept him killing himself. I declined further contact.

He was not a man of his word or he'd be long dead.

Betsy S., Bachelor's in Management Science, '85<<<

Source: https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...

I have seen in this very same thread other people saying there are accusations, but that the people in question do not want to come forward.

Another secondhand (third-hand?) accusation of sexual harassment:

>>>He made overt sexual advances to women at work [in the late 1990s at VA Linux]. One young woman who worked next to me was so upset from his multiple advances that she took it to senior management. She was able to deal with the problem without taking the issue outside the company. I don’t know the details, but she was given advanced warning anytime Stallman was headed over so that she could leave.<<<

Source: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...

Personally, I still stay it was a witch hunt to force Stallman to resign, but if there were substantial sexual harassment allegations from this century [1] and a reasonably fair hearing, I would consider it fair to make him go.

[1] This will make me a heretic among some #MeToo advocates, but I think sexual harassment allegations need to have a reasonable statue of limitations. I don’t think people should be dragged through the mud for something they did 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years ago. [2] [3] [4]

[2] Tom Brokaw was dragged through the mud for allegedly sexually harassing two women over 20 years ago, as well as trying to kiss a woman (who was not his wife, but that bit doesn’t generally matter with the #MeToo crowd) over 50 years ago.

[3] Nolan Bushnell was dragged through the mud for supposedly having a hostile work environment at Atari over 40 years ago, but not one women who worked at Atari when Bushnell led it has come forward to complain, and multiple women who were there, including Loni Reeder, came forward and said Bushnell was very kind and inclusive towards women.

[4] Within reason. Many jurisdictions do not have a statute of limitations for rape; but asking someone out on a date when they are not interested is very different from sexual assault.
If you very conspicuously avoid using pronouns for someone, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on and that you’re deliberately avoiding gendering someone correctly. It’s not as bad as using the wrong pronouns, but it’s still very disrespectful.
Go after the argument please. This attempted character assassination is petty and weak.
The level of paranoia in the Twitter thread is worrying...
and that's where regulation is especially helpful: in a race to the bottom situation, it moves the bottom up a bit.
> trying to figure out how to rework my long-term financial plans around the hole Snap had just blown in my projected income made me feel ill.

Maybe don't make long-term financial plans around a company that's obviously unstable?
Do you have numbers or papers that support your argument? That these applications are bottlenecked by the network?

There is a 2015 paper [1] that argues that improving network performance isn't gonna help MapReduce/data analytics type of jobs much:

" .. none of the workloads we studied could improve
by a median of more than 2% as a result of optimizing
network performance. We did not use especially high
bandwidth machines in getting this result: the m2.4xlarge
instances we used have a 1Gbps network link."

Granted things might have changed by now, but I am curious to see how and by how much?

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/nsdi15/nsdi15...
If politicians didn't regulate businesses, we'd still be working 100 hours a week for 1€/hour.

So yeah, politicians try to defend the general interest best they can. Sometimes they make mistakes of course.

Countries with strong regulations can thrive. I live in France. People like to bash on our social system and on our strong regulations, but we are still one of the worlds greatest economic powers. Same goes with Germany.
> its results are such garbage

Whenever people complain about DDG's search results I am always a bit baffled. It works 95% of the time for me and that 5% is occurs when I am searching for the answer to some obscure bug. I know this is your word against mine but "garbage" is a bit of an exaggeration.
How to Use Lambda Edge with Terraform
Well, there was that recent case about the tween girl who got convicted of distributing child pornography for sexting another tween.

So it's obvious to me that underage sexting itself shouldn't be prosecuted as child porn. Because if they're old enough to prosecute as adults, they're also old enough to legally share naked pictures of themselves.

But of course, it's arguable that third parties -- especially adult third parties -- who distribute such images should be prosecuted.
Japan's Last Pagers Stop Beeping
Yahoo doesn't have its own crawler for years now. Both of them are Bing under the hood: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN2217.html

I still prefer my Bing results without personalization, so I use DDG.
That's totally fair if the user doesn't know what they are searching for (e.g. if the only search criterion is Boris Johnson); but if they already know that there is a body; if they have already heard about the model (or the bus), how likely are they to be put off the scent by irrelevant search results?
If you have an American Amazon account, you can get most of Greg Egan's books on Kindle for $2 a pop.
70th Anniversary of the PRC
That seems a rather different situation : we are not a difference species, and this "no contact initiative from our part" policy include consideration on our own civilization defects.

That doesn't discard the interest of the point, but that brings a call for more specific nuances depending on civilization discrepancies.
Only anecdotal evidence but in my experience price and quality (as in lasting) are only very weakly correlated. In the past I tended to buy expensive (in expectation of lasting). The older I get the less I tend to do so even though I have now more money at my disposal. You're getting crap all the time independent of the brand.
Bad example, it is actually better to replace older fridges (older than 10 years though) with modern low energy designs, obviously with the expectation that they'd last longer than 3 years.

Fridges and Freezers are the only appliances I'm aware of where it works out like that though.

Edit:
Here's a case study for those that don't believe me.

http://www.t2c.org.uk/chilling/new-case-study-of-20-yr-old-f...
Even if women who worked with him feel that way, you are highly unlikely to see such.

Women are generally more vulnerable than men. Other women will tear apart a "traitor" to the feminist cause. Defending someone who is the focus of a metaphorical lynch mob almost never helps them and frequently means you are next.
Perhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).
I met many engineers here, in Germany, from Italy. There are a lot of them, young and educated. I heard their stories why they left.

* Salaries and status of software engineers are low, you'd want to switch to management asap,

* There are very few interesting tech companies,

* Corruption and bureaucracy doesn't help with innovation and starting your own businesses.
And this is why companies offer you stock on a vesting schedule that keeps you around.

The author knew it would be a shitshow before they even started. But took the job because of the stock. Started at the job, found it to be terrible. Stuck around... because of the stock. And so on. Meanwhile, your bet rests on the company, which you now know to be a badly run shitshow, beating estimates and turning a healthy profit. Surely you know that isn't going to happen. At a certain point you're making a life decision based around the hope that stock market investors are too stupid to see the obvious. Then scale that thought process up to an entire company, and you wonder why the place isn't functional.

I do have sympathy for the author, no-one deserves to work in a miserable job. But that's why we have the option of quitting. Stock vesting fundamentally affects that.
There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.

By your definition any news would always be false because they didn't include the entire history of the world in their story.

You aren't being realistic. There are people and organizations that are just spreading completely false information with the intent of deceiving people.
Makes me wonder what Jean-Claude Junker, head of the EU, is hiding now when he came out with the bizarre statement "he did not have an erotic relationship with the Irish Backstop".

Anyone know?
Eradication of Guinea Worm means no more Guinea Worm. Zero ongoing cost for all subsequent time.

This is actually more substantive than for Smallpox because Smallpox is deliberately stored in a lab in case it is interesting (supposedly for defensive research, in practice for weaponisation) and so invariably every decade or four it'll leak. Guinea Worm isn't suitable for that, when they eradicate it that's the end of the parasite forever.

This is an infinite benefit. So to model that without getting nonsense out you have to use a discounting model where you arbitrarily consider infinite future value to not be worth more than, say, 10 billion dollars, and there's your answer. But that's a paper exercise, why bother? You could choose values that say a trillion dollars or $9.99.
Glad to know he's part of your outgroup.
It is also "spiritually" true that you send a fortune to food producers.

Put that way, you focus on the price but not the benefits.
I believe similar situations have been observed rarely in nature, although I wonder if they were indirectly influenced by humans.
The human imperative of stabilizing global climate change at 1.5°C
Miele explicitly markets to customers who expect lasting appliances.
> The item that drives me nuts with disposability at the moment is sneakers. I walk & work out a lot and I'm finding a lot of the running/training type shoes wear out in 3-4 months, the sole is shot but the uppers are totally fine. I'm trying to find more durable shoes to wear for casual wear & walking that actually last.

I work for a niche company[0] that manufacturers high quality running shoes as well as healthy everyday footwear and depending on the particular model and its sole design we offer a resole service, which many customers take advantage of.

[0] https://www.lunge.com/en/
If you are already convinced that something is going on, then this will not throw you off, no.

But if you are indifferent to the matter, then you will most likely quickly give up, thinking that it can't be that important if it's not in the top search results.
Well the ADA doesn't exist for the benefit of the business - quite the opposite in fact.
Show HN: A Multi Purpose Debug Visualizer for VS Code
It's genius in the same way as crawling over websites looking for a 90s relic to inject "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS x;". Personally I don't deem anything genius simply on the merit that "it works".
These types of questions are nice because they allow you (1) to check your work (2) work towards the answer. On the other hand, I feel like these questions make you think less and make you less cautious about your moves because "you know where to go." Furthermore, I had this multiple times in exams where the "supposed" answer was something like n^(-1) and I was so damned sure I did everything correct and my answer was n^(-1/2). I literally wrote on my paper:

"I know that the answer is n^(-1) but I did all the steps and checked it multiple times and did not get a different answer than n^(-1/2). Sorry."

Of course, I was right and it was a small typo. A good friend of mine /crossed out/ his answer because /he thought it was wrong/ (he had my answer).

Luckily the question was scrapped and I got bonus points, but my point stands. My friend wasted a lot of time staring at a wrong answer -- giving him less time to think about the other questions!
His graphs all seem to start from the 90s and he assumes slower growth is down to IT but I think the phenomena has been going on much longer and predates IT. Back in the 60s say Germany and northern Italy had manufacturing industries and the like while southern Italy and places like Greece and Portugal remained doing mostly agriculture and tourism. For better or worse industries seem to concentrate in certain areas - I imagine California will have more tech industry than Nebraska say for a while yet.
My respect level for Boris actually went up a few notches after reading about this :)
PHP is a beginner friendly language, thus a lot of beginner mistakes are done in PHP, therefore a lot of programmers think that PHP is bad language. Common fallacy.

PHP is also a web language, very closely connected to HTML & related technologies, thing is that a lot of programmers today actually hate the web, that is why so many (frontend) frameworks try to hide the web technologies as much as possible.
If I don't make a conscious effort to reduce my intake I can easily eat 5k calories a day of beans, potatoes, or rice.
Maybe he's trying to hide potential results from "Boris Johnson restraint"

Now get that image out of your mind. ;)
The Limits of Logic
Thanks, was wondering about that
>you could walk around miles of Venice Beach streets pointing out unmarked office after unmarked office as you went along. A seemingly empty storefront here, a nondescript house there, the top level of an apartment building over that way.

Is that legal in that area?

I lived in a townhouse association where someone started the company out of his house. Eventually he started hiring and it didn't take long for everyone to notice his employees were taking all the parking. Fortunately the city had zoning laws and he chose to move when push came to shove.
Kuo: High-end iPad and MacBook to launch late 2020-2021
If I double-tap a column of text, it will zoom in on the part of the page to fit the width of the column on the screen, but if the column is too wide (e.g. a page with just a single 100% width column of text) the text size is still unreadably small. It won't reflow the column to fit the screen. (e.g. try visiting http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/ICBM-address.html, a page with no viewport directive and not even any page width CSS)

The early Android browser used to actually reflow columns to fit on the mobile screen when you zoomed in, but it lost that in the transition to Chrome.
>Then I'd argue that we are the greater fools for letting this happen without any consequences.

Letting what exactly happen? Him using a phrase that might or might not have been intended to make a previous story fall in search results?

As if the original story about the model could not still be in the front pages of newspapers and websites, and so on?

That's not even half an accusation...

The public voted for something specific and 3 years down the road it has not happened or been scheduled properly. That should be the bigger democratic scandal (in the real sense of the people's will being followed) than "the PM used a SEO phrase..."....
Southern European here have worked with Nothern European companies and southern European ones. I can attest that management is the greatest difference. It is part due to HR how the hire and check people for management position ( it is loosely a series of questions + his CV) while even for the Junior developer role you can have developer programming tests plus theory question. It is more reliable, and I have seen time and time again bad management that his hired due to the cv and it is just bad professional, can't organize anything doesn't take decisions etc etc and the problem is that it can't be fired.

But also Capital accumulation, when you start from a good starting point where you have the capital to invest in IT. The earnings are exponentially greater, so the effects on Germany from the IT revolution should be greater then in Southern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation
Counterpoint: if you modify the call site to pass in a new value, you don't know whether the function will accept it or not, since you've opted out of any compiler verification.
The planet in our solar system could be a primordial black hole
It's such a shame; having a work/management culture like in the northern Europe would make the south unstoppable -- it might even cause a north-to-south brain drain. I know I'd move, and the EU makes that easy.
I need your help! If you like the idea of this extension, please express your interest in [1]!

Without a proper API from VS Code, this Debug Visualizer cannot unfold its full potential. Right now, you need to install a forked debug adapter for NodeJS to get the extension working.

Thanks!

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/78663
Yes I did. I got a reduction on the repair costs (which where initially at a point warranting buying a new appliance instead of a repair; spare parts alone where several hundred Euros).

But for Miele prices I don't want to be at their mercy. I want a lasting product. When waiting for the repair I looked around. Many competitors have similar offerings (functionality) with a 5 year warranty at 2/3 of the price point (or even less).
Ask HN: How to sell the SaaS product internationally?
I have an idea for a SaaS product which I would like implement and maybe later monetize and to sell internationally. I tried to read about the topic but as more as I read the more I'm confused. How to do you sell your SaaS products and how do you deal with tax and other legal obligations?
Sure! Here is a sample Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfMixfPiaLo7qTpspr2...

When you use Formfacade, it looks like this inside your website: http://customer.formfacade.com/hunchera/index.html (See "Request Early Access" above the fold).
I've done ec stack and I develop a tolerance to the appetite suppressive effects in a couple weeks, also I don't like how I feel on it. Two or cups of coffee per day is enough stim for me, more than that makes me feel awful.
Later the article says it's due to management, not IT. I agree that in the 60s-70s there was a tremendous difference (hence the massive migrations from e.g. Portugal to France and Germany at the time), but I think there was also some convergence in the 90s. I fear the divergence has just been increasing from then on.
Optimising software has frequently been very cargo cult-ish. No measurements at all or measurements that tell you nothing have been pretty common. It seems it's more common to take it seriously now, also tools are better and techniques get written up on blogs and shared, some of the good ones catch on, some of the bad ones eventually fall over. "If experiment doesn't match theory the theory is wrong." Feynman has been the source of a good bit of wisdom in my career and life. Re-post and re-discuss often. If you haven't, "Surely you're joking..." It's worth your time and will also entertain. I should read it again, it's been a while.
Today exploits like this are impossible against even average players
"ABSTRACT: The application of permanent magnet machines as direct-drive generators for wind turbines is considered.
The Axial-Flux Permanent-Magnet (AFPM) machine with slots is compared to the Radial-Flux Permanent-Magnet
(RFPM) machine, for this application. Using a computer-based design model, the two machine types are optimized with
respect to the lowest Cost/Torque. Design optimization for maximum Torque/Volume is also investigated. The
calculations show that the RFPM machine has lower Cost/Torque than the AFPM machine with slots, and lower
torque/volume than the AFPM machine with slots.

...

Conclusion...
...Based on the results presented herein, the RFPM
machine still appears as a better choice for a direct-drive
generator, than the AFPM machine with slots"
I'm sure the experts that wrote this legislation never considered this problem that you just came up with in 5 seconds. /s

We have regulation that makes machines safer. This is regulation that makes machines safer for the environment. If the regulation turns out to be counterproductive it can be adapted later...
Anybody interested in the zone https://archive.org/details/maximumrnr
Did Google fail to build a non-evil platform?
If you make it cheaper to use a less polluting resource than a more polluting one, this can still work. Improved solar technology, for instance.
> The only person who can discern the truth is the individual

We're all postmodernists now.
It’s nice in that the actor model provides good concurrency. One great benefit is that each "device" or connection essentially runs as a single sequential process. That makes data stream processing pretty nice on embedded. Like processing serial port data. Though it sounds like you almost just want a job queue, which would be pretty easy but not really benefit from actor model.

One example where a Nerves setup would be great is say a redundant onsite mini-cluster for processing and redundancy. As an alternative to say a k8s setup to manage devices with Nerves you could readily flash your "app code" to multiple RPi’s, connect them on a lan, and not have to have a separate clustering layer.
"boris" "johnson" "fruit" hm, was it create or... cake?
Most top players today are like athletes. They eat, exercise, and study the game like pros. Being a sick drug addict and winning tournaments was just raw ability.

The level of the game was lower at the time. Ungar would be high level player even today's standards, but his game would not look as spectacular.
And then that manufacturer declares bankruptcy after 3. Limited liability makes it impossible for corporations to offer a credible 10 or 20 year warranty.
He did play ball. He played ball for month after month, even as the cost of playing ball kept ramping up and up and up. Eventually it became higher than he could stand, and he started showing symptoms of mental health problems. At that point, he wisely left rather than end up with full-blown depression.

When you are dealing with people such that what they want is not for you to get a job done, but to humiliate you for the pleasure of wielding power, there is no fixed cost that will qualify you as having played ball, no bargain such that you can keep your side and trust them to keep theirs. The cost will always keep going up. The only questions are when the endgame will be reached, and what you will do then.
Yeah, I was writing a Docker image built around Prometheus' jmx_exporter intended to be used as a mixin for our Java apps, and part of what I needed to do was provide a simple script to preprocess separate config files to produce the config used by jmx_exporter.

My initial thought was Python, but it needed a couple of 3rd party dependencies, and there wasn't an overly clean _and_ simple way to copy the script in from the mixin and run locally.

So I shrugged, rewrote my script in Go, and then used a multi-stage build to copy in the binary and nothing else.

Ending up with a single statically linked binary was cool, even if Go does some stuff that made my eyebrows quirk a tad (I still can't believe that an idiomatic set in Go is map[T]struct{}...)
The Answerer knows everything. Are you able to ask it a valid question?