skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to share a story that I feel demonstrates how there is no good middle ground in trying to create an environment of Absolute Law Enforcement Through Mass Surveillance and Automation.

---

Once upon a hypothetical time, beyond the statute of limitations, I was on a motorcycle and made a perfectly safe but illegal pass of another vehicle. Not at all dissimilar to this video[1]. As I completed the perfectly safe pass that negatively affected no one, the driver of the passed vehicle sped up, crossed the solid center line to get beside me, then quickly swerved into the space I was occupying. After failing to force me to crash, they harassed me with their vehicle until we got to a place where I had the opportunity to turn to get away from them, where they then swerved at me again, tried to force me to stop... and I finally, hypothetically, decided to raise my jacket and make my legally carried firearm visible. They immediately, and quite dangerously, turned around and fled.

Now, that's just the setup. Put aside for a moment whatever you think about motorcyclists in general, motorcyclists ignoring road laws, road ragers, guns, self-defense, "instant justice", and then read on.

I shared this story on a forum related to the nearest city, a place with a rapidly growing super-Liberal techie hippie population surrounded by pro-Trump people. The VAST majority of the responses were that I should have anticipated that reaction, that I incited it and deserved it, that my breaking of a road law was equivalent to attempted vehicular manslaughter. Several people claimed to have reported me to law enforcement. They specifically wanted me "brought to justice" and couldn't care less about the other person.

---

That's what I think of when you suggest there's a good middle ground. Some people think attempted vehicular manslaughter is ok and that an instant extra-judicial death sentence is a reasonable punishment for making an improper pass.

The people behind China's Social Credit system surely think it's a good idea, that they're finding a good middle ground, that tying it in to mass public surveillance and automated detection of certain public crimes will make their society better.

If you disagree with the Chinese system, how can you possible believe that another society can manage to do it better? Especially if you're in America, which has its own rich history of using State power to oppress groups of people? Particularly of groups we'd call Dissidents were they in a different country.

To me, this is the slippery-est of slippery slopes. The State can't be trusted to find a good middle ground and the people are even worse. It's the stuff of 1984-brought-to-life-and-was-actually-optimistic nightmares. The beginning of a new "First they came for the..." poem.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/motorcycles/comments/d8ppzc/first_of_al...
Can you please share your personal experience of using SAT solver with real world problem?
NODE's is pretty nice: n-o-d-e.net
If I ever have a cancer diagnosis that would require extreme treatment or a pro-longed period of suffering, i.e. stage 3 or 4, I'd seriously consider shooting myself rather enduring months if not years of agony.

In theory I'd have insurance, however why put my family through years of seeing me suffer and become a person they might not recognize?
Since I’ve migrated to web IDEs, my daily driver has become a Chromebook.

Privacy concerns apart, it gets the job done and the battery life is over 14 hours. I’ve migrated from Linux, which is also pretty good as a desktop, but feels a little less polished than ChromeOS.
I don't connect our TV to the internet for this reason, but I'm wonder if the PS4 I watch everything on does this. I hadn't heard it called out, but I wouldn't be surprised if tracking shows up at some point.
Pretty sure you couldn’t be more wrong.
>Haywood Fennell is not a victim, the person he and a group of his friends decided to rob and kill is the victim.

"Fennell was the only one convicted in the incident."

An African American 17 year old in 1968 talking to police without a lawyer ... While the crime definitely should have been punished, it sounds kind of questionable whether the justice was served here.
I don't think too many people would be using Windows if it were really bad for Linux based development. I sure as heck wouldn't be.

In an ideal world I would be running native Linux but I had trouble with some audio gear not working and my favorite video editing tool doesn't run in Linux, nor do some of the games I play -- so I use Windows because that's what's available.

As much as I hate to say it, Windows is a pretty good environment to do every day developer things + more.

For example I spent 95% of my time in WSL using tmux and terminal Vim to write code full time (with fzf and everything you would expect on the command line). It's really fast. The wsltty terminal has almost as low input latency as xterm on native Linux (which I run on my modified Chromebook). While developing all sorts of web apps (Flask, Phoenix, Rails, Webpack, etc.) inside of Docker the volume performance is fast enough where I never once had complaints even on 5 year old hardware.

Then I'm a hotkey away from opening any program with command line launchers, switching virtual desktops with other hotkeys, running VMs for testing server deployments, recording and editing videos and playing any games I want without having to think twice about it or dual boot.

Other than bullshit telemetry and forced updates, Windows 10 Pro is not that bad from an all around "I use my computer to do stuff" perspective. I think that's ultimately why Windows is so popular. It also helps that you can put together a beast of a machine for about $750. But with that said I would instantly switch to Linux if all of my Linux problems were suddenly fixed.

In the mean time, if anyone is interested, I have a bunch of blog posts and videos showing how I set everything up in Windows. It can all be found here: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-tools-i-use
>>Are you being sarcastic, or do you see the parent post as an attack on the concept of metaphor?

Given that the parent post has been substatially edited without comment after a reply was posted, it's a moot point to comment on the response sans original context.
It is bad, but I do not think you are stuck. But there are two fronts -- business offerings are going the same way. There is lots of pressure to use almost exclusively MS hosted services. And, in that market, not everything has a good replacement.
Just like Apple makes the iPhone a "Mobile computer as a service". It's a managed device that makes life much safer and easier for most people.

There will likely always be the DIY solutions for folks who prefer that. And that's good too.
Man, I just set up a Windows laptop for my wife past week and made sure to skip it. I guess she bought it at just the right time...
To be scrupulously honest we allowed the medical doctors into that photo as well, partly because wedding, but some of them had both anyway, including the bride's father, who like many people possessing more post-nominal characters than a French grand opera enjoyed a most commanding personality, which would've made any objections quite impossible even if they hadn't been ungenerously contrary to the celebratory spirit of such a day.

> Thereafter, he reverted to "Mr." in such informal situations

"Oh! So you're a surgeon!" [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119265/
A union is a beast unto itself, and much like companies, unions vary a great deal between themselves and your specific experiences don't generalize across all unions, anymore than my experience working for a CPG company generalizes across the industry.

To counter your anecdote, my mother spent years working under a telecom union when I was younger and never had any such issues. Employees sure were grateful however to have someone on their side when it came time to negotiating severance around lay-offs.
SBCL 20: Steel Bank Common Lisp's 20th Anniversary Workshop
Because you are deploying a single artifact with minimal dependencies that behaves in a known fashion.

Whereas if you are deploying code blobs they start depending on the operating system to provide stuff. You have to have the right version of Ruby on each machine. This becomes a problem when the right version varies between products and you would also like to update the OS to something new.

With containers the application code is decoupled from the operating system.
Out of curiosity, do you have a link?

I read: https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...

And from a cursory search I didn't see him exactly advocating.
> That was a form of collective bargaining

How so? AFAIK Apple and Google did not negotiate those solutions with organisations that represents users (such as industry ombudsmen, consumer rights orgs etc), that scenario would qualify as collective bargaining IMO
What I mean is, writing software with other people is about as intimate as you can get, you are literally combining your thoughts on paper and creating a shared paradigm

If you believe that can be done while simulateously avoiding all intimacy on a personal level, the irony will defeat you every time and your software will fail

Being a true software dev means warts and all or not at all
Buy pirated Windows LTSC on ebay (or actual, if you have 260 usd to spare), it solves most of Windows 10 problems
I'd never know that if this post didn't exist, so I don't think the investigation is silly at all.
In Austin, it's been an incredibly effective way to gentrify old neighborhoods.

You have people who have lived in their houses for a generation and may have even paid them off but when the land under their home - let alone their home itself - doubles in value every 8 years and the rate doubles in eight years, they have to sell to get out or lose their house anyway.

Then developers swoop in, tear down the houses, and build condos which are much more "economically efficient".
I've found the combination of sed & awk to be a really powerful duo.

One of my earliest development projects circa 2002 was to create a complex awk & sed program that took tons of database blobs with inconsistent semi-structured test from a publishing company and converted it to XML, automatically prompting the user for input (using the Pico text editor) whenever there was something that couldn't be resolved. It saved thousands of hours as part of a metadata digitization project that got their journals into ProQuest.

As only a semi-literate programmer at the time, it was significantly easier than trying the same thing with a "traditional" programming language. On occasion I still call to awk withing python code when I need to do a one-off quick & dirty <something>

For those interested, if you can find a copy, there'a truly excellent book on awk:

"The Awk Programming Language", by Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger
> The free market never has, nor never will exist.

If you define the free market as nothing other than anarchy, then yes the free market is rare indeed.

But I don't that know anyone that speaks in such absolutes.
The friction involved in getting those other technologies up and running was not trivial though. That played a role in php's initial success, because it was trivial to get up and running.
If only the Linux on the desktop dreams of a decade ago - along with those Linux-installed PCs they tried to push at Walmart - had a more optimistic outcome...
One more release and 0.7.x will be stable for upgrade.
I clearly misspoke, for which I am sorry.

My perspective is that he made the threat in bad faith - trying to coerce the girl into going out with him, but without a truly deep depression and intention to kill himself. I expect there was and is at least some depression there - perhaps he really did consider killing himself but decided not to.

I am unfortunately very used to seeing people try to hide obnoxious behavior behind "it was just a joke, calm down," when people take offense instead of giving them what they want, so I very rarely find that explanation satisfactory.

There are other things feeding into my assessment that I haven't gone into - a story of him picking out one of the few women in a lecture hall as an "Emacs Virgin" and saying that in the Church of Emacs it is blessed to lose your virginity. Yeah, that clearly was a joke, but it was a tasteless one that gives a little too much insight into his perspective.

There's also the photo of his MIT office nameplate that said something like "Knight For Justice (also: hot ladies)" which, yes, is probably a joke, but reads like one of those "ha ha, only serious" jokes oldschool hackers are rather known for, and is once again a joke he absolutely shouldn't have been making (especially not from a position of power).

There are also the various hints on his website over the years that he was (and perhaps still is) single and frustrated by that. An anecdote about his official non-girlfriend stands out in my memory, as I recall.
When the Morris worm went around, one of the ways it got in was through sendmail, using the "DEBUG" command. Right after it happened, some wise-ass sent around an email telling everybody to edit their sendmail binary (with Emacs of course), search for "DEBUG", and replace the "D" will a NULL, thus disabling the "DEBUG" command.

What that actually did was change the "DEBUG" command into the "" command.

At the time I was running a mailing list from the University of Maryland, and often had to check Sun email addresses by telnetting to sun.com port 25, pressing return a couple of times to flush the telnet negotiation characters, then going "EXPN some-email-address".

So the day after the Morris worm, I go "telnet sun.com 25", hit return a couple of times, then "EXPN foobar", and it dumps out a huge torrent of debugging information, because I had accidentally switched it into debug mode by entering a blank line!

I reported it to postmaster@sun.com, and they fixed it. But it's kinda silly that they would have applied such a ham fisted patch to their sendmail demon like that, based on an email that some dude on the internet sent around!

https://www.rapid7.com/db/modules/exploit/unix/smtp/morris_s...

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/courses/nidsS05/attacks/seely-...

https://spaf.cerias.purdue.edu/tech-reps/823.pdf
I use Windows on a day to day basis, and you might sometimes find me defending that.

However, I hate stuff like this. You are right, it is user hostile.

Windows 10 under the hood is solid, but this kind of thing really pisses me off. It’s the same issue with ads or bing in the start menu, you literally can’t turn it off anymore (you used to be able to with the Registry Editor or GP).

I use MacOS as well regularly, and you just don’t get this kind of crap from Apple (just different kinds of crap).
Musk said at the start of his presentation that the magnitude of earth's gravity is such that we are right on the cusp of rocket flight possibility. If the magnitude were a little more, rocket flight would be impossible. If it were a bit less, it would all be a lot easier.

Can anyone expand on that, assuming it's the truth..
I think that people need to think about the distinctions between a white-collar union and a blue-collar union.

A blue-collar union, like the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), can essentially treat each person as known amount of performance and bargain as such. There is relatively little difference between trained employees on a production line. So the UAW can bargain for things like promotion by seniority only, which provides a reasonable balance to keep managers from playing favorites. There's not a whole lot you can do to set yourself apart when you are stamping out door panels and robots do the welding for you, so promotion on merit isn't as important. Take a look at the tone of this UAW web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to avoid bad things: https://uaw.org/organize/no-union-no-rights/

For white-collar unions, such as the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), there often is a demonstrable difference in the quality of work that trained employees do, so they don't want to get rid of merit based consideration, but they do want to ensure that their employees are treated fairly. Take a look at the tone of this SPEEA web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to achieve more good things: http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/Benefits_of_SPEEA.html

The Kickstarter union shouldn't model themselves after the UAW, but more like SPEEA. I don't know what the employees are proposing, but I fear that a lot of people assume that the Kickstarter employees are trying to start a mafia within the organization that controls what all the employees can do. That's probably not the case, they should make sure that two people with the same merit are given the same fair shakes. They shouldn't be telling people to code fewer lines per day because they don't want to give the company free labor.

Things like requiring workers to support certain political candidates is what makes some people dislike unions. It's one thing for a union to endorse a candidate because they support policies favorable to union workers, it's another thing to coerce your employees to vote a certain way.

Things like striking even if you don't agree with them however, is a good part of the union and is how it gains its bargaining power. If people were free to just pick and choose the issues that they supported, then there wouldn't be a point of a union. Assuming the union is not corrupt, you should strike in solidarity with your other union members. If you show support for them today even if you don't necessarily agree, they might show support for you tomorrow even if they don't necessarily agree.
Email isn’t reasonable for a class of 25 children. I get updates every day from my kids teachers in apps like this - they would never be able to figure out email.
It absolutely makes it easy for my kids to see when they did well and when they need to improve.
Windows is also the arguably the domain of GPU related dev. I see lots of Razer laptops. They are small and same weight as a MBP but you can get a 2080 RTX (previously 1060 GTX). Even the newest MBA's GPU is not 1/2 as fast as the 3 year old Razer (and its peers)
I'm gonna go with citation/mathematics needed.

Spaceflight is about velocity and energy.
The reason why I feel like I’m stuck is based on my personal use case. Basically I need two things:

A. Being able to use some proprietary software not available on Linux

B. Being able to self build so I can select the HW that works for me

With Linux I lose A and with Mac I would lose B. I’m thinking that a combo Mac Mini + Tower PC with Linux could work, but using two OSes at the same time, even with shared NAS, KVM switch etc., would not be the best in terms of UX

(Edit I had mixed up “A” and “B” in my sentence)
Hmm, this does explain what I had experienced. Most of my friends are not in IT. There are people I eventually get to know (and that others I know get to know) it's just going into a job trying to make friends can be an extremely bad idea, at least from what I have seen.

Thanks for the comments
Warrant canaries haven't been tested in court. (They have been used as notification of an NSL though.) In particular, judges are human beings, not robots, so the laws are interpreted and implemented by humans. Because they're not robots, removing a warrant canary toes the line on communicating to the affected, in violation of an NSL. Thus, removal of the canary most likely means an NSL was received, but the canary staying up doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't an NSL. Lawyers at every organization have considered the situation and advised their client, but those lawyers are not at the FBI.
This is a real question for anyone who might know: Have mathematicians as a whole ever thought about moving from the age-old formulas using various Greek symbols to something more akin to a programming language? What I mean is, instead of writing π to instead use "pi", or "summation()" rather than using the capital sigma? Functions like sin(), cos(), etc. already look like that, I wonder why the derivative sign and others haven't been changed. Superscript and subscript as well, and prime marks. It all seems superfluous.

I guess what I'm asking is there an alternative to traditional mathematical notation that's commonly used?
I left the NSA after 4 years because I didn't want to support some of the things going on there. Can't dismantle it, but can at least not contribute.
That's what Windows S mode is
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/s-mode
> My desire to survive means I still can’t bring myself to unravel survival’s ethics. One of the chemotherapy drugs with which I was treated, cyclophosphamide, passes into the urine only partially diluted, is only partially removed by water treatment methods, and lasts in the common water supply for 400 to 800 days. Another, carboplatin, is described in its manufacturer’s information sheet as having the “environmental fate” of accumulating in aquatic environments, where it lingers but no one yet knows what damage it does.

Tons of complaining about the drugs, economy, medical professionals, and people that keep her alive. Can’t you appreciate that the system worked and is keeping your ass out of the grave? Yes, it costs millions, but that’s why we all pay an absurd amount into insurance.

> Everyone understands as a matter of fact that unless you are currently entered into this world’s customary romantic partnership, or unless you have lived long enough to raise devoted grown children, or unless you are young enough to still be in the care of your parents, you are, on the occasion of aggressive cancer in the conditions of aggressive profit, rarely considered worth enough to keep alive.

The reality is that the people most likely to care for you at your weakest, most vulnerable moments is your own family. I don’t know how the government can make strangers love and devote themselves to your care with sincere emotion and affection. If you don’t have family because you prefer not to live in a “customary romantic partnership” this is a choice you have made for yourself.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...
2 years ago my Grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was supposed to begin a course of chemo and various other treatments but instead he gathered the family around for a dinner one night and asked us all for our blessing not to go for treatment, it was a rather surreal moment. He died about 4 months later, he took some painkillers and a couple of other medications that improved his quality of life and in the end we all agreed that it was the best way, when he passed away he really wasn't much different than before the cancer, we avoided all of the agony of a long drawn out fight and watching him fall apart in front of us, he died happy and with dignity.
My TCL TV power-cycles endlessly unless it has an internet connection. This behavior didn't start until a year after I purchased it.

I can't help but wonder if it's intentional. It did get me to connect the damn thing, despite my severe misgivings.
PBS produced a documentary film named Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies in 2015, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,
Nest+Bedding+Mattress+Savings+$200
I dislike this because I would need to use a much more complex password for my home computer. Or I can choose to use a simpler to type/remember password for the online account and I don’t feel comfortable with that.

I’m sure that many of you use long complex passwords for your computers but I don’t for my home computer. I have to type if often to login and the environment is not a high risk area. I do use longer and more random passwords for accounts with a wider exposure.
if gravity were much more we'd be out of chemical reactions that produce the energy to beat the rocket equation.