skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add to that, he was in the process of a physics PhD at the time he started his free software stuff. I'd say his work since then, in a spiritual sense, has "completed" his PhD.
More to the point, everyone else is entitled to their freedom to associate with him, despite his thoughts and opinions. He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project. And if other people are willing to contribute money or code to that project, fucking FINE.

That's what this is about. Sarah Mei is coming from a place of, "Because RMS said this Very Bad Thing, no one should associate with him at all." Carrying with it an implied threat: if you continue to associate with a Bad Person, then you are a Bad Person and maybe whoever signs your checks should know just what a Bad Person you are.
In Germany it’s even illegal (Dr. h. c. is fine though).
>>You mean the departments of government that planned and staged 9/11

Holy molly. We're spouting insane conspiracy theories on this site, now?
Ha, at first I thought you were making a joke that WhatsApp could have been aware of the conversations by ... eavesdropping on the government employees who are using WhatsApp.
They are common, Theodore Hesburgh had 150 of them, Bill Cosby had ~60 though most of his have been rescinded. Stephen Colbert made jokes about his on The Covert Report[1]

They are usually (though not always) given to the speaker at a graduation ceremony.

[1] http://www.cc.com/video-clips/irk0rv/the-colbert-report-hono...
I've heard a story from an MIT staffer that the Morris worm of 1988 was first released from a public workstation logged in as username rms, password rms.
Software Design and Architecture Roadmap
Just a reminder that anytime they breach communications like this, it's because they want to be able to spy on their own citizens in order to subvert and control opposition political movements. For example, climate activism, whistle blowers (e.g. Snowden, Reality Winner, the guy that talked about the Ukraine deal if it wasn't an official CIA leak), animal rights, anti-imperialists, etc.
Sadly, I reckon that even a lot of the folks who want Stallman gone are just as willing to turn a blind eye to someone doing the same things that he did if they have the right accomplishments and status, and that they just differ on who they're willing to do that for.
Let me start by saying that most of my knowledge of this is from reading news posts and comments, I will not pretend to have an in-depth knowledge of this situation.

However, as a counterpoint, do you really want to live in a world where the leadership is not determined by how skilled you are at your craft, but how well you conform to a conventional morality? RMS has done some things that don't conform to that morality, and some things that go against my own sense of morality.

He doesn't lead a religious organization. He doesn't lead a political party. He was leading technical organizations, and seemed immensely successful in doing so. I have never once heard of him doing anything that was counter to the goals of those organizations.

Why do his personal beliefs even need to be brought into the equation? Do we really intend to digress back to some kind of Puritanical morality where your ability to do anything is first judged by your piousness, and secondly by your ability to perform the job?

Personally, this has somewhat diminished my interest in both the FSF and the GNU organizations. If witch hunts based on your personal sense of morality are going to be an entrenched part of joining that community. What I look for in a technical community is just that: technology. I'll save the witch hunts for organizations that purport some form a moral compass.
A little thought exercise: your comment from the POV of a ops person explaining why they look down on devs.

Dev folks often take weeks to make even a small change. It doesn't matter how urgent the need is or how badly the business needs some kind of workaround, they over-complicate every problem, and ops has to spend more time in meetings planning their next project than it would have taken for us to put a working fix to be in place. Maintainability is one of the biggest sins I've seen in devs, tools like npm encourage devs to use an overly-complex chain of 3rd-party dependencies for even small projects, and they rarely ever update their dependencies after initial deployment, so if a security update to an underlying package is required or if the underlying has to be deployed to a new underlying system or container changes, things can break easily. They depend on IDEs for everything, and can't even use commonly installed system tools like awk or sed when, or use netstat to debug simple networking issues. It's like the 1970s never even happened and they never even learned what an operating system is.
1. How is Richard Stallman not a "decent human being"?
2. Assuming your answer is "I find his positions on the age of consent / incest / bestiality etc. abhorrent" - having a legal-philosophical view which is lenient on punishing certain acts as crimes does not make one an indecent person IMHO.
>I never said Trump is at fault for these results.

No, but you blamed Trump for not getting the results for other countries. Let me repeat again what you wrote:

>Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.

That you wrote the above without understanding the full ramifications of the change is immaterial, because you

* Take a swipe at Trump ("This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished")

* Then say, based on your misunderstanding, that this "is really not an improvement".

The implication is clear: Trump is at fault for not obtaining the same improvement he gained for the US for other, "small rich countries" as well. I reiterate my original reply to you:

>Trump is president of the United States, not of the EU. It is the EU and its member states' onus to obtain similar changes, should they believe them desirable.

>That you begin with a snarky remark about Trump, and then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria win the kind of changes that the US needed to seriously threaten to leave the UPU for, says more about you than about the US or Trump.
They still get to make those choices.
B52s were used for conventional bombing plenty often during their service lifetime.

And they came damn close to accidentally detonating on American soil on occasion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash#La...
I really don’t care, but it’s yet another convention he ignores, in a terse resignation letter no less.
https://sterling-archermedes.github.io/ documents how RMS's words were twisted. The reporting was without doubt careless and misleading. Specifically, his

she presented herself to him as entirely willing

was re-phrased to

then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be "entirely willing".

'Presented as' and 'be' are subtly, but critically different, so paraphrasing him like that is a lie. At the same time, it's close enough that it could be argued it's an honest mistake. Given how short the original quote was, I highly suspect the decision to trim it to a mere two words was malicious. But convincing a court it wasn't an honest mistake/misinterpretation would be difficult, and it's close enough to the truth that "reckless disregard for truth" wouldn't apply, I assume.

Other publications repeated this, with titles such as Renowned MIT Scientist Defends Epstein: Victims Were "Entirely Willing" - which is again false, as he neither defended Epstein (if you must interpret his statements as a defense, it was only for Minsky), nor did he claim the victims were willing.

In sum, the reporting contained damaging false statements - did you have some specific reasoning why this wouldn't be libel (even if difficult to prove intent in practice)?

Edit: Yes, I agree, merely quoting the initial article wouldn't be libel. However, many articles repeated the creatively re-contextualized RMS quote themselves, without attributing it to the original medium post, and made it look like it was something they themselves were stating.
Because they don't want to pay software engineering wages.
There's a name for things like "the ugliest, awful story known about your behavior"; they're called "your reputation".
If you trust the SSH banner, it's running the OpenSSH version from Debian wheezy (end of support April 2016, end of LTS May 2018).... I feel like that's more likely failure to upgrade than a deliberate choice, though :)
You don't so much learn Perl as develop the ability to emulate Larry Wall.
Conversely, those who earned their doctorate conventionally sometimes need reminding of it.

This came up at my wedding. After the ceremony we had a bunch of silly "group of X" photos. All the musicians, all the writers, the lawyers, the grandparents, the athletes, the tech folk, the doctors, and so on.

The programmers made jokes about type checking, of course.

(I was, on the sly, also gently nudging strangers to connect. Our friends are pretty scattered and don't know each other.)

However, several of the PhDs had forgotten they had one, particularly those that had not subsequently remained in the ivory tower. When the Call for Doctors went around, we had to remind them them individually.
The precise phrasing and context is of ultimate importance in these cases.

There's a huge difference between a false direct quote and an editorialized interpretation of someone's words.
It many times is a perfectly good substitute.
But what does that have to do with him needing to step down? Was he mis-handling the GNU project? Did he abuse people? Did he force anyone to accept his social views (communist/libertarian/whatever) outside the extent to which those are manifested in the GNU project per se?

I am saddened by this occurrence, and am worried about the ability to pressure people like Stallman like this.
this is like saying you don't own a lock because it won't open if you've lost the key
If you keep making mistakes that get caught in testing, you need to be careful. If you keep making mistakes that get caught in production, you need to write better tests.
That being the case, Stallman is free to ignore his critics (and probably has; I think this is probably just vandalism).
>We can all be difficult on planes so why pick small children out for special treatment?

This line drips with irony, since the author's main point is that babies are in fact special and somehow deserve to be exempt from other people avoiding them. I'm going to actively avoid the guy who reeks of moldy onions, the woman who refuses to stop droning on about her vacation, and your troublesome crotch-goblin. I'd fly all by myself if I had the option.
“Based on discounted cash flow analysis”... bwhahahaha
Indeed. When he resigned from the FSF, I wondered myself -- was that a concession of defeat or a mic drop?
I assume it means "science" in the older sense of systematized knowledge, like in "the art and science of painting" or Gries's "The Science of Programming". Not in the sense of the scientific method.
One of my only memories from kindergarten was of the social control system the teacher had. There were three faces, a smiling green, straight faced yellow, and frowning red, arranged like a stoplight. Every child had a clothespin with their name on it. Behaving well? The pin with your name clasped the green light, etc.

One day my teacher was trying to punish a troublesome student, who I only recall because of this incident. She meant to move his pin to red, but accidentally grabbed mine and moved it instead. I, instantly, burst into tears because I had nothing wrong, and still recollect my feelings of outrage decades later.

I can only imagine trying to work through social credit bureaucracy as a child to correct mistakes, or understand outcomes.
That certainly is a difference across countries; not taking proper safety measures as a fisherman or roofer is a qymuick way too lose relevant licenses, get fined or even jail time in Norway.

That said, fishing can never be entirely safe - a storm is a storm, and the ocean is cold and deep (off the Norwegian coast, for example).

Still,while I wildly disagree on the premise that fishing and prostitution could be compared (that is, mostly on an emotional level) - I think I'll have to concede that in some ways it might make for a an interesting comparison point.

I'd guess coal mining could fit too.

But in the context of a sound and well regulated job market, I don't think fishing in general is a luxury goods provider. Neither is mining (in general).
I'm very fortunate to have her with me still.

Brain capabilities probably vary as much as other phenotype characteristics. No one without the genes for it will be able to do a good still rings gymnastic routine. And at the other end of performance, many will struggle to finish a 5K. But the fact that you can't run well doesn't mean that you can't shot put or swim well. The use of IQ as a single dimension obscures a multiplicity of abilities.
I'm not a software insider, but that's not my understanding of how that works. Free software seems to get used quite a lot to make money, but people actually working on free software seem to mostly not make (enough) money on it. It's a passion project and then it gets incorporated into things where parts are somehow locked up as a means to facilitate making money.

Not trying to argue with you. I just honestly don't understand it to work exactly like that, but some of your phrasing seems ambiguous and I'm wondering if I even understood you.
But if you want to communicate with somebody else in an encrypted way, then you can likely do so with effort that doesn't even approach a hobby. Setting up a system requires more effort, but these singular cases are hard enough to detect and crack that the law enforcement agencies would never be able to do it. You might not even need encryption, because you could communicate in ways that are just obfuscated enough that nobody's going to check. Eg write with blocks on the ground in Minecraft or something.

If the goal is to catch malicious people that are trying to hide their communications, then outlawing encryption won't work. But it will give the government a good excuse to spy on people.
Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?
I don't know enough about the original article to comment, and I'm not a lawyer, so my comment wouldn't be qualified anyways. I'm responding to the much broader argument made upthread, that any site that merely quoted the original story would be liable. That much I believe to be false, because, again, it's something Ken White has talked at length about, and Ken White is an expert.
For the interested, matrix project lead answered many questions regarding security and encryption in yesterday's AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/da219t/im_project_...
Hm. When I was 17, I cut things off very poorly with a girl I was interested in. (My real name is associated with this HN account.)

I suppose for fairness we should count only being over age 18, so, I once hit my best friend with a car because I was picking them up from the airport, they were loading luggage, and I took my foot off the brake without realizing it was in reverse instead of park. (They were not injured.)

Do you regularly associate with people for whom having Stallman-level worst behaviors is common?

Also, it's generally common to apologize after doing something bad, to acknowledge that the behavior was mistaken, as a step to forgiveness. I did not apologize to the girl (it seems more harmful than not at this point to reconnect) but I did apologize to the friend immediately. Did Stallman apologize to de Icaza for his behavior?
By rare I mean people with honorary doctorates, not the honorary doctorates themselves. I would assume that there is a higher chance for someone to have more than two than exactly one.
The former quoted text is the process of positive and negative selection, the mechanism of central tolerance.

The latter part you posit is the hygiene hypothesis.

The two are probably not the same mechanism as selection occurs in the thymus and marrow.

You can become allergic to any epitope at any point in your life if immune cells upregulate in response to it. Immune responses are particularly heightened during illness, which can sometimes trigger auto-immune or allergy development.
I agree. The crypto used is industry standard, and the actual process all the way from random number generation to deriving a key is relatively easy to follow.

Active ways to attack the client to make it leak the key are far more worrying - but even an open source project wouldn't protect against that.
Check the last section of https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...:

"Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group

"(This section is by Richard Stallman.)

"Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

"However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

"I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. "
In my experience you literally can't idiot-proof ops. In every operational role I've ever been in there's still very trusted people hammering out commands with very privileged accounts.

Even at my last role people would get angry at me when I'd ask for "command confirmation" and/or "an extra sets of eyes".

In my world, I favor getting it right vs. responding to mistakes. It's the difference between "scalable" and "firefighting".

Having a SPF asset who holds the keys to the entire kingdom is a completely different problem, and a different conversation.
There's lots of huge companies doing Free Software.

IBM bought Redhat at a valuation of $34 billion.
Not only did he not commit a crime, he didn't even do anything other than awkwardly posit that maybe his deceased friend didn't realize he was doing something wrong. Certainly this was a tactless comment.

Now I don't personally like Richard Stallman, but the "one tactless comment and you're dead _and_ people who want to associate with you are dead, too" approach to modern Internet justice seems wrong.
Non-zero perhaps, but quite close to zero.
The most interesting twist here is how it shows that "public benefit corporation" is an empty concept.
What's "conventional morality"? Where's the line between a moral fashion and something more fundamental? If there's no one line, then isn't this all just an exercise in line drawing, and aren't the people who refuse to associate with Stallman simply drawing their own lines?
I believe it. Arc'teryx had a photo essay a few years ago about a journey up a previously unnamed peak https://blog.arcteryx.com/greenland-photo-essay/

Oh, I get chills reading it again. It's slightly different with a nice good fantasy world though so there's a little bit more there than the feeling of that discovery.
Having a 'secure' conversation definitely implies trust in Google/Apple, regardless of the Whatsapp binary behaving flawlessly (e2e encryption, solid PRNG, no logs etc.)

They could indeed serve you a different binary from the app-store. "Do you think that's Whatsapp you're using?"
Furthermore, facial recognition is constantly improving, and a camera that might've been inadequate for it a few years ago can now be used for matching, if not training.

Combine that with the replacement rate of cameras, and you get two factors crossing each other and meaning that the vast majority of those 200M cameras can already be used for recognition, and the ones that can't today, will be soon.
> i have never (ever) seen someone with an honorary doctorate actually call themselves doctor.

You're right that this is abnormal in American academic culture [1]. Apparently German culture would afford him the title "Dr. h.c.", where the "h.c." qualifier clarifies that it's an honorary degree.

To be fair, [his Wikipedia page][2] seems to suggest that he's done enough work to have potentially earned a real PhD, had he been enrolled in a PhD program.

Plus we're often loose with the "Dr." title anyway. For example, we'll often call a college-level instructor "Dr." even if they don't actually have a doctorate.

All that said, it's still a tad less-than-dignified. I mean, it does have a hint of puffery behind it for someone whose work would seem to otherwise stand on its own. Plus a PhD is an early honor; for example, we don't bother saying Dr. Albert Einstein because Einstein's later accomplishments were so much greater than merely earning a PhD that the title seems more like an understatement than an honor. So, it's a bit weird for an older guy who doesn't have an earned PhD to use the "Dr." title, given that it's a bit of a stretch and almost feels like he's leaning on it whereas other famous names don't.

Not really a big deal, just kinda neat to examine.

[1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/72504/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Selected_publ...
https://philip.greenspun.com
He might be homeless now actually:

https://stallman.org/seeking-housing.html
That's a good point, but it's also not the entirety of what happened. See this Vice article https://archive.is/RVpdd :

Selam Jie Gano, an MIT alum, posted on Medium about an email thread in which Stallman argued that the late Marvin Minsky—an AI pioneer accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims, Virginia Giuffre—had not actually assaulted anyone.

Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.

The second paragraph looks, to me, as if it's the author of the Vice article that's making the claim, not Selam Jie.
Just wondering: at the start of the school year, did anyone ever offer you an opportunity to opt out of having your child's photographs and behavioral record shared and stored with Class Dojo and the others?