skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Should everybody start building additional backdoors in their software that shuts it down if it detects some sort of "bad" software is being created, or possibly hook it up to a Twitter feed and shut down if people are saying bad things about the software operator?

No, I think changing license terms to "won't be used by a company which separates families or violates international human rights laws," and not renewing the contract is fine enough.

> Github emphasized that they don't know what is being done with the on-premises, firewalled software they sold to ICE.

You don't have to know what ICE is doing with your software to know what they're doing more generally.

> What about the guy delivering pizza to ICE headquarters -- is he cancelled too? He doesn't know if the "must separate the children at the border" team or the "let's arrest the leaders of this slave trafficking ring" is eating the pizza.

"Cancelling" isn't a real thing, not distinct from "public opinion," anyway. If people want to direct ire to pizza delivery employees they can, but they're not, so I don't know why you're making this comparison.

> At least to me, some of the other protests in regards to ICE have been even more obviously incoherent, like the demand for Wayfair to stop selling clean beds for detained people to sleep in.

Any endeavor with lots of actors won't be entirely coherent, unified, or consistent. Some people think that Wayfair making profits on selling beds for prisons isn't some great altruism on Wayfair's part, and ICE would have a harder time building prisons if there weren't so many people eager to supply them; I don't know how much I'm on board with that as an effective protest, but I can at least understand it.
It's not a myth, it's the default state of humanoids to invent new tools all the time. What is the article suggesting, that we sit on our chair doing nothing? Everything humans do is progress forward so that thinking doesnt even make sense.

> that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not.

Yes, tech is fundamentally different from all other industries because it's not regulated. Regulation kills innovation thats why tech is progressing faster.

Author makes the claim that tech is not random mutation like evolution, but then goes on to mention 1000 projects like smart diapers which are nothing than random mutations of existing products, most of them destined to die, leaving 1 or 2 which will thrive. That sounds a lot like evolution.
When you send an email there, everyone on the list gets it. It's like a group chat via email. Lots of things are discussed, from technical to commit access to use questions.

God I feel old now.
Actually, yes, I think you would need an entire engineering team to write, maintain, scale, and run a system that solves this problem. For example, my employer has a whole team working on internal tools for booking/managing/re-allocating conference rooms. It's almost exactly the same problem, it's non-trivial, it's complex, and it takes an entire team.
Even as a pretty heavy Apple user, I feel so sorry for people that have to identify with a product. If someone asked me to describe myself, my choice in computer/phone/whatever would not be a part of that description.
I love this concept.

Sure, it'll never be a significant source of energy [if we plastered literally the entire earth's surface with them at maximum theoretical efficiency, we'd provide 1% of our electricity consumption].

But the sheer concept of "you know what, lets generate energy from THE VOID OF SPACE, the ABSENCE OF HEAT" is deeply entertaining.
I could never trust Apple given their track record.

Plus, their hardware is overpriced for what you get.

I genuinely have a hard time understanding the appeal. It seems to have the Gucci brand name, maybe integrations but I don't feel this is lacking on Android, and maybe privacy but I don't trust Apple for privacy.
Deep3DFly: The deep-learning way to design fly-like robots
If anything their perspective seems to be that their "true fans" are mainly Chinese and are playing cheap knock of mobile games.
Ask HN: How do you develop crossplatform desktop applications in 2019?
I think that's overly optimistic.

iOS 13 has moved even further away from Obvious UI (and more broadly, iOS since 7).
Maybe what I mean is not clear enough. I imagine that a star, just a few days after 9/11, openly declared that 9/11 was a great recovery movement.
....

well that's dumb
>Of course there is! What does it mean to NOT remain neutral?

No, there is not. At least, not any longer. The moment a company dips their toes into the Chinese market they are getting into bed with an oppressive, authoritarian regime who dictates the rules of conduct. This on turn forces companies like Blizzard to play along with the CCP lest they lose revenue.

There is no neutral; the CCP forces you to chose a side, and Blizzard chose as soon as they entered the Chinese market.
Make an argument, don't be intellectually lazy. How do you think it would have gone?

Spitballing some historical fiction for the admittedly bizarre editorial? There would have been a public hue and cry. The editor who published the opinion piece would have lost their job, heads would have rolled (figuratively, not literally) in the WSJ editorial board.

The person who wrote the editorial would have had a bad time in the public sphere (they still would).

The author of the editorial would almost certainly not have gone to jail or been arrested, tortured, or executed, nor would they have lost their property or business, nor would their family. Nor would the editor who published the editorial.

If the author had been a government employee, they probably would have lost their job. If they were a high-profile public persona (an actor, for example), they probably would have been blacklisted.

But to be clear, that would be the worst of it - even during an extraordinary period of paranoia and fear.

If you believe otherwise, dig up some historical precedent to support the argument.

For the record: I do not think the United States of America is a just country in many regards, but if you're going to complain about injustice, at least get the facts straight.

(Edit: I'm just so puzzled by the bizarre false equivalence on this issue. It's like suggesting that Norway and the United States have the same track record on public healthcare because the Norwegian state health plan stopped covering acupuncture from 1985-1990 (imaginary example). They don't have the same track record, it's not close, slapping some words together on the internet doesn't make it so.)
Time and Relative Dimension in Space
We need total non-cooperation with ICE. No one should even deliver a pizza for them. They are the American gestapo. They put people in concentration camps (there have been deaths!) and tear families apart. They use sneaky tactics to kidnap people, even people who have been here most of their lives and then deport them to places they have never known.

This one story alone is chilling:

"Diabetic Man Dies After Being Deported To Iraq: ACLU
Jimmy Aldaoud reportedly came to the U.S. as a baby and didn’t speak Arabic. He died after he was unable to get insulin, his family says."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jimmy-aldaoud-iraq-deported_n...
How is that being used in the functioning of your website?

Or was it just a fun thing you were playing around with on a hidden page?
What Is Implicit Deep Learning?
This is what happens when you build a company, culture and product important for open source software and in the lives of individuals and organizations building and using it, that they depend on, and then... you take the money and sell out to a bunch of corporate assholes who held the internet back five years through monopoly that neuter you and your ability to take a stand against toxic injustice.

Fuck you, Github. I can’t stop using you because you have a monopoly, but fuck you anyway.
If Apple didn't cave to the US government, what makes you think they're going to cave to China?
>noun: virtue signalling

>the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.

By definition this isn't virtue signalling, GitHub is putting $300k of their own money where their mouth is.
The difference is maybe that I don't see a password as a statement. There is no intent to let anyone know it. The only purpose it serves is to be difficult to guess / crack and easy to remember.
You see anyone killing anyone because they don't like the Apple watch? You seen a person who drives a Chevy Impala being hated on by someone who drives a Toyota? No. You see someone who works at Facebook being subjected to hate because someone else works for Google? Exceptions may be someone rich getting treated better by the law than someone who is poor, but in theory (and in religion you only have theory of the true religion anyway) they are both equal. If a rich person kills a poor person they will have a very difficult time getting away with it regardless of their wealth if there is enough evidence against them to convict... You see most people that work getting enough food to eat and housing. etc. etc. Yeah so not the same at all.
Not really. It was well known that passwords were being cracked, and the guy in question was even warned already that his password had been cracked the week before.
You're correct in the definition of 'resigning'. However, there are many cases (and this seems to be one) where people are pushed into resigning against their will. People will still resign, whether out of a sense of honour, or due to the alternative being a prolonged process which will end in the same outcome (being out of a job).
When people on the left say things that people on the right dislike.

Serious answer: there's a theory that some people say things just to impress their friends of the same ideological stripes (although the charge is usually leveled against those on the left), rather than actually placing much importance on those things.

For instance, the github people opposed to the ICE contract are just doing it to "look good" in the eyes of their peers rather than actually, say, caring about kids locked up in cages and the other nasty things that an unleashed ICE is doing.

I think it's mostly a BS theory.
> at least supposedly voluntarily

This is the implication. As an example very, very few CEOs are fired but a great many are sternly asked to voluntarily resign by the board.
This is an interesting thought, because most Apple products are essentially bricked without software activation. And Apple has gone to great lengths to make it impossible to circumvent. Sure, they could produce cheap clones running Android but China already does that.
The intelligence community calls this a "limited hangout".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout
What does standing up for Hong Kong mean to you. What could Trump do to help? Generally curious.
If people exercising their freedom of speech is an insult to your "national dignity", your nation sucks. What about sowing distrust of the media, further, is "rational" as you so carefully allude to twice? If the truth is the enemy, you are on the wrong side.

Your whataboutism about the US and 9/11 isn't even on target. No one here is particularly upset if you talk about it, except maybe the more jingoistic sort when you start pointing out that the damage we did to ourselves in response with respect to civil liberties was perhaps greater than the damage OBL & co ever dreamed of doing with a few airplanes.
I'm not so sure it's okay for him to do it on Blizzard's show/event.

Interviews are not scripted, the interviewer asks questions but the interviewee says whatever they want. It has always been like this.
Why do you say it's hard to read? Because it's talking about the eventual need for succession?
The a16z podcast recently had an interesting episode featuring the author of this article. It discussed the divergence of the GDP + energy usage curves as well as some of the other stuff in his book.

https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/the-environment-capitalism-techn...
Never realized? You very much underestimate the affect google has had on the world. Imagine how different the world would look if Google and other search engines required a 10k / month subscription to gain access.
Yes! Then they could have sidestepped this problem!
Probably the biggest one is that there was no more spacial file manager.
I think the "towards the end" part is the misleading one. The software has no idea where the end is or it would just jump there. Since the run took 4 days slowing down due to throttling would happen pretty fast as the card reaches a thermal equilibrium. Certainly wouldn't take days to do it.

It's more likely the explanation above of something (not heat) accumulating over time and slowing down the processing.
The end of an era. XBL was the first means of abstraction invented for HTML/XML. We have WebComponents now, which will hopefully be better, but that would never have happened without the experience of XBL first.
Don't try to be Nietzsche unless you actually are Nietzsche.
>If all of those rebuilt gccs are byte-for-byte the same

Isn't that pretty unlikely even if all the compilers are uncompromised?
to be fair, pension indexed to market rates are such a stupid idea; i'm glad most of europe didn't buy the idea - and they kept using the old model.
Is the data available in a machine-readable format?
That's likely the case: at least in Arch Linux, Guile+deps is about 50MB.
Analytics needs unstructured data in order to function well as a modular service. Golangs lack of coproducts makes such data much harder to deal with.

As much as I hate js. Nodejs is actually better for one of these servers. Then again it's mostly the database that determines the schemas.
You're thinking of it wrong, it's not infinite growth investors are after. They are after easy and fast growth.

Infinite growth is useless on a mortal timescale. Easy and fast growth is where it's at and places like China offer tons of it.
That doesn't explain crop tonnage going up while fertilizer and water use are going down.
Things like that happened, we don't have to imagine it. Also 9/11 - a terrorist attack - is not analogous to a mass protest movement. Mass protests have taken place in the US, including violent ones and prominent contemporary voices have been both openly supportive and critical of them.
It's not so much that the letter is guaranteed to be genuine.

They can include information in the letter they can't include on a phone call, as the mail service is performing the authentication.

My health insurer won't talk to me on the phone without me confirming identity, even if they called me, but they'll happily mail the info.

Never call the number off the letter, though.
The original hit piece was from Vice:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...
>Infinite corporate growth,

That assumption is not necessary. Economies of scale and network effects are important. Platform companies can be crippled relative to competition if they are cut from large markets even if the markets are finite.
I'm curious if this research was funded, in whole or in part, by any US government entities -- especially the kind that specialize in signals intelligence.
NixOS 19.09
>Like many Hubbers, I strongly disagree with many of the current administration’s immigration policies, including the practice of separating families at the border, the Muslim travel ban, and the efforts to dismantle the DACA program that protects people brought to the U.S. as children without documentation.

Obama did the same crap, and here a CEO is blaming the current admin.

If this CEO had a clue about what is going on, he would realize that the PARENTS are in the wrong by bringing their kids. Thus, because of child predators they have to be separated. Obama even said so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4QniWO4_Yw
The armstrong thesis is one of the most insightful reads on software construction (I think).
Where did it happen that Stallman exposed his penis to somebody?
(corrected typo)
Just to note

> He was already being super creepy and making the girl who sat across from him uncomfortable, but she never told anyone.

The OP actually did mention that there was prior bad stuff that had gone unreported (quite possibly due to a power imbalance). In the end:

1. Nobody is getting fired over a password alone.

2. Traditionally it's been very balanced against women reporting such things.
Not sure what Google you use, but Apple has about 123.000 employees in total.

Edit: according to Wiki, the US DoD is the largest employer in the world at 2.1M employees.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
Extreme Economies: Survival
Maybe my meaning is not clear enough. Let me give you an example.

Imagine a well-known person, just days after 911, publicly declaring that 911 was a great recovery operation.
Also not a single woman on that list of Stallman supporters, as far as I can tell.

EDIT: I misread, it’s not a letter of support to Stallman. Sorry.
One of my pet peeves with HN. Eventually, every post ends up as "X years ago". I wish I knew when in that year.
so what? we should "repent" by having to station troops there eternally?

the sunk cost fallacy shows us it's not rational to double down on mistakes. so what is your proposed plan forward?
Thanks for sharing the details. I've started something similar to this idea but target audience is students who need guidance.

Sample piece:

https://www.freshgrads.info/post/meet-prashant-kikani-who-ka...

Would be great if you could share some advice on contacting people and getting stories.
Scrambling for cloud relevance, Oracle hires 2k?
Can Indigenous sovereignty survive colonisation?
Crash Only Software

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper...
The rate is misleading since there's a back and forth with the judge before final submission.

eg the judge will look it over and says that there's no specific crime listed like the law requires, two weeks later there are money laundering allegations also listed, the judge approves it without asking where the new allegations came from.
> it wasn’t withholding bedding?

They actually tried to buy extra beds and one of the “do no business with ICE” companies refused to sell to them, so they ended up with fewer beds: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/26/wayfair-draws-backlash-calls...
Does this relate to the buyback-debt cycle of companies? [0]

[0]. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/buybacks-companies-increasin...
We're not going to ban you from a sport, take your prize money and fire those associated with you, if you wore a "Bush did 9-11" t-shirt and shouted 7 words about how the US was wrong to invade Iraq. My children were very amused over dinner when I had to explain why a certain cartoon bear is banned in a country, and how some countries can mock their leaders with almost anything short of inciting violence. While it was within Blizzard's terms and conditions to ban the player, it was still the wrong decision and it illuminated who is in control.
I despise the “I’m all for free speech, just don’t do it here” rhetoric. So where else then? On the streets where most people can ignore it?

This is how protesting works. It has to be in places people can see and hear. Creating controversy is even better because it gets the media talking about it.

I’d argue this was 1,000 times more effective in spreading a message than taking to the streets.
That's just Trump position on the matter.

But it's not the truth: viewers went down because the games lately suck.

> At least some NFL viewers really have tuned out thanks to the national anthem protests — but almost as many have stopped watching thanks to the league’s domestic violence problems

> The biggest factor driving the decline in football ratings affects all sports ratings

https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/9/26/16364210/nfl-ratings-d...
They are showing solidarity with the state by continuing to do business with them in the hope that there will be more business down the line or to head off the threat of intrusion into their business. The amount of money is trivial compared to the relationships they are cultivating.
Something (weird) that I noticed in many Scandinavian websites is their short domain names. I don't know the reason, but I like the fact that you can type 5 letters and access the service that you want.
Note that according to Snopes, Obama's ICE was putting kids in cages.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-build-cages-immigran...
So I worked on this project. As with many stories this one has been simplified to be less boring and emphasize key points. I generally agree with Guillaume’s characterization—he’s a brilliant engineer and it was great to work with him.

The most important advantage of Go was that it is statically typed and there was a broad agreement that we should use a typed language to prevent errors. The other advantage was that Go is faster than Python, allowing us to move logic out of the C codebase and unify the high-level operations in a single codebase. The other other advantage of Go was that it is not C++, for which we were all grateful. As with most real projects, the rewrite occurred concurrently with adding features and tightening coding standards — `go fmt` was a big motivator and the Go codebase had much more comprehensive test coverage than the Python one.

>Also, for a sense of scale, this rewrite took about 4 years to complete from first concepts.

That’s not quite accurate. In fact the Python production code was largely ported by mid-2015, and the Go library was feature-complete by 2016, albeit still linking to C. However, there was a lot of non-production prototype code, implementing more complex optimizations and written in a few additional languages, which took another two years to port, and also to be made production-ready. Perhaps what’s important is that we were able to keep adding new improvements while still “porting” this code. (Real life is a poor laboratory.)

>effectively never updated the library.

It is, or was, still maintained. Most of the very low level file operations had been optimized to death already. Higher-level functionality was slowly moved out of the C library. I left Salesforce in 2017 so I’m not sure what happened next. (Incidentally I left not only Salesforce but tech entirely - I’m now at grad school for medical physics.)

>I imagine it is easier these days to find Go devs than C devs

Maybe? None of us knew Go when the porting began. I think if you know at least 2 programming languages and one of those is C-like, Go will be a piece of cake. I was hired with no Go experience and ramped up quickly.
How to get notified whenever someone logs in via SSH?
The Internet has finally brought the world together, and people are now at scale discovering that people in other parts of the world really are different, beyond just what clothes they wear and what food they eat. That's proving to be a shock to nearly everybody. It was always something you could ignore in the past.
I agree, - but morality is sticky and complex.

It was obviously wrong to be the creepy sexist.

In the abstract sense, it is wrong to invade privacy.

But then, if in your invasion of privacy you uncover a wrongdoing, the right thing to do is report it.

It would be wrong to read the CFO's email inbox, and probably illegal. But then if you uncover they are committing fraud, you need to report it to police, as well as confess your own crime.

Unfortunately, there's never easy rules for these things.
I agree, but I included it for the sake of argument. Any self supporting power system without AC is much easier to accomplish.