skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Information wants to be free - even when it's about you. Putting that genie back in the bottle - the right to be forgotten - creates a world that is less free.

It is accepted (I believe) that it is reasonable that federal judges and police officers don't have publicly published phone numbers, similarly people who have been stalked or threatened or doxed have demonstrated why things shouldn't always be public.

I definitely agree that private corporate data silos are no good (since they're essentially public data silos as soon as they're compromised but serve to monetize your privacy by selling it to third parties in the mean time) but I disagree that all data must be free and I am certainly not offended by people's desire to have a modicum of privacy in the modern world...

All that said if the monetary value of this data is removed by restricting private usage of it then we'll likely see the equation of value vs. cost for companies storing data shift back to preferring to store as little as possible. Disallowing private data silos may effectively restore a measure of privacy to most people by removing anyone's motivation to collect data.
Ok. And then what? Where do the problems start?
Ask HN: Do Companies Hire `Inventors`?
I'm currently a software engineer. I am not fulfilled by it. It does afford my family and I a very comfortable living, however, in the satisfaction sense I got zero.

I used to work with software patents in the past, as a Researcher digging evidence for patent lawyers. I know how they work and I can do searches quickly (searches to figure out if such a thing has been done). Also, ever since I've been a child. I always think of ideas, in any way shape or form. Most of the time I hate reading and learning how it is supposed to be learnt, and I try to learn it by myself by playing with it. This sometimes (however slightly) leads to unusual and unique approaches and solutions.

My current company pays $1k for each patent filing. So far I got 1 (I'm working on another one currently, I also have one published Software Paper from my masters thesis). I gotta say, it feels pretty good to get an Invention on your name. I'm not gonna get any royalties cause company claims everything, but regardless, I feel worthy. A feeling which I never experience when my code is deployed and it is doing what it is supposed to do.

Is someone out there hiring Inventors a.k.a Serial Patent Filers for the sake of increasing Intellectual Property or for researching new market entry points or expansions?

At this stage in my career I have realized that I do not get any satisfaction from my work as a Software Engineer and I do not enjoy the usualness of the day-to-day life.

I would like something that I could do wildly; something that would be super chaotic but with possible success, and where I could work from anywhere, and get ideas about the most random possible things, and put them in paper to make them official ``Inventions``.

If you know of any such companies or roles - I would greatly appreciate you sharing them with me. May the good of the world find you!

Cheers!
As my lawyer friend says, a class action lawsuit is the startup of the lawyering world. Get one good one and you're set for life.
They do, then they get bored
I'm not sure I understand. How is a city supposed to function with no police force? Wouldn't it essentially be anarchy? How long would it take for looting to start, once people realize nobody will stop them? It only takes an hour or so of rioting, usually....

If you did something like this, the result would likely be having the National Guard come in and restore order and be far more oppressive than the NYPD is.
And in this way companies will be made to comply without the expenditure of government resources.

Fantastic.
The problem with that is I would have to subscribe to a hundred different publications, and a new one every few days.

If I could buy a subscription that covered all online publications, and for a reasonable price, I would be quite happy. As it is I already have 5 print subscriptions.
This is from the page:

“Both sides agreed to a settlement to avoid the uncertainty and cost of litigation, and to provide benefits to Class Members more promptly. The Court did not decide in favor of the Class Representatives or Zappos. Zappos denies any liability or wrongdoing of any kind associated with the claims in this class action.”

It was a mutually agreed upon arbitration, no judges were involved in the decision.
I don't know, but it will depend on the ability for the case to be resolved quickly.

When a suit starts in 2012 and ends in 2019, the human capital invested is simply enormous.
Are our nation's courts + lawyers the best risk management managers out there? There are other people in government that could be doing this work (the people at the FAA or FDA spring to mind).
The right to keep and bear arms exists, yet it's illegal to commit murder with a firearm. The right to vote exists, but not the right to commit vote fraud. The fact that a right can be abused is not a valid argument that it doesn't, or shouldn't exist.

If one objects to the right to be forgotten altogether, then one objects to the right to demand that even false and libelous content can be removed from the internet. You can sue for defamation, but you can't prevent the publication and spread of defaming content.

>But the (US) government can't restrict me as an individual from talking about another person's past in private or public spaces.

Yes but the right to be forgotten doesn't apply to private or public spaces, it applies to data on the internet, or am I mistaken?
I'm 100% remote (so is the rest of our team).

The company doesn't pay for hardware devices at all (all staff are full-time). When I started with the company a few years ago, I used my personal laptop with a separate user account called "Work".

A colleague I used to work with did the same. They had a MBP and set up a secondary user also called work. They had an "incident" on Slack involving a crude photo and eventually quit due to embarrassment.

I sucked up the cost and bought a separate device out of pocket. My personal laptop is 100% personal and my work laptop is 100% work (I refuse to even access email from my personal laptop). I also have a work phone that's 100% work.

Don't mix business and personal life unless you have literally no life outside of work.

Unrelated: is it weird to buy your own work computer if you're remote? I don't get any reimbursement from the company... I've always found this odd.
The trend I have seen is that VC's invest in teams, not in the idea at least in the first place.
Citi is weird: the Citi Costco card does not support this functionality. Not sure why.
Yep :P

For a fun fact, CockroachDB was actually started by ex-Squares, so we're definitely very familiar with this exact same argument internally, back in the day when neither CockroachDB nor Spanner existed as a viable option :)
Airbnb has done a good job at defending their platform while uber/lyft has not. The best example of this is how you can compare prices on google maps for ride sharing, flights, and hotels but not for home sharing.

They have no immediate pricing pressure, they control the margins and the advertising. As long as they spend on marketing and avoid creating channels in aggregators they will be ok.

My only worry is that they do 5-10B/year revenue? So maybe they become a 30B company. It already looks like they will IPO above that, which will be unfortunate for any retail investor.
Good analogy.

Because on the other hand, it's risky and time intensive.

You stand to lose quite a bit as well, since class actions don't usually pay the lawyers on loss.
But apparently not tempting enough to give details or show how it is in fact parallel.
I've never met an alcoholic that was scared of a bar
It's by design
Who is impacted and fiscally responsible when it's mis-used? That helps quickly identify whose data it is.
wow, that was a great story, thanks for sharing
Because you asked, it comes from a popular blogpost that has been discussed on here a couple times. Here's the last discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11549536
Isn't that supposed to be part of the dissuading nature of punishment? Like, aren't we supposed to deter the more basal among us from committing crimes based on their fear of what will happen to them?

Obviously not to the extent of cruel and unusual punishment, but having a rough go of things seems reasonable enough for a jail environment. It's not a damned country club.
Nothing incentivized the oil companies from doing the sensible thing and avert this human-caused global warming.

Instead, the oil companies got all the profits.

People in towns got all the risk, and may lose their houses and equity.

That's how capitalism works, right?
Heh, I just realized that this means that biweekly (once per two weeks) is about the same as bimonthly (twice per month)
Thanks! Great questions -- unfortunately the short answer to both currently is "not supported yet" :) But there's reasoning behind it being on the back-burner in both cases; in some older threads I've discussed the lack of renames [1] and data migrations [2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19882611

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873608

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19882862
As a remote worker I miss this so much. Having your work laptop available 24/7 makes it way too easy to sign on for a quick fix on a day off.
Eliminative materialism
San Miguel, IRL
Kubuntu Linux 19.10 (Eoan Ermine)
Wouldn't be surprised if this is why it's closing. I'm sure there's some nice kickback from land developers that will put multi-million dollar condos there or something of the sort.
The lawyers would argue that by enriching them companies are less likely to engage in bad behavior.

But I agree. I am tired of getting practically nothing from class action lawsuits, while lawyers who did not get harmed walk away with millions.
Personal opinion - freedom of speech should apply to people, and not corporations. If you want to publish "truths", then do it as an individual, don't hide behind a corporate shield.
Perhaps Airbnb's problem is... Airbnb? I mean, it's awful. I've had so many bad experiences with Airbnb hosts and Airbnb itself that I've written it off and gone back to a combination of booking.com and Bonvoy (aka Marriott).

The idea of Airbnb seems like it should be profitable, if only it were better managed.
This is NYC. The one rule in the big apple is that real estate trumps everything. Nothing happens there without an underlying benefit to property owners. That said, reforming jails isn't one of those things that societies do in isolation. Jail/prison reform always rides on the back of some other program. What matters is that they make the change. Whether that change is funded by altruism or greed doesn't matter to those on the inside, today and tomorrow. They only care about the change itself.
Who will if the government does not? What entity has power is greater than the corporation who can force them to act?
Harm principle.

The government doesn't ban firearms, automobiles, knives, etc. because they have potential to cause harm, so why would the government break freedoms to censor information on the basis that it has potential to cause harm?

Defamation (libel/slander) is not a crime and is not censurable as such, but you can be sued for the damages (harm) that it causes. You are free within your first amendment rights to leave that defaming information up after it is proven to cause harm in civil court, but then you are still liable for the damage it continues to cause.
> Every discussion here gets swarmed with clueless people who think Java is the apex of OO programming, because that's what gets taught in universities these days.

Realistically, Java (or something very much like it) is the apex of OOP, at least as most people will experience it. The Ur-example of OOP might be a beautiful, internally consistent vision of mathematical purity, but most of us will never experience it.

Similarly, Agile-fall is the most common form of Agile that people will experience, which is why we always fall into "no true Scotsman" territory when ~~arguing about~~ discussing it.

There is, I think, a disconnect between people who are primarily concerned with the beauty of software - simple models, elegant algorithms, and so on - and the people who are primarily concerned with getting their feature branch merged to master so their manager will let them go to their kid's soccer game.

The beauty of software is important, and there's value in trying to bring the useful, but more esoteric concepts of CS into the mainstream, but at the same time we need to be aware of the ground truth of software development.
It it's not the file paradigm, it has to be system calls (plenty of them) set in stone, which could quickly turn into a problem or you probably mean a wrapper library?
There were lots of European countries were serious drug abuse problems in the 80s and many were able to solve them (Berlin, Amsterdam, and Switzerland all come to mind) with a range of policies on the supportive to punitive spectrum. I don't know why Portugal tends to get disproportionate attention.
You're almost right.

Sure, I don't value my privacy, the security of my financial information, etc as much as my life.

But it's close.
> what if we need to change this someday soon?

Git was created in 2005 and its hash algorithm is already outdated.

Additionally, software and hardware support continue to develop for better performance.
Brain-Flak – a stack-based esoteric language
Interesting - if you don't mind indulging me a little, it was surprising to me that you chose kubernetes as the first implementation for this standard. After all, if a large part of OAM's functionality is provided by k8s out of the box (auto-scaling, for example) it's not very useful to someone who knows the existing tech. Kubernetes is, by and large, already portable with minimal dev resources between the major cloud vendors and/or on-prem resources.

On the other hand, if you can pair already-written software with a collection of VMs and place an OAM layer between the machines and business logic, the portability of your code between OAM-compatible vendors becomes a selling point for the standard. I know a large project like this is a team effort, but can you shed any light on the reasons behind your decision-making and prioritization towards kubernetes?
> Taxi Driver formed part of the delusional fantasy of John Hinckley Jr.[26] that triggered his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, an act for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity

Its great to be an optimist and think movies don't cause harm, clearly not everyone got the memo, there's some really crazy people out there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver#John_Hinckley_Jr.
Alternate view coming from consulting with large traditional companies for many years:

Three things you need to attract tech talent:

1) Pay more money. Not willing or able to pay more? Then you don't actually want tech talent, you want tech labor. This is far and away the #1 issue holding back every city, BigCo, and startup that complains about not being able to attract tech talent, to the point where every time someone says they just can't find people, you should ask how much they're offering and then end the conversation when they inevitably give you some ridiculously low number.

2) The exception to #1 is... offer work on things people actually care about. Know why highly qualified engineers trip over themselves to work at SpaceX despite the awful working conditions? Because they actually care about advancing the state of human spaceflight. Your MarTech / FinTech / niche SaaS whatever metoo bullshit company is not compelling to people who are positioned to be able to work on things they actually care about.

3) Remove the red tape. Kill the HR hiring circus shenanigans. Kill the stupid performance metrics. (In the case of Singapore) Kill the barriers to immigrate as a tech worker. Kill the dozen layers of management and twelve meetings to actually accomplish anything precedent in big companies and government organizations. Etc. Tech Talent wants to get shit done, not talk about getting shit done while waiting for three separate sign-offs to even get started.

The other things mentioned in this article are nice, but are generally tier 2 considerations when you dig into what people actually want vs. talk about wanting.
Yeah, that works for changes at a physical location. What about founding of an LLC or other less tangible changes? Even with a physical sign it would be nice to have a searchable long term record. That seems to be what newspapers fulfilled; public broadcast and a reasonable long-term archive.
Weirdly no one had done it so far. That's the reason why I cooked up some high level devices :)
His tip about running "make clean" on ~/Desktop is okay, assuming people actually use Desktop the way he does. Which I observe that many, possibly most, users don't. Apple says that "The desktop is where you do most of your work", but I see a lot of desktops with no files whatsoever.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40612/mac
Ask HN: Do any macOS virtualization programs install without root permissions?
As I recall, Veertu installed from the App Store, whereas VMware Fusion wants root rights to install itself. Do any Catalina-compatible virtualization programs respect the idea of an immutable underlying OS image?
There were a few compilers for AppleSoft BASIC.
The most well-known was Microsoft's BASIC compiler. It could not handle arrays, though.

The original Integer BASIC that Woz & Co wrote was faster than AppleSoft, but lacked much complexity. I never heard of a compiler for it.
There is some truth to that. I write a lot of performance intensive interactive software (music software, graphics software), and use C++ for that. However, you can bring a lot of the FP into C++ world, use it when appropriate, and reason about performance all the way through. I spend a lot of time building tools to make it easier, like for example:
https://github.com/arximboldi/immer
https://github.com/arximboldi/lager
> the compiler can't (in general) reorder steps to optimize use of resources

i'm not sure what you mean by that because compilers reorder instructions to improve performance all the time (and CPUs do it dynamically too).
The justice system is really in all ways more biased towards dealing out punishment than making aggrieved parties whole.
A 523-pg book on modeling snow crystals by Kenneth G. Libbrecht, posted to ArXiv
We’ve built something very similar for PL/pgSQL. It integrates with Gradle so we even have transitive dependencies on different schemas. It has completely changed our approach to software development - development is faster and the application is literally an order of magnitude faster.

The key was to build the tool up front. Without the tool we couldn’t have done it.
Per primary plaintiff.

The rest of us schmucks get a 10% off coupon.
fox and Firkin in my hometown closed but the brewery there now rocks sours.
TTSA Announces CRADA with The U.S. ARMY to Advance Meta-Material Innovations
Good to know - I haven't been keeping up with this thread.

I'll have to check out linkerd, thanks for the rec!
You're leaving out the fact that the attorneys take these cases on contingency and front the costs.
An even more convincing case would be if companies screwing with their customers would have to pay MUCH more, and as a consequence plaintiffs would get a bit more $$ each.
It's Linux style. Syscalls are last resort - they're low level and have to be maintained forever. Instead, there are more robust and purpose specific abstractions built on top of them:

- ioctls on char/blkdevs for either physical or logical devices (which also allow for a 'handle' paradigm of operation, and for event polling via epoll/select)

- sysfs and procfs entries for system and process tunables and data

- debugfs for day to day debugging (which is explicitely unstable and not enabled in most production kernels)

- prctl, fcntl, ...

In addition, all of the above is 'automatically' ported across architectures. Some Linux architecture ports have their own syscall tables (with own numbering) and need to be explicitly modified any time a syscall is added.
AFAIK you can't access the virtualization instructions without root/kernel privileges.

I just checked xhyve and that needs root too.
WSL2 is not technically stable yet at all. It's still only in 20H1 Insider ["public beta"] builds for the version of Windows 10 to be released in the first half of 2020.

(WSL1 on the other hand has been stable and available for production versions of Windows 10 for months now. But yes, it has some known rough parts and performance issues expected to be smoothed over in WSL2 depending on your workflows and needs. Some of those have gone away with updates, WSL1 has seen some improvements over the months from some of the earliest horror reports, again all of which depending on your exact use cases.)
Oh, I agree it’s drivel, and it makes a typical HN reader cringe but this is fairly common language in executive bios.

Taking a career-ending bullet like this is Part of what these c-level people sign up for, an occupational hazard, especially In Baltimore
It's incredible, today we can't keep a bunch of apps running in virtualized containers in virtual machines in some data centre across the world... But these two little things are still chugging along on the outskirts of our solar system in the harsh conditions of space.
The attorneys have also been working on this case since 2012. Paying the salaries of a law firm (including paralegals, and through any number of appeals up to the Supreme Court) over the course of 7 years is going to be really, really, expensive.

In light of that, $1.5m is probably an overall loss for the law firm.
But it should be fine, then, as a replacement for anything written in Javascript, Ruby, Python, etc.

(Also, addressed in the video at the end, answering an audience member question.)
I think Rikers goes beyond that. Preet Bharara talks about it in his book (specifically an example where a guard beats a prisoner awaiting trial to death along with examples of other problems). Some places may be so problematic they are beyond reform.
Isn't this what Mesos is?

http://mesos.apache.org/
How should banks think about the risks of areas of the country that are prone to earthquakes/wild fires/mudslides vs flooding?

What if areas that are prone to flood risk are disproportionately minority owned?
> Maybe ‘pd’ is something like ‘prepare directory’, constructing the dd/dotdot entry.

I think this is on the right track - it looks like the write call is to the newly created .., with df being used to hold the file descriptor.
Complicit? You’re deluded. When I said that I love my country, did you think I meant my country’s government? That’s a foreign concept to most Americans.
I don't buy the fact that "Ferderated Learning" is privacy centric so much as it is liability and/or privacy-marketing centric. I feel that in the long run we will discover that using "ML" as a black box to smuggle user data off device won't hold up to scrutiny.
Yes almost all DDL is transactional in PG, and it works as you say. You can create tables, drop indexes, replace functions, update views - and then roll it all back.

There are a very small number of DDL statements that you can’t do in a transaction, but the devs are fixing them (adding a value to an enum is the only one that comes to mind)

We use it to great effect when upgrading schemas.
One day the voyagers will be gone from our perception. I'm not happy about that. We need something else chasing them into the dark. We should send another. It doesn't need to be a massively complex craft. Slap a big antenna and some RTGs onto a satellite bus. Then an ion engine as a slow boost stage and launch the package. Do a lap or two between earth and mars to build up speed, then aim for Jupiter. Science is great, but having that candle out there should be reason enough.