skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing is: It's flame-bait simply because it's a sentiment that is so prevalent here. It's flame bait because there is a breed of people who lose their shit over it, and that breed is a large fraction of the visitors of this website. There is nothing remotely controversial in what dvt said. Nobody would bat an eye about it at my workplace, for example. You have to be aware of the monoculture here.
TransMilenio is definitely a nice system, but they built it because they felt it would be cheaper than a traditional metro system, like Medellin's. I definitely preferred Medellin's system over TM. But TM is definitely novel.
I don't think even Google actually encouraged people to discuss politics at work. They never did when I was there. It was more a side-effect of decentralising the power to create forums. Anyone could create discussion lists there without asking permission, this was highly useful for coordination, making it easy to spin up new projects and avoiding siloing of information into people's private mail accounts. The flip side was nothing stopped anyone creating lists to discuss whatever divisive topics they wanted.

There's also been a cultural shift over time. When I first joined Google I remember feeling that it was a pretty libertarian sort of place. In my team several colleagues were openly and proudly very pro-capitalist, anti-communist, small government types. If anyone was left wing it wasn't visible and I don't recall encountering identity politics, ever. There was a very strong cultural commitment to neutrally serving every user with every query, and ranking being completely algorithmic, to the extent that the company agonised over hot-patching "Googlewhacks" where pranksters manipulated results for unusual searches to offend their ideological opponents.

This didn't seem strange, it was just how it was. I have a vague feeling I thought other tech firms were the same. Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party after all, and anything internet or web related had a strong vibe of "communication will make us stronger".

This is a very far cry from the modern Google where arguing maybe girls find geeky stuff boring gets you fired, where they manipulate ML models to believe the world is some intersectional 'utopia' as part of social engineering programmes, where employees spend huge amounts of time erasing gendered pronouns from source code comments.

I suspect the shift was caused by Google running out of experienced software engineers to hire, and switching to growing through recruiting new college grads at much greater numbers. The hard shift leftwards in academic institutions has been well documented. Even in 2006 I remember a recruiter telling me they'd "run out" of candidates in the USA and that's why they were expanding more into Europe. The concept you could "run out" of candidates in a place as big as America was pretty shocking to me - on probing, he explained that almost all people with the skills they needed were in well paid happy jobs already and few were interested in moving, even with the great perks on offer. Whilst there were always a small flow of people coming onto the market due to natural churn, "everyone who cares knows Google is hiring" he said, and they'd already interviewed vast numbers of them.

This change in culture would inevitably lead to this situation due to the way that conservatives see leftists as naive, but leftists see conservatives as evil. Combined with leftists generally understanding conservatives much worse than the other way around (this has been shown by large scale ITTs), and together it means flooding your firm with new grads is a surefire way to create massive internal conflicts.
Very generous, thank you. I'll look into Migadu's services. What's the best way to follow up?
DSL modems are a similar technology leap - they used to contain high end FPGA's, DSP chips, and high speed analogue to digital converters, and they'd cost hundreds of dollars.

Now a cheap DSL modem is $10, and it's all a single SoC.

Phased array satellite modems will follow the same price curve.
The edge of the map: the steady decline of topographical cartography
Yeah, I think that people really tend to overlook how much of our common history and heritage exists exclusively as bits on some old hunk of rust, and how frequently those bits are permanently and irrevocably vaporized.

Shutdowns like this are well-planned and orderly compared to the much-more-common-than-anyone-wants-to-admit "woops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory", "woops, I ran fsck on a mounted disk" (which I literally did last night, fortunately without the deserved vaporization), or "woops, someone sold the wrong server and the hard drive is out in the wild now", followed up by the inevitable "woops, turns out the backups have been broken for the last 32 months, probably should've been checking that".

Historians are going to have a hard time moving forward. Until the last 15 years or so, when someone died, you could go collect "their papers" -- journals, letters, records, photos, and so on. The digital equivalent is scattered across dozens of personal devices and thousands of servers. Even if we're generous and assume that something like 20% of it will still exist when a person becomes deceased, the data is comingled in someone's crappy MySQL somewhere, or it's stored behind passwords, crypto keys, and other contraptions that are virtually unbreakable as compared against something like "call the locksmith".

As people age, I think these concerns will begin to be taken much more seriously, but it shows the crucial importance of fully utilizing things like the GDPR-mandated "fork over your data" export and becoming proficient in backup, archiving, and system forensics.

This is an area of some interest to me, so when my grandmother died a couple of years ago, I worked quickly to get a bit-for-bit copy of every user-accessible digital device in her house. I got almost everything, but a distant family member absconded with the iPad, which had been her primary computing device for the last couple of years of her life, before I could even get on a plane.

[Tangential pro-tip here: large files can and do lose bits. Create multiple copies, create parity files, and don't rely blindly on either RAID or filesystem-level checksums.]

Fortunately, she was in her mid-90s and while she enjoyed technology, she also maintained handwritten journals for over 50 years, so we still have the main records of her legacy. But things will be different for people not-all-that-much younger.
> this commitment translates into a 28% poverty rate

The table used to calculate federal poverty level doesn't scale correctly to high numbers of children.

You can make rather a lot of money, yet be considered poor if you have lots of children.

Additional children don't cost as much as the federal government thinks.
Time is slower (relative to us) due to spacecraft being in motion (relative to us).

But then time is faster (relative to us) because it is higher up in the gravity well.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/802098...

So which one wins out?
>Or were you trying to make musical instruments?

Bingo :) The latency was pretty low, and good for UI, but you'd want <10ms total latency for musical instruments.
Seems blocked outside of the EU.
I think more companies should avoid politics in the workplace. It is really easy to create a divisive or more likely, a one-sided org that is generally less healthy.
How do you know that decapitation "heals" a headache? That sounds clever ... you're not bad or wrong for this, it's extremely common and I am guilty of it myself. But I'm pointing to the fact that you don't know that.

"even if they work against smoking, it's not necceserily (sic) a sufficient reason to use them"

This I can respect and agree with ^
Hosted services is an ongoing act of support though - it's more like the inventors of CRISPR taking a contract that let someone use their equipment to engineer a supervirus.
I had contacted them and received a swift "no, sorry." But thank you for the suggestion.
Please omit ye words of terror, lest ye inflict your verbal assassinations upon our poor fragile temperaments.
Don't know of anything more scared of a little heat than a snowflake.
[1]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-does-formation-of-...
I think the real problem is high volume transactions. In theory, buying money off of localbitcoins assuming you connected to their service anonymously, met with the seller anonymously, etc. should be safe.

But if you're accepting payment and then cashing out, you will need a safe way to cash out and localbitcoins will get you caught fast. Agents would see the money going to a localbitcoins user. They could either setup a sting or just contact whomever has been buying these coins off of you.
Because as much as we'd like to believe that everyone reads the articles and that editorialized headlines don't affect us, they do. Sanitizing headlines helps people stay on topic.
Why crime is so attractive I think has evolutionary basis: sure, many will fail, but those that succeed will have increased their attractiveness to mates a great deal. For a similar reason you see a lot of variance in the behavior and capabilities of men.

There are also likely a lot of people who get out before they are caught, after making a modest amount of money.
Zuck says cloud computing is too expensive
A story from a high-tech HS in SoCal:

School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.

So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!
That's the scary thing. Today, it's using a tumbler that filter you in. Tomorrow it's not having a 24/7 camera/mic in your house connected to the internet with weakened or no encryption.
As a digital product designer, my go-to Mac status bar app for this is Contrast: https://usecontrast.com
The difference between this idea and the EM drive is that there's an at least somewhat plausible theory behind it, that's not entirely incompatible with known science.

EM drive proponents could make the same statement and it would be less credible in that context.

That's not to say that experimenting first and figuring out the theory later is a bad thing - that's often how science works - but generally, one follows strong evidence to reach a theory to explain it. EM drive proponents extrapolate wildly from extremely weak evidence. It's not good science.
So when do you imagine they'll be implementing Navajo language support in their UI?

Or is someone going to have to make the judgement call that Navajo users don't constitute a big enough political block to influence their l10n priorities?

Someone has to make those calls
How does arguing if politician X or politician Y is better makes tech more responsible?

Supporting politician X doesn't make person more moral or ethical. Same as believing in god A over god B.

Politics discussions are just tribal wars.
> I don’t understand why it’s encouraged (in some companies) to discuss politics at work in a way that leads to internal issues

I am not familiar with companies that encourage discussing politics.

Politics is about how people ought to be organised. I find it strange that this would not be something to discuss in the context of many persons primary organisational structure.

Part of my remuneration is the effect I may have on the world. Positive or negative.
Democracy is fine.

The health of my family is more important than your politics.
Taking store-bought food and adjusting the presentation to make it look homemade isn't a purely Japanese phenomenon. Even in the United States, frozen apple pie sellers will tell folks to take the pie out of the aluminum tin and put it in a glass or ceramic baking dish to make the pie look homemade.

I rather appreciate how the Japanese still care about how food is presented. (I believe the idiom goes, "you eat with your eyes first.") I hope that in the pursuit of gender equality, pretty meals don't get lost the way that they have in the states.
Utilities are forbidden to deny service based on similar reasoning. It would not be right for Verizon or ConEdison or similar to deny services to ICE etc.

However Gitlab is not a utility or regulated as anything remotely close to one.

A company that takes pro-active steps to declare that they will do business without any scruples or ethical concerns is just plain disgusting.
a company has to be registered somewhere.
Thank you for providing those links. In both cases gitlab is partnering with a non-profit organization that AFAICT is not lobbying to pass or repeal laws. I understood "politics" in the context of this article as being about election candidates, government actions, or changes to the law. These gitlab partnerships are only "political" in the sense that people who like to argue about politics also like to argue about topics that these partnerships touch on.
Then the initial demand to not discuss politics must also be political and therefore self-contradictory, so it should be ignored.
The point of reconciliation/reparations is acknowledging that have been long-standing systemic oppression of these groups— it isn't a matter of just bucking up and working hard when you're subject to multi-generational trauma. I don't know as much about the US situation, but in Canada there was a long period of intentional attempted cultural genocide, where indigenous kids were literally ripped from their parents' arms and sent to far off boarding schools and taught to behave white. That would be bad enough if it wasn't also an environment with almost no oversight that led to rampant other abuses, including sexual.

And this wasn't really all that long ago— the last of these residential schools didn't close until 1996.

If you're interested in more about this, APTN did a terrific series called First Contact, which featured everyday Canadians with neutral-to-negative feelings about indigenous people touring the country and learning first hand about it:

https://aptn.ca/firstcontact/video/season-1/
email :) contact at migadu dot com
I'd agree that Noam Chomsky's linguistic contribution is of the highest order, but I'm not so sure about his political analysis.
Here are his comments in 1977 regarding the reported genocide in Cambodia [1]: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable."

And on the veracity of reports about horrific slaughter made by Cambodian refugees: "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account."

Did Chomsky show poor judgement by discounting such refugee reports? Was the evidence of genocide really so muddy in 1977 that you could not 'know where the truth lies'?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131207072650/http://www.abc.ne...

[2] https://m.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Chomsky-and-the-...
TheRegister really is the gutter press of the tech world.
As a general rule, the First Amendment only restrains the government. It means the government can't ban speech (except in narrow, "content-neutral" ways) and courts can't punish you for it (except for things like defamation).

But the US follows at-will employment, under the more general principle of freedom of association. An employer does't have the same duty to treat its employees "fairly" that the government has to its citizens. Your employer can fire you for pretty much any reason, including differences of opinion, and the First Amendment has nothing to do with that.

The exceptions to this rule are better thought of as exceptions to at-will employment, rather than extensions of First Amendment protection. For instance, you can't fire an employee for discussing wages or working conditions with their co-workers, in the same way that you can't fire someone for being the wrong religion or for reporting illegal behavior.

(If you're saying that the courts should change their interpretation of the First Amendment to include a right to discuss politics at work... well, that would be a major break with precedent, and a huge reach beyond what the text of the amendment says, with wide-ranging ramifications. Instead, some states have passed specific laws that protect workers from discrimination on the basis of political opinion, without needing to invoke the First Amendment.)
Oh if it wasn't clear, I was being facetious. This is an awful idea. All the groups mentioned above already have a legal, constitutional right to redress the government, being groups composed of individual citizens. Lobbyists, paid or not, elected or not, do not deserve floor time in Congress. They currently do not enjoy this privilege, thank goodness.
You have a point there (and hence no downvote from me ;-): GitLab is a 961-strong company (all remote, says the website). However, we have much larger nations and, as a society, we should try to get along with each other, despite differences.

Mind that this rule even prevents discussing legitimate concerns about customers with your team mates.
I can't take Google seriously. Every time they add a new feature, my mind goes "and then they will sell you ads on this geospatial information".
Rodney Stark says that the distinguishing mark of capitalism is that (at least part of) the profits are re-invested in better tools for productivity gains. In this view, "the existence of property rights, money, and the right to freely enter into contracts except when prohibited by law" are prerequisites, but they aren't capitalism. Capitalism is what you do once you have that foundation in place.
I don’t understand how exactly a person can consider themselves ethical when they knowingly assist in performing actions they find unethical - it seems like a contradiction that people find bearable as long as they themselves aren’t directly impacted by that decision. It sounds more like dressing up amorality than it does a principled morality.
> Moose don't live that far South

There are meese all over the northern US, which is - last I checked - south of Canada. I encountered two (a mother and her calf) when hiking in the Tetons as a kid, and apparently there are a bunch in Northern Nevada.
> You know what isn't productive? Getting outraged on Twitter or Hacker News, making emotional outbursts of regurgitated sound bites and platitudes.

Genuine question: you're making a strong statement on Hacker News expressing your disagreement with how other people are acting; what do you think distinguishes this from the behavior that you're describing that makes it more productive?
Many tribal lands don't have street addresses and in some states you have to have a residence with an address to vote.
If your ethical framework would approve of selling computers to the Nazis knowing they’ll use them to commit genocide… maybe find a new ethical framework?
Like text editors? or code formatting?
Statistic wise they seem to have beaten the Church

Not very hard, since the chances of a child being abused by a priest are incredibly small. I saw a chart of it from a .gov web site a couple of years ago, and it had public school teachers at 5x the rate of priests.

The reason the Church thing is a big scandal isn't because of the frequency, it's because of the cover-ups, and because priests are supposed to be at the top of the list of people that children can trust.
For anyone who reads this, NEVER use an I2C bus on anything which needs reliability. Ever.

Use CAN, preferably, or SPI, if nothing better. Even old school RS-232 is probably superior.

I2C simply isn't reliable in harsh environments without extensions (I believe that there is an ESA paper on this somewhere).

CAN, in particular, was built for harsh environments (automobiles).
Eight Private Jets Are Probably Too Many Private Jets
I get what you're saying in theory. But in practice, that's essentially no different than the simple fee system most places have today, with the exception of forcing land to be re-sold at some set interval.

(Unless you're advocating for a method of distribution / allocation other than highest bidder.)

What most people consider ownership is really just leasing from the state via yearly property tax values.

What you're suggesting would only increase property values further. It's a similar mechanism that fuels "gentrification."
Here is a photo of the Cherokee Nation capital building, preserved at New Echota, Georgia. https://joshuacurry.com/american-way/cherokee-capitol-new-ec... This was once the epicenter of the Cherokee government which organized to trade with the colonies. It was taken by a group of 20 non-natives who signed the treaty of New Echota without native consent and enforced by Andrew Jackson. This particular action began the "Trail of Tears". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_New_Echota
> The nazi example they gave is also quite egregious. America has sanctions. If the public wants corporations to not interact with certain countries, they can ask their legislators to fascilitate passing of sanctions

While you correctly note that governments can pass sanctions against countries to facilitate trade restrictions, it's worth considering the full context of the article when considering their descent into proving Godwin's law.

They explicitly state the example of Chef working with arguably contentious and/or politicized domestic organisations. Given that recent employee protests are based around domestic government organisations, that have (rightly or wrongly) been compared to nationalist and/or protectionist organisations in history, what is the correct course of action there?

If you disagree so strongly with your own government, and/or believe your own government cannot be trusted to tell you the truth, what is the correct response? In recent history, we had marches against going to war on what wasn't considered believable grounds. Despite the best intentions of the leaders at the time, who ultimately ignored the peaceful and legitimate protests, the protestors were later proven to be true.

Given that backdrop, and the corporate / commercial capture of legislative interests, how is employee activism not a logical next step of 'vote with your wallet' combined with 'change it from the inside'?
This argument always comes up and it's always so easy to refute, because the vast majority of America is not inhabited at any meaningful level of density. You can simply ignore those parts. No one's proposing building subways in the Nevada desert, Alaskan wilderness, etc.

Most Americans live within or near cities that are populous enough to support car-free lifestyles.
Last time I tried LeapMotion it was terrible. Has it improved?
Mea culpa, I shouldn't have skimmed.