skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So I gather that he's espousing a view that states that quarantines and lockdowns are terrible and ineffective, and encouraging people to ignore them and freely associate.

> I understand that you believe the expression of that view could lead to many people deciding to ignore whatever orders or ordinances that have been imposed upon them.

That is not at all a representative summary of his views, or mine. I see hundreds of people arguing against lockdowns every day, on sites all across the internet, and it's just fine, and nobody is being censored for it. It's so mainstream that even the NYT is publishing opinion pieces about it, e.g. when comparing with Sweden's response.

The actual problem with David Icke is that he espouses conspiracy theories, of the form "the lizard men, Bill Gates, the aliens, and the liberals teamed up to create 5G to wipe out the human race". Stuff like this leads to serious consequences, such as the Congressional baseball shooting, the Pizzagate shooting, the Youtube headquarters shooting, and the armed takeover of the Michigan statehouse.
I was responding to you, not the OP. Most statements on HN are not immediately backed by sources, as this is not a scientific forum. But if you are just gonna tell someone they are full of shit, you should have some solid data behind it rather than a questionable clickbait rag that may or may not be cherry picking and massaging its own sources.
600 miles? I had no idea Great Britain was that small. What is the widest distance West to East?
The Canada thing is a good point, I always forget how much of our imports come from our peaceful neighbors.

America continues to import KSA oil mostly because California won’t frack, which could be changed if necessary.

As far as continuing to import, I believe that’s a factor of oil and refinery quality. America has some amazing refineries capable of eating garbage quality oil, including diluted tar. Since fracking produces high quality oil, my suspicion is that it’s cheaper to export that to older refineries, and import lower quality crude to refine domestically. But I’m no expert here.
I'm going to use that in my daily conversations if that's OK. Truer words have never been spoken.
> it just seems to make things even worse for me because now even 'which python' doesn't tell me anything because it directs to some shell script shims that I can't parse or understand.

I understand it’s another layer and for someone not working in it daily, it’s hard.

Some info, the command

which python

Wouldn’t tell you much anyway. It would just return something like

/usr/bin/python

Reading a binary wouldn’t lead to much either. If you’re trying to get the version of python, this still works,

python --version

Pyenv also has this command,

pyenv version

That also works with pyenv virtualenv (if you’re using it)

If you want all versions installed,

pyenv versions
You realize Trump lost the popular vote right?

Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
It's a very complex topic. But clearly any country heavily invested in and reliant on technology must include a significant fraction of tech/science literate leaders ... an actual requirement for (half of?) any state's Congress-critters.

To whatever extent 'terrorism' is a real threat (and not just an excuse to maintain the military budget), many other dangers like pandemics and an EMP event and climate change were outlined decades ago. F-35s and aircraft carriers and hundreds of military bases won't cut it against them. Nor will faith.
A virologist explains how we’ve domesticated viruses
The only issue I do have with leaving is the war thing. The past few years, I've really been telling myself we're probably at the point that China really does have the U.S. militarily beat if it comes down to it... but despite how many of us HN'ers are aware of some frivolous military budget spending (like literally doing something, tearing it down, and doing it again to spend the budget) - some of those hundreds of billions of dollars are definitely going into tech capable of destroying human life in ways really can't imagine. Plus, if it would somehow come down to large amount of humans actually fighting... the arrogance many Americans have is quite helpful for that.

Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....

Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.
I've had the same thought and it sickens me that we've come to this point.

As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).

After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.

And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.

Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.

Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.

Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.

Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.
It would appear from distribution adoption that systemd is a lot more popular than it is unpopular.
Can I ask what "ridiculously stereotypical Croatian music" sounds like?
Well this is Microsoft, so you can assume they are not average.
> You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve

No individual can just "rise up and fix the system".
I've been using Altium for years professionally and would love to see a FOSS project unseat it. My own efforts to advocate staffing a few FTE to work on KiCad didn't get very far.

There are some things about it which drive me nuts and which could easily be done better in an open tool:

- The UI is extremely slow. Clicking on a component often causes the entire app to pause for 1-10 seconds while it loads all of the part parameters and redraws panels.

- It doesn't handle large libraries gracefully. We have something around 30000 parts and the library compiler crashes more often than it succeeds. The Altium sales folks have attempted to get us to switch to vaults but can't explain to us what the data store is, what the concurrency model is, why it's not further lock-in, and why it should be more performant.

- Better geometry importers and exporters. Getting fancy RF geometries in and out is a huge pain. For one thing, Altium's DXF parser renders at a fixed resolution. So if you have some very small feature it will often get turned into a line or a dot. And even if not, it'll be coarse.

- Never do anything in the UI thread that isn't strictly responding to user input.

There are some things it's mediocre and it would be somewhat difficult to implement better in an open tool:

- Really good understanding of mechanical mates. Basically Solidworks-grade constraints for putting things together.

- Tight interconnectedness between schematic and layout rules, and a really powerful and expressive language for writing rules. Altium's rules language is simultaneously constraining and often lacks coverage for obvious cases. As an example, there's no way to do same-net gap analysis. You can make unmanufacturable spaces between two traces of the same net all day long and the design rule checker would never care.

Some stuff Altium pretends to do but doesn't, and it would be fiendishly difficult to do a good job in a FOSS tool:

- Physics modeling. I want to know how much coupling I'll have between nets. I want to see discontinuities in transmission lines. I want to know what will radiate and absorb and how. Basically I want to be able to have my CAD tool also be Ansys HFSS with varying degrees of fidelity.

- Real schematic hierarchy. The schematic compiler is chock full of bugs that it's dangerous to rely on hierarchy and also dangerous not to. I want to draw schematics with the same type of composition and repetition that I use to write software.

Then there's stuff that Altium doesn't even pretend to do and someone totally should write an EDA tool that does.

- Useful diff of schematics and layouts. I want to be better able to tell where I might have made an unintended change.

- Real time collaboration. Google Sheets but schematics and layouts. I want to be able to drop in on my layout artists' work and be able to point things out or share in the burden.

Lately in my office there have been lots of new people coming from places that use Cadence and they're slowly trying to get us to switch over. I haven't figured out what about it is supposed to be superior.
I would venture that the government should be protecting its people from misinformation like Icke's (after all, they enforce things like "truth in advertising", "medicines must state side effects", etc.) and not leaving it up to YouTube.
As a person for whom Linux and BSDs have been a hobby since 1996, I have no idea what you're talking about.
I suggest you also check out UTM (Universal Turing Machine), an emulator for the iPad that you can build and that allows you to emulate many different architectures and tun OSes written for them (including ARM).

https://getutm.app
> particularly rigorous historiography

It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.

> patently absurd

So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".

They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").

But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.

So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?
No, because the argument that "institutions are not perfect" is a strawman that distracts from the actual question which is "is anything David Icke says anything remotely approaching the truth?" and the answer is undeniably no. Arguing about a slippery slope that the institutions might not be perfect either doesn't matter. Icke isn't trying to be correct. He's either literally mentally unwell (I've read that he has schizophrenia) or he's intentionally being provocative, or both. This isn't even a case of YT removing someone who is acting in good faith.

I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here: the idea that institutions can be mistaken does not mean that we should remove things that are just clearly completely and totally false (and damaging). It's the difference between the idea that a large portion (say, 10-20%) of the population is infected with covid with no symptoms, which is also almost certainly wrong, but there's at least some level of evidence for. Almost all of that evidence is flawed, but like, you can cite real academic papers from people. And the idea that 5g causes covid, which doesn't even make enough sense to create a well founded argument to the contrary. It relies on the audience not understanding what a virus is (or wanting to suspend disbelief).
Agreed. The OS shipping version is not a thing in every single language I've been working with. It's either outdated or not the version my project needs, and what if I need many different versions for different projects?

I always use a language manager for Elixir, Erlang, Node, PHP, Python and Ruby, either the language's usual one or asdf. I'm even using different versions of databases, usually with docker. Java is somewhat easier to deal with, unzip in a directory and set JAVA_HOME but I'm not working much with it so I could miss some nuances.
Never underestimate the ability for HN to participate in an extremely niche flame war.
You don't know that. Italy had early travel restrictions, and had it very bad. Canada had no travel restrictions until much later, and has it better than (parts of) the US. That so many believe the travel restrictions were warranted seems to solely be the product of them having been considered an outsize response at the time, rather than evaluating the arguments against them not qualified on the danger of the pandemic.

In particular, travel restrictions become actively harmful when they reduce the capacity to detect and therefore apply extra scrutiny to those travelling through affected countries. Insofar as people will travel anyways, they only serve to hide that fact from authorities. This of course does not apply to the US, which had no testing capacity at the time. But we can no more suppose that the US would have been worse off as we can suppose they would have been better off.
Work.com
Is it actually unpopular or is there just a vocal minority constantly complaining about it while a much larger part of the user base is happily using it?
And now Go is being praised for being for people that think Java and Python are too hard.

It is a better option than keeping using C, and it would have been great in 1996, but that is about it.
It will all be done in the name of "security" - in this case you don't have to justify or even explain what security issue your are trying to solve. And security software vendors will helpfully lend you an amazingly designed fear-mongering powerpoint.
Good to see HIPAA compliance. I will sign up and give it a try for our product.
But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore. Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.

I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a better outcome.
I know, I was like wait where are these restaurants? I think most places use cheapo oil and margarine.
> Perhaps these are truly unidentified objects

If they’re not another nation’s tech, and not ours, my pet theory is the us government has no idea what they are beyond they exist and are spooky.

They cover it up / stigmatize for a banal reason: admitting there’s something they neither understand nor can control is not something governments like to do.
Maybe, lets see.
The “platform” (section 230) discussion has always been based around a bad faith reading of the law; Ken White (1st amendment lawyer) covered that in his podcast “Make no Law”.

I think the troubling thing is that binding corporations to the first amendment would have all kinds of troubling consequences, including eliminating the ability of moderators to ban people for misbehavior.
you can always skip adding Google account
At the heart of your opinion is a contradiction.

Corporations are just people. You are suggesting that when people speak in groups (e.g. enforcing the Youtube EULA) that is not protected free speech but when an individual speaks it is.

Good luck translating this half-baked idea into a legal framework that is consistent and sensical.
> most [HN] users are Americans.

Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.
Why should the size of the community matter? Under what rationale are you going to decide that HN can moderate but YT cannot?
As someone who also isn't a SWE first, what are the changes you'd make and where can one learn to code in a more SWE way?
Salesforce Announces Work.com to Help Businesses and Communities Safely Reopen
Wow... how does this sort of delivery network work? Is it inexpensive enough to manage food takeout? I've never heard of takeout food delivery across 100s of kilometers, especially same day! I really need to visit Korea
One thing that bothers me about silicon valley influenced thinking is that "business idea" always seems to mean "disruptive startup that changes the world and makes billions."

Business doesn't have to mean that sort of business. Some guy making $3000 a month selling t-shirts and coffee mugs on etsy has, what I would think of, as a good business. Someone opening up a hotdog stand making $4000 also has a good business.

I noticed this in Zambia, lots of people standing by the side of the road selling soda pop and cigarettes or dried fish, or whatever they could get their hands on. Great businesses, great ideas, I'm glad they're doing it and I commend them for it.

The signs this article talks about are extremely limiting, to the point where the author is saying most people shouldn't bother. I think they apply for starting a big disruptive tech startup. I don't think they apply to an etsy store or hot dog stand, and those are viable and fairly easy to reach businesses. Personally I'd much rather focus on the easily attainable later sort of business rather than focus my time and energy in a quixotic effort to try and be the next Musk or Zuckerberg.
My worst gripe with systemd is that I cannot find reliable docs for older versions.
I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.
The conventions "Do one thing and do it well", and "Don't break the user experience" are not threadbare or shabby. Not UNIX nor its derivatives did spring fully formed from the foreheads of K̶n̶u̶t̶h̶ Thompson or Ritchie; it was written as a series of counterpoints to the prevailing designs and implementations of the day.

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret.
Looks good. Installed it and will try it this week! Thanks for sharing.

I was about to start learning KiCad, but I think I'll explore this first.
My intention was solely to counter the idea that using ":" to mean "is" or "is a" is somehow inconsistent with written English. I don't think it's always necessary or even desirable to match the use of symbols in programming with English orthography, in any case.

The use of a declaration with initialization as the example here muddies the water. Whatever syntax you use has to work for uninitialized declaration of variables, function arguments, and structure members:

val breakfast: String
fun serveBreakfast(breakfast: String)
struct MealPlan {
breakfast: String
}

Declaration with initialization just needs to be consistent with these.
Most of the restaurants on Kaua'i also do this. I've many times seen the restaurant owners while shopping and recognize the packaging or products in the restaurant.
And the complimentary - which feature do you want delivered first?
> Automation of the Schematic->Netlist->pcbnew flow would be nice

Recent versions have an "Update PCB from schematic" option which works very well.
I mean saving the address for control to return to so that the subroutine never has to know or care; it just executes the RET instruction. And RET is just POP+JMP. This is super handy--so handy that alternative control strategies aren't explored as much as they might have been otherwise.