skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Throwaway. I worked at an event David did many years ago. I used to be a big fan.

My wife and I watched his 3 hour interview last night after hearing about these bans and discussed this a fair bit.

For those that didn't watch, he categorically denies the existence of Covid-19, calls the entire thing a hoax and said that Gates is a psychopath who wants to vaccinate the entire world with nanobots that will eventually enslave us. 5G doesn't cause Covid-19, because it doesn't exist, but 5g can activate the nanobots and at 60ghz can cause respiratory problems similar to what we're seeing. This is orchestrated by a shadowy group called The Cult. We should rise up against our governments and the 'technocrats' of silicon valley (the 1%) to solve this.

It may sound ridiculous, but he mixes in enough truth (often in the form of things you will have seen on the Internet) and cleverly spun arguments to make the 'lies' believable. He does this over a long enough time period (yesterday 3 hours, but his talks are often far longer), that you come away believing what he's said, that's he incredibly clever, and that he's fighting for the "real man on the street" against the 1% and a government that's done nothing for you. Social media has been very dangerous in this respect.

A few days ago I saw someone on twitter saying that rather than deplatform, Icke should just be beaten in debate. The problem is you can't beat Icke in debate without making his followers dig in further. Like any conspiracist, the retort is "that's what they'd want you to say". It's similar to arguing with someone about the existence of God. You can't prove there is no God, I continue to believe and tell you he exists.

My wife just thinks it's all ridiculous. I think with the vaccinations, it's dangerous. But then I have kids now, both are vaccinated. The concept of censoring people scares me, but the idea of throwing away a hundred years of science and medicine because people are worried about being being controlled by Gates's nanobots scares me even more.
Well, it definitely serves a strong filtering mechanism to find people who have a certain level of probably-going-to-behave-in-ways-you-expect when you're trying to hire. Whether that leads to the most optimal outcome is not always clear, but it seems reliable enough (though boring) that many use it as a filter.

We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
An ad making it to the first page :(
Rebel Wisdom has done some great reporting on this:

David Icke & London Real, an Investigation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDM1wTGOjOw

Why was David Icke been banned from YouTube? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omiD6WkTKak
Also takes huge balls to publish an article about it publicly (rather than just resigning quietly).

I'd be worried about being sued for defamation, etc.
Interestingly, though, it seems that in France, people place a lot of weight on which university you went to long after it becomes irrelevant... especially for the people who went to grandes écoles. I still don't understand how it matters that somebody, for example, want to les Mines 20 years after they've graduated.

But I agree with you; I've worked in a lot of places, and in all of those except France, once you have real work experience, your university degree doesn't mean a whole lot for normal engineering jobs.
I kind of agree and disagree, we should somehow remove it, but again we need to withdraw root causes for those. Sometimes it is just lack of public answers and experts inability to simplify really complex knowledge to drive people to those "alternative" stories in case of covid for instance.
This rings really true with my experience at a startup. Everyone involved in the product could see it's weaknesses, we just didn't have the manpower to change them.

I've definitely fallen into the "attribute to malice/stupidity" trap as well, even when I know that the people responsible are working flat out, if you're not in the trenches it's so easy to say "but it's so simple! I could do it in an hour". It's something you have to constantly keep in check.

Honestly, I think the prioritisation thing is absolutely the most important thing any team or company can do. The person working on a feature almost never has the overall context to accurately prioritise. The next feature or bug on whatever they're working on will always feel more important than someone else's problem. Building a working environment which empowers people to work towards a common goal - and not just whatever feels important to them in the moment - is really hard.
Craig Bartons book is very good - he has a podcast as well "Mr Barton Maths".

About online tutoring: I work in the UK as an Adult maths tutor. I get GBP 24 per teaching hour which includes an allowance for prep time. It's alright as tutoring jobs go.

I had a quick look at Yup as it seems interesting. But Glassdoor reviews state tutors get ~ $10-$15 an hour. (some say $11 an hour)

Ah c'mon. I find that depressing. They're looking for high quality flexible tutors and pay that? I could work in Tesco stacking shelves for that. Even Amazon in the UK pay more (and I've worked there as a picker)

I find it cynical that so much quality is demanded from certain online companies and the pay is derisory.

I suppose the flexibility they offer is worth it for some people... and the chance to work from home...

Anyway had to get that off my chest... I think teachers are under-valued and under-paid anyway!
This still happens in games where people tend to play on the same relatively small (tens or hundreds of players) servers.

Space station 13 is like that because each server has slightly different code base, admins and server rules.

I wonder if we'll see a game company using franchising: server owner sells access to the server and introduces minor tweaks to the game rules, while the main company manages the infrastructure.

...I guess that's Roblox?
> I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

Including this bit is interesting. So he is accusing Amazon of being both sexist and racist in addition to treating workers poorly.
I'm well aware of what happened in the USSR. What they believed and what actually happened are entirely different things.

My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day.

Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.
AI Can Help with Autism Diagnosis
> "Some estimate that they could lose up to $1 billion this year as they brace for downturns in student enrollment..."

3.7 million kids graduating this year, 70% of them planning on going to college, and probably 100% of their parents wondering if they should encourage their kid to defer for a year until things get back to normal.

The drop in enrollment could be lessened a bit by lowering tuition for pandemic-related online classes, if required again (more than likely). Especially since many of those who take the year off may never return. If the colleges were smart they'd think about this before digging their heals in.
The right thing to do.

I've never met Tim and I will probably never meet him, I only know that he was one of first programmers/computer people whose blog I started reading back when I got into programming (more than 15 years ago, closer to 20) and as such one could say that I looked up to him. I'm glad that I chose the right person to "look up to".
"many people dislike"... Could you find even a sizeable proportion of the population that felt this way? as with the re-open states protests these things are easily gamed by interested parties and it takes a vocal minority, which is amplified by media voices, such as Fox news, where it aligns with their owners beliefs to make it seem more of an issue than it is.

having taxes included in the price when I buy something at a store makes lige easier for consumers. I dont need to know everytime I pay some tax exactly how much has been paid.

I honestly read your comments as a sort of astroturfing with your use of 'many' as if to mean a significant number of people, rather than the reality, which is 'some people', indicating a whole lot less people but more than 1.

you are being worked over by special interest groups who are being led on by some rich people who have their opinions and are forcing every one to live by them.

TurboTax lobby officially to make tax filing difficult in the US, they will also spend money under the radar to give voice to the 'individual' who is anti tax because it benefits Turbo Tax not because they align with the individual, but because it helps their bottom line.
> "what is the technically correct way, in the systemd world, of implementing this functionality?"

In the case of terminating programs left running in an ssh shell by a logged out user, it's a pretty simple answer IMO: just leave it alone - if the admin of the ssh server wants to terminate user processes on logout I think that's where the burden should lie and there's no good reason for systemd to get involved, that I can see.
KiCad is great, but it's a bit like Vim in that you need to learn how to use it before it becomes enjoyable and efficient.
The flight has not been cancelled, it's just an air pocket.
If it makes you feel any better and it shouldn't, right now and in the past many people have figured out how to effectively deal with "the ignorant". It basically involves death or camps, reeducation, exile, eugenics etc.

The problem is not "idiots", the problem is thinking that other people are the problem.
> * a poor country prioritizes growth while a richer one can afford to consider the environment

Can afford to. May even consider it. But don't act.

> * a richer country has access to more efficient technology

But will not encourage that efficiency unless there's some kind of profit to be made from switching away from the less efficient incumbent.

> * on the level of individuals, moral (or future) concerns are not in the forefront of your mind until you have your immediate needs for shelter, food etc. covered.

PS5, Samsung S999, Lexus, Jetski, Outdoor entertaining re-model.
As a user, systemd wins for me hands down, because it is simple to use. That it masks complexity away from me is a feature, not a bug. This is also why distros is implementing it almost everywhere: It makes their job easier.

Now if you are measuring the complexity of the system's (full) implementation, you can't really compare systemd to to SysV-init. You need to compare a systemd-based system to a SysV-init based system.

And then you need to account for the 100s of inconsistently written shell-scripts, all the code distributed in the mess of third party dependencies (sh, bash, Perl, Awk, Python, su, supervisord, cron, etc) to ensure that the functionality of the systems you are comparing is really somewhat equal, not to mention the added complexity of the glue between all those components, and how it may fail.

And when you do that comparison, I do believe you will end up concluding that 1. full systems are somewhat complex, for both systems, and 2. that systemd-based systems are not fundamentally more complex, and 3. systemd-based systems have the benefit of a single, centralized implementation for all these core functions, so that developers don't have to reimplement them inconsistently, and possibly buggy.

With systemd, for better or worse, either your entire init-chain is broken or it isn't, so when it works, you know it works. With SysV-init you have no such guarantees.
Very apt. I would like to be refunded for having to live in Trumpmerica as an unarmed non-billionaire. That's clearly an insufferable fate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment_and_wi...
I would agree the door-opening effect is true for many walks of life but it doesn't apply to software engineering and similar disciplines.
I'm a drop out; I studied economics and have been doing very technical work (low latency application development) for over 15 years now.
Worked for UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, etc. No one ever asked me about my degree. They were all (rightfully) interested in what I can do for them.

True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
> Online misinformation can kill people [...] Such content should be forced off mainstream platforms.

Censorship can kill people. Look at China's initial reaction to COVID19, to name a timely example. Admittedly, YouTube doesn't censor to the extent that China does, but whenever you have censorship you open the possibility of censoring life-saving speech, which may be controversial at the time.

Yes, if taken blindly without critical thinking, online misinformation has the potential to do harm and even lead to deaths, as you mention. For freedom of speech to work best, you need an educated and thoughtful population. If you think people are sheep and believe everything they read online, then certainly at first pass it sounds like censoring what they see is the right move. But this relies on a critical implicit assumption: that you (or the censor you defer to) know better and are never wrong. Have you ever changed your opinion? Perhaps you from five years ago would censor something important you would say today. There is no flawless human being in the world that can be trusted with this power.

Okay then, how about we just censor the obviously bad stuff, like Nazis or the 5G conspiracy theories? As other commenters have suggested, censorship will just feed into their narrative, further radicalize, and drive them underground. Instead, for things that are indeed so obviously wrong, simply explain why. Counter their flawed ideas with your correct ideas. If they're so obviously wrong and you're so obviously right, this should be trivial. Reasonable people will see that you're right, and those that don't would be radicalized anyway.

> It strikes me as odd that more people seem to want YouTube to permit far-right propaganda on their platform, than want YouTube to permit 'adult content', which just about no-one advocates.

Personally I would have no problem with adult content on YouTube as long as it's labelled as such. And it's not just "far-right propaganda" that falls under free speech, but also "far-left propaganda" and anything in between. True free speech would not discriminate.

> 'Disagree with' is trivialising the problem. This stuff is serious.

Censorship is also serious, and has serious consequences. It is important to think carefully about the consequences of censorship.
What a great find. Made me smile for a few minutes! Thanks for sharing.
Revelling in their rejection of systemd. It's childish nonsense and a pretty reliable indicator that a person is bitter about it and their comment most likely not worth reading.
> For me systemd has hidden some really horrible things behind it's dependency graph (which is a black box) and socket activation issues (for instance, cockpit "listens" on a port, but it's really systemd's socket activation (PID1) and there was a RCE against it).

I don't understand how this is an horrible thing. Thanks to it you can do stuff as

systemd-analyze dot > /tmp/foo.dot ; xdot /tmp/foo.dot

and have an interactive representation of your boot flow graph, where you can click on any node to highlight any other dependent node. This is super nice ! systemd-analyze critical-chain was also very good to try to find out which service was keeping my NAS stuck for 5 minutes on boot.

The configuration file format is, in my mind, mysterious, with random keys in the unit file which have random meaning, and behaviour that is anything but deterministic.

To give you my experience I was never able to do anything with older systems without reading tutorials on the internet while with systemd I'm able to solve my problems with man systemd-whatever most of the time, e.g. just look at `man systemd.service` or `man systemd.network` with actual configuration examples for common use cases
She also did BoS Europe in 2014 but not sure she's been back since unfortunately: https://businessofsoftware.org/2017/08/kathy-sierra-motivati...

I saw the above talk first hand: well worth investing the time to watch.
I took a History of CS course in college, where this controversy was discussed. The way I understood it, the two camps approached the question of what ALGOL should be slightly differently.

One camp (against recursion) was trying to design a language that would be productive for programming in the (then) here and now, with the machines they had at the time; in other words, the language is molded after the machine. Since efficiently implementing recursion wasn't well understood at the time, adding it to the language was a no-go for them.

The Dijkstra side of the argument was that the language should be designed to be as elegant as possible, without much concern for the limitations of the machines of the day. The idea was that, once a broadly accepted programming language was designed, computer designs would follow to support it.

I think both are valid viewpoints (especially in context), although with perfect hindsight Dijkstra et al seem to have been the more prescient side.
Strongly disagree with the notion that students not paying tuition will trigger a systemic economic collapse. It would cause short term issues for Universities, sure.
Does anyone know what the "laughable justifications" for the firings were?
This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many)

I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more.

Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
> It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.

Stung me the most. Capitalism seems to have such an increasingly firm grip on the world that I'm starting to think the only way out is from some drastic worldwide event (Corona?).
systemd did make package maintainer's lives a lot easier. We don't often see the shift to systemd from their perspective. They are the ones making the distros so I think they are the ones who really get to say what goes and doesn't go in a distro. They don't have to keep maintaining long init scripts for the hundreds of packages that they are responsible for. Unit files are so much easier to deal with.
Well thats my point, they werent forced underground. It was clear for anyone who looked to see what was going to happen. My point is there was an oportunity to engage and faciliate real conversations around these things. That oportunity was squandered with these two instances, because despite them not being outright supressed it was not socially acceptable to have a reasonable conversation around them without being labeled racist etc etc.

If you force them underground you have no idea how prevalent the ideas are, nor do you have any oportunity to genuinely change peoples minds. You cant address a problem you are not aware of.
The Streisand Effect helps to some degree there.
Well it’s kind of the difference between “I’d like to learn to speak Italian” and “I’d like to be able to speak Italian”. The mastery of a new skill can be quite gratifying while the acquisition of that mastery can sometimes be a slog.

I’m sympathetic to the OP, because at times I feel the same way. I want to become proficient in new skills but sometimes I feel I’m doing it in an inefficient roundabout way.
That level of dependence on immigration by schools is foolish, short-sighted, and unsustainable. Forced immigration reductions, whether self-imposed or politically enabled, would ideally provide a much needed opportunity to refocus on developing the domestic talent pipeline and improving the general accessibility of American graduate programs to Americans.
Postmortem of a Scaleway related not-too-critical downtime
Show HN: Lockdown Situation in Different Countries
I think it's just cheaper for them to not care.
It can be built on mac OS and starts but isn't really usable due to OpenGL issues: https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon/pull/290#issuecomment...
Yes... for the sake of reality, I hope it’s copy and paste.
I guess this is a consequence of building an educational system that is for profit and where student pay a (substantiel) part of their tuition. European universities have also closed, yet I still have to hear about any complaints.

In fact, it seems like the Corona crisis will boost university applications in Europe - If you can't have your gab year and find work you might as well just study. In the US it seems like we will see the opposite effect - Less people will apply and commence studies.
Been a bridge between two fields is a differential factor in your favor that you can enjoy and monetize.

One of my first projects was a lisp + cad + export bill of materials + inventory + versioning. I was the younger and the only one they can find to automate the workflow. That was a big lever for next salary negotiation.

Software in industry is always applied software, being able to speak mechanics and software place you in an invaluable place. Use it on your favour.
It should also be noted that there are two types of metal finish on the watch: the aluminium and the stainless steel.