skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yours is an excellent comment, factual and even handed. As someone who had to delve into these things and had to implement e.g. a variant of MultiPaxos for work (this was before Raft existed), I agree that there is a bit of unhealthy confusion going around.

We generalize every day because everyone can't be expected to learn everything, so we abstract away, define constraints and best practices and we select our library-fied tools and apply them. We do this with operating systems, file systems, encryption, and also with distributed systems. The basics of distributed systems and their invariants and trade offs are not that hard if you give yourself time to study them properly, but when you want high performance and scale it does get Challenging.

It is important that any abstractions we make, any generalizations, constraint definitions and best practices that we expect people to read, accept and adhere to are as correct as possible without breaking that abstraction. So thank you for your comment. Please note that mine is not a pro-Paxos comment either, just one appreciating good information being spread so that people can make good choices and trade offs.

Distributed systems are hard. To paraphrase: In the data flow, no one can hear your canary msg scream.
Imagine you are the offspring of immigrants who escaped a closed society and made their life in a relatively open one. Now imagine you start a company you fight the good fight and after years of work you created one of the most influential corporate internet giants the works has ever seen.

And you think “okay I am going to use this power to make the world a fairer place so that nobody is ever disadvantages because of historical inequalities.” You have a vision for the world and you set about filling up your company with people that share that vision.

Then one day this little twerp with a phd joins the lower ranks and starts spreading propaganda that stalls this vision. A porpaganda that has potential to steer the world into one that your parents escaped from.

What do you do?

You destroy the little piece of shit. Maybe you pay him off. But then you make sure he stays destroyed.
Flight Attendants and Covid-19
I think the GP was intended to be funny. (And, judging by the downvotes, HN still has zero tolerance for humor.)
OP’s point stands though, you can search “google snippet fail” for all kinds of misinformation this feature spreads, from harmless but funny mistakes, to conspiracy theories, to dangerous/unsafe advice.
Is this what conservatism actually is, now? I'm just wondering because, although I agree that nothing Damore said was conservative in a traditional sense, maybe conservatism has just been made more broad in recent years.

For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things.

There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified.

EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.
You're right. GraphQL definitely seems like that. There are a few nuances though:

1. GraphQL is like SOAP for JSON. JSON is important to lot of developers today, especially the frontend/javascript ecosystem

2. GraphQL also helps developers think of data as related entities in a way that fits JSON. Nested objects and arrays essentially, but not ad-hoc. Hence a "schema" of your "graph" that describes the API.

3. GraphQL has a construct called fragments that makes it easy to declare data-dependencies at a UI component level that are then automatically composed together into a single query by graphql client tooling (at build time ideally). This can be done with JSON as well, but the ergonomics with GraphQL are nicer.

None of these are truly "new" ideas perhaps. But I think all of it coming together is new.

That said, the complexity of building and maintaining a GraphQL server is definitely non-trivial in the real world. For example, health-check tools often rely on HTTP status codes in responses to check service and API health. This doesn't work well with GraphQL because GraphQL supports partial errors and responses, and the error itself is embedded inside the response. This means analysis the response is necessary. This means that the privilege required for the health-check tooling is greater. Responses should not be logged or analysed by third party services without taking a lot of explicit care.
I'm guessing if you read the memo you only read a version with sources and data omitted. The original version was very much science-based, even if you disagree with the science or think it incomplete/biased.
That's why you wouldn't open the floor for political discussion. You're missing the point.
I feel like that list is a bit misleading and your comment ignores how the PC gaming community always wanted to run their own dedicated servers and games not allowing to do so often got a lot of flack.

Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”.

Which doesn’t even go into other issues this had solved but then came back, like toxic communities resulting from the random nature of match making.

In that context I still have very fond memories of the late 90s and early 2000s PC multiplayer scene: Whole communities grew around servers, who would usually self-moderate not just for cheating but also toxic behavior.

2 decades later this has been replaced with catch all bad word lists that warn and ban people for simply writing a wrong combination of letters, regardless of context, and media blasting gaming companies for their out of control toxic communities.
They are synonyms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharp. Curiously, I've never heard the term "card sharp" before (or I mis-heard it as "card shark").
I was speaking to the general concern.

A small sandbox isn't a full threat in the manner I laid out, just the same owner-is-hostile dynamic.

If attestation keys were only rooted in the processor itself (ie not signed by Intel/AMD) and users could load their own, the worthwhile properties of hardened hardware would be preserved without making the owner an enemy.
Receive forgiveness? Pardon me, but where exactly did Damore ask for forgiveness? People very rarely accept apologies from people who don't offer them.
Are people actually reading this at face value in a non ironic way...?

Tesla is Tesla because of an army of lawyers and financial engineering.
You could easily say too many people go into tech to do ads as well.
Cool! I went ahead and added category sorting last night to twitchroulette, check out the "unknown" filter to randomly browse through streams with no category set. Theres some weird stuff in there for sure (and quite a few pirated movie streams)
Show HN: Covid-19 Alert – Explore coronavirus cases around the world
Maybe you can find solace in the fact that Germany, which allegedly breathes engineering, suffers from much the same fate. The internet in the large cities is good (not great, but good), in the smaller cities it's a mixed bag, but largely okay, and in the rural parts it's usually a joke.

It appears that it is not an issue that's unique to the US, but common in the "old" Western democracies. Friends tell me it's not much different in rural Spain and France.
Seems like a comment that was reserved for pre-2010s when medicine, law, and finance were the only ways to make six figures out of school.

Nowadays it seems more and more common that this phrase is "Too many smart people go into working on ad optimization".
> CS is notorious for its solitary aspect. Stare at a screen juggling abstractions for hours on end.

It's also false. Software is inherently collaborative, especially at senior levels. And it will likely stay that way as long as the job looks a lot like consulting due to lack of defined sub-specialities. There is no technician specializing in particular forms of testing in the software industry. In medicine, there is a whole host of these specialities. Point being "it's your job, so figure it out" is the rule. And that means working out not just solutions but well defined problems with peers, customers, superiors, and other stakeholders.

It's possible to do interesting Computer Science in relative isolation, but good luck making a career out if it without collaboration, publication, teaching, and other inherently social activities.

You might know all this, but I think it's important for the industry to push back on the nerd-bro in a basement imagery since it's absolutely not what actually happens.
> no new competitor to them can emerge, as it would have no way of telling smokers it exists.

A competitor's product could just show up in the store, and if the product was superior and/or the price was better, consumers would choose the other one. I'm not a smoker, but if this isn't happening, I'm guessing it's because the products aren't really that differentiated and/or the consumer gets (biologically) addicted to whatever brand they started with meaning they don't really have the desire to try something new since they just want to satiate their addiction.
The thought process probably was 'if people just want to find the number for X, we should show it on the search page'... The problem being that some phone numbers aren't readily available, but people still want them.

It would seem like something they could figure out, but I'm guessing there's a lot of 'contact us' pages that have the phone number and rank well for the keyword, but don't have the keyword near the phone number.

They should probably have a 'this isn't correct' link in the snippet or something to trigger review of it, but Google is alergic to humans in the loop.
> Nexum was a debt bondage contract in the early Roman Republic. Within the Roman legal system, it was a form of mancipatio. Though the terms of the contract would vary, essentially a free man pledged himself as a bond slave (nexus) as surety for a loan. He might also hand over his son as collateral. Although the bondsman might be subjected to humiliation and abuse, as a legal citizen he was supposed to be exempt from corporal punishment. Nexum was abolished by the Lex Poetelia Papiria in 326 BC, in part to prevent abuses to the physical integrity of citizens who had fallen into debt bondage.[26]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
Fun software, easy to use. Was able to scan my kid's stuffed animal and reproduce a small 3d-printed version of it.
Here’s an idea: don’t project your values or idea of worth on what other people choose to do with their life. You’re not as righteous as you may think you are, I guarantee it.
I am fascinated that on HN of all places people are suggesting that engineers should never be allowed to express opinions about workplace policy.
Very well-written. Sounds like a discussion, not just a rant.
this is amazing - I'm a map geek and this stuff is catnip for me.

I built a, for the time, very good data logging setup for my Jeep and mapped some trails[0] in 2001. Why? The maps provided by the USFS and the timber leaseholders were (and still are) wrong.

I also made a point the first time I was in Europe of renting a car and driving to Baarle-Hertog[1] and walking to all of the enclaves, as well as enclaves within enclaves.

[0]: https://github.com/ryjones/Area29SnowmobileTrailMap

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Hertog#List_of_enclaves
That's an interesting blog post.

As an aside, I've noticed exactly what the author mentions in it happening in hacker news recently - there is a shift in politics to less tolerance. I've reduced my own viewing because of it.

I suppose it will just re-enforce that lack of tolerance.
Too many smart people care about stuff Elon Musk says.

EDIT: Changed my mind - not too many smart people in fact care about stuff Elon Musk says.
What happens if two groups/sides are equally discomforted by the other? Do you silence/fire them both? Is it majority rule?
Sure.

My point is that "discussing politics (A)", where people bring their best arguments to the table and have a friendly intellectual discussion is very different from "discussing politics (B)", where people bond over hating the outgroup of the other political tribe.

And I did this because OP seemed to naively think that since his coworkers do (B), they would also be happy to do (A) with him. Trying to give him a clue before he hurt himself.
True, but they also have drones and a million other ways they can kill people relatively unnoticed. And if the US Gov. really wants to, there are always Black Ops.

This is a bit like complaining about a knife in a gun shop :-)
They solicited feedback. He gave them feedback that was well reasoned and well supported with citations, regardless of whether it was true or not. They didn't warn him, they fired him and the outrage mob wanted to ensure he never worked again.

If you're going to solicit feedback and then fire someone because you don't like it - at least specify that it must be non-dissenting feedback. Be honest here about the dishonest game being played.
I don't think Musk is saying "as a smart person it is in your self interest to not go into finance or law", rather I interpret the statement as "as a society we incentive too many smart people to go into finance and law".
I dont think you understand the hiring pool available to mountain view at all.

The rate of female attendance in comp sci has been in decline since the 70s. At my university it was quite literally 100 to 1.

You cant have a 50-50 hiring pool without some fuckery there.

And for what its worth i absolutely do not accept that the avergage female engineer is not as good as the average male engineer.

If anything, they are anecdotally better equiped.

> All you need to do is to pick more carefully (invest more resources, etc.).

So what amounts to increase their total comp because theyre female and you have a quota to fill?

Thats sexual discrimination is it not?

I really need to say while im passionately pissed off about the way identity politics has infected this industry i am more than welcome to more females joining the industry and more than hapoy to see the broculture fuck right off.
Likes for mentioning Wikipedia.
(by a Wikipedian)
Creating a simple ExpressJS middleware to detect bots
Sadly even imgui cannot get around the fact that many operating systems (macOS/iOS/Android) force you to give up your main thread. Linux and, perhaps surprisingly, Windows are good guys in this regard.
You can not compare the debian software repository with a windows 10 image. I do not need to buy new hardware often because Debian runs nice even on very old hardware.
I type this on a computer 14 years old, that just got apt-get dist-upgrade since then. You can not do that with Windows.
So you can interview current Google employees, but not former ones? Why?
so you're saying he had first have experience in the area before leaving it therefore his comments on the arena are invalid?
The evaporative cooling of group beliefs
From 10 to 14,000 YouTube Subscribers in 3 Weeks – What I Learned
You mean he built a startup to make online payments easier.

He didn't just graduate and get into finance.
that's just productivity enhancement. in most cases, junior positions aren't disappearing, but rather being redefined to do things that were previously too difficult or time-consuming, so were skipped.

like fraud detection. before, you just accepted a 3% fraud rate as a cost of doing business and left it at that. now you get that down to 0.5% because the tools let you do it in the same amount of time, and the owners want that sweet, sweet cash. you still want a second accountant to double-check the first, so you expand the work to fulfill that need. it can still be worth it, even so.
CMU Robotics Prof. Breaks Down Robot Scenes from Film and TV (Wired, 20m video)
>but once you’re in my ear with some misinformed ideas

How the hell do you expect to get anything done in a society if you presume that any hurtful idea is misinformed?

How can you seriously pretend that gendered differences in humans magically stop above the shoulders? You're denying realty. It's black and white.

You can bend over backwards and sweep rational arguments like Damore's under the rug, or you can accept that consistent inequality of outcome across the time and culture is very obviously indicative of at least some degree of intrinsic cognitive differences.
I never mentioned any of the theories in your response. There are all kinds of people who study gender in society from every possible angle, Damore doesn’t strike me as an expert in the field. Just a typical engineer who thinks he knows everything.
This may still be the case, but it’s definitely less true than it was in, say, 2005. Today’s closest equivalent IMO is ad/surveillance tech. Maybe management consulting too, though I don’t know what share of management consultants are actually smart.
Though unlike electricity, it's going to be increasingly practical to deliver decent internet speeds via cellular and satellite. So I'm not sure that pushing wired connections to every individual house is the best approach at this point.
And my impression is that most of them do
In America you can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether you will win or not is another matter, but if you've never been to jury duty the court system is absolutely packed with cases that seem absurd. In this instance, it would be perfectly plausible to sue for something like emotional distress.
I suspect card shark has bled over from loan shark or some other term like that
And too many engineers go into the defense industry.
I guess what surprises me about this is how bad "sort" did.
GPL allows you to change the name.

I'm not aware of an open source license that prevents someone from renaming the software to whatever they want.
> See, here you are automatically assuming that I was "telling a maintainer what they can do with their own project" when that wasn't the case at all. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even talking about Material UI when I posted a comment on one of their issues. I was addressing another user about their ads in NPM.

See, I am not naming you asshole.

> I'm also not calling someone an asshole for disagreeing with me - I'm calling them an asshole for acting like they're better than you and me and that "contributing code to open source is the only way to support open source". (Did you miss the part where I said he acted like not contributing to any large open source projects made me less of person? Because that's exactly what happened. If you don't believe me then that's probably because you have a personal bias. There's absolutely no reason for me to lie and it's not like I go around talking about this all the time - it's precisely on topic and I happened to see Asshole Tassinari's name in the Twitter thread...)

Provide citation or it never happened.

> Incorrect. I have since blocked all ads in NPM logs (and then NPM subsequently banned them) thank you very much :) I'll never see another one. And you can't take back an open source project once it's been released in the wild. But thanks for all the free work! I'll continue to use it for as long as I wish.

You are mistaken, read linked policy. There is a number of cases where ads are permitted. You can decide to block ads but many projects can ask for funding in postinstall.
Another lesson: to do cool stuff you need money to burn. Even if this cool stuff can be profitable eventually it will take years and years to get there. So the first thing any innovator should do is be purely mercenary.

If I had my life to do over I would focus on money and money alone first and defer heavy study into science or engineering or tackling actual hard problems. I did it backwards and so I made everything 10X harder on myself.

Part of the problem is that I was naive and thought the social structures and economic systems that drove this kind of progress in the past (a supportive university system with an academic career path, intelligently allocated science funding, a generally workable middle class economy that you could fall back on) still existed. They don't. We dismantled all that stuff starting in the 1970s because we didn't understand what we had built or why it worked.
I don’t think as many “smart people” go to law school any more. Pretty sure law school enrollment has been on the decline for awhile.
But ad optimization has led to many other technical innovations in ML and scalability. I don’t think the same can be said about law school.

Disclosure: work on ad tech at Google. Opinion my own.
As I understand it, RustTLS will be replacing OpenSSL in somewhat near future. I don't know what the time frame is though. Not sure about RustTLS current support for DTLS or forward secrecy [2]. And of course the older, effectively insecure, alg. might not be supported.

The performance is not a barrier to replacement, but they want to make sure it's at least as secure [1].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-rust-based-tls-library-outpe...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7oxc71/tls_bulk_perfo...
> If he is making the workplace less comfortable for particular groups of people then I certainly would have no issue firing him.

Would you be okay with firing an LGBT person because they "made the workplace less comfortable" for some conservative employees?
I don’t have a good answer. But at that point some kind of outside discussion facilitation is probably necessary.
Note that this isn't a conspiracy, but just each game company individually following its incentives toward extractive business models (and occasionally openly bragging about it and encouraging others to do the same). (Not saying you claimed that, but it's easy to read your post as conspiracy theory rather than accusations of 'mere' ethical bankruptcy.)
Here’s an idea: don’t project your values or idea of worth on what other people choose to do with their life. You’re not as righteous as you may think you are, I guarantee it.

That's pure gold! I'm putting that one in my notes!

But to play devil's advocate: Well, if you go empirical on this, then what the heck else is the Internet for, aside from porn!?
This is great! It's amazing to see what can be made out of open sourced machine learned building blocks
I'm sure there is probably some good advice in there for the "laid-off engineer" but that article begins with a tangential three paragraph note to startup founders. That is not what you are selling and tangential material should be at the end (if you want your target audience to actually read your post).

When the article does start it starts with:

You have done 10, maybe 15 years as an Engineer. But your Github is empty. It has 0 shades of green for the last year or so. What’s your excuse? The Dunning-Kruger effect is so strong in Silicon Valley Engineers. Sometimes, this impression is formed when those Engineers introduce themselves. They have been laid-off recently, for sure. Despite that, they do not pretend to need or to ask for a helping hand.

This reads as if it was computer generated nonsense. I stopped reading at this point.