skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fundamentally, this is the issue with international corporations in the speech realm. People will believe and argue they shouldn't be subject to a given country's laws or have to apply that law globally, but in a real world sense, they must follow all of the laws of any country they want to operate in, no matter how ridiculous or unfair they might feel. Because if you aren't obeying a country's laws, they'll shut you out.
If you have a system without natural dampening and can't tolerate overshoot or oscillation you'd use a bit of D to slow things down.
Google employees have proven themselves capable of collective action:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/google-walkout...

Do it again.
Interesting, but there is a pretty clear difference between censorship to protect an individual and censorship of critisising a government.
> the core language is mostly sound, simple intuitive and performant

I wouldn't say so. Even object initialization is atrociously complex in C++.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/620402/

https://stackoverflow.com/a/54350350/
Ryzen 3/5 have variants with integrated GPU:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3402056/amds-new-ryzen-3000-...
Dude, I am from Europe. I don't care what government does it just that somebody does something. In fact, I think the Trump administration is probably perfectly suited to do this.
As a software engineer I understand these sort of bugs.

A product manager in China asks: can we find a way to prevent people commenting on these videos with comments that contain the word 共匪. Engineer goes away and comes up with a plan to train an AI model to detect these comments. He present's this solution to his manager who informs him that the solution needs to be in place next week, there is no time to gather the required training data and annotate it. There is also no budget for this project.

So the engineer goes off to find a new plan and finds that Google already has a basic spam comment detector which uses simple heuristics to delete comments. He adds a new rule to the detector. Mark as spam if it contains the "共匪" sub-string.

His boss is now happy, it gets sent to a test team in China who confirm that commenting with the word 共匪 on one of the videos results in the comment being deleted. Test passed job done, ticket closed. At no point does this get escalated or reviewed by anyone properly.

And if you don't believe this can happen anywhere, see the Scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Fascinating article, well worth reading for those who have been following the Snowden story and (US) government surveillance in general.

It's interesting to read about the lengths to which journalists go to maintain proper information security. Layers of encryption, safes for hardware, physical removal of wireless chips, and so on. I'm curious as to whether all of that is anything more than a mild annoyance to the NSA or other major intelligence agencies, but I imagine they can hack into those computers with relative ease. There's just no viable way of preventing tempest attacks against your home or office, of preventing surveillance through vents, and more.

One thing about Snowden specifically, he's understandably careful about protecting the secrecy of his residence, but I'd be really surprised if the US government didn't know where he lives. Snowden lives in Moscow, legally, is known to move around the city, he uses the Internet, he's not just holed up in some cave. Between all the CIA people in Moscow and the NSA's near limitless capabilities, Snowden's whereabouts are almost surely known - he's being kept safe by the fact that Moscow is Moscow.
I think so, the harm comes from judging someone from the past through the lens of the modern day. Maybe there will be a movement to add asterisks to everything? *the painter, not the domestic abuse performance artist.
Reddit has been doing this for a while now.
> Or maybe these things aren't actually as important as we think they are in professional software development?

There's something to this. Most academic software is a simple one-off development, with little consideration for long-term maintenance. OTOH it's not likely that undocumented, untested and unfixable software can produce actual "useful scientific results".
The Personality of Politics – How personality signals affiliation and engagement
The same thing happens if you write to an RDBMS master and then read from a read-only replica.
At Least 300 Authentic Phishing Templates Continue to Exploit Pandemic
It’s good that you would refuse to do the work. Sadly they can easily find someone who badly needs the money, doesn’t understand the problems the feature creates, or doesn’t care about doing the right thing. If all the workers organized it would make a bigger difference, but the company actively discourages worker organization.
> Is it really cheaper to let scientists focus on something they know nothing about, than to hire an expert to do it? Do you cut costs by letting scientists mop the floor, clean the toilet and guard the entrance?

Believe it or not, mean software engineer salaries are marginally higher than those of janitors and door security.
Peertube is more promising, since it is distributed.
> I’m genuinely asking because where I live it’s impossible to buy stuff that wasn’t made in China.

So wait, now buying something that was made in China means condoning the CCP? That's a pretty big jump in logic.
Hmm, thanks, I’m slowly starting to see that now. Will probably just move to LicenseZero.
Actually, this is more like: “In other news, you are in China now.”

I don’t care that much about how Chinese citizens let their 共肥 party censor them, but it’s not ok when I am being censored for speech that could be considered offensive to the communist party of China.
My blog is built using Jekyll and the code lives in a private github repo. I use Netlify for hosting and SSL. Total cost is about $9 per year to renew the domain.

https://www.exponentialbackoff.com/
More on Max: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/feb/28/max-mosley-hal...
Generic corporate spam filters can OCR for spam text in pictures and have been able to do that for many years, I would assume Google can too.
For dynamic languages sure. For strongly typed languages it's better to just use the type system to prevent those kind of things. C++ doesn't have great support here (lots of boilerplate needed) & usually people reach for Boost Units or Boost strong types but it's not that hard (https://www.fluentcpp.com/2016/12/08/strong-types-for-strong...). Mozilla is also exploring this specifically for coordinate spaces & whatnot too (https://research.mozilla.org/2014/06/23/static-checking-of-u...).
Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.
Got excited for a moment, then I read the "About" section and closed my browser tab at "crypto decentralized".
China has a stock market [1] and 389 billionaires [2], second only to the US. A decidedly un-communist state of affairs... In reality they are an authoritarian capitalist surveillance state.

[1] http://english.sse.com.cn/
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/04/08/the...
This is awesome!

I'm really liking the .NET Core. Seems like a really productive platform with no obvious downsides (good performance, and cross-platform compatibility?)

You did a lot in 1.5 months. How much would you contribute your speed to the platform of choice vs your experience vs time available, etc?
> But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government

In previous famines (both in Ireland and elsewhere) the government stepped in and halted exports. Governmental behaviour during the great famine was a shift.
The current IP regime is deeply problematic and I would not enourage other countries to copy it blindly.

Also in some societies the idea of intellectual property is not widely accepted, and obviously their laws and behaviour will reflect that.
>If you have a once in a century crisis, and still are thinking about saving some millions, while being sure your crisis response will be above billions, your policy is already flawed and not much can be done to help you.

By the time you're in the crisis, it's too late to make software bulletproof. Not only does that process take time, but it also needs to be integrated with the whole of the research effort up to that point.

So you can't pick and choose topics: you need the funding to make bulletproof every potential policy-related model you might need in an emergency. That's where the costs add up, since we don't have a time machine to go back and fund exactly the lines of research we in fact need at the moment.
These qualities are important for exactly the same reasons they are in production: Without those qualities, your code is brittle, your deploys are brittle, changes are brittle.

It's just like saying "It runs on my machine". The scientific term for this is "Replication crisis [0]"

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
What severance is being offered to the employees being laid off? Is it up to the high ethical standard set by Airbnb?

Separated [Airbnb] employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.
Yes the hut six story was an excellent and eye opening book. We are quick to idolize Turing - and he was an amazing man - but there are others such as Welchman and Tutte who sadly get less attention.
> If you're not qualified to use a tool correctly it's not the manufacturer's fault, it's yours.

It certainly _can_ be the manufacturer's fault, if the manufacturer's salespeople lied to you about the learning required to master the tool.

I think the point of the article is that collectively, as a community of experts, we have been misguiding non-experts into thinking that C++ is a good tool for their job.

A non-expert cannot make an informed decision on which tool to use, they _have_ to rely on advice from experts to pick their first tool, so if they feel like we're recommending C++ (and I agree with the author that this is not a good tool for non-experts), then that's, in a sense, on us.

(That being said I did not inspect the code, so I don't know if the author's implication is right that C++ is the core problem of the code base)
That is what's missing, albiet tersely stated.

The hypothetical business has two choices. Choose Electron, or choose some other toolkit that has native, cross-platform support (like Qt). It's far easier for the business, and the developers there, to take their existing website HTML, CSS, and Javascript; and simply wrap it in Electron (which costs $0), and call it a day. Every other choice is (perceived as being) more expensive.

Qt is a modern toolkit with native-cross platform support, but costs money for commercial use, and businesses and software developers don't want to spend the money on it.
and the Ryzen 3 & 5 with a "G" label.
> Turns out, the American way of half-assing it has been sufficient to slow the spread of the virus more than enough to avert catastrophe

91,000 Americans have died from this[1], and you don't think it's a catastrophe?

Remember, only 2,977 died on 9/11 [2]

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11...
I think that just tipped me on to the negative side ambivalence wrt to Google. It's been a journey.

Profanity filter gone wrong? Meh.
>But would the middle class still demand suburbs if they had to stomach the higher taxes to honestly pay for them? That is the open question.

A huge challenge here is that no one ever has to actually face that, because they can just move to the next growing town/city/state. Depending on the area, you can either create another ring surrounding the metro, or leave the state entirely and move to the sunbelt.

In either case, the legacy cities or inner ring towns are left with the bill, and no one left to pay it. To Marohn's point, we've already seen this happen all over (particularly the rustbelt).

But my point is there's nothing to stop that pattern from continuing, as long as there's another town in the rockies or south or wherever with low taxes and plenty of land. There's just not really an impediment short of people's preferences dramatically changing, and the evidence shows that suburbs are growing.
> Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?

I for one wouldn't mind knowing if a large fraction of those overly enthusiastic users happened to be coordinated in some way.
> Whereas the only legally safe way to use MongoDB is to pay MongoDB Inc. to host it.

This is clearly not the case. Given a) the text of the license itself, and b) the fact that people still use MongoDB.

I think what you meant to say was “I cannot provide MongoDB as a service without open sourcing the rest of what I use directly to provide that service”. In other words, if I want to sell the usage of software which I don’t have the copyright to(remember, open source software may be free, but it’s still owned by somebody), then I have to give my source away as well. It doesn’t say “Thou shalt not compete,” the way the commons clause does. You can still provide Mongo as a service. You can still do anything you want with the software, but you might have to open source the rest of your stack.

Honestly, it’s not like Mongo didn’t have a lawyer look at the license (ie write the thing). If it was as horrrible and perilous as you say, they couldn’t use it because all the lawyers of all the other companies who use Mongo would get up in arms.

The only “safety” you lose is that of owning the copyright to closed source software, which if you really care about that, then why do you care how “closed source” Mongo chose to be?
"circumstances beyond our control"

"global circumstances"

"event restrictions"
Hey! Thanks for your response. I research Commons based peer production (including software projects), and I'm curious to know (if you want to share) - if when you reached out you had already contributed code to any of their projects, or if were you up to speed with the code in another way, so that once you were officially hired you could be immediately productive working on the newest issues/new product features?
I also experienced this on numerous Chinese government-related posts in the past, where front page articles were not flagged, but quickly disappeared. Don't really have an explanation. Would be great if @dang can look into this.
> The standard of their laptops is not good enough any more

I'm with you on this. When I upgraded my 2015 MBP (or was it 2013?), I was still able to manually install new memory and SSD. Since then, newer MacBooks are not user-extensible, from what I hear, with sealed parts. They have a touchbar instead of function keys or escape (!), the keyboard quality is questionable, and there's no standard headphone jack. macOS has seen unstable releases with poor QA, with one bug bricking the machine.

In addition to those issues, I've been disappointed with Apple's stance and decisions about their proprietary operating system. I guess I've known all along, but it's become glaring. In newer versions I've noticed dark patterns, like being unable to set a different browser than Safari as the default application to open certain file extensions.

> the privilege of writing apps for Apple

This summarizes my feeling. Especially compared to what Microsoft has been pouring efforts into open-source, the way Apple is treating their long-time fans is luke warm at best, hostile at worst.

That's why, as excited I am about the potential of Swift as a cross-platform language, unless companies other than Apple are behind it, I won't be comfortable investing time into it.
Looks like they only appear to be touching in the photo but aren't really.
I don't understand how Google could decide a single organisation has the canonical source of truth on a subject, nor the failure in logic Google are using to determine there's any way to determine absolute truth at scale.

Keep in mind the WHO published this in January:

> Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳.

If Google's policy of removing anything that contradicts the WHO existed back then, then they would be deleting any heterodox opinion saying Corona can be transferred between humans.

https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20
another fact, you know which population uses word "共匪"? people in Taiwan, this is actually very old word dated way back from early 1900s when Kuomintang was still controlling China; they call communist party "共匪", and keep using that term after they got defeated in China civil war, and fled to Taiwan island.
I find it hard to believe at least some of that that data wasn't cached on your device. Setting a track to be downloaded just means the cached data is evicted differently. If you run their desktop client with logging enabled you'll see this happening and I'd say it's likely to be the same across platforms. That is of course the actual reason they have a non-native app - to reuse the codebase and save money.
I guess the same as consultants working for McKinsey, or bankers working for Goldman

"Not my department / group / office"

"Just a few bad apples"

I mean yes, those are valid points - and I'd imagine most junior workers being there just for the future (career) opportunities.

No junior engineer at google is going to have any say in strategic and political decisions like censorship.
Absolutely! I wish this were more commonly understood. And, if you take that train of though one step further, it implies that quantum mechanics exhibits non-local causality.
I've posted an AskHN about self-regulation mechanisms on HN just today and instantly got flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220998

Please upvote another attempt:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223939
Sorry but there's a pretty big gap between understanding the domain for which your software is intended, and being qualified to work as a professional in that domain. The latter is what you're asking of academics.
That people still peddle this Leninist garbage is just unbelievable to me.

Saudi have been fighting off and on with the people of that region of 500+ years. Now they have more money. They have always tried to influence what going on there. What is happening there is part of a larger conflict between Saudi/US and Iran as well. How it related to falling interest rates or whatever is beyond me.

And SoftBank simply has to do with the Saudis knowing that Oil money will go away and they are not capable of correctly reorganizing their state, so they think they can just buy stock to finance their nonsense government polices in the long run.

All of this is explained 100x better with an incompetent government that happens to sit on natural resources, rather then some Marxist critic of Capitalism.
Well, it looks like one of the biggest problems in computational biology has finally blown up in our face.

I work in a very similar field to the one discussed here - ecosystem modelling. And much of the code I see is probably of a similar quality to Neil Ferguson's model. (Although I haven't had a detailed look at his work.) For all you angry devs out there, I have three comments:

1. Yes, we have a problem with code quality, and no, this should not be acceptable where policy-relevant decisions of such magnitude are concerned. (Although one should bear in mind that all science is flawed and its achieved reliability will always be limited by constraints of time/budget/etc.)

2. However, changing the status quo is really hard. Specifically, the two greatest changes that are needed are to teach proper software development practices to students in the natural sciences (just like we teach lab technique), and/or make it easier to get funding for software developer positions in a research team. This sounds easy, and ought to be easy, but both run counter to some pretty entrenched ideas held by the "old folks at the top" in universities and funding bodies. (Believe me, I'm speaking from experience :-/ )

3. But yes, we are working on it. The debate is growing, and there's a new generation of computational biologists with much closer ties to computer science who are trying to shake things up a bit. In some sense, we are several decades behind the wider CS world in the techniques we use, but we're catching up. And at the same time, we're starting to develop some of our own methods of quality control (such as pattern-oriented modelling).
As an American that's a pretty easy choice you're asking me to make.
JavaScript Promise.all vs. Promise.allSettled
Commie is itself not a pejorative anymore than “communist” is.

It’s like calling a member of the National Socialist party a Nazi.

Calling someone that’s not a communist or a nazi either would be a pejorative.

“Commie bandit” might not be a pejorative either depending on who it’s applied to.

At times there have been communist guerrilla groups that have used banditry to fund their political struggle.

There are people that believe that an enforced one party state is a form of banditry (although a one party state is not requirement of communism).
Off topic, but this framing really struck me:

> the anti-Trump center/center-left/left

So... basically everyone who isn't a Trump supporter, then? Is that really how you see the world? The president of the united states vs. literally everyone else? And you've chosen the political side instead of the social consensus?
But is it replaced with "I'm an American company?"

There's a deep rabbit-hole of hyper-nationalism right next to the deep rabbit-hole of hyper-corporatism. Does a YouTube beholden to the US government get banned from being used in China at all? And if it does, what happens when China creates a competing product that is more successful than YouTube, and YouTube gets displaced globally by a product that is beholden to China's censorship policies in general, not just in isolated cases?
> figure out just how much money you and/or your parents lost on the deal.

If you consider college tuition to be the money you pay to be educated, you're definitely right. Personally I think of college as something like a licensing or certification.

I learned twice as much at my part time programming job than I did in class (but classes where instrumental in getting me through technical interviews). But, once I had my degree I instantly had multiple 100k+/yr offers in a moderate COL area. For me, that is a good deal (but still a huge hassle).
Yeah, but it's a good reason for a lot of them to keep working at the company and turn a deaf ear towards what it's been doing.
Just like the US and UK did when they were emerging economies.