skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We should aim for having a "Hippocratic Oath" in place for the CEO's, board, and other business leadership too.

They're the one's who's "interesting" ethics are responsible for the things mentioned in the article.

The engineers wouldn't generally even attempt to implement the concerns in the article unless directed by their organisational higher-ups.
Netgear, Mikrotik and Ubiquiti have some that at least are in the price-range of "home".
Do you think your local fire department knew ahead of time that there was going to be a fire at Joes house? How do you believe they know that?
Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?
It depends on the thermal mass of the contents, the effectiveness of the insulation, and the external ambient environmental temperature.

In real world use, it also generally depends on (1) how frequently and for how long you open it, and (2) whether it's top-loading (efficient) versus front-loading (inefficient).

Source: My venture custom designed and built a refrigeration circuit with autonomous electronic management from scratch over the last year or so, so have done numerous recent tests in this space. I also visited about 4 different fridge factories in Guangdong and spoke to their engineers, investigated the different available chemical coolants, relevant sensors, etc.
That's the whole point of a professional code of ethics. If you want to protect people for behaving ethically, that's government's job (c.f. whistleblower laws et. al.).

This sits a layer down in the defense-in-depth stack. And the idea is that if there's a recognized code, and consensus on what constitutes a violation, that employers will conform because if they don't they'll risk not just one "activist" employee leaving but most of them, out of a shared sense of communal ethics.

Would it work? No idea. My experience is that software people tend to be pretty squishy on matters of personal ethics.
When I was taking CS Engineering UG course(IN~2008), there was an elective subject(have to be chosen by entire class) called 'Engineering Ethics'. It was a preferred elective as there was no course work and I think there were no tests as well.

I remember the professor starting the class as,

>"If a Structural/Civil Engineer builds a bridge and it goes down, he/she will go to jail; lucky for you guys there are no ethics for computer science".

Last time when I said this, I was told there's no way a Structural/Civil Engineer goes to jail if a bridge goes down. May be its more common in India, could be very well be the norm because every time a bridge goes down a related Engineer gets arrested the very same day or soon under 'Causing death by negligence'; perhaps a practice from colonial era still being practiced to pacify public.

Read:

Another BMC engineer arrested in Mumbai bridge collapse(2019)[1]

Bhubaneswar flyover collapse: Engineer, director of construction firm arrested(2017)[2]

4 Engineers Arrested In Kolkata Flyover Collapse Case(2016)[3]

IIT Roorkee: Two professors arrested in bridge collapse case(2015)[4]

SMC engineer held in bridge collapse case suspended(2014)[5]

Gammon, Hyundai officials arrested, probe ordered(2009)[6]

I'm sure you can pull up such cases going back at least 200 years.

[1]https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/02041...

[2]https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/bhubaneswar-flyove...

[3]https://www.ndtv.com/kolkata-news/4-engineers-arrested-in-ko...

[4]https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/iit-roorkee-two-profes...

[5]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/38044181.cms

[6]https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/kota-bridge-collapse-30-dead...
"Engineering ethics" is a fallacy as it implies that engineers have high level influence on the goals set by organizations. If lockheed martin trained all of its missile engineers in ethics would they suddenly start building bombs that burst with flowers? Obviously not. Engineers are paid to design things against a very specific set of requirements. If an average engineer pushes back on ethical grounds they will simply be replaced.
Ok sure, all for it but as a business executive, the president of Microsoft can really stay the hell out of the process of coming up with that.
GP is more talking about that the word "WiFi" now has the meaning "Internet connection", not necessarily wireless.
Cancel culture probably should be #2, it's debatable if it even scratches the surface of achieving #2. It seems cancel culture is not interested in people being dishonest, or spreading misinformation intentionally and maliciously, it's more concerned with enforcing new social mores against dredged up old statements/actions. That could be a good thing, in and of itself, but it doesn't help solve the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be.

I agree to a very limited extent about the hierarchical nature of a typical corporation, but I also disagree. Software engineers at a certain level of their career and with relatively uncommon skills can pick and choose what companies they want to work at. In my opinion people of good moral character and conscience need to be prepared to refuse to accept a position at companies known to engage in activities against their principles. And further need to be prepared to resign if they are asked to do something clearly unethical.

From my particular specialization in network engineering, I would never accept a role at an ISP in an environment where I had to implement something like the GFW in China, or further walled-garden/censorship of the global Internet. It's directly contradictory to my principles. I sincerely hope that the best and the brightest of my colleagues would never choose to aid and abet internet-fuckery by autocratic regimes. If people from my field look at a project and could reasonably say "Vint Cerf would be really disappointed if he saw me implementing this...", I hope they will choose to walk away.
Why are you wording this like you're suspicious? Disaster preparedness is not some big conspiracy. Just because America is doing a shit job at this doesn't mean other countries are out to get them.
Specific heat capacity:

---

Water (liquid) - 4.80 J/g.K

Water (solid) - 2.108 J/g.K (transition 334 J/g)

Brine (liquid, 300g/L) - 2.48 J/g.K

---

So 1 gram of water (s) going from -18C to 0C (liquid) is 373 J.

1 gram of brine (l) going from -18C to 0C is 44.64 J.

Seems like ice is a better choice? The phase transition requires a huge amount of energy.

Brine is 70% more dense than water, so if you do it by volume, one mL of brine would be 76 J, so better, but still only ~1/5 that of pure water.
No. If anyone is going to serve the subprime market effectively and profitably, it is someone that can scale it out. That’s the whole point.
Subreddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/macoovacany
In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4

But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath should fall on engineers.

> To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will.

Well, yes - if there were no tradeoffs there would be no point in having an oath to begin with. But there are software engineers today, including some on HN, who do things more harmful and unethical than medical malpractice, and they are personally culpable for the decision to do so - just as their replacements would be if they refused. I would also like to see laws criminalizing those individual engineers' conduct - maybe you're alluding to the same thing? - but an oath is a good start.
So this is where the miscommunication is. I didn’t know people were attacking TLS, that seems absurd to me. When I hear e2e, I interpret it as no one except the communicating parties can see the data. Facebook messenger DOES use TLS but it does not have e2e encryption.

Glancing at the Wikipedia page, your definition is the original one but in the last 6 years it’s evolved to the meaning I was using.
Then was he 20 years ahead of his time?
I just wrote a keylogger in Python, and billion dollar companies shouldn’t be touted as arbiters of morality
Maybe, “don’t be evil”.
The Origin of Elements
I think its important to think about things as information and disinformation.

The post covid comment is clearly disinformation. It was used and promoted by the media in my country as a strawman argument for anyone who had concerns about 5g.

Its important to promote the most creditable voice rather than the least. When the least creditable argument is promoted you know the promoters don't want to deal with the argument at first principal, you believe X this crazy person also believes X there for you are Y.

Its a common framing technique used by the media, you will start to notice it everywhere on both sides of the media echo chamber.
I don't believe she's talking about gentrification as a good thing, just using it as a metric. For example, on a lower income, I wouldn't choose to look in a highly gentrified area for housing, because rent prices may be unaffordable and come with a lot of amenities I don't need. Food/restaurant prices may also be unaffordable. Personally, I have chosen to live in more and less gentrified areas based on how much money I was able to/comfortable spending on rent. At an extreme end of the spectrum, most of us may not live in Beverly Hills, CA, or own a condo in midtown Manhattan, and it's informative to say those areas are extremely gentrified and un-affordable.

There are more discussions about income inequality, capitalism in the housing market, unfair housing practices, etc, that the author wasn't trying to comment on when she was broadcasting information.

Imo, the challenge is that it may be assumed that you have bad intent. And also imo, I don't expect this challenge to go away, or be "fixed" (if it is a problem at all). The power to have your words be broadcast to millions in an instant is also the challenge of having millions of reactions to your words.
Sure you can. Cancelation has nothing to do with the amount of money you own, nor the color of your skin, your religious beliefs, nationality, gender identity, preferred pronouns, political lean or ice cream preferences.
Just as a hunch, but maybe "move fast and break things" doesn't really resonate with the people who are concerned about where billions of dollars are.
Like this? https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
Doctors can’t be told how to practice medicine by non md managers.
https://order-of-the-engineer.org/
Isn't it just because Metal came before Vulkan?
> Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdota...

Clown dismissed.
Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested
This seems like "noble virtue signaling" for software executives.

It isn't taking a five why's approach to the problem of ethical failures in the industry. It won't fix root cause problems.

We don't need a Hippocratic oath for Software Engineers. We need laws and regulations around some things. And then the government needs to penalize C-level execs, the board, and major shareholders for violating them.

The problem is that laws apply to individual without significant financial resources, sporadically to the truly wealthy, almost never to corporations, and never to the shareholders.

Trying to fix a broken system with a "Hippocratic oath" for software developers is like trying to fix school shootings by making sure the doctors will save the school shooters as much as the victims.

Microsoft could still be profitable and fix way more bugs in the software than they do - they choose the higher profit margin over "the good of humanity" all day every day, and it is the executives and major shareholders that make that own that decision.
Yeah, exactly. I love that video. I wish someone would combine the wind powered sculptures of Theo Jansen with a solar sinterer. Let them roam the sahara and turn it back into solid ground... or buildings and monuments.
I bought and filled a chest freezer in pandemic preparations.

Cost of the chest freezer: CAD 1,000

Cost to completely fill the freezer with good food: CAD 2,700

Given that, during a pandemic or a winter storm in Canada, a power failure can be a prolonged event...

Cost of a good gas powered generator to keep the freezer viable beyond a day: CAD 1,000.

This article seems to validate the generator purchase.
>Empty flats can be deducted from taxes as lost income.

AFAIK there's no "lost income" deduction. Yes, you pay less taxes, but that because you had less income to begin with, not because of some deduction. If a tenant is not paying, then you're not getting income, so you're already paying less taxes.
There is serious value to being perceived as you want to be though! It’s not really fruitless, nor an arms race.
You can compile your Java code into an executable which doesn't require Java to be present. Advantages would be reduced memory footprint and quicker startup times, which could be ideal for microservices started on demand instead of constantly running.

That being said, the people at Spring don't recommend it for production use yet. Here's what they have to say about it:

"While GraalVM is now GA, GraalVM native image feature which allows ahead-of-time compilation of Java applications into executable images is only available as an early adopter plugin, so we don't consider it production ready yet."

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/wiki/Gra...
I'll probably get slapped on the wrist for this, but: Is this a way to understand the seven day time line in the first chapter of Genesis?
Would you consider it an acceptable edge case to privacy/decryption to allow child sexual abuse prosecutors to unlock a suspect's phone which was suspected to contain GB of evidence of abuse?
Sometimes you know in advance that power will be off, so you can freeze extra. Or buy outside.
They have a Scala-heavy codebase that benefits from the of the optimizations C2 in OpenJDk doesn't do. In the general case, Oracle optimized free Graal to the point it was just on-par with OpenJDK and made the additional optimizations commercial only
Estonia has a Digital Nomad visa - https://e-resident.gov.ee/nomadvisa/

And I remember seeing somewhere else that some other countries in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean either have similar visas or were planning for them.
I'll save you the trouble. It's 42.
Collect analytics data for your App using AWS Amplify
Quite. Some of the most egregious ethics lapses come from 'management decisions'. Some infamously immortalized by Challenger story ( https://freakonomics.com/2011/06/01/launching-into-unethical... ), where manager effectively overruled engineers, who explicitly told him it was a bad idea. Oh yeah, he called it a 'management decision' too.
Maybe they should go back to +
How do you hire an architect to design your house? Pick a doctor? Pick a lawyer?
Do civil engineers, accountants, or lawyers take an oath?
Yes. Relative pitch will not definitely help the subject. However, it will still affect the test result, as it is involuntary to think about the relative pitch. Therefore, the test still was not purely testing absolute pitch.
Photos from Bell Labs Datacenter in 1960s (2019)
I think the point is that we can't just rely on individual ethics to enact change. People have bills to pay and kids to feed, if it's all on the man at the bottom to say no then a lot of bad software is still going to be created.
That is a much cleaner method
I hate to be a debby downer but this is nothing but virtue signaling.

How can we enforce this? Strong individual ethics without ability to do anything about it will simply make engineers feel helpless. And that’s just going to hurt happiness at the workplace.
The location of the freezer or refrigerator is critical. If you live in a house that has a typical unfinished basement, don't overlook the advantage it offers. With one simple change, you can noticeably lower your electric bill, reduce your carbon footprint, gain extra kitchen space and improve your health. Just move your refrigerator to the basement.

Since the basement is normally cooler than the upstairs, the refrigerator will run less often. This will not only extend its lifetime, but also lower the electricity it consumes, thus also reducing your carbon footprint. The kitchen space previously wasted by the refrigerator has uses that are only limited by your imagination.

Finally, you and your family will directly benefit from the exercise you get with trips to the fridge. Of course it is not convenient - that is the point. Sometimes you might even pass up that extra dish of ice cream, because it's a pain in the butt. However, the size of your butt may be improved.

It's a simple step that can be done in a couple of hours. And the recurring benefits are automatic and last a lifetime.

Method #1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J8ul-CcrzY

Method #2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCiWk-aIyc
It isn't neutral at all, it's merely less-intensive.

Leakage is a problem with straightforward extant solutions, but well operators are poorly incentivized to implement those solutions—the loss is often too small to substantially impact their profit, and the leak is invisible (natural gas being colorless) so it's easy to turn a blind eye and not implement effective monitoring.
This depends entirely on one's situation. I could easily get as much ice as I wanted from a nearby river, should the need arise during winter time. During summers, it'd be pretty much impossible to get hold of sufficient quantities.
Can someone please give a sober explanation of what GraalVM, is and how Truffle works?

I think it is somewhat analogous to LLVM: Graal exposes a "language agnostic" API which allows multiple front-ends. There's a front-end for Ruby, JS, C++, others. But this API is higher level than LLVM: it knows about objects, and allows tricks like querying properties across language boundaries.

But I can't imagine what this API looks like! For example, graaljs exists: how do JS semantics get expressed in a Java VM? What does a getProperty instruction look like? How does it know when to invalidate inline caches?
Even better news, really.
You don't have to be so quick about it. The heat capacity from warm air coming inside is dwarfed by that of the frozen solids and especially their latent heat absorbed during the melting process.
I'm not convinced e2e encryption exists in WhatsApp. Every time I have conversations about products in whats app I get those products as adverts in Facebook.
Corporate strategists blaming software engineers for the consequences of corporate strategy is a fairly brazen kind of blame-shifting.

A system of ethics within the health system are necessary for customers to retain trust in the health industry. It's also strongly aligned with the selfish interests of workers who must enact that system of ethics. These properties do not neatly translate to software engineering—mostly because the most difficult ethical dilemmas in technology are rarely obvious when looking at source code. The problems with Facebook (for example) are not always inherent in code; many are only revealed after being deployed at scale and external groups begin exploiting the system.
I think something like this would be more easily 'enforced' if the current punishments weren't so low they got factored into the "cost of doing business."
There is a web framework called Chicago boss already.
We need to go far beyond that -- we need an actual profession. It always strikes me as odd that someone can go through a 4 week bootcamp and call themselves a software engineer. Robert Martin has been advocating this for point for years -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17vTLSkXTOo
Google 'icebox', which is coincidentally what my Dad still calls refrigerators. Different times.
The argument made is that it's necessary, not that it's sufficient.
Perhaps Brad Smith can let us know when we live in a time when it's not true that all three branches of the US government, to pick on just one country, are daily disrespecting their oaths to uphold the constitution. And then we can talk about the efficacy of oaths.

In other words, oaths aren't worth much in the real world, apparently, as much as we might like to think they should be.

It would be troubling if Brad Smith isn't aware of this. He wouldn't be the first once-respected person to go off the deep end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins.

I have to give Brad the benefit of the doubt and assume something was lost in translation; possibly he is being misquoted or quoted out of context.

But even assuming we could agree on a shared, always-in-sync definition of harm, and even assuming oaths worked all the time, there are plenty of competent people, whatever label we give them, who will design and implement systems without having sworn any such oath, and countries and organizations (including DAOs) that will employ those people. And the first two assumptions are already a bridge too far.
It does speak to why he's treated with so much distrust, as is discussed by other threads. Unlike the average person, Gates is someone who can actually make things happen with his incredible wealth. It suggests a form of paternalistic authoritarian attitude towards social issues that undeniably colors his attitude towards this pandemic.

You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.
You got a little repetitive there, but yes, I agree: "deprecated" means stop using this because it's going away.
Replace Software Engineers with "Anyone involved in the creation of software", and then it goes from a "Definitely not" to a "Eh, maybe."

Until the people pointing the software engineering departments are held accountable for their immoral behavior and goals, I don't think the engineers beneath them can really be assessed fairly.
I have a colleague (contractor) in Belarus. I’m worried about him :(
google reacts https://youtu.be/JyVU6NzfvqI
that's not discrimination, might be a bit insulting, but that's not against the law...
It used to be DON'T BE EVIL until Google turned to the dark side.
The rampant racism in the Singapore public schools, the casual everyday racism and micro-aggressions that Singapore minorities face, local Chinese owned company’s using Mandarin as requirement to exclude minorities, lack of representation in ads/commercials/billboards for minorities, the openly racist statement made by politicians that the majority Chinese will not accept a Singapore Indian as a PM... Singapore has actually regressed when it comes to the Racial relations since the Sixties. This close minded xenophobia will in the long run stymie it’s growth and social stability, if not addressed. You can read some of the stories shared by Singapore minorities on their racist experiences on Insta: @minorityvoices. @lepakconversations

High time that William Gibson does another article on Singapore.
^Ground invasion of China. Not sure if the Soviet navy was up for a significant assault on Japan at that time, but I'd guess no.
is he using... excel 2003? I hope he doesn't open any untrusted documents, because he's probably a sitting duck in terms of exploits.