skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. If you have time could you share some articles / sources / examples / something to lend some solidity to what you're arguing, and also so that I can follow up and learn more?

TBH I'd make an argument for the elimination of war being a huge way to better the world. Imagine:

- No invasion of Iraq.

- No bungling of the invasion of Afghanistan (or no invasion)

- No Syrian war and millions of refugees.

War has huge negative ripple effects in addition to all of the deaths it causes; societies and communities are destroyed, whose effects echo for generations. It consumes insane amounts of resources. If we want to think big, that's what I'd think about. Maybe even focus on exclusively. I mean, who do you think is going to buck against checks and balances on scary intelligent AI research? Defense-funded research.

Sure, EA talks about international relations, etc, but, where's the study on the cost/benefits of world-wide pacifism, if we're theorizing here?

Part of my skepticism of all this is because there is so much thought put into bettering the world over time:

- All the religions, which still undergird the various systems of morals/laws we have.

- To name a few philosophers / social thinkers who directly discussed making things "better":

- Plato

- Hobbes

- Marx

- Habermas (I haven't read him, but I've read about him; big on liberal democracy and the post WWII European system, I think)

That's a pretty hefty list right there. That's not even a full accounting of the Western philosophers/thinkers. Not to even mention the non-Western philosophers/thinkers.

And, tbh, I think it's easy for non-historians, or scholars who don't focus on political science or political philosophy/theory to just write the field off; and, IMHO the "hard" sciences and tech/CS folk in particular have a tendency to do this. So I'm always a bit skeptical.
No, but our democratic institutions do. If I ended up parking my riches in a particular country, I'm OK with whatever I have to pay (or there're enough legal mechanism to make it less painful).

FWIW, it's not "obvious" that many poor people would decide that rich much pay a lot. That's not the case in US, for example. Sure, there're people who want to "make rich pay", but in general US system is already fair enough [1] (page links to multiple bipartisan sources).

[1]: https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/15/the-new-york-times-is...
MicroStrategy Buys $175M More in Bitcoin, Upping BTC Holdings to $425M
Steel, unbroken glass bottles, and clean paper/cardboard are actually recycled at most municipal recycling centers as well.
I think for some people it's just really hard imagining that Gates pivoted his ruthless passion for business (emphasis on ruthless) into a genuine mission to make the world - especially the impoverished - a better place.

Feeney, Buffett, and Gates need to be celebrated and revered way more than sports and movie idols IMHO.
Oh reeeeeeeeeeally? You didn't think it was "needed"?

>Hate speech in the United States is not regulated due to the robust right to free speech found in the American Constitution.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.
Smart idea. Whatever filters I picked up come with a little bluetooth chip on them and require an account with the manufacturer to get air quality information. I didn't bother for privacy reasons, but judging by 40k reviews on Apple Store, there are plenty of people who are subscribed to their air filter delivery. It makes a lot of sense.
What is Feeney going to do if he lives until he is 105? The next decade and a half might be pretty boring for him.
That explanation doesn't require theology. I've seen Peter Singer make the case that it's only "true altruism" if you're just as happy when someone else does something good as when you do so yourself.
> Because an infected machine can and often will participate in infecting other machines.

OK, so how disclosing this vulnerability will help preventing that? It is the opposite, disclosing this vulnerability only speeds up this process.

> Not to mention that if

That big if.

> If not, then the playground having root access immediately exposes ordinary users to high risk of browser-based attacks (drive-by downloads, outright replacing the V downloads with compromised versions, etc.).

That's good example.

And that's one more reason to privately push the owners of the project owner to fix the issue instead of disclosing after one day.

> that's really a drop in the bucket compared to the possibilities of running arbitrary user-supplied server-side code without sufficient sandboxing

I agree, that's bad, and that's happen all the time in huge companies, not just single-person open source side projects.

The correct response to vulnerability would be creating a post to pressure project owner by explaining the dangers of it without disclosing how exactly it can be exploited.

> It's a bit of a harsh characterization, but at the time it wasn't all that inaccurate.

Analogy. Your coworker is dumb. You can say he is dumb. And then he refuses to work with you.

Saying he is dumb is not innaccurate. But it doesn't help constructive team work.

The blog author could start by apologizing (or at least by redacting the post), if they wanted to work with the project team.
Something being legal doesnt mean it was moral.
Why not use a water filter and glassware? That's what I've done at home for 15+ years.

I think many workplaces also have filtered water, including every place of worked at (although not everyone uses it).

The "water cooler" was a really good solution!
If regulations require pest/herbicide to be below certain concentrations per acre, a blanket application is often insufficient.

Targeted application by drone makes it a) actually work at all under stricter regulations and b) can be placed only on the areas that need it, so it actually is cost competitive with blanket application despite being more expensive per acre.
Facebook is on the road to becoming 4chan
> “We don’t want to play world police,” said chief technology officer Alexander Haväng.

Well...
Good to note! One thing I definitely want to do when I have the means is built a cabin/house with the latest and greatest efficiencies. Not in a hippy-earth-loving way, but more in a curious engineer way.

Did you know there are these things called Earthships in New Mexico? It's a bit too hippy for me, but on the right track.
It's too bad this got flagged. I would have liked to see more discussion about it.
Find a site the target visits frequently that lets you inject something that will make a request to your server (“poisoning the well”). Use the gathered IP address, User-Agent and Language headers to start building a persona to look for.
Sort of, but the difference is that Christian altruism results in an increasing expectation of being praised and rewarded by God on the other side for being his agent of love to others in this life.

The result is a lot of joy, knowing one has brought blessing and joy both to God and to other people.
On getting Ponyo playing for movie night
> The etymology of the word 'weird' here is interesting. I think its rootest-of-roots was actually a verb.

Ooooh, thank you for that rabbit hole/etymology adventure! For any others interested:

weird (adj.)
c. 1400, "having power to control fate, from wierd (n.), from Old English wyrd "fate, chance, fortune; destiny; the Fates," literally "that which comes," from Proto-Germanic wurthiz (source also of Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt "fate," Old Norse urðr "fate, one of the three Norns"), from PIE wert- "to turn, to wind," (source also of German werden, Old English weorðan "to become"), from root *wer- (2) "to turn, bend."
[https://www.etymonline.com/word/weird]
I mean at least half of the employees seem to believe it so that's not bad I guess, but I honestly would like to hear what justification the other half has. Facebook is in the business of processing and distributing information, so dealing with disinformation seems to be in their courtyard. Do these people also think banks have no responsibility to prevent scams or fraudulent transactions, or that Amazon or Ebay have no responsibility to detect fraudulent vendors?

What confuses me about internet platforms and their relationship to responsibility is, we've always had platforms. If a barkeeper serves minors alcohol or someone starts some illegal business in the backroom, you're probably on the hook. Do internet giants just get an excuse because they're huge?
> Spend your money on riotous living

The letter is BS with the first line. It makes it sound like the options are giving money to your kids or getting drunk. But that makes no sense for the range of money we’re talking about.

Jeff Bezos could throw a $10 million party every night for a year and his net worth would go down 2%.
Oh joy. Another fluff piece designed to make Bill Gates look good. Drink that propaganda! Gulp it down.
George Soros says: "I am proud of the enemies I have". While I understand why people hate Soros, since he makes no secret he wants to influence the politics for humanistic goals, it's harder to understand for Bill Gates. The main ideea seems to be that he supports vaccines, and that he was pretty vocal during the pandemic and predicted it some years in advance.
> The effect is most pronounced with freshly-planted trees

I'd suggest that a well established, well maintained orchard planted on a grid is even better. They always got my attention even as a kid, going to shop in bulk at local orchards. The limbs are kept pruned off of the ground at a consistent height, providing stark relief where the alignments of trunks obstruct or reveal distance. Best experienced riding past slowly on the orchard's gravel drive, in a car built much closer to the ground than they are these days. The visual alignments strobe through several different iterations, it's just stunning.
Burning plastic in a modern (read: clean) incinerator is probably the best thing to do with it at this point. It's certainly better than burying it in a landfill. Of course, it would be better to just not make it in the first place.
Please share the questions. I always find it amusing that tech types seem to believe their idea of “basic X knowledge” translates across the board. I think it’s this attitude of “oh you don’t know what I think you should know” that proliferates the industry that is a major part of the problem. How do you handle folks that don’t have even the most basic form of formal “CS knowledge” but can still ship product? Do you just dismiss them completely over being able to have a water cooler talk about O(...) and some algorithm someone would never have to implement in that specific context? Seems like a premature optimization to me.
I find some of the arguments in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio... rather compelling.

> Two of the billionaires whose philanthropy I most respect, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, have done a lot of work on criminal justice reform. The organizations they fund determined that many innocent people are languishing in jail for months because they don’t have enough money to pay bail; others are pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit because they have to get out of jail in time to get to work or care for their children, even if it gives them a criminal record. They funded a short-term effort to help these people afford bail, and a long-term effort to reform the bail system. One of the charities they donate to, The Bronx Freedom Fund, found that 92% of suspects without bail assistance will plead guilty and get a criminal record. But if given enough bail assistance to make it to trial, over half would have all charges dropped. This is exactly the kind of fighting-mass-incarceration and stopping-the-cycle-of-poverty work everyone says we need, and it works really well.

> If Moskovitz and Tuna’s money instead flowed to the government, would it accomplish the same goal in some kind of more democratic, more publically-guided way? No. It would go to locking these people up, paying for more prosecutors to trick them into pleading guilty, more prison guards to abuse and harass them. The government already spends $100 billion – seven times Tuna and Moskovitz’s combined fortunes – on maintaining the carceral state each year. This utterly dwarfs any trickle of money it spends on undoing the harms of the carceral state, even supposing such a trickle exists.

Many other examples are provided.
Pebble and FoundationDB are apples and oranges. Pebble is per-node KV storage engine. FoundationDB is a distributed multi-modal database. Internally, FoundationDB uses a library like Pebble for the per-node data storage. I think at one point it used SQLite. I'm not up to date on what it currently use. I seem to recall FoundationDB was writing their own btree-based node-level storage engine to replace the usage of SQLite.

The equivalent of FoundationDB is present inside of CockroachDB: a distributed, replicated, transactional, KV layer. This is where a big chunk of CockroachDB value resides. This is where our use of Raft resides. Pebble lies underneath this.
That's an interesting idea, for sure.
Fiscal Austerity and the Rise of the Nazis
Buying Myself Back When does a model own her own image?
the relationship between Gates and Jeffrey Epstein that was cultivated after Epstein's conviction on sex crimes is not a conspiracy theory.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
It happened. But it's not still happening. Note that New York hasn't had the promised "second wave."

Article: "New York City nervously braces" -> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/27/new-york-city-anoth...

No big second wave in Sweden either: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Yet we did have a second wave in California. What's the difference? California locked down fast and tight while De Blasio was telling New Yorkers to visit Broadway. As late as March 12, De Blasio was hoping to keep subways and Broadway open. Santa Clara County locked down around March 16. Sweden never locked down at all. New York was late to the lockdown party and it seems that while it caused a steep curve, that curve probably led to a more rapid herd immunity. People seem to forget that "Flatten the Curve" doesn't change the area under the curve.

Most people here are going to scoff at this source, however, this article is pretty solid on data on lockdowns and deaths per capita: https://www.aier.org/article/a-closer-look-at-the-states-tha... (TLDR: non-lockdown states are among the best in terms of deaths per capita, while the strictest lockdown states have been hit hardest.
Remembering my father (William H. Gates Sr.)
The article mentions Buffet and Gates as being inspired by Feeney. They, in turn, further popularised the idea of giving away large sums of money.

I can't even say how a bit of fame for people giving large sums is harmful. And whatever people object to, I doubt it's anywhere close to the significance of the positive effects of giving.
Current employees are not the only revenue generators within a company, especially in a high margin monopoly business. Most of the value in Google was created over a decade ago when they achieved market dominance so revenue per employee is an unhelpful metric in their case.

I don't disagree with your other points, just the first.
!!(n & (n >> 1)), I assume.
"You see, today when you buy a Chromebook, it comes with an end-of-life date, its Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date. This is a generous six and a half years after any specific Chromebook is released." -article

This language is insane. This should not be considered generous in any way by a tech journalist.
Windows XP, 12 years.
Windows 7, 10 years with free migration to Windows 10.
Neither are a posion pill to the hardware itself. Desktops/Laptops of the last decade are still remarkably capable devices today for most light workloads. Linux provides a whole other world of possibilities as well.
For air filters, try McMaster-Carr. They generally sell to businesses but ship to home addresses as well.
Forget recyclable aluminum cans, use refillable glass bottles with a meaningful deposit ($0.25 or more).
Their main product is in Go so they are most familiar with it.
I suspect so too, the pricing seems to hint at this - the previous gen Air started at $499 whereas this is $100 more at $599. Now this creates a fair big pricing gap between entry level iPad at $329.

Going to be interesting in how Apple positions the new iPad Pro and the new Macbook. Dare they price the Pro higher despite it having iPad OS and not macOS?!
Badger is written by mad people from my point of view, who disabled issues on github, from my understanding declared it as "done" and "bug free", and any issue tracking is now done on the forum where the threads roll off to the void with no further trace.
> this is as irrational, as baning leaded fuel or asbestos

It's apples to oranges. Nobody really needs leaded fuel or asbestos.

But single-use plastics has a lot of reasonable applications, like ones I gave above: multi-use things which are effectively single-use.

> You claim this to be naive, yet this is the very proposal currently approved by 560 members of the EU parliament, in the new European Union Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904

If MP were really smart people, we would already colonized Mars and other planets. They are just regular dudes who are pushed by voters, by industry and so on.

> However, make no mistake, a ban is coming it is not a question of if but of when

I'm certain of that. And that ban will do more harm then good. Like for example, people might start bying expensive multi-use things for single-use applications.
Stanford's reign on venture capital is ending
Yes, and taxation is theft and you didn't sign a social contract. /s

Government power can be exercised without jailtime, but you seem to take everything to the logical extreme.
You're making an assumption I ascribe any feeling whatsoever to what I described when in fact I was extending the comment to include things most societies currently do have a say in, without emotion.

For all you know I am a libertarian making the argument for a libertarian paradise.
Brains are really not the limiting factor, and yeah, the raw materials for doing this kind of recognition are pretty mature. You'd want some kind of server in any case, but I bet the CV could feasibly be done onboard.

The physical manipulation part would take some work for sure, and the robot itself would be fairly expensive to make, but it's all pretty achievable. You need it to do more than a BobCat while costing less.

It's not "Uber for $sector" but it can be done.
How to form a California LLC without a lawyer
Just saying that Kotlin has had this since ages.
Starbucks vs. Dunkin – A Steamy Culture Clash
Maybe. But maybe not. He doesn't know, and we don't know. And therefore he is taking a big risk.
> There is a term "whataboutism" which is applicable here and which is used for negative description.

I think it's less whataboutism and more like self-defense. If someone punches you, it's not whataboutism to mention it when discussing why you punched them back. Only in this case, it's your industries that you're defending.

It's a very blinkered perspective to view this only through the lens of adhering to WTO agreements, and elevate adherence to them to some kind of virtue, regardless of what other countries are doing.
Once you end up investigating an issue with something that namesquats another thing you'll understand.
I think your idea of controlling "corruption" is simplistic if your argument ends with "let government handle the money".
Then why did they feel the need to obfuscate?
Thats not how networth works. No one has enough liquid capital to spend money like that. As soon as people found out Bezos was wasteful like that, his network would drop just based on stock price.
I think it just sets up some pretty weird incentives for employees, especially when you consider that cost-of-living calculators are often wrong. I don't think this model will work in the future.

Let's fast-forward 5 years and assume many companies have taken on this model and are now remote first. COL adjustments will have occurred, and COL is a very reasonable proxy to "desirability of living location", because as you mention these cities are based on supply and demand. When there's a high demand, COL goes up and as such so do the salaries of the folks living there.

So now employees are basically at a junction where they can live wherever they want. However, their employer will cover the expenses of living somewhere better (if we take this high COL = desirable line of thinking). So employees will go to these places, effectively costing the employer money!

The fundamental outcome of this change is employers are offering a giant "live somewhere expensive" stipend that can only be cashed if you choose to live somewhere expensive. It's just odd. I know for a fact if I was at one of these companies I'd move to wherever I could get the most money, because I think COL often overrates how expensive cities are.
photodna compares to hashes so this is a weird take.
That makes sense. Thanks for the info!
pePDF? Seems relatively unused compared to pep.
Many computers are misconfigured to include "." (the current working directory at the time of execve) in PATH, which allows a trivial privilege escalation and/or native code execution for any attacker that can write a executable file named "curl" in any directory that the target process can be convinced to cd into.

Shelling out also means the process will unexpectedly stop working if /usr/bin/curl disappears (or wasn't installed in the first place), whereas that's a known and expected issue for libcurl.so and there are established tools (eg `ldd /bin/program`) for tracking such dependencies.
Not necessarily - the GPL is a no-go for some companies regardless of the difference in quality between the free and not free.

Remember that it's not free it's about lawyer approval.
I'm curious what you are doing where you have access to cryptographic key schedules, but not access to a use of "random()"?
> I would love to know what companies have good systems to keep internal tensions in check because I've never even seen a single company that had that figured out.

Probably most companies deal with tensions more or less successfully. They have good instruments to manage these things: yearly bonuses and option to fire employees who do not cooperate.

Obviously these instruments are not available in open-source projects.
I don’t think Cockroach cares about adoption. This is not meant to be a generally useful product in itself outside of their database. So the language was chosen mainly based on their familiarity with Go and its ability to integrate with their existing codebase.

I think their omission of major features such as transactions is more likely to limit adoption than the language choice, so language choice is kind of irrelevant from that perspective.
I once had to google something about the Thread protocol. Impossible. I think I haven't seen a worse name for a tech project.
“You can dodge the effects to some degree, but not really.”

Yes really (statistically really) you can. You personally. Not the county or the region, but you personally can. The likelihood of being affected by fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and bad Mexican food can be reduced or eliminated by where you live and how you live in the US. Don’t live on a fault line. Don’t live on the Gulf Coast. Don’t live in a fire-prone forested area. Or build your house to be robust to the regional risks...ask the locals. You absolutely have meaningful agency in this. Whether or not it’s all just weather and the tzu-jan of Nature.
LOL, useless