skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google was an active collaborator with the state, on not just intelligence gathering but on soft-power influence-pushing (according to that article).

Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.

The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.

The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.
Sovereign nations also have the right to set rules and laws that restrict the actions of their executives. The people who govern America are subject to a lot of laws that restrict their power to channel sovereign rights, and for good reason.
I tried to find it but no luck.

The main part of the documentary is a teacher who can't afford to live anywhere near the school that employs her. I think the cheapest rent was $3,500/month and she made 60K per year (?). I believe she worked in San Francisco but had to move to Oakland. She had to take multiple buses and then walk a few miles from the final stop. But in the end she found a place in San Francisco near her school which she could afford.

It also showed Google and other large companies with their private buses. There was a lot of conflict between average citizens and the "Google buses", at least in the video there was.
Likely for the speculative accusations in the second half.
Not saying that this can't work in practice, but it sounds a bit passive-aggresive to me. I'd imagine if someone has some feedback for me, they'd talk to me directly instead of leaving a ticket in an issue tracker. You already mentioned that your company is small and this system has worked for you so far, but I doubt this will work at Facebook scale.
From Big to Small: Mathematical ‘Hocus-Pocus’ Saved Particle Physics
Is this necessarily a bad thing? If people want to eat at home long term instead, the economy shifts. If people want to go back to restaurants, they will reopen with new owners.
Questions to Ask a Techie on a Date
This happened to me as I was laid off from my first job in the US after a year.

It was perhaps the most insanely stressful period in my life. You cannot begin to fathom the desperation that comes with it. There is literally a ticking time bomb until the country is like “whoops, looks didn’t work out for you buddy. Just pack your bags and leave your life and go home. Bye!”. I think of myself generally as a rather carefree person but I couldn’t sleep at night because there was the very real chance that I would just not get a job in time. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

I basically did what the author describes... cast a pretty wide net in my job search. Couldn’t make it into the FAANGS but got another job just in time. The timing was pretty insane though. And as a person still on an H1B that worry is always on top of my mind, although as a fairly experienced engineer now, it is somewhat less intimidating.

The other thing that Citizens May not realize is that CBP can stop you from entering for any fucking reason whatsoever. Which is what prevented me from buying a house and making other long term investments.
If Cargo didn't exist I would believe you. But a group of people learning from past mistakes and doing most of the things right from the start has convinced me otherwise.

Sadly when it comes to C++ I don't think we'll get a do-over. Too many build systems exist already, and important libraries from a decade or two ago will use those systems until the end of time, and so will the projects that depend on them indirectly.
This is extremely off-topic at this point but I'm interested in other's thoughts on this:

I personally have a pretty solid 'no phone use while driving' policy. Honestly I don't really like talking on the phone so it's not that hard for me to ignore it in the rare cases that it rings while I'm driving.

However on Friday my mother had an outpatient surgical procedure and while I was driving her home my phone repeatedly rang, and I don't get many calls so this was very odd. On the third time I decided I would answer it. It turned out to be the nurse who had brought my mother out for me to pick up (no visitors in the hospital at this time) and she was afraid that she had not removed my Mother's IV. My mother checked and indeed it was still in place. So we turned around and went back to the hospital. The nurse was waiting outside in the same place, she opened the back door where my Mother was sitting with her leg up on the front passenger seat back which was folded all the way down, and removed the IV and wrapped the area.
Barbour is probably the most well-known waxed canvas jacket. They’re great, especially in areas where rain comes suddenly.
Which is hilarious if you're monetising their videos.
They were subjected to 170 years of mercantilism prior to the American Revolution. Any American ship that dared trade with any power other than the British Empire was deemed a "pirate" and was fired upon by cannon.
While there was always some fear of foreign war, it never rose to the level of century-long occupation or and domination that China experienced. The American colonies were just too unimportant until the French and Indian War compared to the Sugar colonies.

Even taking New York was kind of a side effect of New England being nearby and English gradually settling down from Connecticut, rather than part of some grand strategy.

Mercantilism was the law, but by defacto neglect Americans were trading with everyone with very few consequences until after the French and Indian war. It simply was too expensive for the British to enforce.
Basic Printing on OpenBSD
> It will be interesting if the EU seeks a similar strategy to grow its tech sector.

The EU is indeed slowly taking that direction:
https://www.ft.com/content/7738fdd8-e0c3-4090-8cc9-7d4b53ff3...
My understanding was that when a repo is deleted one of its forks will be chosen to become the root instead; however if the parent repo is taken down (via DMCA etc.) then all its forks are also removed.
Up until the widespread purge of Bernie bros this year (Chapo and Cumtown reddit bans, etc) it is the only thing that was censored at any significant scale. If you care about free speech you have to promote ideas people want to suppress.
Honest question for Chinese users of WeChat: have you ever thought twice about WeChat posts and communications, whether they'll be deemed "acceptable" to censors? Everyone I know self-censors nearly constantly, if unconsciously.

A good example: in a discussion of this case I was reading today in Chinese the author ironically noted that he couldn't summarize the US government's position because in a large WeChat group the content would be "deemed as against the rules" (视为违规)

Such is the state of WeChat discourse in 2020.
Does the 60 day timeline include the amount of time you need to be approved for the visa, as well?

I wasn't laid off, but am in the process of changing employers with my TN visa. This is probably the least smooth part of the entire interviewing/job changing process, at least from my perspective, as a software dev who doesn't have a degree in computer science or computer engineering.

Wish it were all a little more transparent, and that it wasn't just a big waiting game with lawyers and USCIS!
I find this super impressive! It parses man pages into structured data. I imagine it could also be used on "--help" output.

I wonder if one could automatically construct GUI's for users based on the structured data generated. That may make command lines be more discoverable and have an easier learning curve for new users.
Is there evidence of wechat spying on communication from the US? I understand “it makes sense”, but I’ve never heard anything provable.
What? No. That's the point of the system. It's the checks and balances part.

Or are you arguing Obama was an autocrat because his decisions were struck down by the Supreme Court?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-sup...
It would help legitimize openpower souch if someone would build some a20 based systems.

All eyes are on RISC-V right now, especially with ARM getting gobbled, but the game is open to anyone, any architecture, & it all comes down to making good chips at good power & price points.
Fascinating but doesn't seem relevant to the topic at hand.

The China of that history has been displaced by an undemocratic revolutionary regime that conquered the Chinese people.
Knowing how to cook has done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for going out or ordering in. In fact, sometimes I order the very things I cook to see how a pro makes them.

The trend propelling eating out is atomization. It simply isn't time/cost effective to cook for one person, probably not even two. Shopping, prep, cooking, and cleaning take so much time that even gourmet restaurants have completely reasonable prices.

Unless people start having big families and living in the exurbs, restaurants should be fine.
You have to get the apps to use them, the rest is a VPN or something similar.
Those were not the companies I had in mind with my Rust remark, but if you so wish, Swift, Kotlin/Native, Go, C++, .NET Native, Verona, Checked C, Objective-C.

It remains to be seen how much Rust they will actually make into tier 1 OS SDKs for userspace applications.

In fact, currently it looks more they are bringing their experience with Rust into their platform languages than anything else.

Swift memory ownership, Verona, C++ Core Guidelines checker, Kotlin/Native ownership rules.

Beware wishing for Julia's downfall with glass ceilings.
TIL gortex generics is just teflon. Always avoided gortex products because they seem to insist on very visible branding, but guess I've owned gortex products all my life.
What about this: to to downvote, you need to also specify a keyword as to why you are downvoting. It's a text field (not a pull down). Whatever you enter, will not be visible to anyone except to the person who wrote the comment you are downvoting.

Adds just enough friction to reduce downvotes a bit, provides information to the person being downvoted (no more "why all the hate?" comments), and doesn't pollute the experience for everyone else, since those are not visible by most users.
Hmm, what about being able to see a list of downvotes and explanations on a user’s profile? With maybe some minimum karma before you can see that on someone else’s profile?

So there is potential scrutiny by the community, but not in a way that disrupts the original discussion?
Just to be clear, the USA doesn’t have the infrastructure or legal framework in place to actually block internet traffic. The best they can do is remove DNS entries.
Look for Swedish outdoor brand Fjällräven, their G1000 material is waxed cotton. Not the cheapest but they are high quality and wil last.
Sounds good to me let's get rid of alcohol the US has a really unhealthy relationship with it anyway, let's do it.

Lockdown protects the public health and has long standing precedent. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/197/11

Just come out and say you're a selfish person who doesn't care if they harm people instead of hiding behind all of the pretense that it's restricting you too much.
Is the AstroTurf pay good? Coding on a Sunday has me wondering what else is out there.
> But here's an interesting experiment: rewrite my point that "it isn't the substance that destroys lives but the medical condition of addiction" - without using the offending tautology. Maybe I'll learn something.

This can't be done. Addiction isn't a medical condition. It is, according to this characterization, a description of a set of circumstances. You cannot determine whether somebody suffers from addiction by inspecting the person's behavior or reaction to whatever they're supposedly addicted to. You make a subjective judgment about whether their life would improve if they stopped doing it. Again, this is why the field of medicine gave up on using the word.

Compare https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3303 .

> It's perfectly reasonable to say sports injuries are what hurts people, not sports themselves.

"He's not hurt because a rock hit him in the head. He's hurt because his skull is broken."

This is a terrible analysis. It tells you that the solution is to not break your skull, regardless of whether you get hit with a rock / bullet / whatever. Of course, that's impossible. The solution is to avoid the trauma that leaves you with a broken skull, not to resist the breaking.

> Especially to make the point that what we want to focus on is reducing the injuries, not reducing the sports.

To the extent that you want to reduce injuries, you abandon that goal when you define the groups as "uninjured; no problems" and "already injured; nothing to be done". If that's how you see things, you're limited to fixing injuries that have occurred; you can't take any steps to prevent or avoid them. To do so would be to admit that sports might be dangerous even if you're not yet injured.
How many Chinese have you had intimate conversations with about this?
> Your IP address is not revealed when using Gmail, hey.com.

So what about the rest of the world who doesn't use Gmail, hey.com ?
The distance between the political class and everyone else is shocking. This brings to mind the time that Obama was trying to cut 529 tax breaks and even Democrats were like "Dude, wtf!"

For many of them it's been too long since they've had normal people problems. For immigrant experiences the gulf is even wider.
I've used it, it works. I trust cperciva to know what he's doing and he's been extremely awesome on customer service.

> Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?

Depends on your goals, eh?

"If all you wanted was money you could just rob a bank."
No, I don't think you've nailed causation of social acceptance. In Switzerland after they legalized heroin and decided it was not a legal problem but a medical problem, heroin use plummeted among young people. It became socially unacceptable.

Abortion is tricky because you can be against abortion but in favor of the right to choose. I know many people, even Christians, who hold this stance. We do know abortion rates go down when abortions are made legal. So that would seem to perhaps point to the laws not having much to do with social acceptance around abortion.

As far as marijuana we could use real numbers. Only 8% of Americans think marijuana should be illegal. So no I don't expect a big jump with legalization. I would imagine the number of people who find it socially acceptable to go from let's say 92% to maybe 93%. [1]

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-s...
Reposted on wired with permission. Original from Quanta Magazine here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-renormalization-saved-par...
They have a few different versions now, but the key to the membrane is that it’s really thin. It’s not like most average Joes can make their own even if they buy a bunch of PTFE pellets. It’s also overkill for most people and daily life, but Gore Tex (or some of the newer competitors) is worth it when backpacking or biking; you don’t want to carry the weight of a waxed canvas jacket for a long trip.
>The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.

How is for example Facebook better because it isn't somehow tied in to the US government? On the one hand the state still have access to all the data from Facebook it wants (NSA, warrants) but on the other they have a hard time protecting its users privacy rights. I'm not convinced private entities are any better. For a US citizen maybe Facebook is better as a private entity but for everyone else outside the US?

Personally I would rather put my data in a Chinese-owned Tiktok than an American one because of the extreme amount of data already flowing into US services. Even if Tiktok is used to spy on me I can't see how it would be any worse for an European than putting more data into US services.
Speed, too. For PyTorch to train models and run inference quickly, your Python code gets translated to C++/CUDA. Part of the idea with S4TF is to be able to write ML code in a single, fast language.
Now that I think of it, does anyone know if "abort" is among the computing terms to be avoided (like master, black list or sanity check)?
It's bad, but compared to other industries there are some real pluses.

At least you can actually hunker down and do these silly tests. There's a huge amount of advice on the technical stuff.

And yes it means people who have a job already are disadvantaged, but that also means people who have no income have a way in.

In a lot of other industries, there's no real way to boost your game. Often it's purely reputation of your school and previous employers, and your feedback on a failed application is just platitudes. People circle around for ages and never find anything but crappy advice that doesn't work.

It's also a process that makes bias a little bit harder to introduce. If your pal from the country club can't fizzbuzz, it will be hard to convince people to accept him. Not saying this is bullet proof, but in most jobs it's a lot more vague whether someone is terrible.
Is dark money like this somehow more lucrative for banks than just regular, say, business banking money?
I used the term “street heroin” instead of heroin because of all the complications that come along with it being illegal. This is a thread about black markets after all.

I don’t feel like my claims are controversial at all. Take cocaine. It’s use often leads to psychosis. Snorting cocaine damages the nose significantly. Injecting cocaine is probably the worse drug for the number of punctures a person will do because of the short high and incredible addictive nature of the drug. Cocaine damages the cardiovascular system. It leads to ulcers. It decreases appetite so strongly it often leads to malnutrition. Cocaine increases the risk for seizures and strokes. Cognitive impairment often occurs after long heavy use. This is completely ignoring the social costs of cocaine use, which are significantly higher than being diabetic. The cartels don’t profit from insulin.

I’d rather be diabetic than have years of heavy cocaine use behind me. I’ve been close to people with type 2 diabetes and people that went through cocaine addiction.
If you hold more than 5% of a public traded company you have to announce it. That will be the latest when the US will invoke national security laws and either buy or just take it all back.

Taiwan would do the same in the case of TSMC.
Every one of the numerous studies done in this area over the years has come to the clear conclusion that high-skilled immigration produces a net economic benefit to the country and its workers (here's a recent one - https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Impact-of-H-...).

Silicon Valley itself wouldn't exist had it not been openly attracting talent from all over the world, and the difficulty in getting visas and residency over the last few years is already showing its effects as more and more major software companies are popping up outside the US.
Tooling doesn't make the language great. Java is still objectively worse than many other languages, especially Kotlin.
I don't believe that. Even within the elite, there are different grades of jobs and achievement. Preparation can be the difference.
Agreed completely, so I don’t think the judicial review here is unnecessary or unwarranted.
British invented a tightly woven cotton called Ventile for RAF pilots, which is waterproof, windproof and breathes quite well when not wet.

It has some disadvantages, but it's natural, it doesn't burn and it doesn't make funny noises. There are even some certified organic variants made in Switzerland by Stotz. Many manufacturers in Germany, Scandinavia and UK are adding this to some of their jackets, so it's worth looking around.

Else, Paramo has developed a clever cloth called Analogy, which works in a manner similar to animal fur to push rain out and keep you warm. It's not perfect either, and it's based on synthetic fibers, but it doesn't have nasty plastic coatings. It's used by some mountain guides in my region, and when I asked they were quite satisfied.
I concur that the H1B rules are awful. We should make it as easy as possible for the best in the world to come here. The laws as they stand directly abuse non-citizens for the benefit of companies, some of which are US based. The H1B holders don’t vote. The beneficiaries of a better system are more indirect, and less likely to make a case. (Most of us benefit when the best talent in the world is free to come here and build/create/pay taxes)

However... The system is arbitrary and can punish people short term. It seems strange to buy a house in a country that can kick you out on no notice through no fault of your own.
"When the woman left London on March 1, she had a sore throat and cough as she boarded a flight home to Vietnam, but no one noticed.
By the time she got off the flight in Hanoi 10 hours later, 15 other people who had been on the plane with her were infected."

Wow. 15. It does say March, so perhaps masks weren't in broad use? Still, though, 15 is a lot.
China's commercial policies seem designed to ensure that the CCP can deliver on their grand bargain with the Chinese people. Specially, in exchange for political subserviance to the dictates of the party the CCP will make China a economically prosperous nation. So I expect the CCP to hold on to their current exclusionary policies toward non-domestic apps as an more open playing field would endanger the dominance of domestic players.
Java might be the most successful programming language. It is a solid choice among many different fields. It is used on huge infrastructure projects (Apache Foundation), governments, big tech companies such as amazon, ibm, google, apple for many large scale services. It can do web, ml, GUIs, it's still strong among academics. On top of that it offers a great programming experience with excellent IDE support and it's ecosystem is huge. Even if you don't like the language itself , you can choose between Kotlin,Scala,Clojure that run on the JVM.

I think that Java is seriously being downplayed by HN crowd.
Should employers cut your salary if you change cities?
> Las Vegas is Open! You can fly there, stay in a hotel, gamble, eat, etc... but yet Vegas has tons of closures. People just don't want to go there right now for business or pleasure.

Singling out these re-openings misses the math of the problem. In 2019, casinos were operating at a certain capacity. Every Xth slot machine was occupied.

The gambling floors tend to have a LOT of vertical space. I don't doubt that their air treatment system is normal to poor quality (aside from whatever features tend to erode your ability to judge risks). As occupancy decreases, particularly for voluminous entertainment spaces, transmission risk declines.

The best antidote to COVID risk in public buildings is to decrease the density of people there. This rule applies as much to cherished public institutions as it does to sin industries.

Sure there's some occupancy rate where every Yth slot machine is being used, where the risks drop low enough to counteract the fun of gambling for someone. At some lower Zth slow machine occupancy, risks would be nil. Should the acceptable risk be higher for public education of essential employees? Yes, but the physical reality is that there is LOT of gambling floor space, and disproportionately a lot of air volume for that floor space.

The people going there are probably going to catch COVID from going out to eat (or other highly direct interactions), which they were going to at home anyway if we're being honest with ourselves.