skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me give you my latest anecdote. I order a can of paint from Lowes. They send me the wrong color. I reach out to their customer support. I ask them to send me the correct color of paint. They inform me that they don't have power to do anything as they aren't the correct team. I ask who the correct team is. They give me a phone number to call for a customer support line that closed three hours ago. I call the next day, and they tell me that they too are powerless to do anything and that I need to return the can of paint I ordered online to the brick and mortar store.

At this point, I don't give a shit about the $16 of paint, I'm not spending two hours of my day to return this can of paint at the lowes store on the other side of town. It's about the principle. A sane company would have replied with the first (and only) customer support team with something like "I'm so sorry! We are shipping you the correct color right now." That sane response used to be the norm 10 years ago, because a $16 loss on one can of paint is far less than losing a customer for life who will now make it their life's mission to deter friends and family from patronizing your business.
This isn't anything new, people don't seem to make the connection very often, but this kind of behavior is ancient and just takes different forms from time to time.

The disease is the moral authority police & moral superiority complex.

Humans have this compulsion to be "right", to punish people for not being righteous enough, and generally to cultivate a feeling of their own moral superiority.

This is accomplished with rules, usually somewhat vague and needing the ability to be misinterpreted, overinterpred, or just somewhat related to "punishments". If your policy is "don't be a jerk" it's quite hard to misinterpret that into zealotry, but a complex code of conduct? That's the meat and potatoes of this human failing.

People rejected organized religions because they were full of this kind of person, pepperpots determined on punishing each other and everyone else. The failing logic is that this sort of behavior was caused by organized religion.

The self-righteous and overzealous young people (and not so young too) just changed topics, they aren't thumping their bibles of soap boxes about not loving Jesus the right way or following god's will (some still are, just fewer) the pepperpots of today are getting up on their social media soapboxes and doing their morality masturbation about their brand of justice.

The insidious thing, or why they are so widespread and successful is that their message and their sets of rules, on a quick glance, seems reasonable and rather supportable by most folks. The people disagreeing with this new justice are usually the ones yelling nonsense and that opposition draws battle lines where a lot of people pull themselves into the "justice" side to disassociate themselves from the vocal opposition because they can't quite figure out what is wrong with the justice crusaders.

It is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong with this new generation of moralists, so most people stay pretty silent about it.

It's not new, just the same old monster in a different costume.
Real software.
I support codes of conduct but this is EXACTLY the thing that opponents point to when they oppose them. I expected this post to be a rant against codes of conduct and instead it wound up leaving me wondering if NumFOCUS and JupyterCon was in the wrong here...this guy offered criticism and that is NOT a fucking violation of ANY CoC -- if you can't handle criticism, don't make public statements. The hilarious is that Joel Grus didn't care -- like what the hell...this is why sometimes I feel like proponents of CoCs are at times their own worst enemy when it comes to attaining wide support for them.
Say more? I gave an example of what I meant: Show HN posts. Is that a phenomenon you perceive on Show HN posts?

I don't think it makes sense to ban criticism everywhere, or even most places.
A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that.

Cancel culture has to stop.
There’s ~1 billion Apple products and ~10 billion annually in payment from Google to Apple. Apple would need to make $10/yr per device in order to replace the revenue from Google. That’s a fairly achievable goal.

Of course, there are more complications than that simple figure, but it does provide a order of magnitude estimation.
Leaving aside whether this'd be a good policy for a conference, this argument doesn't really check out for me.

You can exchange ideas without making judgements on other ideas. Like, let your ideas speak for themselves, marketplace of ideas etc, or even make comparisons without saying your ideas are _better or worse_ than other ideas.

I'm sure you wouldn't run out of useful and engaging conference content even with some hypothetical arbitrary rules like "don't say idea X is bad", "don't say person X is wrong about idea Y", like, at worst you'd have to make some minor edits to your slides and reword things to be less personal, unless your entire gimmick is that your presentation is a callout post.
Exactly! FaunaDB was the recent topic of discussion and I was like oh here we go again...

> So yeah it's just a command but yikes, who uses PHP in 2020, right?

Lol yeah, but PHP 8 is looking really nice
The only thing Canada is good at, is sucking its own dick.
This instance is BS
True. The United States is the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (School of the Americas, Bay of Pigs, Iranian-Contra, Operation AJAX, COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird, United Fruit...)
Some of the numerous Cisco vulnerabilities have all the hallmarks of government persuasion.

Not to mention the wholesale hacking of their products bound for export:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608141/snowden--the-nsa-p...
Be aware that your comment unfortunately contributes to the current division. It's subtle, and you may not be aware of it, but the tone you use, the words "rotten" and "madness", the emphasis on "end other people" - they have the pathos and call to action of an "us vs them" atmosphere.

What is destroying society is anger, emotion, and tribalism. Our best hope of saving it is deliberation, consideration, and the dreary slog of rational understanding debate. Strong views expressed dispassionately and all that.
I never thought about the blue tooth aspect. I could picture some interesting projects now.

I am also looking forward to the microphone on version 2. Voice control will be fun for kids.
If the 'target' is OK with a more-critical, even a hyperbolically- or teasingly- critical tone, why not allow it?

Lots of big personalities carry on 'feuds' that are largely acts, to their mutual. The back-and-forth, even with campy insults, creates a framework for understanding the key points and evolution of the disagreement.

Using more forceful, even facetiously disrespectful language expands the range of imagery/metaphor/emotion that can be deployed, often to humorous or insightful effect. It makes conversations, whether live in person or slowly over months of counter-performances, more memorable.

If such talk rubs a few people the wrong way, out of some expansive concern for targets who do not themselves find the tone/language objectionable, I'd love to find a place where those people can be comfortable.

But I don't want to sabotage the value of the free-to-all discourse for the much larger group of people who find vibrant, disputative, raw communication – even to the point of prickliness – more efficient and preferable.

We're losing something if we require all speech to be sanitized for maximal gentility under new secular Sunday School rules.
People that blame it on social media maybe forgot that we once had a civil war that killed 2.5% of the population of the entire country.

The things that divide people are slow and many. The creep along slowly until at some point the differences are so great people believe those differences are worthy of death.
Health insurance premiums are just total healthcare costs for the insured lives plus x% for operations of the health insurance company. If all hospitals have to raise prices to meet IT costs, then presumably the total cost of healthcare for the insured lives goes up, and hence the health insurance premium has to go up.

So yes, typically if your vendor's suppliers increase price, then your vendor will increase their price too. If your vendor has big margins and you have the ability to switch to a different vendor, then maybe the vendor will eat the cost, but health insurance is already a low margin business, so that's not likely.
Yep, this is the logical conclusion of trying to solve all minor social conflicts with a complex and legalistic set of rules and processes.

Nothing got fixed. Everyone walks away angry. It would have been a lot simpler to ask the author to tone it down a bit next time.
Yeah but what makes a document 'original'? There's no hashsum, NFC or anything in those fancy pieces of paper is it?
I haven't built anything that requires significant performance tweaking other than some caching and SQL optimisations. Maybe PHP 8 will bring an even better performance when it gets released

> HP roles typically pay 20% less

Yeah, true. Hence why I am a React dev professionally
I can imagine Steele advising against it, and Gosling ignoring him and doing it anyway. I earnestly hope that is what happened.

I cannot account for Java having retained so many misfeatures of C despite having no backward-compatibility constraint, other than that nobody was paying any attention.
> I have a theory

Pretty sure they were just sharing thoughts.
got anything from the past 50 years?
It does in the sense of intent -- if they built the tool for the express purpose of avoiding copyright restriction, they would do more than hide it in a random unit test or code comment.

Putting it in the README itself would be a far stronger signal of intentional malfeasance.

In the unit test... it's pretty clear the original developer's intent was simply to pick a video, and chose a trivially popular one (taylor swift), with likely no mind towards copyright (or its avoidance).

That is, the tool happens to be capable of the job, because it simply has purpose to download videos, with no awareness of copyright law.
I always wonder if the US is an outlier in stuff like this with Mockingbird, MKUltra etc. or if they are the ones that get caught and publicised the most in relation to other countries.
I see it as a reason to applaud centralized code signing. You can install anything you want, anyway, and I want filters so that the drivers I do install aren't shovelware. This certification process is one of those filters.
Well, maybe don't do that then. You could address the ideas from that talk instead of the talk specifically, and have a slide, like,
"My talk is a response to this other talk by this person and I encourage you to check it out".
> How do they do this? Well, a lot of WebSockets, in the case of Reflex and LiveView, as well as very tightly coupled server interactions. As you can see in the LiveView demo, which I highly recommend, these frameworks tend to operate sort of like reactive DOM libraries on the front end – in which the framework figures out minimal steps to transform from one state to another - except those steps are computed on the server side and then generically applied on the client side. They also do a lot more data storage & state management on the server-side, because a lot of those interactions which wouldn’t be persisted to the server are now at least communicated to the server.

Reminds me of Wicket's AJAX support, which is still the best web development experience I've ever had. You keep the state in the server-side session, when the user pushes a button you update that state and re-render those parts of the DOM that changed because of it. It dovetails nicely with the whole framework being properly component-oriented - rather than the page-oriented MVC style, you make encapsulated, reusable widgets that know what their own state is and how to render themselves based on it, and the actual top-level page becomes almost an afterthought.
The oddest of World Series ends with the most 2020 moment of the season
Interesting that DHS's public twitter has no word of this, and instead is a full-time campaign ad for the border fence.

It's also ironic that for all the pervasive government surveillance of the internet, this stuff just flies right under the radar. I thought the whole point of this surveillance was for our protection?
I think you're right, however in general, one _ought_ to mature out of that phase and be able to separate the two.
If there's a zero day, there's not a lot you can do. NHS got hit so bad because they were running very old Windows versions. A lot of embedded systems have no upgrade paths (MRIs running embedded XP should probably not be on the network at all).

Hospitals need full backup machines and with health care costs already through the roof, that will just add more. Even if you have all your order entry machines setup to not make external Internet connections except to update servers, one bad e-mail getting through and you could be in trouble.
Yea, there's very little .. evidence listed.
Where do you see reduced pain on that page? I would have guessed adrenaline to be suppressing the pain, but that link talks about adrenal insufficiency. “Pain” is only mentioned in the context of experiencing new pains in the abdomen.
Citation needed. What is the differential improvement a CoC can provide over a good implementation without a CoC? Code of conducts are not codifying anything mysterious or disputed that a good common sense judgement cannot arrive.

On the flip side, a CoCs can give bad implementations a veneer of legitimacy. And whenever humans relinquish their best judgement to an inanimate piece of text written by enthusiastic people, bad things happen. It makes the way to say "It is the policy", "That's what it writes there", "I didn't make the rules" and get away with not taking responsibility for the complexity of adjudicating over human affairs.

Law is complicated enough that it took millennia of iterations to arrive its current form and we still have to employ tons of dedicated professionals to apply it while having a reasonable false positive rate. I can't understand the hubris of the author or enforcer of a CoC thinking that they can possibly be just, fair and overall improve the state of things by making and using their own piece of text at the expense of good human judgement.
>diversity of opinions

It takes a level of maturity that most people never reach to handle real diversity of opinions. This is why universities used to be small places with only highly interested intellectuals trained to handle that diversity. And even they weren't great at it. Modern universities are a joke, and they are better than most organizations.
Wow. Um... no. I don't think that disability or other loss of ability diminishes an individual's humanity or personhood.

Let's just agree to disagree.
It's a bit ugly, it's a bit slow, but holy fuck, with a few tiny edits of the carcassone module + working from home, we wasted so many hours and built a map, probably larger than an average room...

All in all, it was fun!
afaiu the talk was removed from or not put on the website of the conference, Jeremy recorded a new version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q6sLbz37gk
Virtual reality is pushing the boundaries of performance.
Most things that ought to occur do not.
You gotta wait for it to be declassified. Syria was likely CIA funded. Same with Libya. Just wait a bit. It all comes out after everyone's stopped caring.
Zero days may get the headlines, but attackers are finding a lot of value in leveraging old vulnerabilities. CISA, FBI and NSA have issued several advisories over the last month highlighting an overarching theme of advanced persistent threat groups targeting unpatched vulnerabilities lately.
What I just said it's that's what most people do. I clarified that this is in spite of "they" typically referring to multiple people. It's helpful for non and new English speakers if you explain these colloquialisms.
It was hard to read this blog.

The author reminds me of a character in The First Circle, Rubin, an avowed Marxist imprisoned in the USSR. Rubin sees his punishment as unjust but he believes this kind of judicial error is a small bump in the road to a communist utopia.

Towards the end of the article, the author accuses "the NumFOCUS policy" of failing to "consider the mental health of people that are accused". But if someone has a mental breakdown after being criticized that does not mean the critic did anything wrong. Legal and moral norms exist to allow us to answer questions like "did this person do anything wrong?" or "did this person cause this other person's mental breakdown?" I think it's naive to expect codes of conduct to improve on what we already have.

I suppose I think codes of conduct are as good as the people you get to enforce them. But that's the thing: the people willing to volunteer their time to be cops tend to be the last people you'd want in those roles. If codes of conduct are not a replacement for fair-minded people maybe they're more trouble than they're worth.

Also, while I did not find his presentation insulting, I do think he made a mistake by spending so much of it directly critiquing someone else's presentation. It was in bad taste though not -- of course -- the kind of thing that needs to be punished.
The entire year of 2020?
DHS’ proposed rule for salary-based allocation of H1B cap [pdf]
>an organism is conscious if there is something that is like to be that organism.

I am afraid i don't seem to parse that
NumFOCUS is wrong and this activity reflects poorly on them.
LOL’d
At least in the cases you mention (HOA or police) there is value in the service they provide and it only becomes a problem when they get overrun by people on a power trip.

On the other hand, the whole CoC thing feels like it was created by people on a power trip, and/or as a virtue signalling instrument to appear "inclusive", and/or a convenient character assassination tool that can be selectively enforced. Keep in mind that "violation of the code of conduct" sounds much worse than "this person offended me/made me uncomfortable" even though in most cases they are used to refer to the same thing.

People for the most part know how to behave themselves, disagreements can be resolved in private between the involved parties and if someone keeps being a dick you just don't engage with them (note that a CoC will not change anything if the person intends to keep harassing their victim). We've been working fine like that, both online and in the real world without any CoC (the law is enough to deal with actually serious cases).

A CoC doesn't add anything to people already acting in good faith (other than being a thing they can be "cancelled" about), but does nothing against a dedicated malicious actor who couldn't care less about it anyway.

Someone wanting to instigate drama and intentionally get offended must've said something about "inclusivity", everyone jumped on it as a virtue-signalling tool and now here we are.
What I find, is that my investment in learning has bifurcated.

I invest in learning how to negotiate the s/w systems I have no choice but to use, (jira) to my advantage. There is a strong cost/benefit outcome favouring this learning.

I invest in learning enough about things otherwise that interest me, to decide if I need to deep dive or not. I did a haskell MOOC for this reason (Glasgow Uni) and the outcomes were mixed: I had no opportunity to move this into the first category (directly applicable at work) but I felt very motivated by what I learned about FP and typed languages.

I try not to over-invest in anything in this space, learning is hard. I'm 59. I hope I can continue to learn, and maybe even pick up the pace, but learning is hard, and being made to do courses in stuff I don't want to (leadership, presentation skills, new whizz-bang techniques to do old things) costs me brain time I think of now a as a precious asset.
You should read the book “The Coddling of The American Mind”. It’s largely about the cancel culture, over protection, and how the voice on college campuses has been changing. How we went from college being a safe place for open debate and discussion to an environment which is becoming less welcoming of differing opinions and perspectives. The authors try to identify the origins of the change and use data and statistics to back up their claims. I thought it was an interesting read.
Social media has been doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to being a scapegoat for anything to do with people being shitty for a good few years now.
NumFOCUS is wrong and this action reflects poorly on them.
I don't think I agree with this. I also live in MA, and I think, in general, the state has done a pretty good job. But we all live within our own bubbles. 5 years in Boston and I never heard a "boston" accent outside of Fenway Park. Does my experience represent, at all, the whole of MA? Probably not.

And with open borders to neighboring states (with weakish quarantine rules) I'm not surprised it's been unable to contain this thing.

At a glance, Plymouth is doing poorly. Probably driven by beachgoers and travelers. Shrug. This is hard.
I've never had to use a maillist patch myself, but from the ones that I've glanced at, I have this same problem, that formatting, syntax highlighting is absent. It seems like this would be an easy problem to fix by using a better viewer, so that might be enough to make it comprehensible.
> The hilarious is that Joel Grus didn't care

It's probably not the case here, but imo it's a feature of CoCs that they protect people who can't publicly object themselves for whatever reason.

Like, for an extreme example, if I know I'm gonna get harassed if I make noise about someone's genuinely harmful behavior, then it's good that I can publicly be like "oh no it's fine don't worry" and there's still a process to stop them from harming more people.
> when implemented well, they can be hugely beneficial to communities.

Does anyone have them implemented well? CoC enforcement is punishment-based social structure and like other such structures (e.g. law enforcement) it is a terrible weapon that requires proper counterbalances to not end as a tool of oppressive tyranny.

Society developed such counterbalances for thousands of years so we ended with current rights of accused for fair trial. Unfortunately people who reinvent these social wheels (as CoC) often reinvent them poorly, with much emphasis on punishment and minimal emphasis on rights of accused.
> if they could be broken, we'd likely see many more attacks that can successfully solve it

I've used buster for years, it's free and open source, one click to solve: https://github.com/dessant/buster
The problem isn't strong views. It's weak people.

There is a time and a place to coddle people. There is _also_ a time and a place for people's whose ideas are garbage to be declared as such and thrown into the bin.

There was a time when people could discuss ideas without having those ideas be internalized within an individual. It is entire possible to attack an idea or way of thinking to break it down and see how it works without involving a single person.

If you want to have constructive dialog about these kinds of things, people being "offended" will only shut down conversation instead of fostering it. Thicken up your skin, decouple yourself from these ideas, and talk about them like adults.