skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lawyers will be lawyers. I assume this request from Apple’s side originates from on of the legal teams, who are paid to pre-emotive ensure Apple won’t be sued.

I have a story that makes me relate from Microsoft/Skype. A few months after Microsoft acquired Skype, a JIRA ticket was opened by one of the compliance teams at Microsoft with a simple request. Remove the mooning emoji from Skype [1], as it could be considered offensive in some countries and thus Microsoft could be at risk of being sued.

All of Skype erupted. The mooning icon was a symbol of playful cheekiness at Skype and has always been part of the app, and Skype never got sued for over 10 years. There were about 1,200 Skype engineers at the time and that ticket had more than 500 comments from engineers protesting this change. Some made good arguments. Some voiced frustration. Others called that this is a step towards censoring.

It didn’t matter. The icon was removed, the ticket closed.

In a similar vain, I’ll assume that not everyone at Apple will agree with this “violation”. But it won’t matter, as long as the legal teams says it’s a risk to have apps with such names and icons in Apple’s store.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=mooning+skype
> You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent.

I'm not sure I agree there. It's notoriously hard to get/keep a research position, especially a) in academia and b) outside CS. There are a decent number of graduate student slots, some postdocs, and then you're thrown into the thunder dome.

The competition itself--and the resulting uncertainty--chases a lot of people into other careers. The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed.

It's not hard to imagine some policy tweaks that could have kept some of them in research.
The flip side is that Apple cannot afford to lose such a case because it would shine a very dark light on them.

If you have anywhere near a solid case they will probably settle for a handsome amount.
And then there is realistic violence to humans but ain't nobody gonna ban popular FPSes :-)
>A few weeks after the previous incident, I was looking at work on Radar which my “iBuddy” had copied directly from what I had done, and I noticed a note under the note section of a hidden slide on a deck that she had uploaded and it was an indirect suicide/murder threat. Given the history of the team, I felt worried sick and stayed home that day from fear of showing up to work and being harmed. I alerted the senior manager who told the iBuddy. The “iBuddy” followed up with another email about a child who was murdered by her parents and was thrown into the river and a person who had committed suicide by hanging himself.

My heart breaks for this person. They ended up on a team filled with people exhibiting borderline personality disorder traits, entrenched and protected by corporate interests. Literally my worst nightmare. Compound this with the other factors in this situation (first job, immigrant status) and it's truly horrible. I feel so bad for them.
I also think the name is kind of tacky/in poor taste.

I agree. When I turned my wife's old MacBook into a media server, I needed an app like this. I chose one that didn't share its name with controlled substance.

Branding 101. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
African Continental Free Trade Area goes into effect today
Apple made a business decision. They are free to ignore the Chinese governments wishes, at the cost of access to the Chinese market place.

The reviewer works for Apple, and has to follow Apples rules, not make up their own. I also dislike that Apple kowtows to the CCP, but that is their choice and given the large revenues involved, I understand it. I won’t tell Apple Shareholders to leave a legal market and give up a quarter of their share value, just in order to meet my ethical standards.

You may enjoy walking around your home wearing no pants. That’s your right. But when you go to a work place, it’s your employers right to tell you to put your pants back on.
> Genuine question here: what's the better way?

I think the candidate should be given a choice - whether they want to solve one of these tricky puzzles or work on a domain problem.
Even if she did, would she have been able to even stay while the lawsuit plays out over months to years? Unlikely.
> So a big reason for the lack of desalination is a lack of demand. Yes, some places are experiencing a lack of water but those are the exception to the norm.

With yet another year of drought in SoCal and heavy fires as a result of dryer weather in Norcal seem to suggest otherwise: I don't think it's a lack of demand at all.

Carlsbad actually built their desalination (Poseidon) plant when I still lived in CA permanently and the cost was the biggest hurdle, as was waste management, as they sold the water to neighboring areas at a premium in order to recover the costs in a public-private undertaking. Carlsbad is one of the more affluent cities in San Diego County so they had the money during the bubble economy boom before the crash.

Another one is/has been scheduled to be rolled out in Huntington Beach apparently [0].

I definitely think desalination should be explored, tested, and refined especially as the CO river source is/has been closed and CA needs to take advantage of the massive resource it has in addition to reducing consumption while figuring out the waste issue with desalination. And nothing could accelerate it faster than CA's massive need for fresh water. A Day Zero situation is something that should be avoided at all costs and in incredibly myopic in what is essentially the 5th largest economy in the World.

Personally speaking, I always figured it would be perto-states trying to diversify that would be the biggest financial backers of these facilities, as well as massive solar farms, as the automotive World moved further way from fossil fuel and OPEC goes to ever greater money losing schemes to prop up the price of oil. Especially in a World with evermore cheap and hot fiat being thrown at stupid things like Airbnb and Doordash IPOs.

0: https://angeles.sierraclub.org/news/blog/2020/07/stop_the_po...
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE.

Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name, please explain what your company does.
JSON is bad, but as someone who doesn't know what an XPI is offhand, .firefox-extension seems kinda nice?
This is no different from being arrested, is it? You can be arrested for probable cause, i.e. if the police think you committed a crime, even if you committed no crime. You can have your day in court later if you're innocent, but you certainly can't fight or try to escape.

Unless you think it's also bad that the police can detain people who haven't committed a crime / should allow people being arrested to fight back and escape?
Honestly if your name your product stupid things I would think that some of us might be choosing not to download your product as a result. And if a store decides not to sell your product because of this it’s really their prerogative. Saying you violated their terms with impunity for 6 years doesn’t mean they lose the right to correct the mistake.

This name is pretty rings rather badly in my ears, though I’m not offended by such things. I’d feel similarly if they had named it “fuck sleep”. I’m not offended by the word “fuck” but I don’t really want to buy products that are named that. Do apps need energy drink names to be successful? I’ve noticed a trend in talking about men’s balls in ads, manscaping, underwater fart jokes. It’s seems so much like idiocracy more then something offensive.

On the other hand a rose is still a rose. So I agree they should probably just rename it. I doubt there would be any major loss from doing so.
no, it would be 9 years ago, 8 years ago, etc.

That is my favorite rebuttal to that overused quote
Puritanism? These are Macs, this is a classy place, we take our drugs to the bathroom thank you very much. Amphetamine.app is so gauche!
I disagree. First, I recommend sending this to the following people:
- Any congressional representatives that target Apple for antitrust
- Facebook's PR team.
- Various tech new outlets

If anyone is willing to make a big case out of this then you can use that media attention to grow your application's user base. This has potential for easy free advertisement through media controversy.

After you have gotten enough free advertisement, go forward with this recommendation of changing your branding.
It may be a little nastier than that.

In some cases, they're selective about which groups will and will not be sheltered from offense. And they may refuse to admit that, let alone engage in a public, civil debate about their choices.
As a hiring manager, I would never bring on an employee to scapegoat them. I had the experience, once, where I felt the VP of Operations was waiting for me to fail instead of supporting my success. I chalked it up to bad leadership on her part which threatened my ability to achieve the goals I was tasked with. Guess what? No one cares. Part of the pathway to success is to be able to navigate around such obstacles. It took me two years to build up trust with her and turn it into a productive relationship. As a manager, I learned a lot about what not to do by watching her, which was a pretty invaluable lesson.
What a dumb application of this rule in this context. I remember a similar app called caffeine (not sure what happened to it).

Amphetamine is great - I use it daily to stop annoying infosec rules from locking my computer after 2min since I’m working from home. It’s my favorite kind of software, focuses on one issue and does it well.
I've been trying to work on my outdoor skills... I already rock climb and ski a little bit. I am hoping to learn to lead easy ice climbs and get into the backcountry to ski this winter, including some overnight trips. We got out today, booted up a snowy canyon... only to find no ice. Oh well, that is the process: we just keep going out and doing progressively more difficult goals, and try not to get killed in a slide or a fall.

Also, my company has hired someone to work directly under me, so I hope to learn to be a competent manager, which I've never done in a formal situation. I've been reading a lot and reflecting on my own experiences, and have been documenting our processes. I will have a plan to onboard the new person soon.

Finally, if the covid situation eases up later in the year, I hope to return to performing music. I've been in a lot of bands and performed solo, or even one-off gigs with other musicians, but I hope to be able to build a band that a) I am fronting for > 80% of the material and b) brings in some income beyond what it takes to operate. That part of the business has its own set of learning curves, at least as far as I can tell from my years as a semi-professional side guy. The plan there is to start as a solo performer and gradually add other musicians, using low-rent bar gigs as rehearsals, but I am not sure how that will work out.
I'd like to focus on this particular argument, because it's a fallacy I see a lot:

> This is actually the problem restaurants are facing: How to adapt to change technology and consumers habits?

The implication is that technology is an inevitable, uncontrollable force. But of course that's not true: we create technology and the laws around it. Restaurants only need to adapt because GrubHub, et al. have decided they want to shape technology and consumer habits in a way that makes their VC investors money. It makes no more sense to ask restaurants to adapt than it does to tell tech companies that they can't change technology like this.

Put another way: delivery platforms are pissing on restaurants and telling them that it's raining. We can either tell restaurants to suck it up and carry umbrellas now, or we can tell delivery platforms to stop pissing on them. I'd prefer the latter.
A Randomized Self-Experiment on Sleeping with Weighted Blankets
We have been trying to help Infineon get onto its own feet for years and years, it just isn't happening. The investment it would take for competing with TSMC would require massive government support with very few benefits. Specialized chips with higher margins but older tech make more sense than mass production with the most advanced process.

Same with solar or battery tech, we have the tech and the people but economically it isn't feasible to have production in the EU.
I don’t get it. This person was abused to the moon and back and al they want is for Apple to “fix” it? How would that even work.

I would say: lawyer up and make them pay through the nose. Once that happens 1) all the people involved in this will get canned / have a really bad time 2) Apple will put some kind of measures in place to prevent this kind of abuse.

Also, hello Apple HR? Wtf are you doing? I understand you give 0 fcks about the employee, but your job is to protect the company? Spoiler Alert: by this story existing you have failed miserably.
Are you seriously equating a company choosing not to host an app with the genocidal policies of a communist government?
Partly we are all hopelessly impressed by American salesmanship.
For example our businesses ignored things like the Acorn Archimedes and bought PCs from IBM instead.
There is another interesting project. It's more of a lightweight and simple photo gallery.
- https://photoview.github.io
- https://github.com/photoview/photoview
And this is why blindly following regulations, without truly understanding their consequences is dumb. From what I heard, the Trump administration got flak for bailing out of the Paris agreement because they felt that the agreement was similarly dumb.
They don't have a point based on the wording of their own rule, because amphetamines are not a class of controlled substances.

They don't have a point based on basic common sense either, because this application isn't telling people to use amphetamines. It's a metaphor.
The two problems can coexist at the same time. I feel this is attributing arguments to a simple concept that it never made.
Accountability, agenda, actions in that order.

So start with asking for the meeting to be recorded. Refuse to attend unless it is using the excuse that you may want to review bits of it later. They can’t refuse for accountability reasons.

Agenda means they need to set a time window and agenda for the meeting up front. That keeps it in writing and the scope well defined. If there isn’t one there’s no reason to attend so carry on your normal duties. This becomes a virus quickly which trashes junk meetings. If you’re complained at for not attending, there was no agenda. If you don’t attend people see the person’s meetings as not mandatory and this disempowers them slowly.

Actions. Make sure recordable actions come from the meeting and make sure they are accountable for tracking them and that they are delivering business value. If they aren’t then they don’t need to exist. Escalate that. Even as a junior a long time ago I asked for concrete actions at the end of a meeting and managed to cause a company wide shit storm :)

After doing this a few times, organisers who rule or even just exist in the chaos and distraction are marginalised or made to conform to order and the good of the team.

Edit: warning this doesn’t scale down to small companies.
Scott Adams has a way of thinking about this that he casts as "Systems vs Goals", where he advocates developing a talent stack of skills that work well together towards unspecified, undefined future goals. He says his talent stack is comedian+cartoonist, he's not amazing at either individual skill but he's one of the best at the combination which allowed him to create Dilbert.

I got value from this way of thinking but I also think specific goals are necessary (e.g. as a startup founder targeting a specific market, product or vision) and that there are some domains that demand you to be the best in a single talent vertical due to a winner take all tendency (e.g. athelete, musician, professional gambler - although in any of these we can still distinguish systems & talent stacks from goals).
Fusion research needs a lot of money and resources. I honestly doubt it can be done by a startup. Nuclear fission was done by very well funded military research. It is true that China has licensed basically every nuclear design, but France is still a leader in nuclear fission.
McLuhan on the Disorders of Our Collective Consciousness
Some people are incredibly stupid and willing to hurt those around them if that allows them to exercise their whims. The rest of society needs to be protected from them, and that is a key function of government.

Someone close to me had a coworker who doesn’t believe in the COVID-19 virus and feels that his employer’s guidelines were designed to embarrass the president. He came to work with symptoms, and infected dozens of people, a few of which are hospitalized.

It’s branch of stupid human behavior that’s always with us. Google the history of “Typhoid Mary”.
Has anyone done the numbers on Coronvirus hospitalizations and wood burning stoves?
This would give unelected officials the power to detain people "suspected" of having a disease. I would much rather live in a world where the government does not have that power.

All the government has to do is declare a medical emergency (which they can do arbitrarily) and they can entirely subvert the justice system. This is the kind of thing conspiracy theorists have been laughed at for fearing, and now people like you openly support these authoritarian policies.
(almost) same here. Had the DX though and quickly upgraded to 8MiB (by adding 36 RAM chips in DIP). Still when compiling the kernel (took about 20m, iirc), I left X11. Swapping wasn't that much fun using a single 65MB RLL(!) drive.
I'm interested in doing that as well, I've often thought of being able to go from Pascal -> ast + symbol table -> executable and back.

You would want to preserve all the whitespace, to make it completely reversible. The ability to modify the symbol table to directly rename a variable or procedure, would be quite powerful, and never wrong. 8)
I personally believe smaller companies and huge companies will be more prone to this. There's less accountability and ability to monitor and punish abuse and toxicity towards both extremes.
Assets were sold to friends and family, with massive kickbacks and for a fraction of their market value.

This can't happen in EU today.
It won't start on my computer. 500 internal server error.

----

[nltk_data] Error loading averaged_perceptron_tagger: <urlopen error

[nltk_data] [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify

[nltk_data] failed: unable to get local issuer certificate

[nltk_data] (_ssl.c:1108)>

And a nitpick:
"Once you’ve done this, you can open the iMessageWrapped.exe file."
.exe is windows. .app is macOS.
Decline of cash is really a shame. When the $100 was introduced it was worth about $2k in today's dollars, and in my lifetime even it was worth almost $300
That's the exact problem. That makes this worse, not better. It means no personal autonomy over your health and sets the precedent for far worse things.

That's always the point with stuff like this, the precedent, not the surface-level idea.
Yeah and I'm sure you'd have no problem with your kids using an app that happens to be called Pedophile. Or maybe you'd have no problem with your wife using an app called Slut. After all those are just words and you don't suffer mind diseases.
For me the latter. I wrote a static microblog generator [0] for my own site [1]. There is both a Perl and a Python version. I wrote the latter to learn more about Python.

[0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
[1] https://plurrrr.com/
Undiagnosed Pneumonia – China (Hubei) – Request for Information (2019)
I apologize if I'm misunderstanding your comment. But just to help others avoid confusion, ADHD isn't the same as being extra energetic.
Anything leetcode related comes down to rote memorization. If LC is part of interviewing process you are hiring people who good at repeating things they’ve memorized, have a lot of stamina to spend hundreds of hours doing meaningless work and are very good at following orders. If that’s what you need than it’s a great filter.

You can save some effort though and just hire anyone who passed Chinese or Korean grueling school system with emphasis on standardized tests. LC-based interviews follow the same tradition.
What would be the upside?

I'd be interested in hearing what problem this would actually solve.
To the senior engineers who are already happily employed and hate leetcode interviews: An effective way to fight against this is to start saying no to these interviews. Senior engineers have the power to change this if it becomes a trend to say no to these interviews. Anytime a recruiter contacts you on Linkedin, ask them does your interview process include leetcode style whiteboard interviews? If they say yes, then politely decline and make it clear that's the reason for the decline.

All the leverage is on the happily employed senior engineer side. If they're not happy or unemployed, then it's different. But for the happily employed, it's the recruiter/company trying to convince them to leave. And it's very reasonable to reject these interviews. An employed senior engineer already has a demanding job that requires at least 40 hours a week. And since they're older, they're likely to have other responsibilities like family. There's simply no time to grind for months on pointless leetcode problems.

If more senior engineers start immediately rejecting any recruiter messages with a simple "No, I don't do leetcode", the signal will be sent. Recruiters will start getting frustrated and tell hiring managers, hey many of the great engineers I contact keep saying no because of this leetcode thing, can you change that part of the interview? I can't find any good candidates because of this. That will force hiring managers to really evaluate if this leetcode interview is a good idea.

Don't be fooled if they say it's not about getting the problem right or they just want to see how you think about a problem. That was somewhat true a long long time ago when these types of interviews started and leetcode didn't even exist. And it's what they still say to make it seem reasonable. But the reality today is that the interviewer only cares that you can write out the optimal solution within the interview time. That's it, that's all the interviewer will care about. If you don't have the right answer, it's an immediate zero. They might care about other factors (like are you friendly, code quality, etc.) after you successfully write the optimal answer on the board. But writing out the optimal answer is the baseline, they don't care to evaluate any other factor until that baseline is satisfied.

There might be a few interviewers who still try to stick to the old way of these interviews, the original intent. But statistically the odds are against you. These interviewers are generally older and becoming fewer and fewer. The new generation of junior engineers are becoming senior and they only know the leetcode grind. In a typical interview loop, it will become more and more probable that there's more and more of these interviewers who expect the candidates to have done the leetcode grind and base their evaluation from that assumption.