skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you’re curious about more of the history (now, almost a decade ago), this was the scandal that likely motivated the above:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/7/2782947/path-ios-app-user-...

Congresspeople sent letters to app developers as a result (not even Apple, ha). iOS 6 was then seeded to the public four months after that article.

But! It actually goes earlier than this. Apple started phasing out access to device identifiers used to track users across apps in iOS 5: https://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/apple-ios-5-phasing-out-ud...

(again, none of this was marketed to anyone)
Axios Wants to Help Companies Write Like Its Reporters–For $10k a Year, or More
There's plenty of good criticism of given products, papers, and approaches. There's also bad criticism though and it's important to distinguish the two.
Edit: I partly misspoke. I assumed CSS transitions would be nontrivially more performant since it's a more declarative API and the math would be done natively by the browser, but according to MDN the performance difference is negligible in most (though not all) cases if you're using requestAnimationFrame in the JavaScript version: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Performance/CSS...

The main case where CSS transitions are meaningfully faster appears to actually be transforms themselves, because for those the actual transition, too, can be moved to the GPU, whereas a JavaScript-driven transition still has to be run on the main CPU thread.
I don't agree with alt-right but I do recognize that alternative social media is a big threat to the established oligopoly.

It is like car manufacturers or oil companies sabotaging alternative energy companies.
The point is doing the translation on the server.
How much work is it to port an AD&D adventure to DnD 4th or 5th edition?
Missed that, Thanks!
The other side of this is that transgender people do exist and there can be some benefit to having many people announce their pronouns rather than just expecting transgender people to call attention to themselves by doing so. People have various opinions about whether this sort of cover is helpful, but this is the motivation behind encouraging cis people to share their pronouns.
They haven't and no, I wouldn't do it. It's compelled speech.
Seems fine to me. As this has been encouraged but not mandated by your organisation it seems pretty benign. From what I understand about this sort of initiative it's about creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their preferred pronouns and helping, (e.g.) non cisgender people to feel like an outlier for doing so.
Distribution of Soil Lifespans
> But how much of social media is real?

One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.

Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."
I don't understand this point if view. I see it like stating your name - it lets people know what to call you. It doesn't have any relationship to what your genitalia are.
So in that sense forming a theory about something is integrating all the practical stuff you've seen before. To me that make sense, IMO that "practical stuff" are what experiments are, aren't they? Probably the experiments are far from perfect, if remotely good even, but that's how empiricism should work? I think? (hmm... not entirely sure)
Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation
Debatable; this is low hanging fruit.

Turn off or strip EXIF data -- most sites do anyway -- and this wouldn't happen.
Only nominally. In practice you will have a board and executives and managers who are subject to the conflicts of interest inherent to the principal-agent relationship. This is a major problem of economics.
I, perhaps, should not answer for someone else, but I read that as:

I am LGBT
and
I am neutral regarding the the use of pronouns.
"A medium gets the content it deserves." Said Marshall McLuhan.

Twitter is a minimalist virtue signalling platform that selects for sensation and controversy. Nothing in the article should come as a surprise to anyone read up on their Chomsky.

If Trump had used traditional presidential communication channels, his pulpit would not have have the same capacity for amplifying disinformation and fomenting outrage. The mainstream media earned many clicks in their expressions of outrage over the last several years. The whole media ecosystem was either complicit or counter-complicit to Trump's BS, and the national discourse is now a dumpster fire.

It's not that the real issue is this or the real issue is that. I'd like to nominate "comorbidities" as the word of the year.
> "Tech isn't political" is itself a political stance. (And a hard to support one, IMO.)

Funny how the only people who say this are the people who want to drag politics into everything. Tech is no more inherently political than, say, electrical engineering. That is to say, not at all without tortured logic that could be applied to almost anything.
FTA: "even though such filtering saves you from having to see things you don’t like, it doesn’t stop the objectionable content from existing". He doesn't want upvoting/downvoting, he wants complete eradication (of whatever the majority happens to objects to right now).
Richard Stallman Agrees That C++ Sucks (2010)
Coronavirus and Moving from WhatsApp to Signal
Well they didn't develop the platform specifically for spreading radical/violent content. They build a generic platform for spreading thoughts among friends, and racist/violent people used the generic platform to spread their thoughts.
What? They're still cartels. Their past crimes aren't removed and their behavior won't change. They're already front many legitimate businesses for money laundering, this just makes their core business even easier.
Siegfried Fischbacher from 'Siegfried and Roy' magician duo has died
Some people like to argue that "nobody punishes you for it" isn't the same as "it's okay", even though it's not clear what the difference between those is for an actual human being.
Awesome! Will look forward to the project's further development.
I wouldn't add pronouns by myself because it's not needed in my
case. Haven't heard of an employer here who even mentions
anything like this, but I wouldn't mind doing it when requested.
For some people(even "binary" ones) this would be helpful
because of names usually associated with the opposite sex.
Especially in emails, where the name is often the only
identifying information.

> they genuinely did not know that stating pronouns was a thing

That is...impressive. I don't think I've used an online
community in recent years where this wasn't brought up as topic
here and there.
The first except for Blackberry. Before IOS or Android even existed Blackberry had granular per app permissions.

I don't disagree with your argument though, of the modern mobile OSs Apple moved to towards the per-app model before everyone else. I just find it interesting when Apple or Android gets coverage/credit for a feature that has long existed but was forgotten or ignored.
At a startup in TX we have been encouraged at various times to place them in email signatures and other communications. I’ve never felt particularly pressured to, it’s presented as a suggestion for being actively inclusive. It sends a signal, which perhaps is the point(that could be perceived positively as being welcoming or negatively as empty virtue signaling), but I wonder if it’s actually all that helpful. I can’t recall a situation where it wasn’t obvious what someone’s preference would be and were there a question in the moment I’d probably temporarily fall back to gender neutral they/their rather than interrupt the flow of conversation to look up their preference in an email signature. I’m not among those this is intended to help though and only have a few people in my extended friend group that are, so I’m open to hearing if this is actually important/helpful to those people.
C++ Papyrus
We've no idea what he was suggesting, as he hasn't bothered responding. Instead, a rotating succession of accounts, trying to insinuate/project my intentions.

The idea that there are impartial or neutral news sources in 2021, is a bit of a laugh, to be honest. The best thing one could do, is read both sides of an argument, and come to one's own conclusions - based on the balance of probabilities.
The top 10% requires an income of about $160k/year. Quite a few software engineers in high and very-high cost of living areas make that--but the vast majority don't.

See: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

Look at the wage growth for the 90th - 95th (top 10% to top 5%): it's in the bottom.

The distribution of salary for Senior SWE is found, e.g., at https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/senior-soft.... The median is $115k, the 90% is $130k--still not the top 10%. Even when you bonuses the salary curve shifts right by less than 10% (e.g. median goes to about $116k, 90% outlier to $138k).

Some 4 million people in the US work as software engineers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...). FAANG accounts for, what, 1% - 2% of that? Maybe a bit more, but not much. The vast majority don't have high TC, most of them are paid a flat salary with a modest bonus and either have ESPPs or no equity at all.

Software engineers are laborers, in effectively the same social class as manual laborers. Our economic circumstances are better, but not that much better.

Your comment is a great example of how the huge inequality gaps and the infotainment media have distorted perceptions among workers.
I know that, that's why it says "Worst student debt you can get is in the UK"
Facebook is intrinsically a passion-group generator. Where "passion" is the edges of "adoration" to "enmity".

Anything that "triggers" you (to interact w/ the platform), be it pottery or anarchy, FB will find "your people".

If you are prone to fits of passion, FB will find your passion-mates... mated to you by fear, anxiety, rage ... or joy.
We don't see all of the countless hours spent by mods like dang to keep the quality high. It's a thankless job most of the time!
In other words: we need plumbers.
I think you are underestimating how many of the services you already use incorporate machine learning somewhere. It's not about GANs or deepfakes (right now those are closer to the art projects you are referring to). Some examples for actual applications or classes of applications are image recognition, speech recognition, recommender systems, virtual assistants, fraud detection, financial forecasting.
This is a phenomenon exclusively on Twitter (and off late, the fediverse). I don't think I've seen it anywhere else.
One of the issues that I know Canada faces (having been in this exact position) is a southward "brain drain". There is no small amount of top talent that graduate from Universities and ship out to SV, or of top talent that seek out remote gigs in the States.

The remote work proposition in particular is extremely enticing. Getting paid in a currency with 10-20% more buying power while still receiving the same government services was pretty swell.
2021 resolutions: Kick off the new year with free Google Cloud training
FWIW it’s looking for the `file` class which does not exist anymore an was a direct subclass of object: `open` now creates a TextIOWrapper<BufferedReader<TextIO>>.

You can still reach TextIO though _IOBase, in python 3.9 it’s object’s 101st subclass, then 0, then 0.

In 3.8 it’s 99, 0, 0.
Yeah, but for their use case it's just KV and also ability to link directly in go
This isn't the court of law. I don't have to do business with fascists if I don't want to. I encourage everyone here to shun fascists just as hard, and to shun people who willingly do business with them. I like living in a free, pluralistic society that preserves human rights, and I fully accept that in order to keep that society alive, I need to do my part to stop its enemies from tearing it down.
Email signatures would change from being

Bob Jenkins - Cloud Services Developer

to

Bob Jenkins (she/her) - Cloud Services Developer

This means that people writing about Bob don't assume that Bob is a particular gender, and helps them use the correct gender.

It's a small effort to increase politeness.
Thank you synnejye, you have hit the nail on the head.
At the end of the day, we have multiple points on a spectrum with related harm levels. If you can't look at that and see a reasonable approach and stance to take, then nothing can be said that will make you do so.
I use the RB4011, which even came with rack mounts. For the last year it's been working great (once you get the hang of how the configuration works). Can highly recommend.

I also use the CRS326, with a little less power than the RB4011, but with 24 Lan ports instead.

The only downside, compared to the UDMP, is the missing DPI
It's not a straw man, I've seen it clear as day in several companies. When it comes to data science, it's "garbage in, garbage out". I've seen companies do lots of "data science" with a bunch of data scientists skilled in python and jupyter notebooks, only to discover a ton of work was useless because the incoming event data was tagged incorrectly due to a bug.

The actual process of collecting, aggregating, cleaning and verifying data is a hugely important skill, and not one I've really seen typical data scientists possess.
> Because only one cop was murdered in a fashion that was probably unintentional, he was beat up.

"probably unintentional"? They dragged the police officer into the mob and proceed to beat him up with lead pipes.

> even so that’s not representative of the whole.

I get that a portion of the mob were simply playing the role of useful idiots, but you're talking about a mob who brought bombs, weapons, zip ties, and a freaking gallows.

How on earth is anyone still claiming the riot was remotely peaceful?
> imho - after the insertion of flatpak, appimage, snaps, and in some cases dockerimages...
> i fail to see what problems we've solved.

Any of those can be installed on most big distros, so you only need to release one for your app. Though I would use only docker for services and only flatpak or appimage for apps. Snap is proprietary; only Canonical runs a server.
He mentions Reddit at the end of the article, which is close enough in mechanism to Hackernews.
An extravagant display of corporate house slave privilege. Most people, even those among the "golden billion," have much bigger problems than gender pronouns.

Think about waitresses or cashiers. Most could care less if you call them Pete or Sue, as long as they can get enough hours for the week, and the direct deposit is on-time.
Yes, social media and maybe even the internet as a whole will radicalize its users. Facebook is a groupthink incubator. So is hacker news. I've witnessed many people change their political beliefs to match whichever group they belong to.
Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana
I think I agree with "I honestly think it is amazing". I'm nearing middle-age and I rarely thought about gender issues and, in my twenties if I was asked to start a conversation about them, I wouldn't have even thought to talk about gender identity.

But identity is fundamentally important. If someone chooses a mean-spirited nickname for you, and refuses to use your actual name, it's not a pleasant experience. Yes, I know, "man up", but if that person is in your workplace and you are there for years and years, it wears you down. If others then join in, even thinking it's a bit of fun, then that would make me pretty miserable at work. It sure did when I was a child.

The reason you and I are amazed is because a swathe of the population have been forced to live as a lie, as someone they're not and most of them for their entire lives. They've married and had children and died of old age and maybe one or two people really knew that it was all a lie they had to project because showing their true nature would have them stoned to death. Yes, an extreme example. But let's say they came out in their 30s, they still lived for a substantial time as someone else, because nobody talked about gender identity, how it may change, or not be simple as "her or him".

This is not a conversation you or I had. Not ideas we read about, were exposed to. I am going to assume, in good faith, that you did not suffer any of these issues. I didn't.

It is amazing and I hope that eventually a better normal is reached, whether it's proffering pronouns or not, where people are not abused because of who they are.

I would guess that you may have been amazed to see SpaceX's kit land itself on a floating sea platform. Read that vegetables have been grown in microgravity or that we can now detect gravity waves. They're amazing but they're not hostile towards us, they're just new phenomenons that weren't around when we were kids.
NYT engineered consent for the Iraq War?
at this point i find it helpful. i’ve started to see people as having two ways to refer to them, their name and their gender. i generally ask people, but that can force someone to “out” themselves.

i use they/them and have had the conversation with a lot of the more conservative people i love about use of gender and they mostly rebuke it with some semblance of the the “give a mouse a cookie” reasoning basically stating they don’t want to be bothered with learning about it.

i think including the information is a good idea, it makes it harder for someone to act like they don’t know your pronouns. it really is an identity issue and participation in it is harmless.
You don't think the Free Software / Open Source movement many of us owe our careers to was a political one?
> I've recently been watching Kirk McKusick's course on the design of FreeBSD

Wow, that is one pricey course. Are you watching it out of personal interest or because you need it for something in particular?
Not quite. They tweaked the way it was run to keep people addicted.
So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler.

I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it just because Facebook has other uses, because they're bigger or because an app store that doesn't have a Facebook app will experience a huge backlash from consumers?
Having moderated some large forums in the past I know!
> “ The idea that you have these programmers who spout mumbo-jumo all day, cost a lot of money, and seem to always be planning stuff behind your back is threatening, and this breaks their control over the means of production.”

That is a very bizarre description of ML engineers. In every company I’ve worked at, ML is a team or teams that partners with product managers and other engineering teams to learn about problems they need solved. It’s very systematic, boring, and tied heavily to those other teams as the leaders and decision makers.

First you look for high level value propositions, like automating a decision process, removing a customer friction point, creating key metrics where simple metrics are intractable, or various multi-modal information retrieval goals.

You identify opportunities in these kinds of high level areas in lock-step with product managers and other engineering leaders. Then you move on to identify sources of data that can be leveraged, and eventually (much later) you get to the smaller set of work training a model, validating with acceptance tests and hardening the implementation for safe production deployment.

If people are spouting “mumbo jumbo” and making big ML model decisions without lock-step synchronization with other stakeholders, that sounds like organizational dysfunction, not any type of issue with ML.

I also find it odd that you bring up “cost[ing] a lot of money” .. that’s very out of place among everything else mentioned. That seems more like insecurity or jealousy over the market demand for ML talent, and wanting to cut other people down rather than work with them or acknowledge the level of effort it required to get that level of expertise in ML.
Companies are tripping over each other to satisfy the woke mob, and it's ridiculous. This is part of that, and my advice is to not participate -- don't give air to unwanted things, and don't legitimize them.

Or, if anyone has a sense of humor (very hard to find amongst the woke) encourage a large number of people to choose whimsical pronouns -- makes the silliness of it apparent.
We barely use email here so no one thinks about signatures but many people have their pronouns in their Slack profiles.

Seems pretty helpful to me. We're a very multicultural work place so working out preferred pronouns just from peoples names can be tricky.
I scored straight A's in french back in school. Then I went to work in France, expecting little issues with understanding the locals.

Turns out understanding a heavy Auvergnat accent is... difficult! I wrestled with the accent a couple of weeks, but after a while it 'clicked'. This was pretty much a matter of 'waking up and not having to translate it in your mind', a very strange sensation. I learned to distinct several accents: Parisian and Marseillais are different beasts, and Swiss-french is also different (I totally dig their counting system though, septante, huitante et nonante makes so much more sense).

Also, I learned that the french in school is nothing like the french they speak in France. Sure, you get by and they'll understand you, but french relies heavy on vernacular, sayings and expressions.

Nowadays people think I'm a Walloon (French-speaking from Belgium, while I'm Dutch), which is a great compliment to me!
Who will do the proper cleaning then?
I can very easily tell Bronx from Brooklyn from Manhattan from Queens, in some cases down to specific neighborhoods or cultures...but really only in folks 60+, maybe occasionally in people more in the 40+ range who had fairly isolated upbringings, but that's it. Any younger than that, I often can only even tell you're from New York City by word choice and slang, not accent. I suspect that's similar to what's going on in Paris, albeit I'm in absolutely no position to know.

(For context: I did not grow up in NYC, but my family was from there, and I lived there for quite awhile myself as well. It's entirely possible someone who did grow up in NYC can do better than I can, but, at least to my ear, it gets very close to just standard American broadcast English the younger you go, so I doubt it.)
If by "moderate conservative" you mean the type of people who also fund a site like Breitbart. I think we're pretty safe in calling them "far-right".
>> The storming of the capitol was probably the most frightening single event in American history in recent times.

This is surely hyperbole or else recent times doesn’t include much of the 21st century.
Just ses how the RIAA played whack a mole from Napster onwards, then government played the same for DeCss, then the MPAA with torrents, and nowadays the government with deepweb markets.

It's just a losing game that ends up affecting innocent people (like DRM in games) but theres just no way to win
Mikrotik hardware is very inexpensive. The rb4011 is the "default powerful small business router", and I've been enjoying it so far.