skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't usually like engaging in political discourse online, as its very rarely fruitful, but I'd just like to encourage you to study some philosophy before making statements like these whereby you treat your own opinion as absolute fact (or at least your phrasing comes off that way to me). The nature of inaction on these issues is not necessarily inherently immoral, and I would personally argue its supererogation rather than moral duty, so whilst it may be commendable to stand up in these sorts of situations, in my opinion you are by no means morally obliged. This whole area has been a subject of debate for a very long time and the answer is never as simple as a generalisation that can fit in a sentence or two.
Yep.

And on the other side of the spectrum, it's extremely uncomfortable to be a Baptist, work with a lot of left wing folks, and then get asked what you did last weekend.

It's not fair to expect everyone to be fully responsible for each others' feelings.
I felt very special the first time I got an email saying that my post got a second chance. Almost like that notification that your crush liked your photo.
GNU Docs are usually quite good. I learnt how to write Makefiles from the horse's mouth.
Trains shouldn't have bars or restaurants. They waste space that could have more passangers. Instead it should be easy to get off, grab a sandwich and get on the next one. Or bring your meal with you.
People have plenty of places they can express their political opinions. They can go to rallies, canvass for candidates, phonebank, volunteer, etc. etc. And all those would actually make a difference! I think people just like complaining, don’t like working, and have identified in politics something that they can use to loaf that is “virtuous.”
> I just don't think it's fair to conflate the decisions one company makes towards what it thinks are good for engineering or business with every possible outcome of those decisions or how others can exploit them.

If the consequences of the decisions a company makes aren't a good metric for whether they are good decisions or not, then what is? We're talking about the largest company on Earth that often has a larger effect on the world than many countries do, and you want to take "outcomes" off the table for argument?

> I'm not here to argue on the fine points of China policy or human rights.

Oh, I'm aware, as you seem more than willing to throw out anachronistic arguments (like using the Chinese Firewall as an excuse before it was in place), and then immediately try to change the subject when it's clear you're out of your depth.

> And yes, when presented with a wall of text consisting of mostly emotional arguments talking past my points, I started skimming.

I'm not sure how you can know it's emotional when you've admitted to not having read it. I'm also perplexed as to why you bother responding if you aren't willing to read what you're responding to. It's like writing a review for a movie you haven't seen, it's not going to be a good review.

*> Finally, you really shouldn't stoop to ad-hominem [...] Try to be less sanctimonious."

Some would argue that blanket describing an entire post that someone invested time in writing as "emotional" to the point of not needing to be read is a fairly bold and "sanctimonious" value-judgement. I at least take the time to read your responses before drawing any conclusions.
Numerical comparisons are already tough. Multi dimensional comparisons are easiest just dodged.

Edit: forgot to say kudos on the joke. :)
I think this is more of the issue. Young startups and management are much more lax with this type of thing and let it fester and become a bigger issue than it ever should have been. I’ve worked at fortune 10 companies and smaller startups founded by older folks and there has never been any overt sexual innuendo or politics talk which would be obviously divisive. Most everyone has enough emotional intelligence to know these things should be left at home since there’s no reason to bring them up at work.
>- Russia is planning to stop exporting raw logs next year. They are about 12% of the worlds supply.

Why would they do this? Is this a way of getting back at the US for sanctions? Seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot.
I am shocked a company with ~60 employees warrants this much discussion and media coverage.
Is there a case for RE legalising heroin: my aunt was one of a small number of GPs in London licenced to prescribe heroin to addicts in the sixties and seventies as part of a treatment programme.
Ask HN: What skills/hobbies/curiosities do you find compatible with programming?
I once heard from a friend a theory that the memorization of the myriad “Indian Gods” helped him more naturally memorize the “nested layers / arrangements” of code.

Are there any such things from “daily life” / from “growing up” that you feel may have contributed towards your development as a coder?

If there is a natural or learned way about which you’ve picked up a new prog. language, what is it that your mind almost naturally has always grasped? Good with numbers? Puzzles? Where does one’s mind go when seeking to solve a programming problem?

What skills do you feel (beyond work ethic) make a HQ programmer?
As a woman I would far rather work for a guy who thinks women should stay at home but keeps his opinions to himself and his family and treats me fairly than I would work for a guy who can quote Steinem and Lorde and hooks but throws me under the bus. Have essentially done both. My personal motto has been "Your beliefs are not a problem for me unless you make them my problem." Orthopraxy all the way.

Outcomes are the evidence. I am not interested in your or your company's social media statements. I'm interested in whether people who are underrepresented in the field can succeed at your company and whether you treat people like me fairly. This is obvious self-interest on my part, just like engaging in paid labor in the first place.

"People leave managers, not companies." I think this is the most appropriate cliche to apply to the Basecamp story.
> disingenuous

That implies intent to deceive, which crosses into personal attack. Can you please not do that on HN? If you feel that someone else is wrong, it's enough to provide correct information in a neutral way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The outrage crowd always prefers easy targets over good targets.
According to the summary articles posted upthread, that seems to be what happened. The list was reinterpreted in the context of Stop Asian Hate to be racist. Which is not exactly fair given that the list is 10 years old. One should judge by the standards of the time, not the changing standards of today. And reading between the lines, that's essentially what the Basecamp founders said too: (paraphrasing) "this was a joke in bad taste made by people who aren't even at the company anymore. we're sorry that it happened, but it's water under the bridge." Then someone filed a racism complaint with HR against the founders and it escalated from there.
Not really. You just pay for COBRA. Your 6 months severance will cover that rather nicely. Granted it might be cheaper to just get private insurance nowadays.
This example strikes me as more as a case of inappropriate boundaries than politics. I do not believe that your or my _opinion_ of pronoun choice is really relevant. Specifically...

You can put in whatever pronoun choice you believe is correct.

I may or may not have an opinion about it.

I can keep that opinion about it to myself, unless you ask for it.

Nearly all political differences have nothing to do with performing one's job.
The lawsuit they lost suggests that the court found it was intentional.
> Current average rental cost for a one-bedroom in Missoula: $1010 a month, up 27% from last year

Pretty expensive for a little town in the middle of nowhere...
> sqrt

Used often enough in n-body to make a difference, not used often enough in spectral-norm? not used in fannkuch-redux …
> Making of lists of funny names is not the first step to genocide.

And that is not what the post you’re replying to said.
> The real problem is that they’ve spent years hiring for a type of person where this sort of thing is anathema.

This is dead on: the real issue here is not politics vs. not-politics at work—Basecamp is having a crisis because expectations were broken.
I like the better performance of computers now. If lower repairability is a way to pay for that, that’s great.
They even have a website! I’d be shocked if there aren’t routinely Hobby Lobby employees visiting Hacker News.
I remember a childhood friend explaining to me what programming was. His father was a computer programmer. He said "it's math, but letters can be any number". I remember that phrase because I puzzled over it for a long time as a child trying to figure out how that could make sense and be a job.
thats a very charitable interpretation. consider the additional signal that they all posted this publicly at the same time. anyway no point trying to mindread. this thing has taken up more mindshare than is really worth.
I don't like it when programs rely on VM overcommit in such a way that they break on other systems. Even if you don't care about Windows (which is a strict accounting no-overcommit system), you should care about Linux, which can be configured to do strict accounting the way Windows does.

If you want to use the big address-space carve-out trick, you can, but the right way to do it is to PROT_NONE the parts of the address space you aren't using and install a signal handler to commit bits of your carveout as they're used.
I think what basecamp is experiencing is what can still happen even though you as a manager believed you managed it well. If you don't let "A misgender B" then you might get hit as DHH did. Because one way to read the affair is that one person got upset that DHH as the manager didn't let that person pull a holocaust reference into a debate.

(not saying at all if this was appropriate or not)
Still widely used and taught in the machine shops of highly reputable universities over here in the U.S.

If you're under 40 and can't use metric and imperial jargon without a second thought in the shop here that's a different problem. I personally enjoy doing machine shop-esque metal fabrication in metric and woodshop type things in imperial, but all machine shop instructors I've met through several good stem uni's that look even slightly middle aged love to talk in thou of inch, some to the point of getting quite physically frustrated when asked where the metric drill index/reamer set are in otherwise highly stocked shops...

Also, I've noticed and heard the same from others in surrounding states - Fluid Dynamics professors love to include absolutely unecessary boatloads of strange units and conversions in coursework/exams to apparently "prepare us for the shitshow that is industry"
Came here to say this, and am glad this is at the top!
StimulusReflex might take over that space if Hotwire doesn't get new maintainers.
> Let’s say you hire a gay employee, there very existence is political.

With a few exceptions, I consider it very unprofessional for an employee or colleague of mine to start discussing their sexual preferences, gay or straight. I wouldn't ask for the same reason.

> ... just blanket “No religion/no politics” is just a way to say you like everything the way it is and don’t want to feel uncomfortable

I think you are just projecting. There are tons of benefits (mentioned elsewhere in these comments) to keeping politics & religion out of the workplace.
Over the years I've learned how most parts of a car work at a basic level. Engines, clutches, gearboxes, differentials etc. I can't help but feel a bit sad that it might all go away within my lifetime. Electric cars are essentially just a battery and a motor. They're just not very interesting.
For many devices the devices themselves are glued making the process of just opening the case interesting and then require near complete disassembly to remove the battery.
Or stop producing as many people.
Mundane... like providing health care?
No, I stand by my claim that many LeetCode problems are too time-consuming or tedious to be effective whiteboard interview questions.

It should be noted that whiteboard interviews are slightly similar, but not identical to IOI and other coding competitions. An IOI problem is not necessarily an effective interview question.
I am the author of the STM32F1 FPB security bypass exploit. Seeing this happen again, with another manufacturer, but this time with undocumented silicon, is just appalling. They will never learn. At least NXP replied to the email... I never got a reply from ST.
> On the other hand, if you kept the history, and if this history was clean from the get go, it becomes easy to read the commits one-by-one and understand the issue.

Or git-bisect.
Doing that could easily add an hour (or in particularly bad cases, two hours!) each way to your commute. Some people do make that tradeoff, but it seems really unpleasant.

The big issue is that transit accessibility is priced into rent, so while parts of US cities might actually be reasonable to get around with public transportation, you'd never be able to afford to live there with a low income.
Mandatory squash merge would be very bad, right. But it sounds like success of this policy is highly dependent on the code size of average PR. I really liked to work at place where commits were usually squash-rebased, which got rid of most "typo"s, but long lived huge feature branches lived mostly usual life. And if possible, some logically atomic and finished groundwork parts of feature branches were extracted and squash-rebased into master ahead of time, slimming feature branch, sometimes to the point that feature branch could be squash-rebased too. Git blame was VERY pleasant to work with, and git-bisect would actually work if need would arise.
But what is the way you'd respond? It doesn't sound like you'd fire them. So it seems like your only option is to say "alright, I don't agree with you about this, but that's fine as long as you understand that you can't go around arguing this at work".

Which is a reasonable solution, don't get me wrong. But this kind of solution is what people mean when they talk about limiting politics at work, and these kinds of conflicts are why it's a good idea. In order to work with people who don't share your precise values, there have to be ground rules to minimize conflict.
> he's now considered by many to be a "neo racist".

I'm sorry, what!? The author of "How to be Antiracist" is considered a "neo racist" by how many?
There's lots of places with OK service, if you measure by overall coverage it's pretty bad.

Like https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016... is about a guy that caught the attention of the internet because he couldn't take public transit to his job.
Eh. They can't ask your marital status, but keeping that secret your whole tenure would be silly. Same for medical history but it would be awkward to never mention a pregnancy that is obviously showing.
It takes effort to get to the point where you can fire someone simply for being a homophobe. People are advocating for these types of rules. They're being told to just suck it up and don't be political.
Once I’m in he restaurant, it has a monopoly. The same way Apple has a monopoly once I’m in the App Store.

Apple is the only seller of apps on my Apple phone.

Burger King is the only seller/provider of plates and cutlery at my local Burger King.
This is exactly what I thought, I’d personally find a company with an explicit non-activism policy insanely attractive, all other things being equal.
A few reasons come to mind.

If you lose control of an aws root account it can take weeks to get it back. That’s probably enough time for the hackers to clean out the backups.

Billing issues can lead to aws wiping out an account.

For $work the backups are in AWS but using a different payment method, account owner etc to prevent cross contamination. Honestly, they should be outside aws entirely, but separate accounts is a good start.
We tried randomly mixing in new stories onto the front page - it was a disaster. The median new submission is pretty crappy, and readers reacted with "how the #@!? did this make the front page", as if we had placed a turd in their breakfast cereal. "We were just trying to test if you would like it" turns out not to be a very popular answer. I've written about this several times in the past, but the only one I can find right now is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868928.

IIRC, the second-chance pool was our next experiment after that one. It has worked much better. The difference is human judgment or, if you will, taste.

It's not easy to come up with new mechanisms that might help with this problem. Every software mechanism we've tried allows many things through that don't pass muster. Community mechanisms, as soon as you open them up, get overwhelmed by people trying to game them to promote their own stuff. There's a feedback loop with that: the more interesting HN is, the more attractive it is to a high-quality audience, and therefore the more attractive a target it becomes for manipulation, which makes the site less interesting again. So there's a cap on how good it can ever get (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
Total building costs are more expensive than ever. Regulations, IBC, and consumer feature demand dictate it to be so. I don't know what you're talking about. Quality also hasn't improved, only marginal cost of production of materials has dropped. The actually structural integrity of those materials has worsened over time.
> If there's one thing that EVs are not, is "light".
sigh

Obviously we are not comparing about the weight of an EV compared to an apple or vehicle that doesn't require a battery. We are talking about extreme measures taken to make the car lighter so it can improve range. Replacing cheaper steel with more expensive aluminum, reducing even surface area of plastics, reducing wires. Truly amazing steps were taken to reduce weight.

> No it doesn't! It has horrible energy density per volume,

volume? Seriously?
"The energy in 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of hydrogen gas is about the same as the energy in 1 gallon (6.2 pounds, 2.8 kilograms) of gasoline."
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_basics.html
>We would both agree that a billion dollars a month is too high.

I would not necessarily agree. There are CEOs who make around that amount, why shouldn't an engineer make that much if they're equally important to the organization?

From what I could gather from Google, TSMC engineers make far less than I do as a FAANG engineer, and TSMC posted a ~$14 billion profit last year. If these employees are so important to Taiwan's future, why can't they at least pay them FAANG-level salaries? It's not that they don't have the money.
To me the world's gone crazy where the word "deplorable" is unironically attached to some people making fun of some names. Unprofessional is the furthest I'd take it. Something you get a finger wag for.

As a customer why would I even care if someone on the other end thought my name was funny as long as my shipment arrived? This generation truly is absurdly sensitive.
As a user I really value having a good ad blocker integrated with my mobile browser.

Safari is okay at ad blocking but it can't do nearly as much as Firefox Mobile with uBlock, and Apple doesn't seem at all interested in improving it.
Microsoft also solely built Windows and the EU still forced them to introduce the browser selection screen. No new precedent here.
ASRock also has some SFF server boards with IPMI and ECC, if I remember correctly, also with onboard CPU and fanless in some cases.
Those ARE real numbers - though we may disagree on how likely those levels of inflation are. Does higher inflation increase capital gains tax bills? Yes, we'll agree on that. Do capital gains impact more people than any proposed wealth tax I've seen? Also, yes we'll agree there too.

However, one fundamental difference between capital gains taxes and wealth taxes is that capital gains taxes are only imposed on the gains on the disposition of an asset, whereas a wealth tax is applied to an individual's entire net worth, and all proposals I've seen are applied annually. This is relevant to the original comment that said "all property" would be subject to a 20% tax - but my point was that's not the case, regardless of inflation.
Not sure why you're downvoted. I'm mulling over an employer change right now for pure career progression / compensation reasons. I have a few good options lined up. If I were offered a generous buyout tomorrow for some random stupid reason, I would probably take it, even without first deciding exactly where I'm going to be next and without any regard to the underlying reason for the buyout. Wikipedia says they only have 57 employees (???). If so, that's less than 20 people jumping from a company with bad PR anyways and during a time when tech hiring is actually quite hot.
While everybody is latching onto "Hurrr... Durrr... Wokeness." apparently there were also some cutbacks to benefits and allowances and stuff. Most devs read the tea leaves from that kind of thing as as a bellweather for time to GTFO.

My guess is that some of this has been building and the 6 months of severance simply put it into high gear.
If they really cared about keeping those people, they wouldn't have offered an incentive for them to leave.

For example, they could have structured the incentive such that it only applied to employees below a certain level. They didn't do that though because they wanted to make sure every employee who disagreed with the policy left.
This applies to average people too. I wonder who among us can say they meet your (reasonable) standard.

Like you said, backups are annoying and unglamorous. Yet, the data on my laptop is the only thing I could not replace. It's more important to me than my passport or my birth certificate. Its preservation is certainly worth a bit of thought.
Choosing a side is how you get polarisation.

If the trouble with the world is too much polarisation, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to take a side.
Somehow car manufacturers are able to make engines, transmissions, transaxles, and differentials really cheaply, so apparently all that precision manufacturing doesn't really cost all that much when producing at high volume. This should be equally true of EVs and combustion-engine cars.

Raw material costs might still be less than the manufacturing costs, but they're pretty hard to avoid. Also, materials that are cheap now might not be if demand grows faster than supply.
There is probably an overlap between attention seeking personalities and every group from which you hear individual voices.

Those attention seeking personalities are just the ones who get your attention and stand out.
It's not a big deal that a bunch of so-called adults were using company time, data, and resources to act like elementary schoolyard bullies making fun of people's names?

Inevitably that sort of thing gets out, and insulting your customers' names is not really a great business strategy.

Beyond that, I wouldn't like working with people who are so clearly children. And not even good children.
OK, I literally Googled "cost for an average US business is to simply replace an employee":

Thirty case studies taken from the 11 most-relevant research papers on the costs of employee turnover demonstrate that it costs businesses about one-fifth of a worker’s salary to replace that worker.

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2012...

So... did you mean $100,000?
Many middle class families own real estate and would increase their taxes. Allegedly this is only supposed to be going after upper class people.
Modern ransomware gangs focus more on data exfiltration rather than actually locking down data, and it lets them remain undetected for longer too. That said, yes, correct, having good and reliable backups is vital.
Genuine question: what security vulnerabilities could Audacity have that would make not upgrading a risk?