skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> RMS's argument made a lot more sense when computers were a professional tool used by trained individuals. But that audience has changed a lot in the past 30 years.

He mentions TPM, but there are modern examples of this.

Try playing a modern UHD BluRay on your computer. Unless you have a drive that allows you to rip the BluRay (modified firmware) the only "legal" way to watch it at 4K is to use "specified software". One of those options being Cyberlink's PowerDVD, (yes that bloated video player that is 500MB from 2000). It requires Intel SGX/iGPU[1] and therefore won't work on AMD CPUs. This is because the firmware for the drive has encryption keys that only let certain software use it.

[1] https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19144

I think this is the exact sort of thing that Stallman was talking about when it comes to a computer not following your instructions because of DRM.

HDCP being another one of these lame DRMs, except built into your monitor. I'd argue they don't prevent piracy at all, and don't really hinder it, but increase the cost of hardware because manufacturers have to pay for licensing.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray
Hey, sorry I missed the statement in the original post where you called them irrational. Apologies for not reading more carefully. In that sense my original response wasn't disagreeing with you.

I do disagree with you tactically, though. The percentage of the adults in my country (the US) who have received one dose is closer to 2/3. That leaves about 1/3 of eligible people unvaccinated. This is roughly the same 1/3 of people who don't believe in evolution, and the same 1/3 that believe that Covid is a hoax, or that you can beat it by taking horse dewormer.

Trying to fight this by winning over hearts and minds is like when serious scientists try to debate evolution with creationists. It's a waste of everyone's time. The only way to get the vaccine numbers up is to make vaccines mandatory for school, employment, travel, etc like other vaccines are.
> Who decides that?

> They lived there since generations. They had weapons. They controlled who goes in their land.

A bit like the Israeli settlers in the West Bank then.
I've done abuse handling, so I've had to give all kinds of bad news to people after cutting them off from the internet. Some percentage of people are always going to be unreasonable, but the vast majority are glad they found out and we stepped in, even when it means they now have to take their PC into a shop, leave it offline until their nephew comes over, or pay their contractor to come in and get the infected machines off their network.

It helps that these days most people have the cell network for a backup and they can still get their social media fix
What would folks recommend for a beginner (electronics and coding experience but new to fpga)? Prefer open source toolchain if possible. Not too expensive. Starter tutorials would be nice.
Southern coastal soil holds zero nutrients. Nothing grows without heavy treatment and whatever you put in leaches away in weeks.
I think it could be useful if you aggressively curated your follows and filtered out all the noise and stressful interactions. It didn't work for me, as I just didn't have the energy to do the filtering. HN is an already filtered set of topics with people who are mostly thoughtful and intelligent.
Speaking as a New Zealander, I think we have a much much smaller "disconnect" than some other countries. For us, I think the key factors are:

- Low levels of corruption [1]

- Easy voting with elections run by an independent body [2]

- Very strict election financing rules coupled with public funding of elections [3]

- A proportional election system [4]

- Relatively low inequality (though admittedly this is worsening) [5]

The result is high trust in our government and public institutions.

One thing noticeably absent is much direct democracy. We do occasionally have referendums -- for example, we recently voted on euthanasia (accepted) and legalization of drugs (rejected) -- but those actually have mixed reception as people can think of them as "cop-outs" by politicians.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/table/nzl
[2] https://elections.nz/about/about-the-electoral-commission/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_funding_in_New_Zeala...
[4] https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
The title is misleading. DARPA has funded teams to work on minimally invasive brain interfaces, but AFAIK they have yet to be achieved.
It's really easy nowadays for most books although, just go to libgen
in general i agree, but i'm not sure what you're referring to as "expert level" here - if it's ternary operations, those a pretty basic concept, and i don't think there's a clear argument to be made that they're more or less readable than expanding out the if statements, it mostly just comes down to preference.
Mobile app first.
Ruby is for handful hacking lang for me like old days Perl. It seems that thoughts who learned Ruby for production Rails app vs learned Ruby for hack is very different.

Python is also great but I still wish Ruby is installed everywhere for writing one-liner since Python isn't good for that.
Also, the rest of us have to actually live in the world the planless plan-believers have created for us.
I'm okay with you not knowing what you're talking about.
This is the big issue with SaaS like this, particularly when doing business B2C. Whenever you're providing marginal utility at markup, there will always be a degree of 'bullshit factor' determining how pointless your provision is. If you provide a good service, that factor will be inconsequential, but in the business of e-books it's the elephant in the room. Copying is practically free these days, we should be using that to empower people instead of using it for debilitating them.
In my experience, Twitter is only bearable on a Zen 3 or equivalent processor with at least 16GB of memory. Anything less than that is almost guaranteed to slow to a crawl if you're doing something other than reading a single tweet and closing the tab immediately afterwards.
Poe's law demonstrated.
Widespread internet outages affect users across NZ
To add to the cacaphony of counterarguments to this, this can introduce nonobvious bugs when refactoring.

If the condition-guarded statement is nontrivial and you remove the assignment, everything stays valid. If otoh you use a ternary or

if x:
y = 1
else:
y = 2

If you now delete the else block or something (like the assignment from a larger else block), a linter can warn you that y is undefined. Otherwise you'd need a test to ensure correctness.
Hardware side anything will always have higher fixed costs (unit production, physical QA, more healt & safety &compliance testing) and lower margins compared to a 100% software company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28399726
Not bluetooth, but every key being wireless is great for ergonomic keyboards. You can tune the layout iteratively without soldering anything. I think there's enough kinetic energy for a short transmit each time the key is pressed, but currently the energy is now dispersed to bounce the key back up. A thick keyboard (like kinesis or dactyl) does have space for a CR1616 battery under each switch though.. That with an NFC/RFID chip for each key might actually enable a truly wireless keyboard.
Some counterpoints:

(1) Just "files" are not going to save you -- they must also be in the standard format. It may be pretty simple for text-only notes with no support for formatting, but anything more advanced gets complex fast, especially if you expect files to be editable.

("Editable" is the worst, actually.. Imagine a pen-based note-taking app which stores data as PDF in user-accessible location... users would expect to be able to drop any random PDF and have it show up and be editable. This will make the code immensely more complex compared to simple proprietary format)

(2) The file interface is pretty limited (no easy way to detect new files, can only query by name), so you need indexes and secondary metadata. You might need a non-trivial amount of metadata in app-specific format for advanced functionality, like "get past version" or "find similar objects".

If you are allowing user to mess with your files, this gets much harder -- you now need to be able to re-scan the whole folder, and try to infer renames. This is certainly possible -- many old-school MP3 managers did this -- but it is a significant additional effort.

(3) A lot of times, it is easier to provide alternate mechanisms rather than trying to shoehorn the data model into filesystem (this applies less to mobile, and more to other non-file-based apps), for example:

- The (cloud based) note-taking service I use offer "export" option -- your notes are stored in whatever cloud database, but there is a 2-click way to download entire thing as .zip full of text + opml files.

- There are also APIs -- the same service offers API to download/upload notes. I run a small script from crontab which downloads all the nodes periodically to my computer.

- Local only: "git" does not expose past revision as files -- you use various git commands to see that data.
Right but as soon as I've written down a blurb or drawn a line I feel like it's set in stone a little bit. It feels like a decision. It isn't necessarily - I can always erase it or draw it again on a new page - but that carries friction which interrupts the process.

It works better at the phase after ideation, where I'm pretty sure I have the major ideas in place and I want to see them to make sure they make sense. But even then I prefer a digital medium because of how easy it is to delete or modify (even an eraser leaves behind a smudge, adding something to a list on paper means moving each item by hand, etc).
> personally given the option between spending 14 days in a fully catered quarantine hotel room, versus spending 14 days in the comfort of my own house with a big backyard, my home office, my workshop and music instruments etc, with only the caveat being I'd have to check-in on a mobile app once a day

That is false dilemma. In free society law-abiding citizens are trusted to observe the law even without persistent surveillance.

We also do not carry persistent surveillance tool to control whether we do not steal or assault, so why not handle quarantine the same way?
Interesting that he takes a jab on the institute of free enterprise. What would be a replacement for that, planned economy and state mandated ventures? I don't think that implies any more liberty.

Unfortunately, I don't see any proposed solutions.
Why Digital Marketing Is Essential to Your Business Growth
I think that's brain damage from years of embedded C.
I'll second that (as a Canadian). This is an instance where going with your gut is what matters. Someone telling me that a study showed I have more freedoms while simultaneously I see the increased burden on what I need to show, what I'm prohibited from or need permission before doing, what I'm comfortable discussing in public... what would a study do?
they can only up their immigration and import workers from other countries like the US. E.g. there are lots of engineers graduating from Chinese, India, and East European countries. Maybe Japan is becoming less attractive for Chinese since the Chinese coastal areas are getting rich, but they can just compete like the rest of the world for these talents.
After living in a few other countries for the last decade, I've come to realize that America is quite less free than how we might think.

Let me explain.

I'm not talking about the constitution, elections, or anything official like that.

I'm talking just about what you are free to do with your life every day in your home, in your business and in your neighborhood.

Most people in the USA, Canada, Australia and Europe don't realize how NOT free they are in terms of personal agency. It's actually mind-blowing.

And yes, you can argue it's that freedom that bought peace and security to the west. But slowly and surely, every day, from the mayor in your town, to the school board, to the local authorities, our freedoms in the west are almost gone.

And the interesting thing about it, we tend to spend a lot of time talking about the federal government, but the ones who are taking the freedoms are your local town counsel who refuses to give the permit for something, or neighborhood group who prohibits you from cutting your grass, or painting your home a different color, or parking your car on the street, or having a party past 10pm.

We have become a country of Karen's. And it's not going back.
Try opening a few Gmail tabs on a machine that's more than a few years old or has a relatively low amount of memory. It might be an okay experience if opening Gmail is literally the only thing you're doing with the machine.
While I agree with the ternary linting, the while loop piece makes absolutely no sense. There are absolutely many, many use cases of while loops; in fact, many dynamic programming algorithms rely on them.

Could you write them as a for loop? Possibly, but why? Is the new 2021 programming fad hating on while loops? Who do I contact to exchange my "js bad" t-shirts for "while bad" laptop stickers?

The logic behind disapproving of while loops in the article seems to stem from the author assuming while loops are "unbounded." This is absolutely, completely, totally false and there are entire branches of reasoning dedicated towards observing the bounded-ness of while loops. Most colleges include this in their curriculums and you usually have to learn to prove (via induction) the variants and invariants surrounding your loop before you can pass basic classes. It's even more ridiculous that, in the same breath, the author assumes for loops are guaranteed to complete execution. I can disprove this in two lines of code and two braincells:

for x in infinite_generator():
do_something()

This is also the general structure that message-queue libraries like Kafka, RabbitMQ etc take with their python code. Not to mention that, in many programming languages, for-loops are actually implemented as while loops behind the scenes.

I'll cede that it's easier to write unbounded code with while loops than for loops, but this is programmer error that can be pretty easily avoided by simply being a teensy tiny bit careful (and can be easily corrected). I'd also argue that the majority of these cases where while loops can be substituted by for loops, are also cases where writing a while loop is much simpler than trying to convert into a for loop. (Besides, you could make any of these arguments about recursion.)

> You know what else doesn’t have unbounded loops? Excel.

This is also a lie, Excel absolutely has infinite loops, it just yells at you when you do it. The equivalent of this in programming is a linter. Instead of just screaming fire every time the user writes a perfectly fine while loop, why not concentrate your efforts on identifying unbounded loops and introducing a linter rule for that?

Honestly, it's absolutely terrifying to me that someone contributing to the predominant linter for a major programming language not only wholeheartedly believes while loops are always unbounded and usually evil, but also managed to get this introduced (and presumably approved) by reviewers of this linter, and then proceeded to gloat about it on HackerNews. It comes as no shock to me that most people I've worked with disable pylint in their editors if they're this unreliable with their review process.
In my family we had a book made at an unusual, large, awkward size. The book was essentially a photo album and the pages essentially contact prints from large glass plates. The subject was the construction of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads to form the first transcontinental railroad in the US. In one picture, a very large wooden trestle bridge had just been completed, and the builders were all over it, if you could find them. The exposure time was long enough to turn the rapids of the river below feathery.

The photographer kept the camera and his supplies in a horse-drawn wagon, which was also the darkroom.
> I don't know if the risk of hitting a building outside the flight corridor is high enough to be important.

It is. From the New Yorker post:

“The Federal Aviation Administration regulates the private space industry and sets aside airspace for each mission, seeking to prevent collisions with general air traffic, including commercial airliners, and to limit civilian casualties in the event of an accident. The regulator uses formulas detailed in a hundred-and-twenty-one-page document—including an equation for calculating expected casualties—to assess the safety of a given spaceflight. According to the F.A.A., an acceptable Ec, as the equation is called, involves no more than one expected casualty per ten thousand missions.”

So there needs to be less than a 0.01% chance of killing someone on the ground. As a bystander on the ground, that seems an acceptable level of risk to tolerate for someone else’s joyride.
> every country gets worse over the time.

How did we get democracy in the first place?
> The medical industry is internally highly dysfunctional and trying to work with practicing doctors can be extremely politically difficult. The hospital bureaucracy often actively tries to prevent practicing doctors from working directly with technologists, preferring instead to silo them and direct all communication via senior management - who are often neither technology nor medical experts. Consequently it seems more likely that major changes will come from outside.

This is one of the areas where working with radiologists actually makes things easier. Radiology groups are normally independent practices that contract with multiple hospitals- they link in with hospital systems but mostly run their own thing. They also tend to have really solid IT departments and enough funding to make things work. Working with hospitals is a nightmare though, as you say.
/r/india (and /r/indiaspeaks) also bans even mildly opposing view points.
I got banned from /r/india for saying that the sub is out of touch with the real world.
Maybe everyone can go part time and focus more on raising children.
I used to code in pencil during the day at school, so I could test when I got home (and avoid boredom). These days I'll still sometimes use paper if I'm trying to optimize some inner loop assembly, easier to draw the code and the data side-by-side when both are changing.

Edit:

This line resonated with me:

> Maybe someday I’ll be able to handwrite code on an e-Ink device and then run it.

Are there successful projects for pen-based programming? I've read about Grail as a historical footnote, using hand-drawn flow charts: https://wiki.c2.com/?GrailSystem
I'm just not sure this is objectively true. Many people on HN seem convinced that there is nothing between all human and all machine that is better but I don't really think this is based on a solid evidence.

I'm also not sure how to verify that.
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I'm really glad you made this and posted it here, it's massively important to shine light on how much social engineering power rests with a handful of users:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312261
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018
I identify with this so much. Pacing, talking to myself even yes, but always manipulating concepts in my mind - and writing the code once it becomes clear. The idea of introducing diagrams or sketches into that process sounds disruptive and distracting at best.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Every single scientific study done on immigration shows that immigration benefits the host country, or maybe, to quote Tucker Carlson, it turns out that immigration doesn't really make our country "poorer and dirtier".

THOSE are OUR "fundamentally American values".
Taxpayers is a word I hear now and then.
Top priority compared to water, no of course not.

But if we have a commercially viable solution that solve a number of problems, why not do it?
Mildy related:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_a...

Not limited to audio forensics as the article mentions.
Brilliant, the HOAs in America are one of the most insane forms of government
Fantasy is believing that granted powers will not be abused because the powerful claim they won’t abuse them. Yes, we extrapolate and this might seem outlandish to the naive. Some of us know how history rhymes and call out the patterns that are paving the road the hell.
Yeah. People talk about second amendment solutions, and I wonder exactly what line needs to be crossed for that to come into play. My guess is nothing will ever be egregious enough. It's all BS.
Work issued T580. IT insisted docking stations were needed for higher resolutions. Doing some research, it turns out that is true but also one can buy a proprietary USB-C cable as well, my bad. It's the built-in HDMI that caps at 1920x1080 as I experienced.
Not sure how is this related to "cloudification"?

I mean, my Nokia N9110 communicator back in 2000 (which had no associated cloud service) had the same setup for note app -- single file in proprietary format, with all notes stored there. And no mass export tools either!

And before that, in the middle school, we used "At Ease" system [0] which was alternative system interface which exposed no files -- there was one "tab" with objects, but no folders or renames.

[0] http://toastytech.com/guis/atease.html
What about no filters? Could it be just pushing air around into things in the room is the most effective?
I have never really been exposed to the likes of Scheme, Lisp, Smalltalk etc. and I'm curious if anyone without an academic background actually got in to any of that by themselves.

Generally, it's just a bunch of JS, C#, Java, Python, and some Scala that runs everywhere I look, which often also has a large "I came across it and I got to work" type of developer or engineer using it. Maybe it's just the type of ecosystem I keep hopping around it but it seems that it's much less prominent than you'd expect.

There are always novel compilers, transpilers and showcases, but the amount of widespread use eludes me. (Only ErLang comes to mind with RabbitMQ, and maybe OCaml with Xen)
I can't help but note you conveniently glossed over the fact that his continued bad behavior is directly harmful to the cause he's trying to lead.

RMS is an actively detrimental force in the Free Software movement. He's a complete and total liability who hasn't made a substantive contribution to anything in 20 years.

It's like people are purposely blinding themselves to the fact that if your cause is represented by a lunatic, it's less attractive than a similar cause led by someone who doesn't eat their toejam while giving a lecture.

You have a person lacking even the most basic of social graces, who's consistently rude and unpleasant, who makes really gross comments about women and pedophiles, and this is who you think should be the public face of the movement?

Why not literally anyone else?

If the Free Software movement wants to be taken seriously, perhaps it should take itself seriously.