skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Apple has, and will, fold to government pressure faster than a lawn chair."

As a publicly-traded, trillion dollar company, where profits are at stake, this would seem to make sense.

What does not seem to make sense is why anyone would believe Apple might ignore its own financial interests and those of its shareholders and deliberately sacrifice a major opportunity^1 in order to resist government pressure based on some political issue. Why would anyone hold such an assumption. There is nothing to support it^2 and it does not seem to make any sense.

1. That includes the opportunity for Chinese customers to purchase the Apple Watch, albeit with a disproportional size representation of some geographical aspect in the Maps application

2. NB. If resisting government pressure resulted in an increase or no change in profits then that is a different situation. In that case, resisting, or even appearing to resist governmental pressure, would seem to make sense.

To put it another way, no one should be surprised by decisions like this one, whereas some of us should be surprised if we ever learn that a publicly-traded company with the market cap of Apple deliberately sacrificed an opportunity like selling to the Chinese market^3 because of a political issue. It is doubtful we would ever learn about such a decision, for various reasons.

3. Or using Chinese manufacturing facilities

"But the Maps app had become a priority for Apple..."

Apple acts in its own interests. It seems strange that anyone would believe that it acts in someone else's. Unless it increases profits, that would not make any sense.

Generally, large companies do not protect citizens from abuses of government. It is supposed to the the other way around. Governments are supposed to protect citizens from abuses of large corporations.
What about the lifestyle of an average white collar job though? Don't they generally have a similar 50-60 hour week like other East Asian countries, South Korea and Japan, that would be considered quite excessive by western standards?
> Thiel seems to genuinely believe the USA, and the west in general, is in an existential struggle with forces intent on destroying it. I can’t speak for him, but maybe Islamic fundamentalists, authoritarian autocracies like Russia, Chinese communism, etc.

I believe such a struggle exists as well. But I have my doubts whether one would find him fighting AGAINST the authoritarians.
The implied background context is an analysis of whether C++ should adopt a fiber-based concurrency model presuming nothing outside a C++ compiler will ever change or be adapted. That may be a fair presumption from the perspective of the C++ committee, but the conclusions regarding efficiency and ergonomics of different concurrency models are not at all generalizable.

Even then, though, the analysis in the paper is still poor. Take section 2.2.1, for example:

> This is approach allows fibers to use very small stacks (less than a typical memory page size of 4K), but, at the cost that the developer must have complete knowledge of how big activation frames are for every function that can be called directly/transitively from the fiber. This is a very precarious approach to be used with extreme caution as the smallest mistake can lead to memory corruption and security exploits.

It characterizes the problem of determining stack size as being so intractable as to be unsafe. And yet this task--precisely calculating activation record size--is exactly what the compiler must do to implement stackless coroutines, the author's preferred solution (and the one adopted by Rust and eventually adopted by C++).

In reality, the compiler can't always do this, and so stackless coroutines in these languages don't permit things like recursive function invocations or calling through function pointers (e.g. virtual methods), at least not without falling back to dynamic heap allocation. And yet elsewhere in the paper the author discusses and dismisses segmented stacks, without it apparently occurring to the author that segmented stacks is precisely what a C++ stackless coroutine implementation must end up implementing in any call chain that cannot be statically determined, which can be quite a common (even pervasive) situation in an object oriented language or in environments with dynamic linking.
Two other tips: a lot of the ip commands have idempotent versions too. Look for the “replace” versions of each command.

Also, if you have a complex firewall then putting your rules in your own chain and inserting that chain into a top level chain is the idempotent way:

iptables -D FORWARD -j LOL || true
iptables -F LOL || true
iptables -X LOL || true
iptables -N LOL
iptables -I FORWARD -j LOL

…and then add your task specific rules to your own LOL chain and leave everyone else’s alone.

Much nicer than polluting the top level chains with the iptables equivalent of global variables. You can work on your own but if the firewall without clobbering all the other stuff.
This reminds me of the scene in Antitrust where Milo, the young computer scientist, meets Gary Winston, the Bill Gates / Steve Jobs figure, for the first time. Milo is set on contributing to open source, saying it will do the world good, but Gary asks him, "How many will be altruistic (with what you do for free), and how many will make billions off of your generosity?"
Whether you are “supposed” to do that or not really depends on what kind of software you are building.
Clearly you’ve rejected Capitalism because you don’t properly capitalize anything.
“The United States does not support Taiwan independence.”

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/
The contract should be ironclad on acceptable quality, consider including a term for longevity of the product in its acceptable state (bridge can't collapse in 10 years or something)

The US has one of the most well-funded legal industries and we are worried that we can't write a complicated and thorough legal contract to do work? Doesn't really make sense.

If the winner cuts the corners and doesn't deliver, they get sued in US's extremely thorough courts. I also think the bar for applying for these contracts should be higher. Firms with liquidity, track record, etc. get the best jobs.
> Relationships with unions in the US seem much more adversarial than there, on average.

Depends. You have "red" unions, which tend to be more aggressive, have revolutionary ideologies, and see bosses as enemies to perpetually keep at bay.

Then "yellow" unions tend to be more centrist, conciliatory and, arguably, somewhat toothless.

Which kind of union is more present varies from sector to sector.

But in any case, if you've ever seen a CGT propaganda poster, you'll never be under any impression that these guys are feeling "cooperative" with management / the government.
Improving Language Models by Retrieving from Trillions of Tokens
Yes - Palantir was born out of 9/11. The idea being that US institutions need software that actually works and has tight controls around PCL.

Otherwise more attacks will happen and the reflexive response will be an increase in authoritarianism at the expense of western ideals.

I don’t personally agree with his support of trump (I see it as a partisan blind spot because of his Cato institute Republican identity) to me trump increases authoritarian risk in the US. Otherwise I agree with a lot of Thiel’s positions, even where I disagree it’s rare that his position is not thoughtful.
I think there are a lot of complete indie WebGL games, but they aren't nearly as well known as console titles from the late 90s. And that's because the market and technology are much more mature since then: demand for retro games like that is lower since the technology isn't state-of-the-art anymore, and supply is way up.
An update on 0day CVE-2021-43798: Grafana directory traversal
Antibiotic resistance is usually on plazmids which can be exchanged between different bacteria (often even between different bacterial species). So only one bacteria needs to find the right gene and it starts spreading.

Viruses have really small genomes and simply adding a gene for bypassing immunity does not work. It would need to restructure it's surface proteins so that the immune cells can't recognize it anymore, but this restructure often breaks the virus.

Also there is the thing that antibiotics are present at low concentrations everywhere which makes small but constant pressure for the resistance genes.

> On a larger scale, since 1940, antibiotics have become an omnipresent pollutant in environments of all types (55). Even in places largely untouched by humans, we can find antibiotic compounds and, with them, ARGs (56–59). In recent years, we have learned that even low levels of antibiotic pollution select for high levels of resistance (60–62). Additionally, regardless of the biome or their ability to clear pollutants, humanity’s worldwide industrial-level use of antibiotics has resulted in a steady stream of antibiotics into the environment, without ever allowing natural systems to return to baseline levels (63).

Immunity does not come in this constant small pressure. You either have it and then the virus is dead quickly, so it does not have much time for finding mutations. Or you don't have it, so there is no pressure for the mutations.
oh i do, don't worry about that, i don't even need to work anymore

because of that i get to realize how wrong it is
I support that. At the same time I assume you have written this in a device manufactured in China together with many companies there object we have in our daily lives. Are enough of us willing to abstain from these devices?
That's quite the incantation.
> Oh yes, there are some old computers that won't boot from USB

Back in the day, there were some old computers that wouldn't boot from a CD drive. I recall that the solution back then was very simple: within the ISO image, there was a bootable floppy image, which you could write to a normal floppy disk (actualy, there were IIRC usually two such images, one for 1.44 floppy drives, and another for the older 1.2 floppy drives). You would boot and load the kernel from that floppy, but the installer would look for the rest of the files on the CD drive.

The same idea could be used here: for those old computers which have a BIOS which do not understand how to boot from a USB drive, a small bootable CD image containing only the bootloader and the kernel could be made available, either within the USB image or as a separate download.
You know the risks? What if things go south and your options are worth zero?

90% of startups fail
From the article:

Contrast all of these issues with a city like Istanbul, where the M5, an 18-mile subway line, was built in seven years and for just $630 million.

-

That is roughly $35 million per mile. And it is one of the deepest subways in the world. Almost as deep as Moscow's. Meanwhile the 2nd Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion per mile. That is a difference of 71x.

The big bogeyman that is ignored is the incredible corruption involved with the politicians, contractors and "consultants" who rig these absurd outcomes.

And let's not forget the incredible corruption in Boston and the Big Dig that became a smaller dig with massive cost overruns and delays:

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

One other thing is that in countries like Turkey they build a lot of infrastructure with private funds who run it like a concession for a certain period of time (say 2 decades) and then it reverts back to the government. The private contractors have an incentive to build build inexpensively and quicker as their IRR is ticking.

Examples of such Public Private Partnership projects are:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87anakkale_1915_Bridge

The concept of PPT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partner...

-

By the way the awesome website of the quoted and mentioned Alon Levy which I discovered years ago when we had a discussion on the disparity of subway costs per mile between the US and places like Prague:

https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/
> Without it the blog post is less interesting.

I disagree.

When I see the author's exaggeration and overconfidence, coupled with a lack of examples, I stop reading. It reminds me of driving by a paper mill. Memorable, yes, in the wrong sort of way. I'll remember to avoid it in the future.

I don't dig the writing. I find it uninteresting and unpersuasive. An author does not have to exaggerate to be interesting. Even a dry scientific article can punch you in the face. Isn't that interesting? Perhaps impact and exaggeration are inversely related. Perhaps become exaggeration is easy and overused.

There is a time and place for exaggeration, sure. However, a skilled writer has many varied tools: metaphor, details, humor, and much more.

There isn't one formula to good writing, certainly, but what I'm seeing here misses the mark.
Most software engineers aren't working on something that needs knowledge of CPU caches to reach performance goals. Especially (web) engineers. You can write performant javascript for years without even knowing that CPUs are pipelined, let alone the details.

Most of the few software engineers that make their living writing code that needs to be fast, do know the things they need to know to make the code fast.

I don't agree even with your altered claim. Most software engineers do know how their code works at the level that they need into order to make good software.
I could can buy a kit for a 3 bedroom house for say, $35K or less. But PG&E charges $20K+ to connect your electricity, the fire department charges $20k+ assessments and etc, bringing construction costs to $200K in a rural area and more in an urban area.

A lot of this is prop 13 bs - cities can't tax so they finance themselves with new home assessments. But prop 13 itself is all about protecting those who built yesterday from the costs of maintenance today.

The thing is, those costs are real. The "a normal person can afford to build a house" isn't coming back. The single family home system has diseconomies of scale (roads and electricity get harder as the scale of suburbia increases, think about it). A modern society can't afford to do things that way and it's continuing by because those doing it are pushing the costs onto other people.
They're employed by people who want them to make specific changes that drive their own interests, which are often for-profit (hence why they have the funds available to pay someone to make changes to open source)
One "obvious" solution for the issue of building projects while still respecting citizen rights would be to have them all given public approval votes. If approved that mandate could shield it from disruptions that could turn it entirely into a waste or make lawyers the biggest expense. I believe that the grounds for lawsuits against passed ballot initiatives are limited mostly to constitutionality. Even if it just resulted in civil engineers drawing up every possibility to try to solve the issue that would at least support the proper expertise.
We Brits still curb our enthusiasm. Kerbs are just the things on roads.
> Contribute to open source projects like Linux where they can't do that.

The Linux Foundation 2021 annual report [0] forecasts revenues of over $177M and companies are still involved in the development of Linux and other open source projects under that umbrella.

Either way, Linux devs and other open source devs are being "supported" by these big corporations.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/tools/linux-foundation-annua...
I find this attitude, as common as it is, a bit of a non-argument. Every company is motivated by profits, and yet I have vastly different opinions on the behaviours of different companies.

Even when you have one ultimate goal, there are a thousand different ways to go about it, including to behave in ways I find admirable in order to secure my business going forward. It's fairly irrelevant to me why you're behaving the way you are, so long as you are.
Many people here seem baffled about why there are laws here in the US that require various people to sign anti-BDS agreements specifically mentioning the State of Israel or the Israeli government.

After all, BDS campaigns may seem rather silly.

Would it possibly matter if you stop buying Sabre Hummus?

But these campaigns can be effective (for their proponents). They make US citizens aware of the conditions they would not otherwise be aware of.
That's a misunderstanding.

https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2021 "Lists are based on search terms that had the highest spike this year as compared to the previous year." so it's not most searched at all. Those list are heavily editorialized. Otherwise the top 10 would be 'Google', 'Gmail', 'Amazon' and similar generic terms.
US, UK to Partner on Prize Challenges to Advance Privacy-Enhancing Technologies
Those are great thank you!

I suppose I'm also hoping to go deeper. Like how is this going to help us understand how galaxies evolve? I suppose it will because we can see farther and so younger galaxies, and compare that to older galaxies to learn more about how they change.

I guess I'll have to wait for science to do it's thing and then we'll likely have lots of information to explain it all. Right now it wouldn't be a particularly compelling book to write.
Zero-Shot Text-Guided Object Generation with Dream Fields
Consciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.
AFAIK it is both closed source and encrypted. Otherwise we would already have nouveau with black market firmware extracted from the official driver than unlocks power and clock management (something that nouveau can't do, reason why it's so slow to be useless on modern cards)
Defeat, not destroy. Unions aren't destroyed in the US today and they're not sought out to be destroyed, no large government agencies or corporation is hunting them. In the Jimmy Hoffa days certainly there were some powerful people inside and outside of government that wanted the Teamsters destroyed.

The corporations aim to defeat them in the sense of keeping them voted down / out of the operations. John Deere for example recently came back with a rather lame offer for wage increases, the union went on strike, Deere capitulated and gave them a more fair wage hike, the union accepted; Deere didn't attempt to destroy the union.

Kellogs and their union haven't been able to agree to terms. Kellogs didn't attempt to destroy the union, they didn't send assassins or thugs to kill or rough up the union leadership. They replaced the union members with temporary labor and resumed limited operations. And that's entirely fair, the union can strike and refuse to work, the company can replace them.

Amazon didn't destroy the union in Alabama, that battle will continue; Amazon - at least temporarily - defeated them.
I've notice some non-native English speakers use "double verify" where native speakers would use "double check" or "verify". It could be a play on that.

Or they had a meeting where the founders asked "what domain sounds twice as good as verify.com?"
If $1T is not enough to end homelessness, then maybe that extra $11B would help?

But pulling welfare funding numbers from "The Desk of Jeff Sessions" might not be a good place to start.

https://www.cbpp.org/blog/the-deeply-flawed-sessions-report-...

So no, we do not spend $1T on "welfare" a year. But let's focus on the money spent specifically for helping house the homeless. It is only $2.5B.

https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today awarded $2.5 billion to renew support to thousands of local homeless assistance programs across the nation. HUD's Continuum of Care (CoC) grants will provide critically needed support to 6,597 local programs on the front lines of serving individuals and families experiencing homelessness. See local impact of funding below.
You're quite right. I had run `pactree sudo`, forgetting that the correct command was `pactree -r sudo`.
Or just have your script make a lock file somewhere on a persistent file system and exit if it exists.
A Romanian service plan covers the entire European Union.
I've got an amateur interest in nuclear disasters, and I've noticed an echo between TMI and Fukushima... in both cases, the plants were substantially mismanaged by the electric company, who seemed more interested in downplaying and covering up the issues than in solving them, even as the emergency continued.
I think the article touched on that, but your second sentence gave the context of why looking at the atmosphere is interesting. Thank you.

And yeh, that is exciting!
Google did actually make a stand here a decade back, and have been blocked ever since. The last straw for them at the time, however, wasn't political pressure to make some islands look bigger or censor some websites, but espionage.
> There are some multi-boot tools, that enable putting many ISO files on the one USB-stick. I have never used them, and don't see the point of them, unless you are a crazed disto-hopper.

If the author had taken a bit of their own advice and went out of their comfort zone they might not have been having so many issues finding where to put the save file years ago! Overall though I get it and image distribution is easier for 99% of cases. I have found it more difficult in 2 cases though, both are cases of "the tooling knows ISO".

The first is on IP KVM's, even when they support non-ISO based virtual drives you'll often be wishing they did. The last I remember trying to futz with this was a Lantronix Spider and it wanted to pass through an entire drive letter but it wasn't working for whatever reason and I eventually just made an ISO with the files in it and mounted the file with 2 clicks.

The second is virtual machines with a similar story but this time it's usually possible to qemu-convert or extract and put into a virtual disk of the right format and you're good to mount the disk - or maybe you get lucky and the packaged format is just a click or config line away from natively mounting like assigning an ISO to a virtual CD drive is. A good example of the latter was just today I wanted to boot a live Linux environment to run gparted on an existing guest VM on an M1 Mac Parallel's guest. I had 0 knowledge (or desire) to investigate how to get an ARM64 image of my preferred distro to be in whatever format Parallel's expects just to use for 5 minutes then never use that virtual disk again so I found Fedora shipped ARM64 ISOs and was able to easily mount it with a few clicks in the GUI and do my work.

I don't think either of these are at the forefront of Puppy's use cases but worth mentioning in a universal call to retire ISO. It may be an old hodge-podge at this point but most everything understands how to work with it as boot media already vs whatever disk image format you choose instead.
Google withdrew from the Chinese market for multiple reasons, but one influential one was the state sponsored penetration of Google ops in China.
Ah, isomorphic keyboards. I have spent a lot of time in that particular internet rabbit hole.
Great article!

On and individual level people often won't admit to mistakes either. There is a great book called:

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts
Perhaps you forgot about [1].

If regulatory capture permits BigTech to force police/govt to exercise authority for them, that is basically close to the same thing.

I'm guessing they could easily horsetrade w. the FBI on this, for expanded levels of access or simply qui pro quo.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468894/cops-raid-home...
Pretty sure it took two tries also