skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claims that have never been tested in court here aren't part of the license, but rather commentary as to what constitutes a derivative work under copyright law. If true, they would affect the legality of a number of practices that apparently do not require distributing or modifying licensed components or accepting the license at all.

If loading and running a program with dynamically linked modules with incompatible licenses creates a legally prohibited derivative work in memory, that is a reasonable claim that the author copyright holders of some of the code could pursue the users in question about. That is not what is controversial though.

The controversial claim is that by merely making a module that is link or use compatible with another module a legally prohibited derivative work has been created. Not by incorporating inline code, or copying the structure, sequence, or organization of another module, but merely by making something that is compatible in the abstract. Where is the legal basis for this claim? It is apparently nowhere, little more than wishful thinking.
Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now:

* Privacy online

* Google search for niche or exact matches

* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet

* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive

* SEO before it got hacked to hell

* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)

* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)

* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren't soldered on

* In general anti right to repair hardware

* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine

* Ransomware wasn't a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back

* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop

* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable

* CGNAT not being as common

* OAuth is still annoying to implement

* Blocking ads was easier

* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common

* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don't understand consent and couldn't behave, also leading to performative/annoying cookie banners we see everywhere

* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS

* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports

* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsers

Edit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.
Well, maybe SE programmes. There’s some CS in security work, but not at a basic level.
One reason to incentive warmongering I assume is domestic politics in the Western countries: Biden's and Boris Johnson approval ratings are pretty low, and nothing better than war to give it a boost. Take Johnson for instance: some days ago the news was his parties during the pandemic, but, alas, not anymore.
Yeah. Slack and Discord sure have enough resources to build three dedicated native apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Slack has been through several full rewrites yet still works terrible. At this point it must be nothing but stubbornness. It's definitely not an informed engineering decision.
> I don't like GitHub's security screener dismissing this report because of the "social engineering" aspect.

Agreed.

I get where it comes from, npm isn't responsible for individual contributors getting social-engineered, but this is much deeper than that, and part of the flaw is with npm's support allowing the password reset to go through.
As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM.

I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have been more lightweight, but ultimately found that only kde of all things gave an acceptable user experience while not feeling overly slow.

I don't remember which was which, I tried mate, cinnamon, lxqt And maybe something else I'm forgetting now. One of them was really slow to react to the multimedia keys, and then would appear to buffer the keystrokes from the key repeat like it's the MS-DOS days, ie you press brightness up, nothing happens, so you hold the key, and when it finally starts adjusting the brightness you immediately let go of the key but it still goes on and on to maximum brightness. Then another one couldn't be convinced to behave in a consistent way when it comes to screen brightness wrt (un)plugging mains power and using the brightness keys. It was something like: unplug, screen goes brighter as I manually adjusted it way down before on mains power (sitting in dark room), and the default setting for battery happened to be higher. Annoying but ok, but then if you touch the brightness controls again it first goes up again and then very low and whatnot. Like, there might be some very clever intentions behind this that I didn't catch right there, but then I doubt the non-tech-savby person this was intended for would get what kind of 4D chess magic was going on there. It just felt like it was spazzing around. Then the third one installed and had all its icons missing and the font rendered way too large. That's just the three most blatant issues I ran into. Installed KDE last and everything was sane and usable, to my surprise.

Granted, some of the issues, especially the icon/font one are probably just packaging mistakes on debians side; I don't know how often people really install multiple DEs in parallel, so this might be untested territory, but still, showed me once again that as much as I like Linux, I'm never gonna claim it's the year of the Linux desktop for probably another decade, and only would encourage curious tinkery friends to actually try Linux as a daily driver if they do more than just browse the web, and then probably never use anything besides KDE or Gnome 3 at least for a start.
> Tbh the world would've been better off if these apps didn't exist. Especially VS Code.

You're confusing "I personally don't like X" with "the world is better off without X".
Are you saying that all the publicly accessible satellite footage showing Russian troop movements is fake?

Are you saying that the discredited Russian false flag attacks in separatist areas didn’t happen? (A fact anyone can verify by looking at the metadata of those videos)

Are you saying that the Russians are lying when they confirm these troop movements? Are you saying they lied when they publicly stated that they’re considering military action in Ukraine?

What exactly are you trying to say? These are very real independently verifiable facts known to the whole world.
Yeah: Google employees routinely leave patches for bugs in the PR queue because someone hasn't either update the existing tests (which clearly were adding negative value if they fail on the fixed code) or write new regression tests, as if "the code is already known to be wrong shouldn't trump "maybe someone in the future will break it again".
Economics, ethics, and moral philosophy (2018)
A fast CPU and plentiful RAM isn't a license to not optimize your code. A fast internet connection isn't a license to not optimize your binary size.
It's probably easier to remove all pastic junk from the great pacific garbage patch, where stuff doesn't move around at relativistic speeds.
That's my takeaway as well. In thinking about the log4j, it seems like these big things inherit complex escape hatches which make you vulnerable.
Why specify Americans?
I think that in the Signal case, anyone can generate forged messages in some sense. OTR pretty much only allowed your correspondent to do that.

I personally don't think it matters as I consider deniability though a false claim of a forgery pretty much bogus to start with. I would actually prefer that messages from me could not be forged by anyone. I don't feel the need to have off the record discussions and chances are will never have that need.
Cross-platform GUIs shouldn't exist. That's it. They always inevitably are worse then native ones.
> zsh comes with a function to check "rm" arguments and issue a warning if rm * is supplied.

For those of us following along at home that is the RM_STAR_SILENT option, and there is also a RM_STAR_WAIT option should you wish to just have a little wait first.

> it is simple to write "calc '3 * 4 + 5'"

You can use the GP's syntax without quoting on zsh by using the noglob builtin: `noglob calc 3 * 4 + 5`. There are a few commands I like to alias with `noglob =$cmd` for nicer interactive usage.

--

GNU coreutils' cat and GNU grep will also error out in the basic case of IO loops with `{cat,grep}: foos: input file is output file`.

I largely agree with the premise that there are a heap of problems though, and having some environments that fix the some of the problems isn't all that useful.
we use settle up for money, Apple notes for shared wishlist and occasionally for shopping.

that's about it.
We were definately a dog family, when we had our first born kid, untill she was 2 years old there were so many things we related to same as a puppy
But not for Wordle, since a Bloom filter cannot enumerate items? (So, you can't tell which letters were correct.)
That's a good one, but I'm not sure if it captures the full extent of the idea; in this case, the negative externality is a 'feature' for the transacting party, whereas in general the phrase 'negative externality' simply implies some negative external consequence of the transaction was not duly considered during the transaction (at least as I understand it; am I wrong?).

What I have in mind is things like, e.g. youtube amping their ad ratio by 100% when they started offering paid subscriptions. Or Apple intentionally not fixing features that cripple using windows on their new Intel processor. Or IOS shaming android users in their messaging app instead of providing appropriate support. Or MS Word detecting files written in libreoffice as 'corrupt' and offering to fix them. Or matlab introducing syntactical changes that break octave. Or Android making you go through hoops to use software outside of the play store. etc.

In other words, if you're a company engaging in such a tactic, it's probably not that you haven't necessarily considered how a 'feature' might affect users of competing products; it's probably that you have considered it, and it's just that extra bit of friction to make them feel your own product is more streamlined and superior (for all the wrong reasons).
Personally, I disagree that parsing was hard before and made easy with PEG parsing.

For decades it has been easy and common to implement parsers by hand.

From what I can tell, universities and textbooks just overcomplicated the process by teaching parser generators.

I have done a few studies of various open source ecosystems now and (edited: other than CPython) I haven't seen PEG parsers really used in anything but toy implementations of things.
Nah, but I do agree all scientific text should be rot13 encoded, and only let the “real” scientists in on the secret.
> Why do few Americans have access to european chocolate?

Americans both make good chocolate and have ready access to good foreign chocolate, which is in pretty much every grocery store. Many Americans are habituated to low-quality chocolate, or particular products where low-quality chocolate is a component but the quality of the chocolate doesn't particulary stand out because of nuts, salt, caramel, nougat, etc.
Installing Windows without a Microsoft account
I really like that XKCD comic about identifying birds in a photo, so it's unfortunate that it didn't age that well. How could we rewrite that comic to today's tech? I was thinking something like:

A: I want to create an app that scans good feedback of our brand online...

B: there's a li rary for that, consider it done

A: ... and understand if they are actually being sarcastic.

B: I'm gonna need 5 years and a lab of experts.
53 points from 2 hours ago but already off the front page

This piece is clearly war mongering propaganda, but the discussion in the comments here is somewhat decent. It’s too bad HN immediately kills any concrete discussion about world events like this.
I don't know why the animated gif seems as popular as ever, I can't think of any positives about it... bad colours, large file sizes and are encoders more readily available than proper video encoders? Also, supporting it fully now requires either threading or an event loop. The value isn't worth the complexity.
> Things that used to be hard and are now easy:

> Concurrency, with async/await (in several languages)

The number of times I've been bitten by the very specific semantics around async/await in JavaScript makes me wonder if I've hit some kind of a ceiling in trying to grok it.

Coming from the world of threads, I've found Kotlin's structured concurrency approach the best of the lot I've used so far, even if it isn't with out its quirks: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/composing-suspending-functions.h...
You can't just buy backup. You have to think about scenarios and you have to test the restore.

As an example, I have an online account and a synology nas. I test my backup every time I move to a new laptop, by doing the data migration trough the restore.

Synology, it turns out, had changed its backup solution, and finding the installer for the old tools needed to restore was non trivial. They also wanted me to click on every individual file, with 100+ K files to go. The alternative was to download a zip file, except this actually timed out before it could complete. All the data was there, except not in a decent restorable format.

Apart from that, this is not an offline backup. If your house has a fire or whatever, your backup is also gone. A NAS on its own is not enough.

I was hoping to use rsync.net as online provider, but they had no way to receive money from a SEPA IBAN. They also store data outside the EU, exposing me to a foreign legislature with markedly lower consumer protection. When looking to the EU, the storage landscape becomes fragmented quickly. There are options, but its not easy.
> it does really happen

When has this ever happened?
San Francisco's Mayor Is Urging Employers to Return Workers to Downtown Offices
> The US didn't need to invade: President Kennedy instituted a naval blockade and that plus Kennedy's promise to remove US missiles from Turkey in exchange was enough to get the Soviets to agree to remove their missiles from Cuba.

We did try to assassinate Castro several times, so not exactly.

> That blockade of course was an aggressive act against Cuba, and it was the correct course of action IMO because a rule that says that no country will be aggressive towards any other country is unworkable because there is no power above the countries that could enforce the rule.

Practically speaking yes, but there are enough treaties in place at this point that if someone invades someone else they are at least breaking some of their own rules. Think of it like a credit system for countries, the more you break rules you laid down for yourself, the less credibility you have going forward. Decentralized global governance of sorts.

> Some courses of action at the country level are more ethical than others, but it is more complicated than you imply it is and any ethical framework has to take into account certain realities.

I didn't intend to imply it wasn't complicated when you zoom out, but it is very un-complicated when you zoom in. The guy who throws the first punch is the aggressor. Sling words, make agreements, talk a big game, but the first one to violate the sovereignty of another government is indeed the aggressor.
If I want to know what the neocons in the US think about things, I always turn to dw ...
Nice article.

I had similar thoughts on 'work better' vs 'work more' in the past, and how it relates to Boyle's law :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30000296
Windows has Thumbs.db
If you are going to use hydrogen, use a hydrogen fuel cell. Not a V8 internal combustion engine.
Even in the sort of modern systems available to wealthy developers try to run more than two Electron apps at a time and tell me if you don't feel the slugginess
I'd like it if there was a rundown of fees somewhere. Say I do this with $1000 and then buy some gift cards, how much am I likely to be left with?

Also, I'm not familiar with prepaid credit cards, or gift cards really, do you need an address and or ID to use them, or can you somehow buy and use them anonymously for nontrivial things?
This is a false equivalency. I get into this a lot with Russian immigrants. They're so used to distrusting the government they distrust everything.

Sure, our politicians lie. But with the exception of Trump this is at a "reasonable" scale and they're usually held accountable. You can check them up. In the case of dictators lying is the default and if you try to hold them to account you'll breath Polonium pretty soon...

It's pretty clear whose lying here.
> Again, then you have a centralized authority

Not really, unless you think of PayPal and Stripe as the "centralized authorities" of credit card processing. It's still a system with multiple authorities/centers of power; you'd just be paying a third party for the convenience of integrating those multiple authorities into a single layer of abstraction. If you're worried about the aggregator somehow subverting or altering your requests, you can always cut them out of the transaction.
UK starts to ponder how Huawei ban would work
From wikipedia:

Bulverism is a term for a rhetorical fallacy that combines circular reasoning and the Genetic fallacy with presumption or condescension. The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error." The Bulverist assumes a speaker's argument is invalid or false and then explains why the speaker came to make that mistake (even if the opponent's claim is actually right) by attacking the speaker or the speaker's motive. The term Bulverism was coined by C. S. Lewis[1] to poke fun at a very serious error in thinking that, he alleged, recurs often in a variety of religious, political, and philosophical debates.

Similar to Antony Flew's "subject/motive shift", Bulverism is a fallacy of irrelevance. One accuses an argument of being wrong on the basis of the arguer's identity or motive, but these are strictly speaking irrelevant to the argument's validity or truth.
Well so far no one started the war.
Internet connection now required for Windows 11 Pro Insider setup
This is why I don't believe SCRUM is meaningfully agile at all, and only exists so that companies can signal agility and management consultancies can sell agility. When agile development is fundamentally about fast feedback loops and not letting bureaucracy get in the way of delivering, a process laden model like SCRUM cannot be said to meet that definition.
I think the “root key here” search was silly but due diligence i suppose. There are a lot more tools than there used to be thats true but its also a much larger attack space than it used to be as well. Scripts and tools make no difference if you don’t know when or how to use them. That’s true overall not just pen testing. But I concur with the sentiment all though I’m also under the impression the purpose of the chosen example was meant in an encouraging way
> try to run more than two Electron apps at a time and tell me if you don't feel the slugginess

I run more than two Electron apps at a time and everything is fine.

Unless you’re running ancient hardware with 4GB of RAM and trying to load up many intensive applications (Electron or otherwise) it’s not a problem. If anything gets “sluggish” then you’re probably swapping, but it’s difficult to actually reach that point with just two Electron apps.
I've started to notice a lot more videos using TTS voices for narration, presumably because the quality of said voices is increasing.

Increasing "enough" is subjective of course.

It could be that the creator doesn't feel confident recording themselves doing the voiceover, regardless of nationality.

Or they are recording the video in many different languages and it's easier/cheaper to get text translated than to find voice talent in multiple languages.
Ocean Life Follows This Massive Pattern – Except Where Humans Have Interfered
I assume your are referring to the land used by the military?
Eh... I'd argue against quite a lot of those being "easier" than doing things manually.

Docker is a prime example. It's supposedly easier to spin up a docker container for a basic web server stack, but to be honest I'd rather install PHP/MySQL and an SSL certificate manually, rather than spend time finding a decent container from a trustworthy source, and then spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how and why it's been configured the way it has, etc. etc.

Plus there's the need to actually install docker itself and learn how to use it in the first place.

Every one of these comes with its own learning curve which isn't always better than just learning how the actual tools underneath work.
Who was wrong, UK or Sweden? Both, of course. Both tried to archive herd immunity in 2020 spring by mass infection till they realized that they are wrong. Then they continued to let people to die for months from 2020 fall till 2021 spring (Sweden even till summer 2021) until vaccines arrived.

Only this was a turning point for UK and Sweden because they managed to vaccinate relatively fast the people who really needed protection from vaccines.

If you want to learn from somebody, learn from Denmark.

Here is Our World in Data comparison between 3 countries https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
How Anti-Smut Activists Made 'Louie, Louie' Famous
Yes! Not only is it a real thing, but with Moore’s Law slowing down, data/compute appetites going up, and the gap between processing speed and memory speed still large and growing, the need for task specific compression is currently going up.

Working on GPUs, I see many, and work on some task specific compression ideas as part of my job. The compiler has it’s own ways of compressing code & debug info. The hardware has it’s own ways of compressing textures. A recent feature we built on my team is a compressed encoding for adaptively subdividing curves. All of these things have the primary goal of reducing memory bandwidth, which in turn increases the speed of computation because memory is so frequently the main bottleneck.
It can move much more per instruction with MOVEM which let's you move many full registers at once.
Three major browsers are about to hit version 100. Will websites cope?
> this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities)

We still have both. Now we have a government saying your kid’s chemistry kit won’t include lethal substances. And you (or your parents) can buy a chemistry book and do whatever experiments you feel are safe.

We now have two layers of trust instead of one and you can choose which layer works best for you.