skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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> Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News.

> Asahi Linux developers are frequent targets of abuse on Hacker News. Despite our pleas, the moderators have not taken effective action to improve the situation.

> Overtly hateful content is often flagged on HN and not immediately visible. Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. That preserves the 'clean' image of the website, but the reduced moderation activity enables abuse to continue. Although you don't see those threads, search engines do. HN uniquely has a high page rank and low moderation, making it a prime target for bad actors to poison search results with abuse, bigotry, and nastiness. This isn't low-level trolling, but an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities.

> Please demand change within your community.

This is an unfair and gross assessment. I've lost some respect from Asahi for this.

They're calling for extreme moderation of opinions they don't agree with, which is the opposite of open discourse.

Asahi: deal with it. You're Streisand Effecting this. Your inability to handle drama is actually causing more drama. Just turn the other cheek and ignore it.
If AI safety is moat-building for American companies, why doesn't JD Vance support it, since it would allegedly benefit American interests?
As a software engineer, a PhD doesn't seem worth it.

It's a lot of work and time, and most companies don't particularly need PhDs. Maybe a PhD gets a boost in pay starting out, but 5 years of experience cancels out most of the benefit. I suppose PhDs can get a shortcut into Prinicple or Senior roles, so there's some tangible benefit.

On the other hand, if a company is hiring PhDs and doing research, I feel those jobs are most likely to get cut if business is going poorly.
Flagged incoming in 5...4...3...2...
Who said anything about crimes?

Protests are legal; they still require organizing, and keeping bad-faith folks out of that planning process.
Unfortunately it is not the first time a good developer leaves the project for a famous "Linu(s)x shitshow", and it will not be the latest...

I don't believe in the Linux project since a few years now, especially as "the bearded ones" are not interested in moving the project to a certain future, but only jerking on their old own code.

Good luck for the futur Hector, and thanks for what you managed to do until now with your team.
> industry setting unrealistic requirements for education

This sounds like a market dynamic to me. If it were difficult to find qualified candidates, requirements would be lowered.

Just leaving this here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Musk literally said DOGE is "dismantling the radical-left shadow government."[0] Like, he said the quiet part out loud.

Anyone still claiming that DOGE's purpose or goals have anything to do with government spending or efficiency are either naive or else engaging in regime propaganda. It is about purging the government of wrongthink and harassing political enemies, end of.

[0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
I think there is some inherent value to PhDs in general. Even the ones commonly looked down upon as frivolous here, even the ones with little to no economic benefit.

The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.

So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.

Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.
we are expensive to employ
Plot twist: your TV hasn't updated YouTube yet.
Yes, this is pretty normal; in paid products I even find it's less aggressive than in free things. But I have a hard and frozen shell around my vital organs to just politely and friendly point to the place in queue and where to donate to speed it up. For $10k I will build your cpu temp proc, if that's not an option then it's in pos #17463 of my task list.
No? Or at least not as far as I know.
I really feel for Hector.

Open source can be brutal, especially with larger and well established projects.

I contribute to several projects as a well recognized person in my field, not at their scale, but everything they say rings true.

Established developers often push back extremely hard on anything new, until and unless it aligns with their current goals. I’ve had maintainers shut me down without hearing out the merits, only to come back a year later when whatever company they work for suddenly sees it as important.

Project leads who will shift goalposts to avoid confronting the clear hostility their deputies show.

I’ve had OSS users call me personal number, or harass me over email for not having their pet interest prioritized over everything else. Often that’s because I’m blocked by the maintainers.

Open source can be extremely brutal and it’s a battle of stamina and politics as much as it’s one of technical merit.
Seems like we'll need to coalesce on a term for these. A microapp[0]? Or a tiny app[1][2]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microapp

[1] https://tinyprojects.dev/projects

[2] https://tinyapps.org/
I was hoping for an explanation for why this is a key agency, or why it's more interesting news than cuts at any other agency. None are given in the article.
Musk has never seemingly progressed beyond being that nerdy, annoying kid at school who always bragged that his dad owned a Ferrari, but continued to be disliked by the entire class, mostly because all the effort he put into trying to be “cool”, made him even more unlikable.
I agree that this is needed. It doesn't stop the person requesting the feature from asking for a meeting to explain why and just whining that they need it the whole time and saying they shouldn't have pay anything to get it addressed right now.

Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly and I never had more than 1 meeting a quarter with really toxic people and they were at least paying for the product and maintenance so hearing them out was part of the job. It unfortunate to get to the point where you view customer requests as antagonistic, but I can see how it happens. Some people really feel entitled, and some have a job to do and limited resources or control to do it in.
I don't get that complaint. None of those messages demand anything from anyone or berate Asahi Linux. It's just useful feedback and questions.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

...oops, the law preventing that was amended under obama, to allow it. Drat.

(cf. the original Smith-Mundt act preventing it, and the Modernization Act of 2012 allowing it again. The original, of course, created because law makers were terrified of what would happen if this was turned inward.)
Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you know there is nothing for them at the end of the tunnel.
I love it. Why did it take us so long to make SQL easier to reason about?

Hopefully, it gets adopted in Postgresql too.
Decoding AI Judgment: How LLMs Assess News Credibility and Bias
My point is: If one doesn't vote, it's an implicit vote for the winner. Not voting means you're saying "I am supportive of whoever wins" So including those, most presidential elections really aren't that close.
Wow, what an uncharitable read. Are you aware of what that term means? He said it was not about literally shaming people, but showing what contributing to the kernel is like, and even clarified it wouldn't be for public consumption. It's a colloquialism for a resource where peers can learn from each other's mistakes. My high school Spanish class had a hall of shame.

It's a magnitude more professional than the extremely over the top and public emails that Linus shares, which HN jerks off over. I too would be burnt out if people were picking apart what I said so closely but clapping when Linus says "this code is retarded"
There was a way to achieve GDPR's goals without covering the non-walled-gardens with barbed wire banners.
I've always had /active as my primary link. It's where the best discussions are! Even if they are controversial, it's usually where the most interesting posts populate.
It’s not even good for the USA, long term. In today's The Rest is Politics, Rory Stewart highlighted that when the UK removed DFID and dropped its commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid down to 0.5%, we went from being able to put in £100m to development projects to being able to commit £5m. He was, at an independent charity, able to put up £25m in comparison.

What kind of soft power can a nation wield when you’re being outspent 5-to-1 by a charity now?
Marcan is a legend, it's a shame it ended like this. The communities around certain software technologies can act incredibly hostile and entitled towards developers, paradoxically even more so for free and open source projects. I've seen this many times happen in audio production and game emulation software.

But Marcan clearly has true hacker spirit, I'd wager we'll see him again in the future with an equally cool project. It's often best if the visionaries just spend their efforts to get the ball rolling and then let the project evolve on it's own as they move onto their next challenge.
I feel like you're missing the point. Yes, false positives have risks. But if blood tests (or in the case of bowel cancer, fecal tests like cologuard) are effective, we can replace more invasive screening options with them. People have historically been encouraged to get colonoscopies once they reach a certain age because, for the general population, the risks of cancer are higher than the risks associated with a colonoscopy above the age of 50. Developing less invasive tests lets us lower that age, catching more cancers, while at the same time making screening safer for people already in the recommended screening window.

Also, pancreatic cancer, which is what the original article is about, has no alternate form of screening. Most people only find out they have it once it's already symptomatic, which is usually stage 3 or 4
Open source attracts some of the very worst users. Often people pretending to be trying to help by "suggesting improvements", but just as often entitled people who want to work for free. I don't think policies will change that. It's just something you have to accept when you provide something useful to lots of people for free. Even if you use moderated environments for user feedback (adding the burden of constantly banning people), people will find your email address and complain to you directly. See also: jwz/xscreensaver/Debian drama. Seeing how people treat open source developers makes me hesitant to upload any code I write to a public repository.

I'd expect the worst part for an Asahi project contributor to be the active sabotage some angry Linux kernel devs are trying to pull because they don't like Rust. Users being unreasonable is one thing, but your fellow maintainers are supposed to be allies at least.

I hope Marcan can find a new project to take on that doesn't involve all of this mess.
There are countless pragmatic reasons to avoid a PhD, and no doubt both the article and other commenters will bring them up. The most constructive thing I can do is share a personal perspective.

I am 30 years old. I am working through my last few months as a computer engineering PhD student. Eventually, it went good. Not great (the world gives zero f*cks about my work, nobody has offered me a job yet), but not hellish either (didn't quit, still mostly sane, learned a ton of stuff that I never had the guts or prudence to delve into as an undergraduate, and most importantly, I decided I like computers).

Now my background is anything but academic: none of my parents finished high school, people from my village consider me either batshit crazy or a genius. I mean, I was thrown into the PhD archipelago by life itself, rather unconsciously. I just knew that "corporate IT" wasn't my thing, and as for the cool computing jobs, I wasn't their thing. Again, I spent my years as an ECE undergraduate burying my insecurities instead of building my future. To understand the degree of mental fragmentation I was under, I had never made the connection between my digital design courses and my operating systems courses (all of this is the story of the computer, stupid, it's in the title of your degree for God's sake!).... Anyways.

It took me six years to get to today. I am another person now. The PhD (well, and the pandemic, and all that followed) crushed all of my assumptions about the world, myself, the meaning of life. There's no way to put it in the condensed form that an HN comment requires without sounding naive, but I'm telling you the truth. Being forced to survive an alien landscape can make you whole again. It made me.

At the end of the day, talking sh*t about hard stuff is sooo easy. You could replace any polemic against a PhD with one against starting a family, or a company, or in any way rejecting "safety" for the potential of leaving your own mark on the world. Being you. Like that poem by Robert Frost, these things make all the difference.
If US have a backdoor, why not others? Privacy is a myth and a mobile can be secure only after a hammer touch.
You can't reach that conclusion by limiting to only examples where fear worked, as I can also point to Pol Pot, Mugabe, and the Kim dynasty of North Korea ruling by fear, and it being bad for those countries.
Cause they sat down, discussed it like rational adults and came to some logical conclusions: my dad was more entrepreneurial and a bigger workhorse whereas my mom has a much wider scope of interests and knowledge, which is to say, more knowledge to share, even if they ultimately graduated the same university. And now that I'm an adult (and have been for a long while now), I do appreciate the sacrifices they made and can safely say that they genuinely did the absolutely best job they could have done with very limited resources and a lot of compromises on their end. Something which I did not see when I was a child or a teenager, even though it was in front of my face.

To the second question - for most teachers, looking after a child is their job. 18:00, work's over, adios. To most teachers, children are just that: work. Which is not the same as rising your own child. I don't have children to say that with certainty and the closest thing I have to a child is a dog. I love all(most) dogs but I'll walk the extra mile for my own dog. Also, welcome to eastern Europe, where the biggest struggle in the 90's was having food on the table, so tough luck having a teacher.

I'm also a prime example that being near a child does not mean that the child will follow your path: my parents: artists. Me - software engineer, who can't draw a straight line even if my life was on the line. My parents - terrified of fast speeds or extreme sports. Me - well I have double digit scars all over my body from skateboards to bicycles to head butting a flower pot.
The broadest one is that new definitions of woman and man have been imposed which not just accommodate people who sometimes manage to successfully masquerade as the opposite sex (like some of the people you've met) but the ones who do not do so at all. According to these new definitions, merely stating that you're a woman or man (or somehow, neither) is enough to make it real.

This has been used to rewrite law and policy so that any man who claims he's a woman can, with impunity, impose himself upon spaces that were only ever intended for women and girls.

That's a huge change and has significant impact on the female half of the population, wouldn't you agree?
Have you met any software engineers?
Buying MacBooks and doing your development work in a full screen Linux VM (with e.g. UTM) is a surprisingly good solution, that’s what I’ve done for the past year with no regrets.
its completely over for this field. anyone that doesnt think so has their head in the sand, we are 18 months out from the value proposition of a 50-85th percentile software engineer dropping to the floor
Then let's take those things into account when calculating what tests to do. Surely, though, we can do better as a society than solving this with "no preemptive testing except for extreme risks".
Paying over the market rate for talent is how you attract good employees. Every business has to do it because trained specialists don't get out of bed for a 5 figure salary.
Brigading has no place in open source communities. There are some members of the Rust community who believe C is obsolete and that C programmers should either switch to Rust or get out of the way. This is an extremely toxic attitude that has no place in the Linux kernel!

The fact remains: Rust doesn’t solve all of C’s problems. It trades them off for a whole lot of new problems, many of which are challenging to address in a kernel development setting (and much less of a problem for userspace software).

This makes the “C is obsolete” position even harder to defend and ignoring the concerns of long-term kernel maintainers is not going to get anywhere! I think these folks ought to learn the lesson of Chesterton’s Fence [1] before continuing on their journey to promote Rust, which does a lot of great things!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
They aren't trying to replace us in earnest, yet. They are using the threat to beat down wages, and to more generally tilt the power balance further in favor of ~capital~ employers.

"Replacement" is smoke and mirrors at this point; anyone who seriously tries it will quickly fail, with today's technology.
i think at this point, the only path forward for rust and linux is a hard fork

Rinux
You would need to take into account how aggressive a given cancer is and our ability to treat it.

For instance, prostate cancer blood screening often led to radical treatments that are no longer thought to be worth it for most people.

> most prostate cancer grows so slowly, if it grows at all, that other illnesses are likely to prove lethal first

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/health/prostate-cancer-sc...

In the case of pancreatic cancer, it is much more aggressive and you need to catch it early.
There was the Arian heresy in the 4th century that caused a de facto schism and divided the Church off and on for a couple of centuries.
I agree on the dropping compliance when asked for aspect, the problem I'm referring to more is the driver dropping compliance without the game asking for it. If the underlying system can randomly drop compliance when ever it thinks it's fine without telling the user and without the user asking, I would not consider that compliant.
Because:

1) We're expensive (at least for Poland, I can aim for ~6-8k PLN monthly after few years of experience. Other, even civil/mech engineers will have around 4-6k monthly with similar experience) [edit: and minimal wage is 3.5k after taxes]

2) It appears to be replaceable (you can replace us with LLMs to an extent, you can't do that with other jobs)
OK, but these people all voted.

A majority did not vote for Trump. A very narrow plurality did.

Tens of millions didn't vote at all, but they're in a different bucket.
They should just ditch ClearType and use grayscale AA like Acrobat used to have. PPI is high enough on modern displays that the reduction in resolution won't matter.
That patching is nothing new. It's pretty automated on FreeBSD. It has a ports system that does just that.

I don't think udev is ported though. Some linuxisms are, like dbus because several desktops need it. But FreeBSD has its own udev alternative called devd. Wayland is probably configured to just use that.
To me, unless there is an exchange of money and a signed statement of work, I have absolutely zero entitlement as a user. And the maintainers are well within their rights (by law and social contract) to tell me to go away. I wish this was a more adopted mindset.

It’s why things like CentOS being abandoned, terraform licensing, et. al. never bothered me. I’m not paying them, so :shrug:.
I upvoted this due to mass flagging of articles on this topic, but I don’t believe this article is high-quality.

I would prefer this one were removed and replaced with Schneier’s article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977, currently at 150 upvotes.
i think this is just typical natural language ambiguity:

"Inverse Square root" is used to mean "(Multiplicative) Inverse (of the) Square root" as opposed to "(Square root) Inverse"
Easier said than done. If you care about users, and then realize most of them are jerks, it’s deflating. Maybe the secret is to not care about users, but the risk is that you end up doing self-gratifying work that leads nowhere.
Just be aware of the Chesterton's fence principle [0]

> "Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...