skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most people don't view Stallman's words as gospel, he's actually kind of a running joke nowadays - a sort of the caricature of the software profession, all neckbeard, tin-foil, and wizard powers. And it is true a lot of Stallman's ideas are sadly unrealistic for a large corporation operating in many highly complex environments.

And although nearly every single point on his rant regarding facebook's policies is ridiculous as an argument against using facebook (except the psychology study one), I do absolutely agree with him that folks should, with enough time and introspection, grow out of using facebook personally (professional use is fine). The fact of the matter is facebook gives you the illusion of personal connection and being "always in the know" so you short-circuit that reward-loop in your brain and wind up with an addiction. It's just like drugs, alcohol, video games, or any host of other addictive activities out there for us to waste our lives on.

Granted it's fun at first, but after a while, one needs to realize one has become a slave to a rather meaningless habit (checking your feed, updating your status, "liking" shit) that doesn't make you better, richer, or any more intimate with another. Instead, you've sat at your computer for another evening, poor-ifying the circulation in your legs, watching the highlights of other people living their lives, and feeling mildly displeased with yourself yet not enough to ever look away. Instead of facebook, you could've did leg day at the gym and gotten better glutes, hiked to the beach and communed with nature, joined a crossfit class and paid to irreparably hurt yourself, or even got some work done on your hobby project.

Facebook is literally wasting you away for the promise of social fulfillment that it can't fulfill. After all when it comes to social connection, facebook is far inferior to actually meeting up for a date, direct call/skype, text/im/email... hell, in a lot of ways Facebook is worse than video games because, when you're playing a video game with friends, at least you're all working together on a common platform (especially if it's one of those Kinect dancing games, nothing brings people closer than watching each other dance awkwardly). Instead, you're on facebook, ruminating over ghosts of people and events that have already passed by you, thinking you're together and connected with all your friends, yet still miserably yourself in front of your computer with nothing to show for it. Also, one can stand to look at only so many pics of receipts from super expensive restaurants by friends who have just recently gone and are gushing over the food like some 12 year old fangirl over a boyish pop idol.
Be Well-Rounded. Celebrate Pi Day
Yeah, and any employee with a shred of self respect would tell the bank to go hang. I've had clients complain about what staff say on social media (not about clients or work!), I just tell them it's none of their or my business, and if they really care, get your lawyers in touch.

Nobody has.
This. For instance the "Psychological Harm" chapter. That is not even an opinion, rather a fact, so I feel the OP's 'disagree with essentially everything he writes about it' is too strong - you cannot disagree with facts. Actually a lot of what Stallman writes on that page are just facts, and a lot of them also apply to tons of other services on the web. Maybe not all at once though which why he picked FB I guess.. Still in debate with myself though on whether I agree with his strong opinion on it or whether it's even worth having such a strong opinion on it. There are way worse things in the world than FB.
Maybe I toughed of a simple reply for this phrase ? "And who is to say what is wrong ? And will it stay that way ?"
Opinions ?
Why would Facebook need to verify a phone number? It's a social network, used for jokes, farmville and whatnot. Most people I know that are on FB don't even use their 'real' name. IF someone provides a telephone number in his account details, FB can treat it like a string.

I understand why FB would like to 'verify a number', but why should we allow that to happen? Why is this a valid reason to ask for permissions on my phone?
You actually read to the end?

The article concludes with the lack of representation in Congress which is certainly linked.
For a single traveler staying short-term - sure, in fact, I think there are plenty of markets where an AirBnB rental with cleaning fee will come out more expensive than hotel (which already has that factored into the price).

For family travel with kids, the options before AirBnB were more limited - you either had to upgrade to a hotel suite, paying Ritz-Carlton level prices for a one-bedroom at Holiday Inn, or stay in "suite" hotels like Homewood or StayBridge that tend to be on the outskirts.

Factor in some other amenities like full kitchen and en-suite washer+dryer, and AirBnB carved up a nice niche for the market that was not previously addressed.
InfluxDB (YC W13) needs an admin assistant (and more)
As an executive/ admin assistant, you will be allowing our founders to breathe! You’d be taking on many essential responsibilities, but maybe ones that don’t need to get done by the founders themselves.

We're looking for candidates who value mastering whatever it is they’re doing. You'll need to be open to figuring things out on your own. This may mean spending some time researching the best way to accomplish things (e.g., finding a decent place to print business cards). It may also mean experimenting, which means that sometimes you might fail. (That's okay.) Along with that, you'll need the persistence to keep going and try again. While we don’t want you to stress out, you might think about this job as de-stressing the rest of the team.

We’re looking for someone who can communicate very clearly, who has a lot of patience, and knows how to get organized.

This position will be based out of our SoMa office in San Francisco.

Does that sound like you or someone you know? Tell them to apply here:
https://jobs.lever.co/influxdb
$65 a month?! shit,that's high! For 1GB od full speed internet, and after that unlimited lowspeed, with morze then enough calls, I pay $7.34 in Poland.
I once knew him
I'd like to add to this by saying that Ed Snowden's documentary, Citizen Four, is a great and informative film.
Some of RMS opinions are extreme, because they take to an unbearable point some consequence of some ideology. For example refusing to have kids is extreme, most people cannot afford psychologically to not have kids.

But RMS opinions about Facebook are not extreme, he doesn't propose to refuse to have friends who are using Facebook, for example. He says just don't use it, it's common sense, just like don't eat fast food is common sense. Common sense is sometimes very uncommon, kudos to those who keep their mind clear in our messy times.
It is the only integer (and, in fact, the only real number) that is neither negative nor positive.

Yet in the IEEE 754 standard there is both a negative and a positive zero. They produce "true" when compared for equality but they usually produce differently signed infinities when divided by.
It's more like "set your budgets accordingly". I run a couple sites there and only once I hit one quota limit for a site I did not set a budget and that exceeded the free tier bandwidth limit. I like it specially for students because it encourages good practices.
Can you give an example?

For instance, I was aware of Stallman in the 1980s, read his writings back then, didn't think they were correct, and the future he predicted has not come to be. Yes there are some of us who are that old. Specifically, he said that without the virility of his license, there would be no free/open source software and that all software would be locked down and proprietary.

The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period.

He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one.

Given that this is pretty much the central tenant of his ideology, and it has been markedly disproven over the past 30 years, I too wonder why people listen to him.
My GF is with nju (and I'm moving to them soon), for $13 a month she has unlimited calls, texts and 5gb of data. Sweet setup.
Facebook is like a dentist. The benefit is that you get to spy on old friends who aren't really friends anymore, but you have to remember that a) the dentist is going to cause you pain, and b) he's going to invoice for for the pleasure of doing so. The difference is that the dentist has your best interests at heart, whilst Facebook has its own best interests as its primary focus, its customers secondary, and hint hint - you aren't the customer.
When you have enough samples, probabilities just become counts.

I would assume at the void it's dimly picking up the atoms at the bottom.
Thank you, I was fearing I'll see an ad-hominem argument criticizing Stallman and thereby nullifying the arguments while actually not saying anything against the arguments. Your points are right, and personally, I don't see a reason to follow people who're not friends anymore
>Just like I wouldn't listen to Usain Bolt if he were trying to teach me the biological mechanisms behind doping, I can't see why Stallman's opinion is considered so correct in these matters.

That's a false analogy. Stallman has been fighting for our digital rights for ages and has actually been right most of the time. That doesn't make him right all the time, but it does make me more inclined to believe he isn't just spewing nonsense.

>IMO his ramblings about personal liberties and freedom being infringed by everything under the sun from Amazon to Google to Facebook are oversimplified and childish. The world isn't black and white and he obviously fails to understand the entire point behind many of these companies.

He has to be that way, because otherwise he would be seen as a hypocrite. It is interesting you think his arguments are "childish" when it seems every day more and more of his arguments are proven true when we find out how another company is using our data for malicious purposes.

>When Facebook makes you use a real name it's not because theres some "Mr. Evil" at the top level plotting to steal your freedom, it's because it leads to a better working social network.

You are correct in assuming that there is most likely no "Mr. Evil" at the top, however that assumes that ordinary good people aren't capable of collectively and unknowingly becoming "Mr. Evil" through their actions, which our knowledge of psychology would point out is more than likely.
Unless you’ve written a buggy program, you don’t realize that you’re addressing our intellect. This is why I think that every engineer on the planet looks at a bug report and feels a twinge of pain as they read whatever detail that was left to serve as a figurative shame sticker on the report card of their creation. It really sucks when you’re just flat out wrong.

Being wrong — rather, being incorrect — is an extremely humbling experience. The catastrophically incorrect, which is when software crashes, money is lost, or the absolute worst, data is stolen, is the kind of thing that makes you question your career choice. It makes you want to curl up into a ball and weep at how completely fucking stupid you were when you’ve found the problem.

Just had to quote this - I urge people who stopped reading or down't want to read the article to read this anyway. I've read a lot on developping but I think it's the first time I saw someone putting it like this. And oh boy, is he right. At least for me. Every bug report (well, the ones which points to something I obviously fucked up) hurts. What hurts even more is the dreaded reopened because I fucked up again. Especially because sometimes that means the whole set of classes surrounding the bug are just textbook examples of all code smells in the universe. And the only thing that can be done about it is the nearly impossible write good code 100% of the time.
Oh well, just what I was fearing here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9201896

In 2 mins, you're the top comment
How about actually disproving his arguments one by one. The world is not black and white is a bad statement to make. How about your pull up your panties and try to make it better, rather than giving useless arguments.
>>At this point in the evolution in technology, I find that Stallman is increasingly irrelevant

In your HN profile you say that you are a college student and are "still learning the ropes of how the world works." And yet you arrogantly dismiss the ideas and opinions of one of the leading professionals in your own field, who is at least a couple of orders of magnitude more knowledgeable and accomplished than you.

Allow me to give you some unsolicited advice: the best way to learn about how the world works is to be humble, keep an open mind and avoid dismissing what smart people say as "irrelevant." Just because someone is smart may not make them right, and you definitely don't have to agree with them, but you can still learn something from them if you make a genuine and honest effort.
Why Our Brains Love High Ceilings
Not always true, especially back in the early days.
Watch people code in real time with Livecoding.tv
By some definitions, "apparently" does soften your statement, but you are still essentially claiming "Zuckerberg is a great admirer of China and socialism" with a citation that doesn't really support that. Going only by your quote, he could just be saying, "I think it will be valuable to my business for my employees to understand Chinese socialism."

By other definitions, "apparently" strengthens your claim to an "obvious" statement of truth, so maybe people are reacting strongly because they read it that way.
Solar powered plane takes off for first global flight
Novel Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm
"Don't use Facebook" is currently not common sense. Many people are on Facebook and have thought about all these arguments and decided it is worth it to them.

(In the meantime, fewer people seem to consider it common sense to be on Facebook, at least it seems to me less and less people are surprised if someone doesn't use it)
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly.

https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRe...

https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999
Real names help Facebook to combine offline purchase activity (Axciom) with online activity.
see also http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/08/middleeast/solar-impulse-fligh...
I have been paying like $99 for a plan with a bunch of data and minutes I don't use. I changed the plan and its down to I think $60. I should have cancelled and found something cheaper than a regular Verizon contract. Only reason I didn't was because it would take some work to find the right alternative. I know I am still getting screwed though.
Well put.

"Hatred (or hate) is a deep and emotional extreme dislike. It can be directed against individuals, groups, entities, objects, or ideas. Hatred is often associated with feelings of anger, disgust and a disposition towards hostility."

-- Wikipedia (Hatred)

It is alright until you get to the three last words. Disposition towards hostility. Things tend to go downhill from there, especially with large groups of people. People get dragged into all kinds of spats, some see no problem with doxxing, spreading outright lies, continuous flow of ad hominem and other logic errors, ... The a few actually good people tend to leave quietly as time passes, and what is left is toxic wasteland of bigotry.
25 years ago, the KH-12 series of spy satellites reputedly had a resolution of around 2cm[1]. FAS also has a page that shows what different resolutions do with a newspaper headline[2]. 1 cm resolution can nearly read newspaper headlines from space (squint your eyes when you look at the 1 cm picture, and note that software can reconstruct that picture you see better than that method does).

[1] http://fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Intro/Part2_26e.html

[2] http://fas.org/irp/imint/resolve5.htm
Isn't the piece mostly a series of correct observations (if they are not, no doubt someone will point this out) about Facebook from which one can come to one's own conclusions?

I'm not interested in your views on Stallman himself. BTW Usain Bolt and anyone else is welcome to present a cogent argued position on the biology of drug doping if that's what he can do. I fail to see where 'teaching' comes into this discussion.
Stallman predicted the total surveillance state, and warned of the very dire circumstances it put us all in.
Apple engineer shares thoughts of the new Apple macbook
It is the cheapest to implement, commodity $4 wifi/bt chip is enough to gather all the data, and you dont even have to process it all that much, 200-400MHz router SoC can do it without external controllers.
~400 million people in EU disagree with you; that's one jurisdiction where privacy is a human right, and this is not just some abstract concept but the basis of legislation you can invoke to force companies to cough up the data they have on you and/or demand it be scrubbed from their databases, even if you originally shared it voluntarily.
That makes complete sense when you consider that IEEE 754 is all about approximating values, though. It is possible that the value you're trying to represent is smaller than the smallest values actually representable by IEEE 754 floating point, but it would be nice if you could at least preserve the sign information (so that, as you point out, dividing produces the correct `Inf` value).

The real WTF in IEEE 754 is why there needs to be so many different ways to represent NaN.
More advanced systems are build around SDR platforms and passively scan GSM band for TMSIs.
OpenVPN is just an apt-get install away, and the defaults would suit you fine in if you don't have any special needs. You do need to configure what IP nets you want to tunnel (unless you use it in bridging mode), but that's it.
Why Children Need Chores
The corollary to this ridiculous argument: "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" .. is this:

If you've done something *right*, you will be the target of those you offend.

When "right" can be defined variously as any one of: a) done something to reduce the effect of the criminal military-industrial complex on society, b) exposed corruption in the ruling elite, c) fought stringently for the rights of minorities who have been oppressed, d) fought valiantly to expose ecological and economic criminality on the part of the industrial elite, &etc.

Just because they say its for fighting criminals doesn't mean that it won't be used to fight revolutionaries and upstarts who mean to bring justice to a destitute world. Every single technology under the sun can be used for good, or evil purposes - the only thing that makes the difference is the intention behind those who wield the technology.

And as of right now, there is no way to monitor/control/adjust the intentions of the super-surveillance state: they, real people behind the masks, simply have too many secret powers.
> "Apparently" isn't a claim.

Since when?
Random MAC is fine. Pretending to be 20 devices is obnoxious.
> I am not going to bother to rebut your examples

Well, this kind of attitude tells more about your argument than the rest of the comment.
superresolution to the rescue, as long as your lens, or the target is moving you are golden
OR it could be GCHQ employees with relevant inside information and full familiarity of their own organization's modus operandi, making an informed judgment.

Then again, maybe they're just tin foil crazed conspiracy theorists who just happen to be, err, employed by GCHQ.
As a complimentary perspective:

For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s

Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonderful example of this stupidity a guy just before Tiananmen [Square] anniversary a guy was an English professor in Beijing was flirting with a lady in London, and since they were both educated he used a wonderful quote from Shakespeare, because you know in Elizabethan England the word "protest" meant also "I publicly declare" and he quoted to her "I protest my love to you" chop-chop and the conversation was cut short because the word "protest" was prohibited because of associations with Tiananmen, what I find so ridiculous is that if the guy were to be extremely vulgar and told the lady something like "I will fuck your brain out" everything would be okay, you quote Shakespeare... You know computers just give you immense amounts of data and you can play with it."

Errors and omissions intentional as I'm directly transcribing Žižek talking.

He then goes on to relate an experience as a young adult in Slovenia meeting with his friends and upon parting, knowing everything was recorded, they didn't hind anything and at the end of the conversation they would say something like "Mother baked a good apple pie" and then later found out this really confused the people monitoring their conversations.
You can do that with much cheaper fixed wing UAV and a gopro.. oh wait, US/FAA lol
I have a slightly different take. That used to be my initial reaction and it probably still is but taking a cue from other engineers better than me they seemed to internalize that there will be bugs, period. So might was well get over it and just fix them as they're found rather than get upset over them.

Of course they try to write good code, follow good practices, write tests etc but there's just going to be bugs, period. So don't beat yourself up. Just fix the bug, learn whatever you can from it so hopefully you won't do it again and or if it calls for it adjust your build infrastructure or testing infrastructure so you're more likely to catch them in the future.