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Free speech has limits.

Not in America, it does not. You folks have "hate speech" laws, banned symbols, banned words, banned expressions, and used to have banned video games, music, and movies. The core of your legal system has the concept of "honor"/"dignity", which is inherently subjective.

The justification is always a variant of your thought, saying that it will only affect "bad people", with the very definition of that being heavily influenced by the aforementioned concepts.

Germans tend to defend the concept of filing charges against an individual for the crime of "insulting them" with similar logic - it's generally a nasty thing to do and only "bad people" will do it, therefore, it shall be punishable under the law.

Any limits to free speech are by definition on the famous "slippery slope". As others have called out, once the legal precedent is set, nothing stops politicians to expand it at their will, given that it is based on subjective judgment - history can be a great teacher - and I'd like to remind you that a much harsher version of the current German "social media hate speech" law just made its way through international media earlier this year. This law was justified with "a rise in right wing extremism".

I've said it before, I'll say it again: The ACLU, an arguably left-leaning organization, has famously defended KKK member's 1st amendment rights for those very reasons. They don't argue about the content - as an analogy to the HD topic, it should be easy to debunk with massive amounts of historical evidence - but rather about fundamental human (and, in the case of the United States, constitutional) rights.

Naturally, all those points apply to governmental censorship and not to a private entity. That being said, I don't believe in limits to free speech.

Not to mention the culture at work. I've never experienced a more stuffy, hierarchical, and old-fashioned IT "industry" as I have in Germany.

I've been hosting my server with a German company for years. They have recently opened a data center in Missouri - which would be great for latency (I'm in the southeastern US).

So, I send an email to the effect of "Hey folks, could you please let me know if it's possible to migrate server xxx.xxx to your MO DC? Thanks!" and that started an email-chain of mighty proportions. Every single email starts with "Dear Mr. XXX" (which is not common in the US, even with attorneys) and uses language that sounds like somebody fed a Markov chain with a fun mix between Nietzsche and the entirety of the German civil code. :)

(In all fairness, the company is fantastic and the end-result works great and was done on time)

I have struggled with both points of the argument for a while now. In general, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that this would be a glaring overreach on the side of the feds. It's also apparent that social networks have a tendency to cater massively to one side of the increasingly divided political spectrum, as proven with experiments like Gab. I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that bases their philosophy on the 1st amendment, but in reality, all it did was to attract the polar opposite of the /r/politics subreddit (to put it lightly), rather than to facilitate free and open discourse.

On the other hand, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al are undoubtedly massively influential on the public opinion and their corporate position on political topics - Yoel Roth's recent tweets serve as a decent example, showing clearly that this person cannot be an objective "fact checker" - essentially create a public forum where I am not able to exercise my first amendment rights (and, legally speaking, rightfully so). I cannot help but to find this very concerning.

YouTube (despite numerous issues with their interpretation of free speech), for instance, starting linking Wiki articles under videos that cover certain topics or are uploaded by certain channels. Videos by the BBC show a notice that the BBC is a British public broadcast service, simply informing the viewer about the fact that any bias they might encounter can be easily identified (feel free to switch "BBC" with "RT"). I've found that to be a decent middle ground between outright suppressing views by a corporation pretending to be the authority on certain topics and broadcasting everything without any context.

To the point where the ACLU actively defended KKK members' First Amendment rights multiple times.

Second, and more directly related to the events of this weekend, there are important reasons for our long history of defending freedom of speech — including speech we abhor. We fundamentally believe that our democracy will be better and stronger for engaging and hearing divergent views. Racism and bigotry will not be eradicated if we merely force them underground. Equality and justice will only be achieved if society looks such bigotry squarely in the eyes and renounces it. Not all speech is morally equivalent, but the airing of hateful speech allows people of good will to confront the implications of such speech and reject bigotry, discrimination and hate. This contestation of values can only happen if the exchange of ideas is out in the open.

There is another practical reason that we have defended the free speech rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Today, as much as ever, the forces of white supremacy and the forces for equality and justice are locked in fierce battles, not only in Washington but in state houses and city councils around the country. Some government decision-makers are deeply opposed to the speech we support. We simply never want government to be in a position to favor or disfavor particular viewpoints. And the fact is, government officials — from the local to the national — are more apt to suppress the speech of individuals or groups who disagree with government positions. Many of the landmark First Amendment cases, such as NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and New York Times v. Sullivan, have been fought by African-American civil rights activists. Preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/equality-justice-and-f...

As far as I'm aware, that is only true for L1, not H1B, which has a 60 days grace period. I don't know how it affects folks with AOS to an I-485, though.

I use it on my Gazelle and have been surprised how well it works. All the user friendly helpers, even including their "app store" (which is essentially an APT GUI) are actually useful.

The only issues I had with it were the lack of setup wizard support with LUKS and Dualboot to Windows w/ Bitlocker (for Games) over GRUB, so I had to configure everything manually.

Other than that, it works like a charm - unless it hits the proprietary Nvidia blob driver (no real hotplug for HDMI and mini-DP, sometimes screen tearing on big displays). But that is not a popOS! issue and most of the time it works fine.

Instead, NoSQL systems like HBase, Cassandra, and MongoDB became fashionable as they marketed themselves as being scalable and easier to use

HBase did not - the project has always been very clear that they cater towards a very specific set of use cases - fast writes with little schema constraints, fast single-key and range/fuzzy lookups, not big ETL pipelines.

Even during the rise of Hadoop (everything is a file... I mean file based!) and the subsequent absorption of that into the Public Cloud vendors, SQL has always been there, just wrapped in different tools. These days, someone else hosts it and it's now called Athena instead of Hive, but fundamentally the same thing and has been the same thing.

Even Apache Sparks entire Dataset/Datframe interface yields SQL-like execution plans, exposing the same functions that an RDMBS would, just in Scala/Python/R.

For non-technical people, this is not surprising, as Google shoves it down your throat when you go to their website(s).

For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs).

People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower?

This is a genuine question - not just a rant.

As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

Some artists do special masters for vinyl, though. For Devin Townsend's new record, Empath, he spent an extra month (I believe) just mastering the vinyl version, not to mention the tremendous effort for extra artwork. This intentionally different sound offsets the technical inferiority of the format.

Wholeheartedly agree with your comment, though. My house as a "music room" without any screens for that purpose. Some people might say that's a bit excessive, but I too enjoy my hobby. :)

Probably OpenStreetMap/Nominatim or something along those lines.

I would argue that every single programmer with at least the tiniest bit of tenure in the field (or a kid straight out of college who took at least some math classes) will have run into this at some point in their life.

Even if you (somehow) don't know about it, figure something out? Do something "stupid that works" like this:

  def floatcheck(x:Float, div:Int): String = (x / div).toString.split("\\.")(1) match { 
      case "0" => "int"
      case _ => "float"
  }

  (1 until 100).foreach(e => {
   if(floatcheck(e,15) == "int") println("fizzbuzz")
   else if(floatcheck(e,3) == "int") println("fizz")
   else if(floatcheck(e,5) == "int") println("buzz")
   else println(e)
  })

I find this to be very true.

Before smartphones were a thing, I used to have a side-gig as semi-professional photographer for metal concerts. Semi-professional means in this case, I had an official accreditation for the venue and the band, experience, equipment and most importantly, professional courtesy an respect, but was working for a not-for-profit heavy metal magazine that just had to cover server costs - all volunteers who happen to be really into the music and wanted to share that and support artists, big and small.

There are some very easy ground rules: You are in the photo pit for the first (usually) 3 songs, no flash, not getting in the way of other photographers, and not disturbing the performance or audience.

This worked out great - as few people were able to capture the concerts, people actually appreciated our work, both in the magazine I wrote for as well as on my personal photography blog. It's a great way to re-live some moments of a great performance, for free.

I stopped doing that after more and more kids with smartphones spent entire concerts on their phones, trying to get front-row selfies, crowd-surfing for the purpose of their friends snapping a picture, kids who somehow got into the pit with a phone and the flash on full power, and of course unprofessional "influencers" who only cared about getting a shot for their Instagram page and their own self-image and brand, not for the reasons I highlighted in the first paragraph.

Do you happen to know if cpu and case fan controls work on Debian on your machine? I have a server with a very similar setup, but cannot control the fans.

    ~ sensors
  No sensors found!

That is precisely what the projects I'm usually involved in do. A client might want "buzzword technology", but at the heart of it, what they really need are stable, scalable, and consolidated data pipelines to e.g. Hadoop or AWS that gives "Data Scientists" a baseline to work with (and anyone needing information, really - it was just called "Business Intelligence" a couple of years ago).

In the end it doesn't matter if you wind up with a multi-TB copy of some large database or a handful of small XML files - it's all in one place, it gets updated, there are usable ACL in place, and it can be accessed and worked with. That's the point where you think about running a Spark job or the above AWK magic.

Are they, though?

I got back into a video game the other day that was released 15 years ago (also when I first played it). There were plenty of dedicated websites around the game, most of them with forums that contained guides, little details and secrets and whatnot (matter of fact, I ran one of them for a while).

All of those are long gone, with all associated content - which I suppose is not surprising, given its age. However, the issue remains - as interest in a topic dwindles, fewer and fewer people see the point in spending the money and effort to maintain these sites containing (mostly) unbiased information and the information, alongside potentially thousands of user-generated posts/content in the forum, gets lost in the void. If you happen to look something up you saw a decade ago, you might find it on the wayback machine, but certainly not via a search engine.

It sometimes feels like they encourage it by not taking measures against obvious fakes. Take a look at this: https://smile.amazon.com/TNSO-Certified-Lightning-Charging-C...

The "top reviews" are all positive, but all for different products (this is supposed to be a pack of Lightning cables) - phone cases, LG G6 accessories, a rifle stand - and it's the 4th product when searching for "lightning cable".

It looks like they can just completely change the content of an existing listing, including customer reviews, without any oversight.

I apologize for my misleading post, my experience is based on living in multiple major and / or university cities in southwestern Germany, 3-10 days visits to smaller and larger towns all across Europe and frequent visits to Switzerland.

In my experience (I'm from the West), the southern cities in Germany have better public infrastructure compared to what I lovingly call the German Rust Belt. I have been to Hamburg and Berlin for work, where using public transport was a lot easier as well, but those cities are not comparable in size.

From what you describe, I would consider the public transportation system in the city you lived in edge-case average for a 350k city, but certainly not optimal.

It is decent for folks living close to any type of train, as a lot of my friends do who are still in college. Car sharing did not exist when I left, that might have changed. But even if it does, the problem of the famous last mile pertains - if the area where I live is too much of an edge case for any type of public transport, it is hard to profitably provide supply. Here, I can at least get an Uber in fairly remote locations (as the car picks me up wherever I am, albeit for a premium).

However, a 3 mile distance to the city center (where the train station appears to be) is easily covered by bike.

Not in a suit or when it rains, not to mention medical conditions. However, I agree, that is a good point.

But you do not visit you friend daily, so why would you need to own a car for that? Even if you visit him weekly, car sharing might be enough, and less overhead.

Yes, that is a good perspective on it. However, this serves as an example - in that region, a lot of the interesting places are fairly spread out, often across cities. This quickly becomes a view of opportunity cost and convenience. As long as public transport doesn't offer enough incentives - reliability, flexibility, quality, and price - I am personally very willing to invest the money for a car, as I generally value time and convince more than money.

Doing anything on PT often proves challenging. I personally cannot read or work on a bus (get horrible car sickness), but I know other people can manage just fine. On a train, it depends on the availability of seating and WiFi - which, in my experience, is a huge gamble. If those were true, see above, one could justify the extra time invested.

But to your point here, yes, need becomes a subjective term in that regard.

It's always fascinating how people here generalize an entire continent's major cities by anecdotal evidence from one city. This can also be observed by comments from people clearly living in SV or NYC - none of those apply to suburb-dwelling me in the South.

I used to live in a ~350k city in Germany. It has public transport - given the college in town, probably also one of "average" quality. Unless you live very close to a tram, you are bound to use a bus which will get you into the city center (~3 mi, 10 min by car), which was scheduled every 30 mins and took another 30 mins. From there, you might get a train (or another bus!), often times scheduled in such a way that you'd have to wait another 30 or so minutes for it.

For me, getting to see a friend in the next town over (~15mi) would take me 25 mins by car, including traffic, and 1hr to 90mins by public transport. Going to work, a solid hour by car due to really bad traffic, took 90mins to 2 hrs using public transport (~30 miles).

Not to mention common trips that take me from store A to B and back home - every single stop requires you to wait for a bus and often change lines as well.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love more public transport in the US (we have some, but it is horrendous where I live). But even for Europe, saying you don't need a car is a very narrow-minded outlook.

It is, to a degree. However, given the intentionally lose definition of it, the interpretation of this topic is up to the individual and the group.

The BBC piece explicitly mentions this - with almost no ties to politics and an open door policy for all people - but I am aware that other groups are not as open. This cannot, however, be generalized.

Some folks do hold the believe that people with a different heritage should follow their own culture's roots, which often results in a very similar line of thoughts an beliefs, yet differs in customs, names, rituals ..., but ultimately leads to the same guiding principles. I personally don't agree, given our modern societies, but it can be regarded as a valid thought that is not driven by racism, but merely by the guiding idea of remembering the old ways, regardless of where those might be rooted.

Jesse Byock's translation of Snorri's Edda touches on the historical aspect of this in the prologue as well as his annotations. It's a great read if you are interested.

It's not just news. It's ever website, with some notable exceptions, such as HN (minimal, curated, informative headlines, no bloat) or some private blogs (as the one linked - 2.2KB, 0 trackers, yet questionable headlines).

Recipe websites (and I'm not even talking about big names like allrecipies) give you the author's life story (for SEO) and a mountain of trackers, ads, and javascript. A recipe on "TasteOfHome" yields >200 requests, 4MB of data, and just uBlock Origin (which is the 2nd stage after my piHole's DNS based blocking) already blocked 42% of the website's content. Not to mention a plethora of websites rendering "support chat" overlays or pesky newsletter popups. I'd much prefer some sponsored content - "This recipe works best with a KitchenAid(tm) blender! Buy one here!". Seems to work for YT creators.

And "Tech" sites like TheVerge throw a compressed 5MB at you, with about 20% blocked. The layout is confusing and most of the stories are what I like to call "the stage before clickbait" - the ones addressing the user directly, presumably to create some sort of personal connection to spark interest ("OnePlus 7 review: designed to make you want the OnePlus 7 Pro"), or headlines with 0 informational content ("Laptops are getting weird and wonderful again").

Aggregation sites like reddit are unusable on a phone (not to mention the content). On every refresh, a popup prompting me to install their app shows up. A total of 3 screen elements are used to push me to their app - which is not going to happen, as I only use reddit as a search engine flag every once in a while.

One of the few decent ways of reading the news (for me) is to rely on the WSJ's iOS App (if you are a subscriber, the iPad app gives you a very useful, traditional newspaper layout that is easy to navigate and read, and so are their notifications). However, I would highly doubt I'd become a subscriber by bothering me with paywalls.

I would be interested in that.

I'm inclined to disagree to a degree. I don't use my phone for anything but Messengers and Twitter (apart from the "utilities", such as Uber or an alarm) - and have deleted by Twitter account a while ago.

After doing that, I find myself looking at my phone out of habit/boredeom, but realize I removed the last time wasting app (I got rid of reddit about a year ago) and turn the thing off again. This results in me doing things I consider to be a better investment of my time.

Yes, that might be watching a show on TV - but I found that to be more engaging than mindlessly scrolling through people's opinions I ultimately don't care about (as Twitter, as opposed to say HN, rarely spawns intriguing thoughts).

Also not having a simple distraction available does result in me being more likely to spend time on more "important" things, might it be yard work or a side project. But it certainly depends on one's personality and preference.

Purely from a technical perspective and ignoring the political implications, I don't think that phones are helping all that much. I travel quite frequently and work with a lot of people across the US (as well as Europe and India), who also travel frequently.

I keep tab of who is - or might be - where on any given day, simply to be able to coordinate schedules and not call folks who are in PST at 6am by accident (or have people call me at 9pm).

A system for messengers (Skype, Slack, Teams, Text ...) where people could share their current time zone would make my life so much easier sometimes.

I cannot confirm this at all. I have some friends who work in Germany (I left several years ago to the US), and even those in senior tech jobs with years of experience only get up to ~80k EUR and the sky-high taxes push that down to <50k.