deadbytes

You will only ever get name calling, knee-jerk responses and purely emotional, speculative arguments here

Thank you for so perfectly proving my point

Also, there should be more ways to "praise" a project.

Maybe github should implement a "feedback" tab where people can post their experiences of using the project. Perhaps some of those experiences would be negative too, but it would also allow people to give you neutral or positive feedback on what they like about the project, how they are using it, and what they have achieved with it.

I would encourage all developers to download a Commodore 64 emulator and spend some time learning 6502 assembly.

There is no memory protection and no software abstractions. You display graphics on the screen by writing directly to video memory.

Programming for the C64 made me have innumerable lightbulb moments and significantly changed my perspective on what a computer really is.

I think programmers need to start taking a lot more responsibility for what we release into the world.

If you don't think your software solves a real problem, or will improve people's quality of life, then why release it?

There are already too many distractions in the modern world. I don't want to create more. Any software you release that doesn't solve a real problem is just another distraction that takes time away from people's lives.

You are just making this up. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of them requesting data of 1,000 users to find one criminal.

What the article actually says:

From January 2020 to June 2020, Google received nearly 40,000 requests for user information from law enforcement

There were 185,884 deportations by ICE last year, which is around 92,942 in the same time period. They are making 0.5 requests for information for every person they deport.

I am greatly opposed to mass surveillance, especially when justified by some immaterial bogeyman such as "stopping terrorism".

However in this case, illegal immigration is a legitimate problem in the US with actual statistics to prove so, and it seems that they are only targetting individuals that they actually suspect of being criminals.

If law enforcement has genuine belief that I am a criminal then why would I be opposed to giving them data to absolve myself?

And yes of course this has the potential to be abused, but is there any proof of this in the article? It seems like one specific individual was targetted, and they had the courtesy to notify them that this was happening.

Google hands over data of criminals to law enforcement

What is the story here?

calls for the killing of babies if they where jewish, black etc.

How is this in any way equivalent? Being jewish or black are not disabilities. Downs syndrome is a horrible condition that greatly impacts your quality of life.

I personally think abortion is horrible, but aborting babies who are going to enter life with awful disabilities is the least objectionable form of abortion there is.

You should be outraged at the millions of perfectly healthy babies that are aborted every year just for convenience. Not this.

When I looked into doing this before I think the ultimate issue was that the C specification doesn't even give you any way to check the overflow flag.

So even if you knew your specific C implementation handled overflow properly there is no way to check the flag afterwards anyway.

This is scary to think about.

The upside of third-party trackers is that you can completely block all of them by just blocking third-party javascript. What are we going to do once all of this tracking code starts getting served from the first party domain instead? Or even served inside the same source files as site code?

I imagine we will start seeing a new class of privacy extensions that behave more like anti-virus. Checking for known hashes of tracking scripts, monitoring for certain patterns of behaviour during execution.

The difference is that with a human near by I feel like I am being judged and when they are not I do not feel that kind of pressure

I will offer you another perspective to consider.

Technology is extremely subversive in that it bypasses all of our brain's instinctual responses. Someone or something monitoring and tracking you should be setting off warning sirens in your brain. At best they are trying to study you, at worse they are trying to exploit or harm you.

Through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution our brains have built up warning systems to make us feel fear and unease when we realise we are being tracked. But since humans have spent 99.99% of evolution entirely in the physical world these systems have no concept of the digital.

The reason you feel extremely uneasy when being monitored by a person, but not when being monitored by a computer system that is collecting the exact same information (or more), is that your subconscious brain doesn't understand computers.

goes to show you have to encrypt EVERYTHING at rest, even file names

Or just block all third-party javascript.

Facebook code shouldn't be running anywhere aside from facebook.com

Tracking is not ethical. Corporations only get away with it because most users don't realise it's even happening.

If you went into a retail store and an employee followed you around the whole time with a notebook and stopwatch writing down everywhere you walked and every product you looked at, you would rightly be creeped the fuck out and tell him to stop.

This is exactly what online tracking is, but done virtually.

The rich aren't, but the companies they run practically are, from a political standpoint.

Basically all large, multinational corporations now make their company logo rainbow for pride month, and all release the same sounding official statements about racial inequality on a regular basis, etc. etc.

It's almost impossible to find a large corporation that doesn't do this now. And their statements are so bland and generic that they are almost all identical, and completely interchangeable.

As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.

Oh wait no I don't, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.

The capitalize on it because it keeps everyone focused on white vs black instead of rich vs poor.

They want you constantly thinking about race instead of thinking about wealth inequality.

They want you constantly fighting with your fellow workers instead of forming unions.

I think it's a combination of both:

a) modern corporate culture trying to make employees take on the company they work for as part of their personal identity

b) young, liberal people working in PR departments who would be horrified if anyone personally called them racist / sexist / homophobic etc

These people go to work, see some random account on twitter saying "<your company> is racist" and a) and b) combined makes this feel like a personal attack on them that they have to defend and social signal against.

This is the most likely explanation I have come up with, because as you said, none of this really makes sense from a logical business perspective.

No, this is a terrifying precedent to set.

You are completely inverting democracy.

If 98% of people vote that something isn't offensive, and 2% vote that it is, and your takeaway from this is "the thing is offensive", then how can anything ever be determined to be not offensive?

You are right that nobody is being physically forced to make this change, but I think you vastly underestimate the power of propaganda and social pressure.

In today's hyper-socialized society there is not really much difference between "you are forced to make this change" and "make this change or else you will be socially outcast by all your peers".

Github is used by millions of developers all over the world. There is almost certainly at least one person in every western software company that regularly uses github. They have the power to broadcast messages into every software company in the western world, and right now this message is "make this change or you are racist".

You should contribute these improvements upstream then.

The Arudino developers are not trying to write slow code on purpose. Mocking them on hackernews doesn't solve anything. I'm sure they would greatly appreciate you pointing out how slow this code is and offering your improved implementation.

The abstraction that docker provides you is simpler, but the whole system has gotten more complex.

Run something with no, or very specific, network access

If this was such a problem in linux then why didn't people focus on improving this instead? We could have solved this problem in linux and made the whole system better for everyone.

Instead people left the problem there and just piled more crud ontop. We added an entire new layer of abstraction that everyone now has to spend weeks learning how to use instead of just fixing the original problem. The whole system is now far more complex, and the original problem is still there.

Typically, vaccine manufacturing doesn’t begin until a candidate has proved to be both safe and effective in animal and human testing. In the past, that process could take ten years; Pfizer’s vaccine, which was developed in collaboration with BioNTech, a German biotechnology company, took a record ten months.

This seems terrifying to me, especially combined with the headline.

Perhaps the fact that the vaccines are "not available to everyone" is not such a bad thing.

Considering the risk the virus poses to young, physically fit people is extremely low should we really be pushing such a new and unproven medical procedure onto them?

Very strange title, I don't understand why people blame "capitalism" for problems like this.

Saying "crappy kettles exist because we have a free market" is like saying "murder only exists because we allow people to freely move around".

Something being allowed to happen in a system doesn't mean that the system is the thing causing it to happen.

"Why are people buying crappy kettles" should be the title.

A large majority of people in tech seem to have convinced themselves that you solve complexity by adding even more complexity ontop.

Yes, linux security is complicated. So why not work on improving this instead? Optimise and simplify what we already have.

Docker hasn't made the complexity of linux security go away. It has just added a whole other dimension of potential security issues people now need to manage in addition to the security of the base system.

Programmers need to shift their mindset. We already have far too much complexity. Stop thinking about what new things you can create, start thinking about how you can improve and simplify the software that we already have.