kick

Fox News was notoriously famous for having extremely negative coverage on African Americans during the 1990s through 2014. They still are famous for that. National Review was extremely famous for it, too. The New York Times was also a conservative outlet, as I mention elsewhere, having hawked for every war since Vietnam.

Even the person Damore was inspired to write his manifesto because of (SlateStarCodex) admitted it was too far.

Biased reporting isn't new, it's always been universal, and it'll never go away. You just sound like you want more conservative outlets. Here's a tip: Turn on your local news. Local news in America is almost always owned by one of three conservative companies (Sinclair and Nextstar come to mind most immediately), and all of them have an extremely conservative bent.

That's not even getting into the bias of media on scientific issues. HIV/AIDS never got proper coverage, and the coverage it did get was usually outright wrong and hostile during the 1990s. Climate change? Completely debatable! A matter of emotion! They were still pushing that up until a few years ago. Encryption? Can be government-crackable and still secure! That's been a constant topic since the 1990s, too!

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/26/8296091/media-bias-race-crime

According to a report by the progressive research center Media Matters, New York City television stations give disproportionate coverage to crimes involving black suspects.

The Media Matters study found that between August 18 and December 13, 2014, the stations (WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW) used their late-night broadcasts to report on murder, theft, and assault cases in which African Americans were suspects at rates that far exceeded African-American arrest rates for those crimes.

There's always bias. Always will be bias. The above issue was even worse in the past.

Journalism was rarely feigning objectiveness: during the 1920s through the 1970s, some of the strongest voices in favor of labor were journalists. "Neutrality" is largely a construct, or meme, that has been pushed by Rupert Murdoch since he founded his "news" network. Naturally, his own properties are nowhere near objective, despite some people claiming WSJ magically escapes bias.

Everything is naturally biased, the only distinction is whether an entity is open about their bias. This goes for anything: whether it was the New York Times and FOX hawking for nearly every war during the 2000s, or it was Newsweek favoring MLK Jr. and Life describing his speeches with phrases like "demagogic slander" during the 1960s, everyone's naturally got an opinion. This doesn't stop applying when writing about a subject.

No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.

You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."

Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.

So if there's no proof, and you'd agree with it even if there was, then why bother posting this awful article?

That link is transparently pushing something, and what it's pushing definitely isn't "the truth."

The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.

Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.

What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"

They aren't even trying at this point.

Drew is an Alpine maintainer. Alpine, which you might know as probably the most-used server-side Linux distribution in the world right now, bootstraps everything in its repositories, just like every major Linux distribution on the planet.

I figured that was implied with the mention of Ken Thompson in the same sentence ("Ken Thompson's APL") and all.

Morten Kromberg (big guy at Dyalog; coincidentally, author of the post we're discussing) in "justifying" why Dyalog isn't libre, just a few days ago: There is little risk of the demise of Dyalog APL any time soon. Our customers run businesses that are based on Dyalog APL with a combined annual turnover in excess of a billion euros/dollars.

https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/52405?m=56860424#5...

There are a few other companies with proprietary APL implementations that are also getting by really well.

k, which is pretty similar, is even more of a money-maker than Dyalog APL, having been responsible for a company worth a billion or more (Kx) and an entirely different company that also seems to be doing pretty well.

J also is used somewhat commonly, though less, and its users seem to be doing more than well, too (my current employer and most of my previous employers have been J shops, and none of them have gone under yet. I think a couple of them had record-breaking years in 2020). J is also free, libre software, so instead of paying for a Dyalog or K license, you should really just use it (or ngn/k, if k is more your thing).

Yes, the one mentioned in the post.

https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/52405/the-apl-orchard/

"the best syntax"

Yes, absolutely. By a long shot. For starters, J can actually be parsed. (k can also be parsed, for what it's worth.)

"Easiest to learn"?

Spend ten minutes using J's built-in Labs feature. Or read J for C Programmers (also ships with the language), if you come from a non-array background. Iverson was able to teach this stuff to public school children in no time at all; modern array languages seem to deliberately make themselves obtuse to outside observers. APL was doomed to obscurity because the people making it decided to please existing customers rather than try and make it approachable.

I don't know when you mean modern

Pretty much every APL2 feature and everything that came after it that they didn't borrow from J.

While J has English control statements, they generally aren't used, but nearly every time I come across something written in Dyalog APL it's full of :If :EndIf and all sorts of atrocious English words which mock the ideal of a better notation than ALGOL.

If you're interested in recent developments in array languages, I recommend checking out:

BQN https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/

ngn/k https://git.sr.ht/~ngn/k/tree/master/item/readme.txt (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009241)

aplette, which is a modernization of Ken Thompson's APL (with a LOT of projects in between them; Ken's APL interpreter -> ? -> OpenAPL -> aplette) https://github.com/gregfjohnson/aplette (Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740536)

I'd also recommend checking out J, which isn't a recent development, but has the best syntax out of all array languages, has the best development environments, is the easiest to learn (it has a way to learn it built into the language itself!), and is the only one that treats making GUIs as a first-class feature (and, also, critically, is not proprietary, unlike Dyalog):

https://jsoftware.com (Has so many previous discussions I just recommend using HN search to find them.)

The chat is biased in favor of Dyalog APL, but a lot of the modern additions Dyalog has made to the language make it (in my opinion) worse as a notation, so ideally don't let it turn you off of the concept of array languages entirely if Dyalog doesn't "click" with you.

If you haven't already, you should also check out Notation as a Tool of Thought, a paper so good it won Iverson the Turing Award:

https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

He has a lot of really good blog posts and software toys on his site and on itch. I recommend looking through them. He also has a web comic that's pretty good, but he hasn't updated it in a while.

http://beyondloom.com/blog/index.html

http://beyondloom.com/things/index.html

http://beyondloom.com/games/index.html

http://beyondloom.com/comic/page0.html

('RodgerTheGreat on HN)

http://beyondloom.com/tools/specialk.html

The SE chat is really worth lurking if you're at all curious about APL; nearly everyone who has written a publicly-available array language implementation who isn't dead or over sixty is active on it.

You could check and see if it was ever posted on the Shootout site with archive.org, but when I checked coverage was spotty. The point of these benchmarks is everyone being able to run them themselves, though.

If you look at my post history, it's actually primarily free software APL implementations! ngn/k is amazing. John Earnest's work with his own variants is really fantastic. I dislike klong and Kona.

He wrote solutions for Shootout (predecessor to that Debian page) problems a few years ago; a lack of k in benchmarks is not due to a lack of k being volunteered: http://www.kparc.com/z/comp.k

k is really fast. Half of the things on the Shakti mailing list are just Arthur getting really excited about how significantly he's beating x or y or z in performance and giving numbers for it. `grep`ping it now I see 40 in half a year that explicitly contain the word "benchmark," though not all of these are comparing to other things (some are just comparing to different k releases), and there are more comparisons without that word.

Arthur doesn't work at Kx anymore, by the way. He's at Shakti now. Shakti has a different (but still draconian/non-(A)GPL) license. It probably doesn't have the benchmark clause, but I don't care enough to check (I prefer J to k and don't have a proprietary k on my system).

There is privacy. Citing a philosopher that made his life into a joke doesn't magically make privacy disappear.

He didn't say his name, though. At minimum it's a desire to stay pseudonymous, and I think it should be respected.

The idea that privacy can be violated like this solely because random Facebook users are interested in it and on the off-chance that family he hadn't interacted with in years might find some abstract comfort despite not being close at all is just incredibly bizarre.

Why do those people deserve to know anything? They obviously haven't sought it out, and given he hadn't contacted them in years, it's completely pointless to assume they were close.

Answer: They don't.

Privacy should be respected, even in death. Especially in a case like this.

Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you have concerns over someone's behavior, please just message the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. Pushing discussions into meta-arguments about reposting poisons threads.

It's amazing how rude Facebook, reddit, and in this case, greedy companies, can be. If he cared enough about anyone knowing who he was, he'd have told someone. This is just blatant disregard for a man's privacy.

Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).

(This user was lying, and their link is, as 'dredmorbius notes, a thinktank funded by Exxon and the Koch brothers.)

https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira...

https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

Consider: it's not that Linux users are hostile to criticism, it's that your criticism is of the laziest, least-intelligent part of the spectrum of criticism.

Facebook isn't a collection of books, and it isn't a collection of speech: the speech is a side effect.

Facebook is a virality engine. How do you get content that's appealing to the widest variety of people shoved into their faces?

The popularity of a President almost always goes up by starting a war, because the American public loves war. It's how Bush Jr. got the popular vote after losing it so miserably the first time.

People love hate, so an engine aiming to do nothing but push content with the possibility of going viral, viral, will endlessly promote the most inflammatory content. It drives engagement! The speech doesn't matter at all; it could be anything. On their other popular platform, a platform with a younger population, the most popular post is literally a picture of an egg. It's more a video game than a "marketplace of ideas."

Of course, the obvious solution would just be for Facebook to stop suggesting this content algorithmically rather than removing it outright, but hey, I'm not Facebook. It's not an attack on speech for a company that makes money off of suggesting content to other people to stop suggesting some variant of content, though, because again: the content never mattered.

Drew...doesn't, actually, use much of it at all. I don't like the article, but you picked the one person who basically lives by what he rants about.

Censoring words and topics is literally the textbook definition of censorship; are you trying to be dense?

They didn't contribute a thought, though.

Congratulations, you've committed a felony. That's what Doctorow's protesting: that Amazon forces you to commit a felony to do something as basic as changing a file format. He points this out in his Kickstarter:

What's more, Audible won't allow you to sell your audiobooks through their store unless you allow them to wrap your books in their DRM, which cannot be removed without committing a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Every audiobook you buy from Audible is locked to Amazon's platform...forever. They can revoke access to the book (they've done this with Kindle ebooks, starting with -- I shit you not -- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four... You can't make this stuff up!).

What was the point of this comment? You listen using a service that abuses its users and you want everyone to know it, sure, but...there's literally no substance to the comment. It's pure fluff. You didn't even explain why or give any reasoning whatsoever. Just, "I do [thing]."