datashovel

Publications just need to continue to follow these stories, and print relevant details. The rest will take care of itself.

Investors with large stakes in AT&T, and board members, need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves whether the CEO's compensation is in line with his ability to ask his legal department to sue people / companies / governments, or is it in line with his ability to make at&t a great company that accomplishes amazing things for its customers.

This reminds me. I've been wanting to ask (In fact I'm about to post a "Ask HN" about this in case anyone wants to have a discussion about it).

Similar to "Who is hiring", I am wondering if a monthly "Who is networking" would be a good idea. Or does something like this already happen here?

I'm thinking in terms of skilled people who are looking for other skilled people (with a different / complementary skillset) to collaborate on a side project. I'm doing just fine for myself as far as my career is concerned, but at this point I'm convinced startup life is in my blood so I am going to continue looking for that fix even if it's only to dedicate a few hours a week.

With all the news about VCs tightening their budgets, I imagine folks may want to start considering spreading their tentacles into many different side projects to see if anyone out there would be a solid partner.

I wish I had a timeline that showed me the frequency of stories coming out on this.

I am only spitballing here, but does anyone else think the heat has risen for federal law enforcement to set some precedents on this stuff now that Antonin Scalia has died? My hunch is that with another liberal judge on the Supreme Court there may be a push to have some of this type of case heard at the highest court.

I think the question is less about whether or not a "correct / valid use" of this new technology is acceptable. The problem is that it's impossible (once it exists) to guarantee it won't be used in malicious ways.

I'd love to know the names of the people within the FBI who are pushing this agenda. The only way this foolishness is going to stop is if those people are out of a job.

I'm not kidding when I say that if they want to know where to spend the $2.5m I would start with cleaning up their core codebase. IMO Mediawiki open source code is a disaster.

EDIT: Not because it's written in PHP. Because it's architected poorly.

I submitted this a year ago, and hope to continue to do so annually. When I read the top story re: LSD: Life-Saving Drug, I felt today would be a good day for it.

I would love to hear more details about why folks don't like the idea. Let's suppose the solar panels are durable enough for heavy vehicles to drive over, and modular so as to make re/placement reasonable. What are the real problems?

I seriously can't wait for Oracle stock to crash so Google can just buy them outright. First order of business: Fire the legal department.

My take on this is the essay exposes a pretty significant flaw in the human condition. The more capable a person is to ignore the bullshit (ie. enough money to retire comfortably immediately) the less likely they should be doing so. And yet having the ability to "ignore the bullshit" is an integral component of what we've all come to recognize as "living the dream".

In way too many cases the "bullshit" exists because too many capable people are ignoring it.

That is unless "bullshit" is defined as all things that don't matter to anyone. In which case why would we assume anyone is focusing on those things anyways?

I get the feeling the air is quite thin up in the ivory tower PG must be living in these days :)

"Our US congress had the chance to fix this back in 1990s and they screwed up with enforcing it properly. We could've had a better pure fiber-based national build out but it didn't work out."

I'm not familiar enough with the industry to have an opinion on this, but it sounds very odd that a private corporation is so tied to government that it can't innovate on its own? How does this work? And how did it end up like this? I guess what I'm after is an ELI5 on this last part of your comment :)

The patent system would be a lot better if it didn't protect "obvious" technologies (which in general is pretty much all of the useful technology).

One of the largest problems with the patent system is large corporations try to position themselves as the go-between on some obvious and useful technology. It's not about protecting real innovation to them, it's about stifling competition.

None of the major corporations (technology or otherwise) are innocent here as far as I can tell.

While I can't argue the indictment is a bad thing, I think at best it helps point out that, as long as you're not "too big", government is more than happy to go after you.

I think most people would agree it's one thing to understand how the pieces work together "in theory", and an entirely different level actually building a functional prototype.

In the past I've even loosely spec'd out a system that would build integration tests simply from crawling a website. In my head. I'm surprised this hasn't become a bigger priority from some of the biggest tech companies.

I know it would be a tough problem and a big project, but I think with only a small amount of human interaction you can build all the integration testing you would ever need simply by allowing the crawler to build them for you.

In fact the way I imagine it would work, the system would automatically build a framework and a user could (in a very structured way via structured UI) coerce the integration tests in small ways to ensure it understands what's going on. For example: "This form is used for registration". "This form is for logging in".

He may not have meant to imply this, but I think he's wrong on at least one of the points.

He says there's no way to work productively on the problem. And perhaps from one perspective he's right, there is no imminent threat of overpopulation on Mars, and so probably no one is going to pay him a salary to work on it, but in general I think preventative maintenance is more important than dealing with fires when they actually happen.

If we know "overpopulation" is a problem in modern civilization, why not work on defining measures to prevent it in the future instead of letting history repeat itself?

And as far as AI apocalypse is concerned, I'm not concerned from one perspective but somewhat concerned from another. I think we don't need to be worried that AI will become sentient in the near future. I think we do need to be concerned about humans putting too much trust in AI to solve / automate critical problems for us. As a perfect example, I wouldn't recommend putting the decision of launching a nuclear weapon in the hands of some AI system. Though the AI wouldn't be evil in its intention to launch nuclear bombs inadvertently, the inadequacies of its ability to understand when it would be appropriate to launch nuclear bombs would certainly cause a lot of problems the world would need to deal with in the aftermath (if anyone were to survive).

Does anyone here know the theoretical (usable) energy output they can expect to get from this device?

I think the answer is obvious, but not because I have some moral reason behind it. I think it really comes down to the actors involved and what their current responsibilities are.

I can't imagine today's pedestrians assume a driver will attempt to preserve their life over the lives of the people in the car. So as a pedestrian you take measures to avoid putting the driver of the car into those situations.

I think it's reasonable to assume a driver's objective is self preservation and preservation of his/her passengers before preservation of people outside of the car.

I can certainly imagine a scenario where a person driving by themselves might make different decisions because they can't imagine living through an event where they were responsible for killing others, and didn't do everything they could to prevent harming others. But then what if there are passengers? I have a dilemma of attempting to preserve others' lives in the car and outside of the car. Are we honestly going to ask our drivers to "rate" each passenger? ie. If Joe is in the car with me, I could care less if he survives a horrible crash because he slept with my wife, so you can feel free to kill us both in extreme circumstances. If Mary is in the car with me by all means do everything you can to preserve her life. She has kids and a husband and is happily married.

The objective of the driver (and thus driverless vehicle) is to transport the driver and passengers safely. They shouldn't attempt to actively reduce likelihood of achieving that objective in order to preserve non-passengers.

I think the recruiting problem in technology in general is that programmers don't meet and interact with enough different types of programmers in work settings, so they really don't know what they want or what they should be looking for.

I'd suggest everyone start doing this instead:

For anyone who meets basic criteria / filters, hire them at least part time, and put them to work. If they don't make the cut 3 months later (based on some objective criteria) let them go. Then after you've done all your recruiting like this maybe 1-2 years later evaluate what your team consists of.

It's not even a question in my mind. I'm not 99% sure. I'm 100% confident the team will not look like the recruiting team originally envisioned it would look before they started hiring.

EDIT: And I'm 100% confident those teams will consist of an overall better quality of engineer, and putting out higher quality products, than they would've ended up with if they stuck with trying to find what they believe to be the right "culture fit" or some concept of what a "prototypical engineer" is / should be.

>> Privacy advocates also worry that to carry out its hacks, the FBI is using “zero-day” exploits that take advantage of software flaws that have not been disclosed to the software maker.

I imagine that's not the only attack vector. I would be surprised if FBI / CIA / NSA don't seek (direct or indirect) commit access to popular open source projects.

I agree. But in a long-term scenario as long as all developers within a company know (and share with their co-workers) that their management are not open-source friendly and do not give back to the community of developers that they directly benefit from will find ways to revolt silently. Whether it's look for another job, or spend an extra day on a project they could've wrapped up in a few hours.

Those corporations who do not have good hearts and do not make good choices within their leadership will ultimately lose to those that do. Darwinism in full effect.

EDIT: In fact one of my ideas for a while now is to have a standardized disclosure that corporations could use to publicize to the world how they give back to the open source community (specifically and generally). This public disclosure would be primarily used as a recruiting tool. Eventually if it became big enough, the assumption would be that those who are not disclosing are probably not contributing. Huge implications as a recruiting tool IMO.

And it's not a lot to ask. It's not like you're asking for even $1000's of dollars. Khan Academy I think set the bar when they announced a while back they would allocate $5/mo/developer to allow each developer to donate to open source projects as they saw fit. If a company with a large team of developers can't afford something as simple as that then they have bigger problems.

Developers need to be bringing the culture of open source to their places of work. That means asking management for monthly budget they can use to make donations to open source projects (preferably to the projects they use in the company). If the most successful open source projects are not receiving donations from the companies that use them it's our own failing.

And if management refuses to allocate a budget for donating back to open source projects (either in developer time or in money) then developers should tell their coworkers that the company they work for is not an open-source friendly company. They're not doing their part to give back to the community of developers who are working so hard in their spare time to make what they do possible. I think the last thing companies want is to build a wall between management and their developer teams like that.

I'm certainly not a professional trader, but it seems intuitive to me that as long as demand is greater than supply for an extended period of time a trader could "unwind" the position over that entire time frame. I think it would be silly to assume these kinds of schemes would be opened and closed overnight.

I think I get the point. Still doesn't change my perspective / prediction.

Microsoft is slowly but surely winning me as a fan. Keep doing things that matter, show that you're committed to the open source community, and continue to help push the web forward and I think nothing but good things will come from this.

I totally get it. Sounds like a crazy prediction. I don't try to make predictions all the time, but am always interested in how accurate they were, and so all I can say is I've added a date on my calendar ~10 years from now and so you can rest assured that I'll learn either way whether I was right or wrong.

Don't get me wrong, my personal take on this is not based on anything about these 2 companies except what is exposed via press releases and news.

These days it seems to happen quite often that when I read about what's happening at Google I'm genuinely amazed. And so often when I read about what's happening at Apple I'm underwhelmed or disappointed.

Not that things can't change, but my impression is the entire core culture / trajectory of Apple will take many years to change even if they decided to start today. My hunch is they won't, and will end up paying the price for it.

Prediction: Within 10 years Alphabet will be in a position to buy Apple.

Generally speaking I'd say it's far healthier world when we don't think we're all dependent on billionaires to make the world a better place. Also far healthier world when billionaires don't actually believe they're responsible for illuminating the world's path to salvation.

IMO the criticism is warranted, and there is a clear path Zuckerberg could take to quash all of the bad publicity. While he may be surprised people are calling him out, I say good for them. Why let anyone pull wool over your eyes voluntarily?