csnover

I guess my question is can you please fix your braindead blacklisting?

Several times per year—I can practically guarantee it’ll happen sometime in December, and indeed had to deal with this just five days ago—I end up with a bunch of users whose email notifications stop working because Microsoft have started blocking the entire netrange where my server lives. I don’t have control over other Linode customers, guys! I even wrote extra code to stop sending mail to addresses that start bouncing specifically to avoid blacklisting, so after MS finally processes a blacklist mitigation request, someone also has to go in and re-enable those accounts.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC are all configured; I’ve sent from the same IP address for about a decade; I’ve not once received an email abuse report; mail volume is low (most days, volume does not reach the minimum threshold for SNDS to report data[0]). I’ve never had any other mail provider blacklist my server. SNDS always says everything is OK as I am S3150s. What is even the purpose of SNDS at this point when it lies about what is going on?

[0] P.S. The janky SNDS calendar widget resets the month to the current month every time you click on a date, even if the date being viewed is in a previous month. I don’t have any hope that anyone will ever touch SNDS code again since it was clearly designed in the early 2000s and the copyright on the site is now ten years old, but this is a pretty silly bug.

When the APA released their guidance on the use of social media by adolescents[0] earlier this year, they cited a study[1] that described the impacts of instructive[2] (a.k.a. active) versus restrictive[3] parental mediation in preventing cyber-bullying. This study found that the use of active mediation was associated with a decrease in victimisation, whereas restrictive parental mediation was not only unhelpful, it actually increased the risk of victimisation. In the discussion section, the authors reference several other studies that also suggest restrictive parental mediation is worse than doing nothing when it comes to stopping online victimisation.

The APA appear to go out of their way in the guidance to explain that what they mean by “adult monitoring” is open coaching and discussion, not spying and blocking, but this sort of distinction seems to be missed or deliberately ignored in many discussions about online safety.

As such, the source of the problem here doesn’t appear to be that the tools are inadequate at their jobs, but rather that they’re all fundamentally the wrong tools. In this case, no amount of engineering can solve it. Given this, perhaps the question should not be “What parental controls?”, but rather, “Should these kinds of restrictive parental controls even exist?”

[0] https://www.apa.org/topics/social-media-internet/health-advi...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104026

[2] Definition from the study: “Instructive mediation […] explicitly involves children in the process of online monitoring. For instance, a parent adopting an instructive approach might appraise their children of the potential harms of certain online material, the appropriateness of sharing personal information online, and the latent danger of interacting with strangers on social media platforms.”

[3] Also from the study: “Restrictive mediation does not directly include children in the intervention process. Rather, it involves the curtailing of cyber-routines through blocking software or parental monitoring of children's online habits and associations. Shielding children from the dangers of the Internet is given primacy over educating them about such hazards[.]”

I’m not the op—they explicitly stated programming is not a skill like reading or writing—but I’ll go down this rhetorical path for fun and say: sure, why not?

The utopian aim of technology is all about offloading burdensome work so we can focus more on the things we enjoy. If reading is a burden to someone, why not let them use a TTS? If long division is a burden, why not let them use a pocket calculator? They’ll probably learn enough to get by even if they never get to the point of reading Dostoevsky by sight.

Lest you say, “well but those skills are essential!”, humans needed food to survive before we needed mathematics or written language, yet we’ve been been OK outsourcing farming for at least a century because we’ve experienced how it frees us up to pursue other things. And, to that end, we’ll probably be facing some pretty extreme civilizational crisis if we get to the point that someone without basic maths skills can’t find a calculator.

In addition to the suggestions others have made for locally testing workflows, there are also reverse shell actions[0] that can be used for troubleshooting CI failures on the GH runners themselves.

[0] https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

> This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal?

You don’t need to look at a study, you can just look at zoning and land use maps for basically any city in America. Areas zoned single-family are not allowed to build anything else. There are multiple articles on Wikipedia[0][1][2] about this topic with literally hundreds of citations to primary and secondary sources. What a frustrating question.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States

This part of the discussion is mainly about economics, not expression.

The parent argument was that AI will force artists to spend more time engaging in non-artistic pursuits because the amount of money the market will pay for artwork will go down. The counterpoint is that the amount of time the artist needs to spend on creating artwork is also reduced. In other words, if the market value for creating one artwork goes down by 50%, but the amount of time it takes also goes down by 50%, then there is no change except that the artist gets to double the amount of work they produce for the same amount of time.

Regarding the natural human desire to create art, unless you’re famous, making money as a creative involves mostly shitwork. Most commercial projects are just not very fun or interesting. Tools like generative AI can help to automate away a lot of the shitwork, so when the really interesting projects come along, they can be given more energy. This, to me, also seems like a win.

Could you please be more specific which vast powers and heavy handed regulatory approaches you are referring to?

The last two times net neutrality was in the news (during the initial reclassification, and then the repeal), the main claim then was that it would/did reduce investments and innovation, and that was a lie[0][1][2][3]. So, knowing this, what are the actual risks you see today in treating ISPs as common carriers?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/sorry-fcc-charte...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/attverizon-lobby...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-fcc-says-net-neutrality-crip...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/insights/does-net-neutrality-st...

> If they can't get money from their creations they'll spend less time creating and more time engaging in activity that generates returns.

On the other hand, artists who adapt AI into their workflows will have vastly improved productivity, so the amount of time they need to create new works can also be much smaller for the same amount of output.

There will still be some artists who can avoid using AI and make a living, but like all skilled industries that have already been disrupted by automation, the market for that kind of work will become smaller and more exclusive, and that’s probably OK. Live musicians were the only way to get music on the radio, or in the cinema, or at a party, until audio recordings decimated the industry[0]. You can still buy hand-made furniture, or clothing, or cars, but most people today get them from a factory.

I do think there are serious issues with large players attempting to corner the market and extract all the wealth for themselves, but this is an old problem[1], and I think on balance these lawsuits perpetuate, rather than attempt to solve, the root problem: a missing social safety net and no guarantee that people will not have to scramble to survive every time a disruptive technology emerges.

[0] https://timeline.com/live-musicians-were-so-terrified-of-rec...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

There is a secondary issue: Even on projects where someone is interested in doing polish work, since it usually takes longer to polish than to write a new feature, those who only care about writing features cause the backlog of things that need polish to grow infinitely.

I don’t really know of a good strategy for dealing with this in FOSS. If a feature contributor doesn’t care about polish, and you say to them ‘please fix the UX’, they can just either ignore the feedback (‘perfect is the enemy of good! move fast and break things!’), or if they don’t have direct commit access, create a fork that they can then advertise as having lots of cool new features.

I would love to know some strategies that work to strike a balance between not demanding perfection and not allowing garbage to be mainlined.

Apple don’t use semantic versioning. macOS 10.15 broke all 32-bit software. If that’s not an incompatible version update, I don’t know what is.

Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.

Just based on a cursory examination, you seem to be cherry-picking from your citation and omitting words that appear in that study, like “slightly”, to make it sound as if there was some sort of significant growth of the Antarctic ice sheet since 1979 that is now reverting to some stable state, which is not the case.

Looking at the data itself, Antarctic sea ice extent was pretty stable until the past two years, where it has fallen quite dramatically.[0] I think it is reasonable to express some alarm when you’ve gone from a trend of -0.12% per decade, to 16% below the 30-year average, in two years.

[0] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/snow-and-ice-ext...

Edit: I moved this comment to reply directly to the OP at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37251831 since that seems like a better place for it.

IP range is definitely a problem. I manage to get blacklisted a couple times per year by Hotmail, who still only support IPv4, despite SNDS always saying everything is fine. They don’t seem to care that blocking a whole IPv4 netrange of a reputable VPS provider because some other customer was sending junk mail will cause collateral damage.

IP/domain reputation is also probably an issue; I’ve been using the same IP address and domain names for over a decade so services like Talos are reasonably satisfied I’m harmless. If someone sets up a server and it has never sent mail for their domain before—or, worse, they get a radioactive IP address—it may be hard to become accepted by other email providers.

I get the sense that the relative lack of trouble I have maintaining a mail server is more to do with being effectively grandfathered in and worry that if I ever have to shift away from my current provider that email sending is going to become a lot harder since I won’t have my IP reputation any more.

I guess the OP thinks anyone sufficiently motivated by financial self-interest such that they won’t want the job unless it pays ‘enough’ is also someone who is going to be more open to bribery because they value personal wealth too much. I can see both sides on this but I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

People who are drawn to positions of power and also highly motivated by personal wealth seem like particularly bad choices if you want to avoid corruption, so keeping the salary low may sufficiently disincentivise this sort of person from entering the public sector.

On the other hand, public sector work is harder in many ways, so not providing equal or superior compensation may discourage many people who are entirely scrupulous but not foolish enough to both take on the extra burden of public sector work and make less money at the same time.

> It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service.

I understand that it may seem foolish or unjust, but it feels unreasonable to me to suggest it’s exploitative to pay someone a 97th-percentile salary[0] just because it’s not commensurate with private sector peers in a highly compensated industry.

> For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest.

The problem as it applies to judges and legislators is that they represent a very small group of people with the ability to make high-stakes decisions that impact a large number of people, and their decisions are enforced by the power of the state.

Charities don’t have the power of the state behind their decisions, and personnel within the military apparatus tend not to have much individual power, so the incentives for corruption are much more limited (and if it does happen, much less impactful).

> It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea.

Is there some proof that under-compensation is the main source of the corruption in the current system? I have no evidence either way, but my sense is that it is not.

[0] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ at $250k

The insane thing about this is to me that Exxon did seem to have ideas about pivoting away from oil and gas in the 1970s[0]. They funded research that brought down the cost of solar panels five-fold and started manufacturing and selling their own panels[1], they developed the lithium-ion battery[2], and they created subsidiaries for servicing the nuclear power industry[3], among other things.

I’ve never understood the obstructionist position of these oil execs. If you want to make a shitload of money, why not push for development of some emerging industry like renewables where all the infrastructure has to be built up from nothing? That could be money you are getting paid to build it. Instead, now it’s money going to some other company.

[0] https://www.desmog.com/s1ep1-bell-labs-energy/

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/763844598/how-big-oil-of-the-...

[2] https://www.bupipedream.com/news/49390/prof-whittingham/

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1976/03/14/archives/exxons-innovativ...

I feel like it may be helpful for you to try to understand how poorly constructed this argument is by reflecting on all of the pain and evil that has been enabled by allowing something you enjoy or care about to exist.

How confident do you feel that your religion, or people acting on behalf of it, have not engaged in violent acts of revenge, torture, child abuse, or human trafficking? Does it not cause significant duress in many cases to teach people to feel shame, to tell them normal feelings are sinful, that they will suffer for eternity if they break the rules? No one needs to worship any particular religion—there are plenty of other ones, after all—so perhaps yours should not be allowed because it’s associated with bad things?

Do you eat meat from industrial farms? Use electronics containing conflict minerals? Wear clothes made overseas? Play video games from studios notorious for crunch? All these industries cause significant amounts of suffering and many are exploitative. They fund wars, genocides, slave labour, child labour[0][1], human trafficking, and animal abuse. They cause duress, evil, and pain. Shall we disallow them? We don’t need to eat meat and it would be healthier for most people and the planet if they didn’t. We can go back to buying only domestic clothing, or just make our own. We all lived without smartphones until 15 years ago, so those can go. Games are just like porn—merely diversions—so if we discount all the joy they bring to people, they really have no value to society at all. Should we get rid of these things, too, because they are associated with bad things?

Allowing books aids a probabilistic percentage of people who want to promote violence and hatred toward others, deliberately spread falsehoods, advocate for and explicitly describe abuse, and give instruction on how to cause harm. Even when there are disclaimers, sometimes they cause significant duress to readers. There’s a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing books to spread… do you get the picture?

All human enterprise has problems, and inductive fallacies like these are no way to judge what should or should not be allowed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36186445

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33299929

Based on a quick search, they are probably referring to this study[0] which states “One fish serving can be equivalent to drinking water for a month at 48 ppt PFOS”.

The EWG map of PFAS in fish[1] provides some specific measurements on fish in the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

[1] https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_in_US_fish/map/

Well all you have to do then is make it not hard to read :-)

   #[derive(thiserror::Error, Debug)]
   enum Error {
     #[error("bad index somehow")]
     BadIndex
   }

   // ...

   let pivot = array.get(array.len() / 2).ok_or(Error::BadIndex)?;

What you are describing basically matches my experience. Whether I’m doing a blame or a code review, if I’m reading commit messages, I’m doing it to understand why some thing is the way it is. Reciting what changed in 70 characters instead of saying why it changed doesn’t feel like it helps me much.

For the case of trying to find a change, I’d personally just run `git log -G` or `git log <file glob>` depending on what I’m looking for. I suppose one must know that these commands exist, though, so maybe that’s part of it.

From April: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/free-software-group-...

Discussed several times previously on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563378

The story of the barely surviving artist that needs extremely long copyright durations to eat and keep a roof over their heads is an emotionally compelling one, but I’ve never seen it backed up by data—and I’ve looked quite hard to try to find some. Can you point me to a source that provides sales figures by publication date so it is possible to look at how much money is being spent on >20 year old fiction? A source that can exclude dead and high-net-worth authors would be ideal, or at least one that provides quantiles, since I’d expect old book sales to be disproportionately weighted toward rich or famous authors, rather than the sorts of working folks you’ve mentioned.

It seems to me like you are describing an unlikely situation where a lot of conditions would need to be true for >20 year copyright to make sense:

1. Many artists are commercial failures for over two decades, but eventually succeed;

2. These artists’ newer successful works don’t result in income equivalent to working a full-time non-creative job for that time;

3. Fans will not pay them for the old works without the threat of legal action;

4. There is no other way to monetise the old works by e.g. recording a commentary, audiobook, screenplay adaptation, manuscripts, compilations, special editions, etc.;

5. Artists don’t pander to current trends only because they know they might be able to make some money over 20 years later;

6. The money they will get paid in royalties under a contract where they sold the rights to a publisher when they were an unknown nobody is greater than the amount of money they would make selling it directly in the public domain after becoming commercially successful.

The link in the article about emphasising phonics[0] vaguely answers that question in the reverse, in terms of what was being taught instead; a podcast series from 2022 called Sold a Story[1] (transcripts also available at the link) gives a much more detailed answer about why.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/phonics-science-reading-c715dea43...

[1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

I was curious about this so I did a little research.

> you need to decode and have every frame ready in less than 41 milliseconds, which is shockingly difficult even on high-end hardware

There appear to be multiple high-speed JP2K decoders on the market; Comprimato[0] include a calculator for their product and it claims that a $240 GPU from 2016 can decode 4k 4:4:4 at 72fps.

> Do I need to mention read speeds and network traffic? If every frame is, say, just 5MB, that is over 960 Megabits per second, saturating a Gigabit link.

According to Wikipedia, the DCP standard has a maximum bit rate for picture of 250Mbit/s[1]. My $60 home internet connection could stream that at almost 2x realtime.

> When you are calculating audio in real-time for 30 or more speakers, the compute costs add up, potentially into custom hardware / FPGA territory.

Dolby offer a software version of Atmos for soundtrack mastering that runs on a Mac Mini[2]. Real-time 128-channel object mixing was possible using consumer-grade hardware as early as EAX 5.0 in 2005[3], but Atmos does not need to be rendered in real time at a cinema, it can be done in advance and then during playback those pre-rendered PCM streams would be used which is a trivial amount of data to handle (under 20Mbit/s for a full 64-speaker array).

[0] https://comprimato.com/products/comprimato-jpeg2000/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package#Picture...

[2] https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/What-are-the...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions...

For CMake stuff I would search like `<function name> path:/CMakeLists\.txt$|cmake/`.

For translations I would search a phrase using `<phrase> lang:"Gettext Catalog" path:/<language iso code>/`.

For reviewing library consumers I would just search for `<my library name> (<function name> OR <other function name> OR <third function name>) NOT path:<my library name>/**`.

There may be better queries for some of these, but I really didn’t have to do any magic or weird tricks. Everything more or less just works.

Absolutely. GitHub Code Search is by far the most valuable online development tool I have used the past year. It is so much more useful than Copilot or any of the AI LLMs in my experience.

With Code Search, I have:

* Rewritten a CMake build system, which would have been practically impossible without access to real-world examples because of how poorly designed and documented it is;

* Validated machine-generated translations by looking up language strings from projects that used human translators;

* Tracked down bugs in unfamiliar codebases, using symbol-based navigation, without the downtime of fetching a bunch of files and waiting for a language server to process them locally;

* Reviewed how projects were using the APIs of a library I work on to determine whether high-maintenance features were actually used, and whether tricky features were being used correctly or needed redesigning to reduce programmer error

Kudos to the team at GitHub. Genuinely stellar work.

I don’t live in Oregon but complaints here about drug use on transit—and antisocial activity in general—have also increased sharply since the beginning of the pandemic. So, I suspect if there is actually a causal relationship between legalisation and antisocial behaviour, that it is currently heavily outweighed by other more significant changes that have occurred in the same period of time.

I am not a subject expert here at all so I don’t know if I understand exactly what you mean by “methods that would let you design such a thing in-silico”, but there was a paper[0] and interview with its authors[1] published a year ago about a drug-development AI being used to design chemical weapons.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/17/22983197/ai-new-possible-...

GPT-4 readily hallucinates data[0], so that seems unlikely, though it also appears unlikely that it would make it any worse!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34775853