lambda

Thanks!

You're right, I don't think that it's particularly novel. Just that it seems the misogyny aspect of "MGOTW" is more important than the celibacy aspect.

This sounds like architecture astronautics. Lots of things that sound good in theory, but there's no analysis of how useful they would actually be in practice, what actual tradeoffs there are with current designs, etc. Lots of wishlist features.

Not really. This is more organized misogyny than voluntary celibacy. If you take a look at their forums, they are more concerned with criticism of women and feminism than celibacy.

It appears that that's the intent of using an obscure acronym like that; people can drop it casually in conversation, and then people search for it, and then someone edits the Wikipedia article to crow about how many people are searching for it.

I think he's saying that in this document, "creat" is sometimes spelled with an "e", indicating that the OCR process overcorrected.

  3.5.2 Create
  
  To create a new file, the following call is used.
  
       filep = create(name, mode)

When I say "at some point", I don't mean that that's the timeline for a particular movie. I mean at some point in your life, it is better to let go of the idea of walking into a movie in a completely pristine state with no expectation about what will happen in it.

Otherwise, either you have to cut yourself off from all media and conversation that might possibly reference the movie, or try and convince everyone you might interact with, and everyone who might write anything online, not to discuss the movie. Neither option seems particularly pleasant nor realistic to achieve. I suppose you could also just see every movie you intend to see on the first showing of the opening day.

What you are doing by asking for absolutely no information at all, even the basic exposition and setup of characters at the beginning of the movie, is imposing a large burden on everyone else around you to prevent a very minor inconvenience to yourself. I understand not wanting major spoilers, and that there should be a reasonable time before discussing those points openly without a spoiler warning. But it just seems that the trade-off is fairly poor for not even allowing the most basic discussion.

At some point, you have to stop considering any discussion of a movie as spoiler.

The term "spoiler" should be reserved for a reveal that actually spoils the movie; where some crucial element of the movies emotional impact can be taken away by knowing some fact in advance that is held secret through the movie.

The discussion in the first paragraph here pretty much just covers the exposition in the credits, and the material you learn very early on about one of the main characters.

I feel like treating this kind of information as a spoiler will just lead you to endless anxiety until you have seen every possible movie that could be "spoiled" for you this way. Why not just relax, accept that people are going to do some light discussion of movies, and reserve your outrage for actual spoilers of surprising plot points, mysteries solved, puzzles spoiled, and the like?

Take a little time off from checking HN?

Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place, that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments that I'd never be able to find without an automated system.

For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on.

With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe some days there's someone better to pool with.

You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and more convenient.

> Do we really have excess capacity compared to the peak demand? Put another way, how many people own a car and aren't using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a complete guess I'd say maybe 5%?

As I said, when I look out at my residential street at 8:50, I see about half of the cars still parked there, or maybe a third (very rough estimates, I haven't actually counted). Now, I do live in a city with good public transit options, that's also fairly walkable and bikable. But at least where I live, there's a pretty serious oversupply of capacity, just because people do need cars occasionally and the options for not owning a car are not good enough.

In fact, on the next street over, parking goes way up at around this time since I'm near a major subway stop, so a lot of people park here and take the subway the rest of the way in. Rather than just sitting there, going back up and shuttling more people to the subway would be a more efficient use of cars that you could do with self driving cars. The commutes from house to subway station are likely under 30 minutes, and since rush hour generally actually lasts about two hours from 7 AM to 9 AM, you could fit a couple of round trips in that time period.

> (Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).

This is increasingly untrue. Mixed use developments, companies moving out to the suburbs for cheaper real estate, people moving back in to the city, and so on mean that reverse commutes are increasingly common.

If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us. It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker, and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at 3 AM.

Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks.

In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always have it available.

So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.

The installer from https://www.rust-lang.org works fine on Debian stable. Right now, you can just use the upstream rustup.sh script for platforms that don't yet have it packaged (like Debian stable), or install from your distro for those that do (or use rustup.sh on those as well if you like).

What I'm not seeing is the value of a Docker image. Rust doesn't have much in the way of runtime dependencies, which is where the value of a container generally comes in. I don't know of a platform where Docker image would work but rustup.sh would not.

It is unfortunate, and it is a good question to ask why Rust is attracting so few female contributors.

To assume when asking that question that the project is misogynist is a bit of a stretch, however. It's worth checking the project's policies and behaviors, to make sure it isn't doing anything that provides some kind of bias, but simply starting out by claiming that Rust is "anti-female" goes a bit far.

A few things that I can think of off the top of my head:

Some of the prominent contributions from women don't show up in the list of contributors because they are not directly to the compiler and standard library which are what are tracked in this contributor list, but rather to the broader ecosystem. Julia Evans has written some good blog posts on writing an OS in Rust, that have inspired other people in this space: http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/. Emily Dunham does some excellent work on Rust infrastructure: http://edunham.net/2015/05/20/open_infrastructure.html There are of course many more that I'm not listing here, but the point is that the Rust community, and even the upstream project, consist of more than just the compiler and standard library, though those contributors are the ones that get credited in a release since that is what is being released.

Rust is still a nascent language; while it is starting to gain traction in the industry, it is not yet broadly adopted, and thus investing a lot of time and energy in joining the project is still a bit of a risk. People who have more social capital and more free time can afford to spend more of that on projects like Rust with a lot of potential but a higher amount of risk. Unfortunately, in our society men tend to have both more social capital, and more free time as domestic labor and child rearing is still seen as primarily women's work.

There are probably a large number of other factors at play. The Rust community that I have seen has been very supportive of women contributing, and has been doing a better job recently of outreach, but there is still probably more that can be done.

Can you provide any suggestions; any place you see the project structure, or contributors, being "anti-female", or any positive action that could be done to increase outreach or increase participation?

What benefit would Docker images have over the existing upstream distribution or distro packaging? The Rust compiler doesn't have any particularly complicated dependencies, either installing the binaries directly from rust-lang.org or installing packages from your distro (if your distro has packages yet) should work fine.

Container images are great for daemons with possibly complicated dependency sets that might have conflicting version requirements with other packages and can benefit from isolation from other packages that containerization gives, but seem like a pretty heavyweight solution for just installing a compiler.

It's an arms race, and the users are the losers. Either they disable the ad blockers, and their browsing experience is filled with so much junk you can't find the content within it, or they enable the ad blockers and lose content.

Isn't that the one I linked to? It's just the final unredacted version, but I don't know how interesting the redactions would be.

It's a different game, but it seems to be in the same genre. The blurb even describes it as "similar to Civilization". It's reasonable to ask for two games in the same genre, and with the primary description of one as being similar to the main influence for another, "what are the differences? Why would I want to play this game over that game?"

To answer that, you can click through to the "About" page (http://www.freecol.org/about.html), which spends most of its time answering exactly this question (which demonstrates that this is a reasonable question to ask):

  In Civilization the objective was to build a nation that 
  could stand the test of times and that could also do one 
  of the following: conquer the world or be the first to 
  launch a spaceship. In Colonization things are bit 
  different ...
  
  A Colonization game starts in 1492 and the objective is 
  to colonize America. You begin the game with one vessel 
  and two colonists.

So, right now you've paid $180 for two $9 computers.

Assuming they do actually fulfill their rewards, you will wind up with 6 or 7 $9 computers (unclear if the second alpha was just an extra, or if that counts towards one of your 5), plus a $40 screen/keyboard/battery (based on the Kickstarter pricing of the C.H.I.P. plus PocketC.H.I.P.).

So, using a $9 price for C.H.I.P. and $40 for PocketC.H.I.P., that should cost $103. You spent $150 on it plus the shipping. Now, sure, that gets you pre-release models and "earliest shipments of release models", but it's not a very good demonstration that they can actually sell these for $9 at scale.

I dunno. They seem to have every intention of selling these for $9 at scale, but unless their BOM has changed substantially in the production version, it doesn't seem like that would be possible. Since the production version is not actually available yet, and no specs have been posted, it remains to be seen how closely it resembles the alpha version. So, that's why I say it's vaporware. Yes, the alpha models have shipped, but if those aren't the same as the production models, then the production models still are vaporware. It seems that at scale, they're either going to have to increase the price, ship something with a different BOM, Allwinner is going to have to drop their component costs substantially, or for some reason Allwinner is quoting substantially different prices to Olimex as they are to the C.H.I.P. guys.

But anyhow, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. They say they will launch their $8 sale tomorrow, and if they do that and actually ship more than a few at that price without exorbitant shipping, then we can say that it's not vaporware. But until those actually ship (and remember, tomorrow's sale is still a pre-order, and are supposed to ship after all of the Kickstarter rewards ship), the $5 RPi actually exists today, while the only people who have a C.H.I.P. today spent a lot more than $9 on it.

Hmm? This is Medium doing a reasonable thing.

They comply with Do Not Track, but people can embed videos on sites that do not comply. Here they do a reasonable thing, and show a message to people with "Do Not Track" enabled, letting them know that they can still click through and see the video, but the site they are directing you towards might track you.

Medium is just a blog hosting platform, as far as I know they don't control the content that gets posted. What would you prefer they do; not allow embedding YouTube videos? Not warn you that the linked content tracks you?

The thing they seem to be missing here is that the CHIP isn't a sub-$10 computer. They did a sub-$10 Kickstarter as a marketing effort, but their BOM on this chip is over $10, so it's apparent that they were doing the Kickstarter at a loss just for publicity.

https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/how-to-get-in-the-ne...

The C.H.I.P. manufacturers disagree, and say that it really will be $9 when shipping, but given that it's still vaporware at the moment, it doesn't really make sense to compare to something that has already shipped tens (hundreds?) of thousands of units.

That's a graphical console, not a serial console.

For some reason, while I always see Adam Cadre mentioned along with Plotkin and Short among the innovative modern IF authors, something about his writing style just rubs me the wrong way and I've never been able to enjoy his games.

No, I don't own an iOS device; I refuse to support walled gardens financially. So I don't play any iOS or console-only games.

Why do you need to need to be using the full capacity of your computer, if you are having fun?

One of the real advantages of interactive fiction in the modern era is that it can afford to take more risks, narratively, than a AAA title. Since it can be the work of a single person as a hobby or small business, rather than needing mass-market sales to repay for its development, you can try out different things, some of which may not work out but some of which can be fascinating.

Beside Andrew Plotkin, I've always loved the work of Emily Short, like Galatea which couldn't even really be considered a game but is quite fascinating.

No, Red Hat and SuSE do not apply such onerous restrictions. Canonical says that you must rebuild the binaries, even if those binaries don't contain any Canonical trademarks.

Red Hat merely requires that you remove the trademarks in the actual branding packages; they even explicitly state which packages those are, to make it very clear. From their trademark guidelines (https://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/corp/RH-3573_284204_TM_Gd.pdf):

  You must modify the files identified as REDHAT-LOGOS 
  and ANACONDA-IMAGES so as to remove all use of 
  images containing the “Red Hat” trademark or Red 
  Hat’s Shadowman logo. Note that mere deletion of 
  these files may corrupt the software.

Canonical requires that you rebuild every binary package in the distro (or at least, they don't qualify at all which binary packages have to be rebuilt when saying that you must rebuild binary packages). This is a far different, and much more onerous, requirement.

  Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be 
  approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going 
  to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove 
  and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the 
  source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect 
  your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of 
  the components of Ubuntu. If you need us to approve, certify 
  or provide modified versions for redistribution you will 
  require a licence agreement from Canonical, for which you may 
  be required to pay. For further information, please contact us 
  (as set out below).

Any attempt to clarify with Canonical to determine whether they just mean rebuilding those packages that contain branding, or how this interacts with packages that are not covered by copyleft licenses (that forbid applying extra restrictions like this recompilation requirement), have been met with silence (at least publicly).

The Free Software Foundation and Software Freedom Conservancy have put out statements on this matter, criticizing Canonical for this vague policy:

https://www.fsf.org/news/canonical-updated-licensing-terms https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/jul/15/ubuntu-ip-policy/

Whether this requirement is actually enforceable is another question. Given that Canonical ships copyright notices saying that the software may be distributed in source or binary form, and the only use of the trademarks is in some ancillary metadata on the packages rather than included in the packages themselves, it's unclear if this would actually be considered infringing on their trademark. But the FUD caused by their refusal to clarify this point means that it's a risk for anyone to try doing so; it's possible that a court could decide that it is likely to cause confusion, even in just the form of ancillary metadata in binary packages.

How is it protecting their brand to say that I am not allowed to redistribute the libpcap0.8 binary package that they built, written by other developers, licensed under the 3-clause BSD license, packaged by Debian developers, and the only reference to Ubuntu is the substitution of "Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>, Original-Maintainer: Romain Francoise <rfrancoise@debian.org>" in the binary package details, that they automatically add when they rebuild the package on their infrastructure?

That sounds more like "taking the work of others and trying to pass it off as their own" rather than "protecting their brand."

No one involved has a problem with branding guidelines that require replacing graphics, strings, and other branding information that shows up in user-visible locations. The problem is the weird and vague rules that Canonical imply to mean that anyone who redistributes packages from Ubuntu have to rebuild all binary packages (with an exception for GPL'd packages if that requirement would conflict with the GPL licensing which doesn't allow adding extra restrictions).

Because of restrictions like this, third parties who create forks of Ubuntu are left in a weird legal limbo. It can be solved by doing a full rebuild of all packages, but it is a lot of work and very error prone to set up a build system and rebuild every package. Rebuilding only the ones necessary for removing user-visible branding and whatever local changes are necessary is much simpler.

The other problem is that this policy was imposed relatively recently (in 2013). The previous trademark policy did not mention needing to rebuild all binary packages. So people who were relying on the earlier trademark policy are left in the lurch.

What is SatNOGS? I know that GNU Radio is a software defined radio toolkit. From the diagrams and "Sat" part of the name it seems like SatNOGS is some kind of thing for keeping antennas pointed at satellites. But it's hard to figure much else out about what this is and why this is relevant to anyone not already part of the community (in which case they would likely already see it by following the forum).

The link at the upper right doesn't help, since that just brings you to the front page of the forum. I have to Google for "SatNOGS" (or guess that I can delete "community" from the URL) to get to the landing page: https://satnogs.org/ which describes: "DIY Satellite Ground Station and Network - SatNOGS is an open source ground station and network, optimized for modularity, built from readily available and affordable tools and resources."

This helps a little bit, but it still doesn't describe what it does and why. Does this just let you track satellites? Read data being transmitted by them? What types of satellites? What kind of data?

Posting this to HN feels a bit like posting a link to a discussion about a refactoring of the internals of the block device driver in MINIX on its mailing list. Maybe technically interesting to a few people who have context, but a bit puzzling for a wider audience, and with very little context.

I don't mean this to be negative, I'm mostly trying to give constructive criticism that it can help to provide a bit more context, and links to make it easy to find more context, when posting an announcement to a more general audience like HN.

It's common in the hacker circles to refer to people by their usernames, and it was long a convention that people go by their initials as their username (at least in the East Coast, MIT influenced groups). Thus Richard M Stallman goes by "RMS" (and in casual conversation, rms), Robert T. Morris by rtm, Paul Graham by pg, Eric S. Raymond by esr, etc.

This isn't worship, it's just an established convention. It may be a bit in-groupy, but so are using jargon like calling this "Hacker News"; you have to at least know that "hacker" is used in the sense of neat technical tricks, rather than the more mainstream sense of breaking into other people's computers.