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>This is pretty naive

I think you may be misunderstanding me. Ethics stands above the law in that if ethics and law conflict, a person ought to do the ethical thing rather than the legal thing. It does not mean that people who disobey the law should be off the hook so long as they were obeying their own personal code of ethics.

If this view is naive, then I believe most all work in moral philosophy is naive. I don't think there are any major viewpoints that would elevate obedience to the law as being a concern higher than ethical behavior.

Do you think that the entire field of business ethics is bunk and can be reduced to the single maxim, "Follow the local law"? Is the code of ethics by which I would be required to abide[1] if I became a professional engineer an unnecessary restriction?

[1] https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics

I cannot condone my own countries recent (say past couple hundred years) treatment of freedom of expression. It causes my blood to boil on at least a weekly basis. That said, press freedom while important is only a subset of freedom of expression.

I'll admit I get a bit more worked up about companies colluding with governments to suppress speech; the potential harm is much higher. If Github had themselves taken a stance that the contents of the censored repository were unethical and independently chosen to take it down, I'd have much less of a problem with them.

>Would you rather choose a company that doesn't comply with local laws?

Absolutely. Companies and the individuals who make up companies should not comply with unethical laws just as people at large should not comply with unethical laws. Ethics stands above the law.

1. Please let's not start name-calling. The fact that you disagree with my beliefs does not necessarily make them or anything I say uneducated.

2. The fact that a judge was the one who ordered the limiting of freedom does not make it any less limiting.

3. Censoring an entire platform because it was used for evil purposes (I haven't personally confirmed that this is the case) is easily within the definition of limiting freedom of expression.

I'm weighing doing just that. The problem is that the primary language I use (Julia) has most packages heavily centralized on Github and even specifically designed their central package repository to be simpler to use if your package is hosted on Github. Migrating repositories I maintain to another service is a slam-dunk, but being unable to easily contribute to Julia packages hosted on Github would hamper not just my work but others who may have benefited from my contribution.

Github will not be shutdown over any action they do or do not take in Spain. The worst that can happen to Github is that they are prevented from doing business in Spain. Given how strongly Spain has come down against freedom of expression on the Catalonia issue, Github is making it very clear by taking this action that freedom of expression is not one of their values. Let me repeat, Spain has come down hard enough against freedom of expression that I do not believe it is ethical for Github to continue operating in the country.

I highly value freedom of expression, and it is especially important to me that a code-hosting and (like it or not) a social media website holds to that value as well, and fights to preserve that freedom on their platform. This will definitely affect whether I choose Github or Microsoft in the future.

> I've seen some projects lately with many people involved and months or years of development time invested in them, that I, an average programmer at best, was able to solve with a few days work and with at least an order of magnitude less paper used.

Are any of said software projects open source or otherwise well known? I've often gotten the same feeling but haven't gone so far as to reimplement and prove out my intuition.

I like this essay a lot. But the hn title is incorrect. Article title is "On Authorship and Style" (1860). OP, if you want to discuss this as it applies to programming, it would be much better to leave a comment to that effect than to mislead with the title.

is "Michigan" supposed to be Melbourne? Can't find any mention of Michigan on your website...

Does anyone have a way of setting up the ReMarkable to run Emacs with an external keyboard? If so, the device might be able to satisfy 2 disparate needs in my life for a more portable and readable outdoors coding environment as well as for note-taking as a paper replacement.

I think the racist bit might be assuming the primarily Sri Lankan company is from India.

If it's a helpful perspective to you, here's an economics researcher who had been using common lisp for scientific computing and why he switched to Julia. I found it helpful for choosing between the two when first selecting a language for personal use:

https://tamaspapp.eu/post/common-lisp-to-julia/

Also for the record, Julia has all of 0, Missing (indicating data that is uknown), Nothing (indicating data non-existence), floating point NaN (as well as +Inf and -Inf of course), and exceptions for actual errors in Base and the Standard Libary. If you need more than that, user-defined types are just as performant and relatively trivial to implement.

Not sure if you were including Julia in "science or stats languages", but there it is anyway.

You could try leo. Definitely inspired by emacs in many ways.

https://www.leoeditor.com/

It's going to be really neat to watch what the Julia package ecosystem comes up with now that they have access to truly composable parallelism at the language level. Up until now, most parallelism in the language had to live at the application level rather than being in library code since parallelism either relied on spawning new processes or the Threads.@threads macro which couldn't be nested.

Realized after submitting that the more useful link might be this one: https://leoeditor.com/preface.html

Did you read the article? One of the big issues that some cities are facing is finding real-estate for installing charging stations of sufficient capacity. It specifically cites Philadelphia as having run into this problem.

If it's the same project I'm thinking of, Janet is actually by the same developer as fennel. Janet was kind of his followup project to fennel.

Oh neat. Is the plan to write a proxy sitting between client and server and decrypting/encrypting all events so any client can be used in e2ee rooms?

I was the original reporter of linked bug. In fairness to Riot team, it appears to be an upstream bug with their rte: https://github.com/ianstormtaylor/slate/issues/2612

The server-to-server specification was only formally released on February 5 of this year. Before that, it was certainly necessary to do reverse-engineering of synapse in order to build a HS, but it no longer is. The lack of server implementations just over a month after the release of the spec isn't good evidence of a bad spec. I strongly disagree with Jason's (who has been openly hostile to most of the matrix community including me) characterization of the spec in its current form.

Disclosure: I like matrix and have hacked on a few matrix-related projects as a hobby activity (Jason would refer to this as buying into Matthew's (the CEO of New Vector, the company primarily driving matrix) personal cult). That's it.

The article devotes significant time toe discussing the effect of minimum wage policy under point 8. He makes a convincing argument that it doesn't explain much of the effect.

He discusses this point in his conclusion. He was also expecting to find a single, clear factor but didn't. Even if multiple factors causing a single large change is relatively rare, we'd still expect to see it sometimes, and he's arguing that this is one of those times. I found the argument relatively convincing.

I don't see how a cryptographic WoT system is necessary for that kind of concern. That sounds like more tooling needed around the language's basic packaging system.

They get published per reviewer as a git repository on e.g. github, which is fine since you're not really supposed to be putting any value whatsoever on joe-random's reviews.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? Were you wanting people to be able to publish proofs that they've reviewed the legal standing of the code as well as the code itself for problems?

There's some more background and vision for this software in this blog post talking specifically about the Rust ecosystem: https://dpc.pw/cargo-crev-and-rust-2019-fearless-code-reuse

It also has some nicer narrative examples.

Sounds good to me. Thanks!

Could you change the title please? The project is called "qutebrowser". No dash and no capitalization.