samhwr

System programming is quite poorly defined in general. I’d call it “the kind of software usually written by people who write C instead of Python”, and leave it at that.

“There are far more people doing [thing that I personally do] than [thing that I do not personally do, and thus know fewer people who do it].” — everyone ever

It _affected_ the whole network, and _effected_ the whole outage ;)

It’s massively viral news about the exact stuff they specialise in. I’m not too surprised that they’d be putting out content. After all, Facebook is hardly in a position to do so ;)

>> eclipsing Intel

> AMD had 2020 revenues of $9.76bln to Intel's $77.87bln.

Ever heard of a solar eclipse? ;)

> though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea

I wouldn’t judge ravens too harshly. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were notorious for booby-trapping bodies in order to take out first responders - so humans are clearly not impervious to making the same mistake.

> One must keep in mind that the United States is and near or more always has been a welfare state.

> If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?

The contention was definitely whether it has been a welfare state ever since its founding. No judgement though - the English language is terribly poorly designed, so I can totally understand how you read it that way.

Sorry, I was responding to the “not expressed so much in code I can look at” point. All these things should be expressed in code nowadays. I’m sure some Makefiles are excessively complex - and Terraform and K8s manifests surely as well - but you should hopefully be able to hunt down some good ones.

Yeah, after wasting eight years of my life doing Latin at school I understand the basic etymology, but I’m confused because the English meanings aren’t very close. Your careful phrasing manages to get the word ‘hold’ into both of them, but ‘someone who holds a lease’ isn’t a very natural-sounding definition of ‘tenant’, and the notion that most people who make this mistake are familiar with the paradigm of teneo feels rather tenuous (plus ‘tenant’ noticeably isn’t a Latin ending, it’s apparently Old French, though transitively descended from teneo). You don’t think it’s more likely, if anything, to be that they just sound similar?

I’m not totally sure what you mean there? I’m not saying that all mentally ill people are prone to that, I’m just saying the inverse: that most people who are prone to that are mentally ill. It’s certainly a very very small subset of mentally ill people, if that’s what you mean.

> But how to build an executable I can wrap in a systemd process running on a different machine? Those are actions people do, not expressed so much in code I can look at.

The former sounds like a makefile, and the latter sounds like a Terraform plan (perhaps combined with something like Kubernetes manifests, but that’s getting more architecture-specific). These days I don’t think there’s any excuse to use the point-and-click approach for setting up infrastructure: it’s effortful, bug-prone, a security hazard, means everyone has to be trained in yet another area, and risks accidentally spending far more money than you intend (either by using surprisingly expensive services like Spanner, or by inadvertently leaving unused infrastructure running).

That said, I do agree that platforms like AWS are unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of CRUD web developers. The complexity makes sense for the small percentage of people who are genuinely setting up a very idiosyncratic and unique architecture, but the 98% of CRUD developers really need an opinionated platform, perhaps built on top of AWS/GCP/Azure and modelled on v1 platforms like Heroku, which would set up the infrastructure you need for the average web backend.

Yes, I’m not a fan of lots of what Apple does, but I don’t see how these generalised complaints about Apple are related to this case. I don’t think your comments justify the notion that Apple is obliged to hire people at a loss to provide some form of ad hoc social welfare.

I’m not sure why having the money is relevant. Plenty of companies, people, and governments ‘have the money’. The question is why it is specifically Apple who are obliged to provide welfare for this person at their own expense.

I have huge sympathy for human beings who are unable to work, and a humane society should provide for them, but I don’t see why it falls to Apple. This kind of populism (“person X or company Y should be arbitrarily forced to pay for thing Z, ultra vires, because they can”) feels like a lazy way to avoid solving a deeper societal problem which goes well beyond this one person.

Yeah, the complaining about this is ludicrous. It feels like there are increasingly two camps, one of which believes anyone fired for social justice reasons is being wronged due to some kind of cancel culture, and the other of which believes that the former never happens in any case.

The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.

Not only logged, but potentially subpoenable in lawsuits. Any reasonably large company usually ends up with the occasional lawsuit from some mentally ill querulant who feels wronged for whatever reason, and in one of those cases, at a past employer, we ended up blowing off steam by joking about the letters from their ‘lawyer’ (i.e. almost certainly themselves). We were fed up after having to gather vast amounts of data, which they demanded just to make things difficult for us.

And then, as I should have foreseen, they demanded all communications within the company relating to their lawsuit. I’m not a lawyer, but, for whatever reason, our lawyers considered it to be within their rights; I’m sure it wouldn’t have applied to privileged legal discussions, but we were just code monkeys so I suppose our chat logs were fair game. I’m never doing that again. I don’t think their lawsuit went anywhere, but it was mortifying all the same, especially considering our brand was quite a friendly and liberal one.

I think it’s a harder question than either side is willing to accept. You have someone who isn’t of much use as an employee, but by no fault of their own. It’s a horrible situation for them to be in, and it’s one we have to think about as a society, but it’s unclear why Apple specifically is obliged to provide them welfare at its own expense.

I don’t quite understand your confusion - did you read his comment as “at any point since its founding [i.e. just not before 1776]”?

> Their tenants were largely about taking care of each other.

For what it’s worth, you almost certainly mean ‘tenets’. I don’t know why, but this malapropism has become increasingly common. Tenants are people who rent a property.

Hey, I know this is quite far downthread and didn’t get much attention - and there’s a 92% chance you won’t even see this comment due to HN’s bizarre lack of any adequate notification mechanism - but I just wanted to say I really appreciate your writing this. This crystallises a lot of thoughts I have about that kind of ‘selective pyrrhonism’, where positions one agrees with can be justified with only vague hunches (or defining your position as the null hypothesis: e.g. we default for no clear reason to assuming Amazon’s benevolence), but people who disagree are demanded to give preposterously specific evidence.

This is a complete non sequitur as a reply. The commenter you're replying to asked people to prioritise his grieving family's wishes over your own curiosity. He/she was absolutely right to do so.

Your reply talks about other families who lie and state a false cause of death, which would be morally wrong but in this case is completely irrelevant because that's not what's happened.

The one bit of your comment which is relevant, I think, is wrong: namely "the prevalence needs to made public so we treat these things like the crisis they are". We have anonymised statistics on suicide and overdose deaths. That is not the same as demanding a specific person's cause of death - and the sense of generalised academic interest you're alluding to is plainly not the reason for which people are curious about how he died. I wish we would get a grip on ourselves here, because it must be upsetting for anyone who knew him and is reading these comments, as surely some of those people are.

Edit: I died of a heroin overdose, briefly, before I was resuscitated. If I'd died permanently, my family may well have wanted to keep that information off the record permanently (easier in my case of course because I'm not a public figure). It's easy to think in the age of Wikipedia that all information is in the public domain and belongs to everyone. It's not, and it doesn't.

Oh I see, you mean you were just making the descriptive statement that people will speculate if they are not given information? I took you to be saying that they (the family or whoever has the right to give out that information) were actually obliged to tell people.

In that case, sorry about the misunderstanding. I agree with you in that descriptive sense, that people will speculate.

I also think they ought not to speculate or demand information, and that it's quite l̶u̶r̶i̶d̶ [edit: morbid, rather] of them to do so. I understand the psychology behind it, because generally information is transparent and accessible by default these days. And generally that's a good thing. But people may not want to share certain information when grieving a loved one's death - and when they may still need to tell people who were close to him, rather than letting them find out from a trending Twitter topic. They may even never want the manner of their loved one's death to be an open fact on Wikipedia, like for instance David Carradine's family might have wished. I'm sympathetic in either case. I think we internet people as a whole really ought to be sympathetic too. Some of the comments on this thread are appalling in their sense of entitlement to know this information.

This is certainly an inventive argument! But I would argue in response that your odds of being killed by whatever killed Dan Kaminsky, in the next 24 hours or so, purely because you weren't told soon enough how he died, are rather low!

May you live until tomorrow and may your genes prosper to fight another day ;)

Are you telling me why I upvoted, or (by implication) why his original post was downvoted by others? Because yes, I’d argue it was important. (I’m sorry if I’m not familiar with the rules here quite yet.)

Unless he was killed by a bear and that bear is still on the loose, or something like that, then I think we can probably wait a few days for his family to be informed.

There are a lot of people here making very high-minded comments about how it’s deeply important to the sum total of human knowledge that we learn the cause of his death so that we can reflect on our mortality, and so on and so forth. I can’t help but feel those comments are a bit insincere. It’s morbid curiosity, let’s be honest, and it’s not enough to justify speculating when his family and friends are probably reading these comments and possibly haven’t found out.

I agree, this was clearly voiced very respectfully and with good intentions, but I’m astonished the commenter couldn’t see what a classless thing this is to imply – especially about someone who just died. I was pretty dumbfounded reading this.

I just wanted to say I agree with you and I don’t know why you were downvoted. This seems to me a well-intentioned and quite reasonable request.

They don’t need to do anything. People aren’t morally entitled to demand information from a grieving family just because it would sate their curiosity.

NXDOMAIN :(