vacri

If a project actually follows semver, then you know that unless the first number changes, there won't be any (significant) backwards-incompatible changes - eg, your config files will still work as expected.

Ubuntu has made the commitment for 6-month releases, so that makes sense for them. Debian releases "are ready when they're ready", so they can't predict the month (or even the year) ahead of time, and the version number is needed well before the release is made official.

> Is that not against his own interests?

The effects of higher tax rates on Buffet's quality of life are entirely negligible. In the words-ish of Bill Gates: once you're eating $30 hamburgers, the extra money doesn't really do much.

I still have a hard time hearing people complain about environmental regulations, when articles like this post say things like "The river caught fire a number of times". When your river is catching fire, surely that's a sign that perhaps some controls should be put in place?

The US's high living standard is due to all the cheap crap it can import. You can't just slap super-high tariffs on China, because the manufacturing will just move elsewhere. You'd have to slap tariffs on almost all the high-population countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Such a hostile trade environment would rebound on the US, and it'd suffer more.

The problem isn't really that the manufacturing jobs have been given to the cheap countries, it's that the US is okay with the top quintile grabbing all the money for themselves (probably because 'freedom')

> b) issues with ethics

On a tangent, I've found it an interesting marker if a commentator speaks of the Three Laws of Robotics as if they are part of a solution. We can't even explicitly codify how those laws (ethics) should function for ourselves, let alone put them in as a restriction into a computer system. Whenever I see those mentioned as part of a solution, then I know the commentator really is only thinking of surface issues and 'sci-fi magic' answers.

Superintelligence is a fearmongering book with little internal consistency. It makes quite a few leaps of logic, and seems to be more about dreaming up doomsday scenarios than thinking about them. About the only realistic scenario is "a super AI controlled by a hostile nation"; all the stuff about turning the Earth into paperclips (or whatever) is just nonsense. It's a "pop science" book.

I did like the 'history' bit at the start, where it mentions the frustrations AI researchers have - every time they reach a goal, it's then labelled "Not AI", and the definition of AI then becomes more complex.

In addition to all the other reasons, the IT industry is much, much younger than other industries. The 'web' itself is only 26 years old, shorter than a single person's career. Punchcards were still in common use in the late 70s, again within the reach of a single person's career.

An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s.

Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.

What about the 39 nations above the UK in the RSF listings? My point was that the First Amendment is not the only legal control on freedom of speech in the US; merely adopting that one line of law doesn't make the rest disappear.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the First Amendment. I'm just pointing out that the situation is more complex that people usually appreciate. The First Amendment is just a plank in the arena of 'free spech', it's not the source of it (after all, free speech exists in countries that don't have the US constitution).

I mean, take your example of the boss firing you for saying 'go to hell'. It doesn't make sense; it doesn't make any real-world differentiation to other countries. In what western democracy do people get jailed for telling their boss to go to hell? You have to go to some pretty extreme authoritarian states before you start to get to behaviour like that.

My point is that merely quoting the First Amendment is not sufficient to carry an argument on free speech. There are lots of indirect ways to suppress speech, and I gave an example link. That's why the US isn't up at #1.

I mean, look at the rest of the US Bill of Rights. Amendments 1 and 2 are the poster-children, though 1 isn't perfect as we're discussing. The third amendment is now utterly irrelevant. The fourth amendment is routinely ignored, given things like 'civil forfeiture' and SWATting. Fifth amendment is mostly intact, excluding again things like 'civil forfeiture'. The sixth amendment is sick and dying, with plea bargaining replacing the vast bulk of trials, and trials hardly being called 'speedy' these days. Seventh I don't know much about. Eighth is long gone, with extremely long sentences given out to poor people for non-violent crimes, and frequently ridiculous sums given for bail. The ninth is a curio pertaining to law. The tenth is a source of lots of controversy, with all sorts of arguments about what is states rights and what is not.

What I'm trying to get at with all that waffle is that despite these things being "enshrined" in the constitution, it doesn't mean that that's the way society behaves. "It's in the constitution, therefore it must be so!" is not always the case.

And yet Reporters Without Borders rates the US down at #43 when it comes to press freedom, marginally below the UK at #40.

https://rsf.org/en/united-states

An example of why it rates so low: https://rsf.org/en/news/us-rsf-concerned-second-wave-journal...

Also, while the First Amendment is good to have, it's not as absolute as its fans make out. There are plenty of restrictions on free speech in the US - libel/slander, obscenity, official and military secrets, insider trading, incitement, 'fighting words', intellectual property violations (a big one, thanks Disney), National Security Letters (yay 'warrant canaries')... and then there's things like 'free speech zones' (aka "time, place, and manner restrictions" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...). Some of those are good things to have, but nevertheless, not all of them are, and they're still 'government restrictions on speech'.

Again, the First Amendment is good to have, but people need to stop quoting it like it's a vaccine against loss of freedom of speech. The actual situation is a lot more complex.

Exporting data incorrectly isn't a missing small feature. It's data corruption.

> most of us are here to discuss business and learn

HN stopped being about business quite a while ago. It's a general-interest board now. For example, I literally can't recall the last time I saw an article on A/B testing on the front page, nor an article about how best to deal with employee issues from the employer's side. Or an article about how to increase your product's market reach.

From The Fine Article:

> Location Services is still enabled, Apple devices (like Apple Watch and Pencil) stay connected, and services such as Handoff and Instant Hotspot stay on.

> The only way to turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios...

The GP is right that it's weird that Apple Watch stays connected when you ask for a disconnect, but Apple Earbuds do not.

TFA wasn't only talking about the wifi radio.

Here is a common enough non-techie use-case where this new behaviour is clearly a regression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15413902

Apple changed the behaviour of something that people have been using since the first smartphone (before, even), without indicating that to the user. Saying that the option is there when it's poorly-discoverable doesn't really counter the GP's point.

Can you please provide some real-world examples of what you mean, because I can't figure the kind of things you're talking about when you talk about excessive empathy being a problem for others.

> The jews in Nazi Germany spoke german.

Oh, ferchrissakes, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. The OP did a 'name one' gambit, and I pointed out that there were plenty.

Now, I'm not sure if you know this, but in WWII, the Germans fought more than just their own German-speaking Jewish population. They fought the French (don't speak German), the British (don't speak German), the Americans (don't speak German), the Polish (don't speak German), the Belgians (don't speak German), the Soviets (a collection of people, none of whom speak German), the Danish (don't speak German), the Norwegians (don't speak German), the Canadians (don't speak German), the Australians (don't speak German), the Dutch (DO speak German... but their assisting colonies didn't), the Indians (don't speak German), the Kiwis (don't speak German), the South Africans (don't speak German), the Greeks (don't speak German), the Chinese a little bit (don't speak German), the Rhodesians (don't speak German), some Yugoslavians (don't speak German), the Kenyans (don't speak German), an assortment of smaller, lesser-involved nations such as Costa Rica (also don't speak German) and, towards the end of the war, Italy... which doesn't speak German.

Not to mention that on the eve of the war, there were only about 200,000 jews left in Germany - most emigrated in the half-decade beforehand to distant places like the US. The 6M jews that were killed in the Holocaust were drawn from all over Europe - about half of them from Poland. It wasn't 6M German-speaking jews that died in the camps.

WWII claimed the lives of over 60M people, and 200k people is a rounding error on this number. It's drawing a ridiculously long bow to claim it as a civil war because a few of the victims lived in-country.

> you can't just hand-wave civil wars away.

Again, I wasn't. I was responding to the OP's 'name one'. It wasn't even a 'name one where it's a cause', just 'name one where it's a barrier'.

What does an Apple have to do with electronics?

Would you say that Apple's marketing department leaves much to be desired?

Love letters rely more on emotion, allegory, and subtext than the news, especially modern-era news.

Google translate is... iffy. Here's an example from this morning, where I asked a colleague about how the mooncakes were at last night's mid-Autumn festival:

were the mooncakes good last night? -> google translate -> 月饼好吗昨晚好吗？

月饼好吗昨晚好吗？ -> google translate -> Would you like me last night?

I ended up forming my own question, which was slightly wrong - my colleague asked 你是要说好吃吗? ("did you mean to say 'tasty'?") which I threw into el goog for a laugh, and got in return: "Are you going to be delicious?"

So either google translate is a bit iffy (still amazing, but iffy) or mooncakes are some sort of aphrodisiac and I'm not understanding that :)

> It's hard to see the financial incentive to provide unlimited translations to anyone in the world for free.

More communication = more trade, more market penetration = more money floating around. It's not a direct incentive, but it's there.

> Name one current conflict in which language and the inability to communicate is a barrier.

It'd be easier to list the wars in which language wasn't a barrier. Excluding the category of civil wars, there aren't many wars where opposing sides largely speak a common language.

Pft. That's an empty slogan to make puritans feel better about themselves. Plenty of smart people swear. They just don't swear to extreme, and control their swearing when they're speaking formally.

As a ridiculously obvious example, look at Steve Jobs, darling of this site. Whether you love or loathe him, if you think he was an inferior intellect, you should be questioning your own.

> Between that and all of the other shit you have to do in a day (commute, chores, eating, exercise etc.), it seems like there's little to no opportunity to just have a life.

It's a cultural marker that you define 'eating' as 'not part of having a life'.

The "extreme view" I'm referring to with Poe's Law is the phrase "far too much empathy". "far too much" is synonymous with "extreme".

I was saying that "far too much empathy" is not something that goes well with "screw you, you brought it on yourself".

The efforts of the EU (and other things, of course) have helped the major powers in Europe avoid war for over half a century now, a rarity in European history. Why wouldn't that be worth recognising?

I mean hell, on this page we have people complaining that the prize "only goes to three people when thousands were involved", and here you're complaining that "a group of people are awarded instead of a few individual". Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Perhaps look at it another way - assigning a Nobel peace prize is a way of putting wider attention onto someone, and maybe works as a soft pressure to keep them behaving a little? For half a year or so after you get awarded a peace prize, your profile in the world is a lot higher than normal, perhaps giving you a bit more of a nudge in the right direction.

Also, Aung San Suu Kyi won her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, 26 years ago. How old is that? Well, that was the year that the world-wide-web was born. Kurt Cobain was still alive. George Bush was in office and was just 'George Bush', not 'George Bush Sr' (and the first Bush war against Iraq started in January). The Soviet Union still existed, dissolved only in December of that year. Street Fighter II hit the arcades. The Rodney King beating sparked the LA riots. The war that gave us the term 'ethnic cleansing' started that year in Yugoslavia. Apartheid was still going on in South Africa, with a couple of years left to go. Linus Torvalds announces Linux on comp.os.minix.

Calling the Nobel Peace Prize bullshit because a recipient behaves differently-to-expected a generation later is itself bullshit.

> The United States is 50 small countries in one big country

I see this sentiment touted a lot, but is there really that much difference between a Connecticuter and Rhode Islander, or a Mississipian and an Alabamian? A North Dakotan and a South Dakotan?

> There is far too much "empathy" in the US.

> But I don't want to pay for an obese persons knee surgery.

This is Poe's Law writ large.