Threads for headgasket

25

flaviusb 1 year ago | link | on: Is it ok or not to talk about capturing and directing values created by technologies on lobsters?

So, this discussion has been ongoing elsewhere as well; a realy good point was made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13128366 that what is and is not ‘explicitly political’ is itself a political question, and that a lot of the attempts to remove politics from technology discussions are actually bad faith attempts to push a particular (neoliberal) politics, for example by deliberate conflation of ‘personality politics’/‘party politics’ as being the same thing as any discussion of the consequences of or biases built into a particular technological thing.
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  pizzaiolo 1 year ago | link
  
  Couldn’t agree more. I personally think that any politics-related topic that intersects with technology should be accepted.
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    friendlysock 1 year ago | link
    
    I personally think that any politics-related topic that intersects with technology should be accepted.
    
    This is such a colossally bad idea I have difficulty politely engaging with it.
    
    That opens the floodgates to all kinds of current-events and navel-gazing bullshit and low-quality submissions that I can’t believe you’d in good faith suggest it. Let’s apply that logic for a bit:
    
    Computers can be used to handle medical records, so we should submit more stories about doctors complaining about EMRs?
    
    IBM helped make the census machines used to round up minorities in Germany, and so we should expect to see thinkpieces here on the Holocaust?
    
    Automated newsfeed ranking tends to favor linkbait, so we we should post articles talking about the “alt-right and fake news”?
    
    New advances in nanotechnology allow for more efficient filters, so we should post articles talking about water politics in Palestine and Africa?
    
    Apple and Foxconn build our phones, so we should see stories here about factory workers killing themselves?
    
    There is nothing actionable about the above stories, they are memetic bait that are guaranteed sympathetic upvotes, they all will have pages and pages of people “discussing” (read: ranting) at each other, and they all will take up space and bandwidth better used on the actual practice of technology.
    
    I get that you tend to favor more political articles–you probably don’t think it is a problem seeing more of that sort of stuff here. Then again, it’s my experience that folks in a more activist mindset tend not to care that they are sacrificing the space of others in order to make their point and that is exactly what your suggested policy will start bringing out here.
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      Irene 1 year ago | link
      
      Would your concerns be addressed by a policy that narrowed it to only articles that have actionable advice relevant to the present day?
      
      To reiterate what I usually say: Any change like that wouldn’t be driven by me.
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        nickpsecurity 1 year ago | link
        
        That’s an interesting proposal. Those do at least get shit done or result in more useful discussions. Quick example might be the 10-20 posts on election security, tampering, etc I’ve seen between Hacker News and Schneier’s blog. Under that rule, that stuff gets filtered in favor of stuff like paper on specific risks in election systems, secure schemes for them, proposals on alternative implementations for existing ones with a shot of working, and so on.
        
        It would’ve had a good effect in that use case. Im not going to push it in general, though, until Ive thought of the potential consequences. Includes objective data with actionable recommendations sounds nice, though.
        
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        Irene 1 year ago | link
        
        That’s completely fair.
        
        I thought of it because I’ve been drowning in political material that I want to read, this past month, and picking the actionable stuff first has been essential triage for me.
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        friendlysock edited 1 year ago | link
        
        (tl,dr; that might help, but there are still subtleties. Text dump ahead.)
        
        So, the first thing to note is that if we don’t blacklist political articles entirely we will have to wade through a lot of “weeeellll maybe this one is okay” articles and their accompanying discussion, probably a great deal more than we already have to. That’s a price we are going to want to pay in order to keep from flooded; failure to pay that price will be very bad for the site.
        
        Second thing to note is that political articles “relevant to the present day” start to look suspiciously like news and current events. My stance on news as the mind-killer is well documented, but I’ll point something else out: that metric would’ve, for example, been completely cheerful in allowing “Vote for Clinton/Trump/Johnson/Stein” spam here the day before the election. Additionally, those articles tend to bring out theorycrafting and argument by people giving slightly different advice…and unlike our holy wars about text editors and init systems, none of those articles or bits of advice are going to help us practice our craft.
        
        Third thing to note is that a lot of the “actionable” part is going to be basically “go vote or fundraise”. I don’t come to Lobsters to see ten articles every month reminding me to fund the FSF, EFF, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Greenpeace, or any of a dozen other groups the patronage of which would be good and sound actionable advice for me.
        
        ~~~
        
        (here down is stuff not in direct answer to your question, but probably worth mentioning as we discuss this)
        
        The big problem with this line of reasoning is that it leads to, on average, really really trite and dumb articles. Whenever I think of folks talking about the “consequences” of technology, I’m put in mind of lazy tryhard intellectuals writing hack articles to the effect of:
        
        “Maaaan, what if voting machines could be hacked? What about the consequences, man? What about our democracy maaaaan?”
        
        “What if, like, what if people didn’t have to pay for music or software? How weird would that be?”
        
        “There’s this, like, rich person, doing things with other rich people in some far-away place. We should, like, protest.”
        
        “People are killing themselves and stuff over how hard work is, maaan. How bad is that?”
        
        “What are we going to do with robot cars? That’d be pretty far out…what are we going to do when car drive you, tovarisch?”
        
        “The Third World”
        
        “Maaaaaaan, the poor. what a concept.”
        
        And yes, those are completely unfair characterizations of these articles–but only just.
        
        If the articles were showing all of the numbers and stepping through an analysis on the jobs lost, maybe it’d be useful because then we learn how to perform that kind of analysis. If the articles talked about the business practices for handling an employee’s suicide, that could help somebody out if they ever (God forbid) ended up in that situation. If the article traced the flow of money from content creator to distributor to consumer and showed an alternative model with spreadsheets and graphs, sure.
        
        But that’s not what happens. What happens is a bunch of shitty blog posts where people don’t show their work and they pretend to be thoughtleaders and then people who are too lazy to do their own analysis and too scared to flag bad submissions and still want to feel like they’re part of something give upvotes out of sympathy. It’s the entire armchair intelligentsia approach that sustains business models like TED, the Rolling Stone, and so forth.
        
        And I cannot support the notion of any sort of political here that will end up there.
        
        ~
        
        The main justification I’ve seen repeated here and elsewhere for non-tech articles lately is that “bringing up the consequences and impacts of technology is important for us as developers”.
        
        Let me dispense my other main critique of such things, nihilistic though it may be:
        
        Technology marches on, regardless of how we feel about it. I’m pretty sure that no significant change happened at Amazon because somebody killed themselves. I’m equally sure that nobody here who has an opinion on either Trump, Palantir, Thiel, or anything related has any reasonable influence in those circles.
        
        I’m quite fucking sure that for 95% of everybody bemoaning the privacy and the surveillance and the automation and the whole rotten rest of the clearly and directly evil things we as programmers (not even the tech sector folks, us) have done none have put in their resignation or run Tor nodes or put their principles ahead of their livelihood.
        
        How many of you (yes, you, fellow crustacean) have used Facebook to provide pictorial surveillance of your family and friends? How many of you have allowed your friends' and coworkers' emails to be hoovered up by Gmail? How many of you have retweeted inaccurate restatements of other people’s positions, because gosh darnit they were wrong/toxic/racist/misogynist/mean?
        
        We’re almost all hypocrites of the highest caliber, and yet still we are going to bray like so many asses that we should make space on this site for articles which we won’t read, which if we do read we won’t critique, and which if we do critique we still won’t do a damned thing about?
        
        There are better places for the self-flagellation and pearl-clutching and hand-wringing that always accompany these “tech and politics” articles, so let’s leave them out.
        
        ~
        
        The final word (of too many from me, to be sure) I’ll give on this subject matter is this:
        
        Technology marches forward, with or with us.
        
        All technology boils down to increasing efficiency.
        
        Most people survive perpetuating inefficiencies.
        
        One day we will have removed all inefficiencies that people live off of.
        
        The moral and practical questions of what to do with redundant human beings will be handled by statesmen and businessmen, not by hackers.
        
        There is no interesting discussion to be had here on that topic that is both actionable and effective, so let’s not bother. We can suggest the actionable step of stopping our individual work, which is not effective. We can speculate the effective step of all the world governments uniting to create a post-scarcity paradise, which is not actionable.
        
        Or, we can ignore the articles entirely, and go back to what we’re good at: talking about math, code, computers, and problem-solving in areas that directly impact our livelihoods.
        
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        mcheely 1 year ago | link
        
        First off, I think you’re conflating your personal opinions on many of these subjects with an objective analysis of some sort, and unfairly generalizing on an entire class of discussion. Attempting to hang a lampshade on it by saying:
        
        And yes, those are completely unfair characterizations of these articles–but only just.
        
        Doesn’t excuse it.
        
        Most of your criticisms of stories on the intersection of technology and social & political issues equally apply to stories on technical issues.
        
        You seem to make the assertion that many of the stories related to political/social technology consequences aren’t backed up with hard data, and that makes them useless, but how many technical articles do we share here each day that aren’t filled with graphs and spreadsheets and charts? There have been plenty of good anecdotal stories about someone’s personal experience with a technology or tool-set discussing how it improved some desired technical outcome for them, or held them back. Many of these have prompted me to try something new in my own development processes. Why are those anecdotal stories valuable when they have technical or economic consequences, but not social consequences?
        
        We’re almost all hypocrites of the highest caliber, and yet still we are going to bray like so many asses that we should make space on this site for articles which we won’t read, which if we do read we won’t critique, and which if we do critique we still won’t do a damned thing about?
        
        There are a ton of stories posted on the site already that I don’t read because I’m not interested. There are lots of interesting articles I don’t critique, because I don’t feel informed enough to do so, despite being interested in the topic, or because I think the story stand on it’s own. There are plenty of great stories on Lobste.rs on things I can’t do a damn thing about, like addressing the P = NP problem, or making purely functional programming languages more efficient, because I don’t work in those fields, and likely never will at this point in my career. That doesn’t mean we those articles don’t belong here, or don’t add value for me.
        
        There are better places for the self-flagellation and pearl-clutching and hand-wringing that always accompany these “tech and politics” articles, so let’s leave them out.
        
        I disagree with the assertion that that’s all that comes out of articles about the human consequences of technical designs. I for one, am quite interested in the difficult problem of designing social technical spaces in a way that limits their utility for abusive behavior. It seems to be a very difficult problem both in the technical/UX design space, as well as in organizational design - building a team that is aware and recognizes the potential for abuse in systems before they ship. I suspect based on your comments that you’d be opposed to articles in that space.
        
        Technology marches forward, with or with us.
        
        I don’t think this idea the technology marches on a pre-destined path that we are powerless to influence holds water. If it did, why would we discuss the merits and trade-offs of different languages or data-stores? Why would we be interested in novel designs for solving new problems?
        
        All technology boils down to increasing efficiency.
        
        Choosing what to make efficient and what the costs and trade-offs there are is a fundamental part of engineering. We always build systems with a set of end goals in mind. Occasionally (possibly, frequently) we’re bitten by the unintended consequences of our efficiency increases. Sometimes those consequences are technical (Shit, my writes are super fast, but sometimes they’re not consistent). Sometimes they’re social (Damn, people are using the software I built to very efficiently abuse individuals they disagree with).
        
        The moral and practical questions of what to do with redundant human beings will be handled by statesmen and businessmen, not by hackers.
        
        I see no reason to assume that these sets of people are non-intersecting.
        
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        friendlysock 1 year ago | link
        
        I see no reason to assume that these sets of people are non-intersecting.
        
        Here, perhaps go with the composition of the 111th US Congress, which included a whopping six engineers in over 500 voting members and fewer still non-medical scientists. Or the number of MBAs as opposed to engineers represented in publicly-held company senior management.
        
        Choosing what to make efficient and what the costs and trade-offs there are is a fundamental part of engineering.
        
        Sure, but technology as a whole is decidedly about increasing efficiency–and that’s before we even get into the flamebait of “Is software development engineering?”. Your point is orthogonal to what I was observing.
        
        I don’t think this idea the technology marches on a pre-destined path that we are powerless to influence holds water.
        
        Another orthogonal observation, and one that misstates my idea. We can talk all we want about which particular vector in the forward direction technology marches, but the fact remains forward is the only direction over time.
        
        I disagree with the assertion that that’s all that comes out of articles about the human consequences of technical designs.
        
        I didn’t claim that was all that came of those articles–I claimed specifically that the unhelpful stuff that always accompanies those articles was sufficiently undesirable that we shouldn’t have them.
        
        There are a ton of stories posted on the site already that I don’t read because I’m not interested.
        
        You miss the point (perhaps written poorly by me) by a country mile. First, there’s a huge difference between “this article is a technical thing that is not immediately useful, but one day may be” and “this article is talking about issues I have no control over or never will or which I will go along with because I’ve bought into the system”. Most of the political stuff becomes either news, matters of opinion which are untestable by any of us, or happen at a level none of us are involved in.
        
        Most of your criticisms of stories on the intersection of technology and social & political issues equally apply to stories on technical issues.
        
        You’ll have to elaborate more here, as it is you’ve just got a blanket assertion–if you mean that we get bad tech articles too, that’s certainly something that happens and gets flagged appropriately.
        
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        mcheely 1 year ago | link
        
        You’ll have to elaborate more here, as it is you’ve just got a blanket assertion
        
        I thought that I had, but in an effort to clarify I’ll give it one more shot. The TL;DR is that the majority of us build software to achieve some outcome for other people. The decisions we make about how to build that software have both intended and unintended results. Sometimes those are technical in nature (Writes are slow. The system doesn’t scale.), and sometimes they are human (The development team is miserable. Users are engaging in abusive behavior). For me, and I think for many other developers, both of those sets of outcomes are important. Certainly they are if you’re trying to get as many people as possible to use what you’ve built.
        
        You miss the point (perhaps written poorly by me) by a country mile.
        
        I think I understood your point, but I disagree with many of your fundamental assumptions.
        
        First, there’s a huge difference between “this article is a technical thing that is not immediately useful, but one day may be” and “this article is talking about issues I have no control over or never will or which I will go along with because I’ve bought into the system”.
        
        What specifically is that huge difference? I don’t see how discussing software design decisions that lead to a faster Rust compiler is any different than discussing designs that lead to less abusive behavior from users. An anecdote about how a particular vim plugin allowed someone to develop a website more quickly is not vastly different than an article about how changing hiring practices allowed someone to build a more effective team with a wider range of backgrounds.
        
        I don’t think your assertion that none of us has control over these things holds water, either. I’ve interviewed and hired quite a few people in my career. I’ve built and designed software used by people to interact with each other, and I’ve generally had a voice in that design process. Knowing more about unintentional human outcomes would help me make better decisions in that space.
        
        Most of the political stuff becomes either news, matters of opinion which are untestable by any of us, or happen at a level none of us are involved in.
        
        I think you’re conflating big-government nation-level politics (which admittedly few of us have influence in) with the actual topic under discussion in this thread, which is the human outcomes that result from the software that we build. I suspect there are many of us here that work on products where those topics apply.
        
        Choosing what to make efficient and what the costs and trade-offs there are is a fundamental part of engineering.
        
        Sure, but technology as a whole is decidedly about increasing efficiency … Your point is orthogonal to what I was observing.
        
        What I’m getting at here is that the engineering trade-offs we regularly discuss here, some of which are fundamental to computation and cannot be avoided also exist in the space of human consequences of our designs (how unavoidable the social trade-offs are is still up for debate). Maximizing the efficiency of certain types of communication may also maximize the efficiency of abusive and harassing behavior. That’s a trade-off that I think many of us care about, and it applies to our work.
        
        I don’t think this idea the technology marches on a pre-destined path that we are powerless to influence holds water.
        
        Another orthogonal observation, and one that misstates my idea. We can talk all we want about which particular vector in the forward direction technology marches, but the fact remains forward is the only direction over time.
        
        I don’t see how you can claim this is orthogonal. What is the discussion of the human/social consequences of the software we build if not a discussion of the direction we push technical progress in?
        
        As an aside, this idea of technology marching forward in general is a poor rhetorical concept. It’s vague enough to justify or dismiss anything, and subject to nitpicking about what “progress” is, what “forward” or even “direction” actually means in this space.
        
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        friendlysock 1 year ago | link
        
        I’d be happy to carry on this conversation on the #obsters channel or in PM, because I think that we’d get too far off into a subthread here fixing some definitions and assumptions I think we both have a mismatch on. I think we’re starting to talk past each other, and sorting that out would burn a lot more space here.
        
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        stefantalpalaru 1 year ago | link
        
        news as the mind-killer
        
        Fear is the mind-killer. Fear born out of unknown. Fear that makes you escape reality in some gee-whiz version of the tech world you read about as a fearful child. Fear of a world that you don’t understand and that you gave up understanding. Fear of becoming useless if you stop being productive or you miss some “actionable” piece of info that will allow you to carry on being busy.
        
        You embraced this utilitarian fantasy out of fear and now you’re worried that the outside world is going to strip you of it with its confusing news and current events, but it’s not the world that needs to adjust to your needs. We’re not here to provide background entertainment for your assembly line.
        
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        asthasr 1 year ago | link
        
        Or: we read complex political topics elsewhere and we prefer that we have a source of “just” tech news. Your assumption that this reveals “fear” and “fantasy” is silly.
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        stefantalpalaru 1 year ago | link
        
        actionable advice
        
        We’re not all robots looking for our next marching orders. Some of us like some food for thought, some perspective on an increasingly complex world. Some of us worry about the effects of all this “action” and “productivity”.
        
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        friendlysock 1 year ago | link
        
        One doesn’t need to be a robot to recognize that all of that both already exists elsewhere in great quantity and that including it here would dilute a rare source of quality technical content.
        
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        worr 1 year ago | link
        
        re: dilution, lobsters' tagging system works very for filtering out discussion that you want no part in. While I’ve made my opinion clear elsewhere, I think regardless of what your opinion is, guarding any news-related story behind a tag (I’d hesitate to use news, since that motivates non-tech articles), is the obvious choice here. There are clearly many for it that care about that type of content, and clearly people against it that don’t want to engage with it here.
        
        Maybe we should start bikeshedding about tag names ;)
        
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        headgasket edited 1 year ago | link
        
        Hello angersock, I tend to agree with you that “news”, “press releases” etc especially if they are tangentially connected to technology are mind-killers and cause dilution of an otherwise great source of hacker freshness; these also have the potential of carrying political bias that can lead to wasted brain power in useless discussions. If I can put it oh so delicately, so are whole chapters and chatter in the comments section. I think there should be a penalty system on length for comments, a la twitter. Time is of the essence. Time is the essence. Please dont take this the wrong way, just sharing my perspective to make this a better place for all that are marching towards making this planet and this solar system a better place for human kind. :-)
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      flaviusb 1 year ago | link
      
      ‘Things at the intersection of technology and politics’ does not mean ‘things that are within seven degrees of connection to technology and politics’, in the same way that cheese does not mean grass.
      
      To apply your standard, we should currently expect to see lobsters overrun with articles about surfing, because surfing happens at beaches, and beaches have sand, and sand has silicon, which is the basis for much of our technology, therefore submitters will not be able to distinguish between whether they should be submitting posts about new programming languages or the weather on beaches, because no one could possibly tell the difference between these things.
      
      Yet people somehow can tell the difference between these things. I do not see why it should be any different if we say that the politics around, about and encoded in technology are also within the scope of this site.
      
      Also, with respect to actionability - that is a terrible measure, for two reasons. Firstly, many of the articles we all enjoy here (eg about historical computing, say) are not actionable - I would need a time machine to be able to change how things happened. And secondly, much of the political discussion that you characterise as ‘not actionable’ or whatever is actually actionable - those ‘pages of people ranting’ do actually often have eg useful tactics or information.
      
      Also, with respect to
      
      That opens the floodgates to all kinds of current-events and navel-gazing bullshit and low-quality submissions that I can’t believe you’d in good faith suggest it.
      
      You are the one who in bad faith is claiming that your opponent said proposed something completely different from what they proposed.
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  michaelochurch 1 year ago | link
  
  Yes, this is an excellent observation. When a manager says, “There’s no politics in my organization”, you know that it’s an extremely political organization. He’s just blind to it because he’s always getting what he wants. In his world, “politics” is when he doesn’t get what he wants.
  
  The term “political” is also misused. People use it as a euphemism for “corrupt”. When they say that someone’s promotion, demotion, or firing was “political”, they’re trying to call it out as corrupt but use a less confrontational synonym and have plausible deniability. By definition, those decisions are political, even when they’re done right. Likewise, when someone loses his license for driving 100 mph in a school zone, that’s politics working well. We don’t call it that, because it’s independent of left/right politics (we can all agree that reckless drivers should be taken off the roads), but it is politics: the people have decided that there should be certain penalties to those who abuse the roads in dangerous ways.
  
  So, like you said, what is and is not called “political” is a political debate. Those who are in power will always argue that their positions and objectives are “not political”, and that’s because they’re mostly getting what they want. This is why I hate the self-serving term “meritocracy” as it is applied in the tech world. It’s the people on top saying, “We don’t see a problem, so quit whining.”
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    apy 1 year ago | link
    
    I downvoted this comment because I don’t feel it has anything to do with the point of this post.
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      enn 1 year ago | link
      
      I think it’s very relevant. As recently as yesterday, one user attacked a post on the grounds that it was “political.” This user has not been shy making such attacks nor about his intention–to shut down certain types of discussion. Against this background I think it’s entirely pertinent to point out that “political” is a contested category, not a value-free descriptor.
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        michaelochurch 1 year ago | link
        
        I like @angersock and I think he has a valid point.
        
        There are different flavors of political discussion and some are of higher quality than others. Discussion about politics ought to be fair game, because almost anything interesting can be called “political” by someone. The biased pushing of a specific viewpoint, company, or product is dangerous: it turns a forum into Hacker News, which these days is 75% shilling (“PedobEar (W ‘15) Is Changing The World!”) and 25% content.
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        apy 1 year ago | link
        
        I think that aspect of the discussion is fine. I believe that @michaelochurch’s response is a continuation of his rants on office and the Valley, rather than promoting a discussion on what we should do here.
        
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        michaelochurch edited 1 year ago | link
        
        I believe that @michaelochurch’s response is a continuation of his rants on office and the Valley, rather than promoting a discussion on what we should do here.
        
        I’m more nuanced in my views than you might think. I’ve argued for both sides in this post. That’s uncommon these days, to argue a point from both sides, but it’s a worthwhile exercise that ought to be taught more in schools.
        
        The problem I face is that I tend to write long-form. It’s my mathematical training: something isn’t proven unless every corner case is handled and every detail is correct. Most people don’t want to read long-form essays, and I don’t blame them. They get 300 words in, realize that they’re less than halfway, skim the rest and conclude, “This guy is really angry.” Which I am, but that’s beside the point, and it’s not why I tend to write long-form (or, to use your word, “rants”). If anything, I write long-form so people can check my work. At any rate, my emotions neither validate nor refute my arguments, and given that emotions fluctuate and that reading emotional intent in anyone is a dodgy business, attempts to impute an emotional state (“he’s angry”, “she’s bitter”, “that writer is just jealous”, etc.) from content ought to just go away.
        
        Obviously, people have the right not to read what I have to say, or to decide after 300 words that I’m too long-winded and to move on to something else. That’s what they should do if they’re not interested in what I write: not read it. I have no right to their time. What I don’t tolerate is when people read a couple hundred words and them proclaim themselves to be experts on (a) my mental state, and (b) why I wrote what I did, when a more thorough reading would refute what they are saying about me… except when they accuse me of being long-winded and culturally elitist, because those charges are actually true.
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        friendlysock 1 year ago | link
        
        As recently as yesterday, one user attacked a post on the grounds that it was “political.”
        
        That’s incorrect. I explained my reasoning pretty clearly.

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headgasket 1 year ago | link | on: When Climate Change Meets Sprawl: Why Houston's ‘Once-In-A-Lifetime' Floods Keep Happening

I fail to see what this has to do with lobste.rs.

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robertmeta 1 year ago | link | on: Is it ok or not to talk about capturing and directing values created by technologies on lobsters?

I think it is fair to ask for clarification. In that spirit – I too will ask for clarification… can you please give some examples of stories you think fall into the bucket of “capturing or directing values” – because I legitimately can’t think of a good example offhand.
1. crocket 1 year ago | link
  
  [Comment removed by author]
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    headgasket edited 1 year ago | link
    
    Hello crocket, I submitted the ,“pebble throwing the … pebble” story, linking the press release. I still fail to see why there was downvotes. Is this capturing and or directing values in your view because pebble was a commercial entity? Besides this angle I’m sorry to fail to see the reasoning. I see the pebble as a very cool hackable weareable computer which got a lot of attention from hackers at the foreront, the ones that see what is just over the horizon. The core was even more interesting technology to some. It feels weird to write this out as this is obvious? How is this “capturIng or directing values” from your POV ? Cheers!
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    steveno 1 year ago | link
    
    The average number of up-votes for the articles you listed is 31 (rounding). Do you feel that Lobste.rs' user base is being unperceptive of these types of stories? Because the links you provided suggests otherwise.

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headgasket 1 year ago | link | on: Introducing Gomix – Gomix

Interesting. What will be the business model? Is the whole stack exportable to host and use somewhere else? (No proprietary component?)

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headgasket 1 year ago | link | on: Pebble's over.

submitter here. I had the core and the time 2 backed on kickstarter. The core was a truly promising device, for which we had a few software ideas. It’s too bad the hardware/software is not open source; as I’m sure the current userbase would have kept it alive, and a kickstarter for hardware only could have led to interesting forks.

Few thoughts: it would be cool that have a “shotgun” clause in the constitution documents of kickstarter-backed hardware-software ventures that forces a GPL or MIT licensing of the source and design in the case the company stops being a going concern…

Also: how is this off-topic? It’s a cool hacking platform that just died. I would appreciate if the downvoters explained their thought process: I joined lobstahs thinking this was a new select group of hackers interested by rad coding platforms and cool tech, of which pebble was a great example?
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  jm 1 year ago | link
  
  it would be cool that have a “shotgun” clause in the constitution documents of kickstarter-backed hardware-software ventures that forces a GPL or MIT licensing of the source and design in the case the company stops being a going concern…
  
  Or just require MIT and GPL in the first place.
  1. 1
    
    chadski 1 year ago | link
    
    I’m partial to GPL with optional commercial licenses.
2. 7
  
  Robbie 1 year ago | link
  
  Judging by the conversation taking place in the comments, this isn’t off topic so don’t worry :)
  
  I joined lobstahs
  
  Are you from Boston?
  1. 4
    
    headgasket 1 year ago | link
    
    No, but we vacation in Maine, and that spelling got to me… And love them softshell with buttah:-)
3. 5
  
  chadski 1 year ago | link
  
  No idea why three people thought this was off-topic. Thanks for posting it!
4. 1
  
  lmm 1 year ago | link
  
  Few thoughts: it would be cool that have a “shotgun” clause in the constitution documents of kickstarter-backed hardware-software ventures that forces a GPL or MIT licensing of the source and design in the case the company stops being a going concern…
  
  Something rather like this has been done before: https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

34
friendlysock edited 1 year ago | link | on: Lobsters Community Standards
I’ll give some thoughts on the matter. These are all just my opinion, and with that warning out of the way I’ll skip my normal niceties in tone and wording. These thoughts are about what Lobsters is to me, what I’ve learned in general, and how I think moderation should be shaped.
What Lobsters Is
Lobsters is a wonderful discussion forum for people working in computer- and electronics-related fields to discuss ideas relevant to our industry practices and culture. It is a place to teach and learn, and a place to compare notes on how to do things.

In bullet form, Lobsters is a place:
- …to learn about new programming and engineering techniques and ideas
- …to learn about weird software and hardware hacks in the old sense of the term
- …to learn about software and hardware history
- …for professionals to compare war stories and employment information
- …for somewhat established members to show other members their cool hacks and software projects (projects != products)
- …to reflect on the philosophy and culture of engineering and programming and how that relates to our professions
- …to debate/argue with other members on any of the above and to be able to do so civilly
For me, those are the core things Lobsters is.
What Lobsters is not
The thing’s Lobsters is not is even more important.

Lobsters is not a place:
- …for advertising and shilling new products and services from non-members or new members
- …for posting things whose value derives from novelty (read: news in most forms)
- …for posting political or politically-minded articles
- …for posting things whose value derives from outrage (read: most stories of unfairness or inequality)
- …for rabble-rousing and social calls-to-action
- …for making empty comments and stupid/low-effort jokes
- …for insulting and making ad-hominem attacks against other members
Those are all things that have caused other communities to go to the dogs. HN, Reddit, Youtube comments–all are better places to get that information. News and product marketing tend to clog aggregators and disrupt things, and political stuff leads to unmoderatable echochambers.
Moderation
So, with that in mind, where does that leave moderation?

I think the old system worked pretty well. We could possibly do with another moderator–I don’t know what their perceived workload is right now.

We do need to, as a community, take responsibility for aggressively flagging content that doesn’t match Lobsters. We need to take responsibility for tolerating posts that we disagree with but that are civil and reasoned.

And we need to make sure to downvote posts that aren’t good and explain why they are not good or ask for clarification. Even @Zuu’s hilariously silly “feminazi” ranting could’ve been avoided had they taken up the opportunity to calmly and civilly explain why they had a problem–but since they couldn’t, downvotes let us fix it.

What we don’t need is mindless feelgood upvoting. Maybe upvoting should require an explanation too?
1. 30
  
  FioraAeterna edited 1 year ago | link
  
  I have mixed feelings on this.
  
  On the one hand, I really do like the idea of having a good site for technical + scientific topics that focuses on deeper and more interesting discussion. Issues of politics and inequality matter, but they end up causing two problems. The first is that on a personal level I’d rather this site be a place to go and hide from those things, rather than be constantly reminded of them (I get enough reminders in my own personal life…). And secondly, they tend to attract that certain type of tech bro who is extremely eager to argue about those topics and, to put it rather bluntly, shit up the entire site in the process. You can see this effect where certain political threads end up with a far higher comment-to-upvote ratio than anything else on the site.
  
  I’ve always wanted a more “pure”, low-level, in-depth tech site, but inevitably, like you worry about, they’ve gotten ruined by political types and low quality posters (remember Slashdot?). We should probably try to avoid making Lobsters a site that seems attractive to people who are “looking for an argument”.
  
  On the other hand, it’s tricky because everything has politics in it. Everything we do affects other people, and affects society. Where do you draw the line? Do other people agree with you on where that line is? And so forth. Is it possible to reasonably come up with a line at all?
  
  And perhaps as engineers shying away from the social consequences of our technical choices isn’t always the best idea.
  1. 14
    
    Gracana 1 year ago | link
    
    I’ve always wanted a more “pure”, low-level, in-depth tech site
    
    That’s something I’ve trying to find for a long time. A site without the derisive “why,” no billion dollar startup valuations, just people enthusiastic about the things they’re building/learning/exploring/doing.
  2. 2
    
    nickpsecurity 1 year ago | link
    
    I really do like the idea of having a good site for technical + scientific topics that focuses on deeper and more interesting discussion. Issues of politics and inequality matter, but they end up causing two problems. The first is that on a personal level I’d rather this site be a place to go and hide from those things
    
    I agree. It’s a site distinguished by the quality of technical submissions and commentary. It’s better to keep political threads off of here. Sites that do that are like a breath of fresh air to someone just wanting tech instead of political nonsense.
2. 10
  
  stsp 1 year ago | link
  
  I mostly agree, except that the effects of technology on society are interesting to me, and such topics will always touch on politics. So i do think those kinds of articles have their place here.
3. 6
  
  brinker 1 year ago | link
  
  I love all of this, and agree wholeheartedly. I don’t come to Lobsters to hear about new apps or businesses, or to hear about tech news. I can get all of that elsewhere. I come to Lobsters for deep and thoughtful technical discussions on things both inside and way-outside my area of expertise.
4. 5
  
  inactive-user 1 year ago | link
  
  What we don’t need is mindless feelgood upvoting. Maybe upvoting should require an explanation too?
  
  I rarely comment on meta posts, but here goes a crazy idea:
  
  I think we should just get rid of “votes” altogether (I can see you enraging already, but stay with me), because they are badly defined. An upvote on a joke comment might mean “funny”. Or maybe someone took it seriously(!). An upvote on a thoughtful comment might mean “I agree”. Or maybe “I disagree but your comment is thoughtful and helps discussion” or something. Nobody really knows. Worse for downvotes.
  
  I propose we replace them with Github style “emotions” instead. They inherently carry meaning. I know this will be seen quite controversially, and you might have started typing “why add ugly orange lightbulbs to Lobsters' clean UI”, but I don’t mean we should copy the same funky UI as is. We just need a way to let people express their state of mind after reading a comment without writing it out as a reply, since we want to reserve comment area for material discussion and not “omg I completely agree!”.
  1. 2
    
    nickpsecurity 1 year ago | link
    
    That’s an interesting point. I was initially skeptical of it when I saw Facebook do it. I reserved judgment to watch it play out. The results were quite like you said: many BS comments shifted to emotional reactions that I could ignore or observe for curiosity of impact of the post on diverse audience. There were still nonsense comments. They just seemed lower in number. Facebook should run one of their mass studies on the comment data before and after that to give us an idea of what the technique achieves.
5. 4
  
  kghose 1 year ago | link
  
  I heartily agree too. Also, I’ve noticed over the months that really highly voted submissions tend to be product or social/political topics. Submissions with ~7-10 votes tend to more closely adhere to these guidelines.
6. 3
  
  jackivan88 1 year ago | link
  
  What we don’t need is mindless feelgood upvoting. Maybe upvoting should require an explanation too?
  
  I like the idea of upvotes for stories and comments requiring an explanation. That would balance out the downvoting system. There might be a slight decrease in the number of upvotes because of the extra step, but those that do make it through the filter will be more considered.
7. 3
  
  tsironakos 1 year ago | link
  
  …for posting political or politically-minded articles
  
  It is impossible to isolate technology from society in any historical context, especially today, given the current explosive rate of technological progress. We’re heading in a jobless future, most likely run by machines which we’ll have to program to make political decisions for us.
  
  …for posting things whose value derives from outrage (read: most stories of unfairness or inequality)
  
  Again, technology can create these issues in a much more aggressive rate and people have already started to notice. Unfairness and inequality is not subjects to be taken lightly. I don’t think any of us or our children would appreciate technology being faceless (and most probably dystopian).
8. 2
  
  nickpsecurity 1 year ago | link
  
  What we don’t need is mindless feelgood upvoting. Maybe upvoting should require an explanation too?
  
  I’m up for discussing that, too. Winding down tonight but I favor constructive comments over votes. Much less to intuit that way along with greater contribution.
9. 2
  
  headgasket 1 year ago | link
  
  IMHO, it’s the nature of the internet’s million monkeys (no offense to anyone here) that sends communities to the dogs. HN was an awesome place at the beginning, so was reddit. Before checking lobste.rs daily when I quit HN because it was full of samples from the IS NOT list above, and useless opinions by the mass, I went back to slashdot that also had it’s eternal september, around 2000. Time is of the essence. Time is the essence. I’d suggest expensive voting (say you have to add a comment?), as well as length-based penalties (on the value of upvotes?) for a given comment past a certain length. This is not the place for long form. (Personally, I have little time for long form in my life, it has to be of the enlightening and positive category)
  
  Ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. Cheers. Lets keep productive, and keep together, balancing both in the daily timeline? :-)

3

headgasket 1 year ago | link | on: The Refragmentation

I find it sad that a polemic following a smart guy’s out-loud philosophical reflections in an essay has caused so much trouble. So the guy veered a bit and stepped on some political toes metaphorically, and showed some undergarment’s color. A shouting match ensues. Banning here, vitriolic comment on that site. Now he’s gone silent since; I find it too bad because his reflections were worth the reading.(personally not drinking the SV–YC cool aid mind you)

Where has the art of agreeing to disagree agreeably gone? Where has the conversationalists retreated? I logged out of HN when the news list, voting and comments became more polarized. Now everything seems like a static-charged firebomb. Is this how a run-up to another large WW conflict feels like?

not taking position, just thinking for the good of a peaceful place we try to keep it open ended, forward looking, Eh?
1. 5
  
  mjn 1 year ago | link
  
  I might be missing what you mean, but what does “banning here” refer to? Bans on lobste.rs are all logged publicly and only two users have been banned in many months, both purely for spamming.
  1. 2
    
    headgasket 1 year ago | link
    
    Sorry I was not clear, not here with ref to lobsters but as in “here and there”. (Twitter HN etc) I think public listing of bans is wise.
2. 4
  
  nickpsecurity 1 year ago | link
  
  I’m not sure what you’re talking about. This site was partly created in response to Graham’s habit of banning opponents in various ways. He seems to have knocked it off a bit since this essay and Income Inequality discussions got tons of flack aimed at him by both fans and opponents without consequence that I saw. For example, some of the top and middle comments in HN version of this oppose Graham’s position:
  
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10826836
  
  He has plenty of chance to speak as he owns the site. He just doesn’t show up. On I.E. debate, he posted a second essay trying to clarify and justify his position that didn’t impress much either. Idk if he’s blocked from joining Lobsters but he voluntarily avoids discussion on many of his essays on HN. I think he’s just into doing his businesses and recently spending time with kids more than online arguments. He probably just speaks his mind not caring how much people disagree. Happens to a lot of people as they get older. Even I’m into way less shouting matches than 10 years ago because I wisened up a bit. ;)
  1. 3
    
    headgasket 1 year ago | link
    
    Yeah it’s the “debate” “banning” etc angle that I deplore I guess. From my pov PG got so much flak, as you put it, that he decided not to share his essays anymore. I’m positing that maybe if we’d keep it cooler we could have a wider conversation instead of ppl withdrawing or getting banned? I personally find that these last few years have been about a balkanisation of the public discourse and polarization of positons FWIW. Cheers, don’t ban me please. :/) Lobster.rs is great.
    1. 4
      
      Irene Sysop 1 year ago | link
      
      I can’t imagine somebody getting banned from lobste.rs for saying something to the effect of “we should agree to disagree and discuss this politely”.
    2. 2
      
      flyingfisch 1 year ago | link
      
      Cheers, don’t ban me please.
      
      You’re not trolling, and are discussing this in a polite and reasonable manner. I wouldn’t be too concerned about being banned. ;)
3. 1
  
  flyingfisch 1 year ago | link
  
  Is this how a run-up to another large WW conflict feels like?
  
  WW as in World War? I’m confused.
  1. 2
    
    headgasket edited 1 year ago | link
    
    Yeah. A large scale conflict. If you ask me, It does not feel like we’re on a path for collective enlightenment and detente as has occurred post Cold War, but rather the opposite. I hope and wish I’m wrong. Last words on this as lobsters is most def not a place to discuss world news.
4. 1
  
  michaelochurch edited 1 year ago | link
  
  Paul Graham’s goons– to wit, Dan Gackle, Paul Buchheit and possibly Marc Bodnick although it’s not clear that he had a choice– tried to destroy my life in late 2015. This is well documented on Quora, and it was completely bizarre and unreasonable. It was Trumpianism on their part, before anyone took Donald J. Trump seriously.
  
  They failed, obviously, leaving me– and them, I must note– standing.
  
  The world is better with PG in a spider hole like a disgraced dictator. No doubt there.
  1. 3
    
    nickpsecurity edited 1 year ago | link
    
    Got a link to that Quora thread?
    
    Edit: There’s a flood of comments on Quora about you to the point I cant make sense of anything. Now Im doubly curious if you have links showing whatever you were doing with the others' reactions.

3

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners

this has a satirical undertone… I have to suggest: why not RLETRL instead? Reinforcement Learners for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners? ;-) Cheers, fellow flesh-based algorithms.

6

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: Introducing unlimited private repositories - Github

keep it really private with gitlab, without any restrictions. (behind a VPN to be 100% sure, as some holes are found from time to time)

0

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver

if this would be implemented as npm, I can imagine some serious havoc… :-)

4

headgasket edited 2 years ago | link | on: Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux

Microsoft used to have and develop XENIX a long way back, before transferring it to SCO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix.

Opinion disclaimer, please disregard if you disagree. I think it might be the best strategy going forward for MS to swap the NT kernel for linux or a BSD-based one. Think of all the tooling that would become instantly compatible. IMHO, the closed-source NT kernel went from a strategic asset to a byzantine liability in the past 15 years; as the quality and breath of the open source alternatives have grown.

Closed-source Windows can live on powered by a different kernel, ala OS X.
1. 1
  
  drs 2 years ago | link
  
  Think of all the software that would become instantly broken. There needs to be a long and slow transition for this to happen. There are decades of software that is compiled against the Win32 API (or wrappers around the Win32 API).

2

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: Poke holes in this idea - Distributed Search Engine ala block chain

crypto-based system in dire need of an overhaul of a distributed nature: DNS and x509. With a blockchain based system, there would not be any need to trust a cert issuing authority. https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain

6

apy 2 years ago | link | on: Cash: replace cygwin with es6

Maybe this is what the author uses cygwin for, but the rest of the ecosystem is really where cygwin has value if you want a unix-like experience on Windows. Also, why on earth would I want these es6 implementations anyways???
1. 8
  
  vhf 2 years ago | link
  
  It’s not intended to replace cygwin, the title is misleading. The author doesn’t even mention replacing cygwin.
  
  I like the idea and don’t care whether it’s written in ES6, PHP or Haskell. I haven’t touched a Microsoft OS in a few years, but if I had to I think I’d use something like this to quickly have a terminal I already know how to use. And switch to cygwin if I really need a heavier compatibility layer, not just a way to get around powershell without learning it.
2. 5
  
  headgasket edited 2 years ago | link
  
  es6 and node implies that this will work everywhere v8 and node is ported. Some components deployment and/or testing setup-teardown for testing integration with legacy components are still more easily addressed with shell scripts; for example simple lxc container orchestration where kubernetes is overkill. With this, as it cover more of the basics, your shell scripts will also run on windows, should running on windows be a requirement. Also, if you are using cygwin for heavy lifting on windows, I would suggest running a real linux distro in virtualbox to have full super-hero powers and not maintain 2 code bases. (I’m sure you know cygwin has quirks)
  
  EDIT: my bad, replacing cygwin is not the primary aim of this project, but bash is mostly why I keep cygwin on my vm.

1

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: CVE-2015-7547: glibc getaddrinfo stack-based buffer overflow

According to this tweet https://twitter.com/NLnetLabs/status/700253478115999745, nsd4 and unbound are not affected. nsd4 cannot be used as a caching server, so you can not hide an affected implementation behind it.

-1

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: Object-Oriented Programming is Bad

45 minutes video? 15000 views by programmers? thats 1.3 years of potential code output wasted IMHO, unless he’s discovered a major flam in OOP that will make everyone more effective. Why not a a bullet list of his main points? Time is the essence. You cant get those minutes back.
1. 4
  
  mort 2 years ago | link
  
  That’s a logical fallacy. You’re pretending programmers spend all their time writing code. Most likely, for most of the people watching this, it replaced watching other videos without more value than this one, possibly while playing a game or doing other activities.
  1. 0
    
    headgasket 2 years ago | link
    
    Hello mort. I do not believe it is a logical fallacy to say the video form is ill-fitted to state an argument about programming paradigms. It is true to say that programmers do not spend all their time writing code, but would you agree that browsing lobste.rs would happen most likely during the time leading to (procrastinating?) to code output? I invite you to revisit your comment and mine in 10-15 years. Cheers, F
    1. 0
      
      mort 2 years ago | link
      
      I don’t have the kind of metrics which would be necessary to determine whether time on lobste.rs generally leads to programming or to procrastinating, but for myself, if I felt like programming, I would already be programming.
      
      I don’t know if video form is so ill-fitted to state an argument about programming topics, but I don’t have strong opinions on that and won’t dispute it because it’s unrelated. I didn’t say it was a logical fallacy to say a video is a bad medium for it however; you’re attributing arguments I didn’t make to me. What I called a logical fallacy was how you calculated how much programming time was wasted from a lot of programmers watching that video, as that assumes all those programmers would otherwise be writing code, which is false.

2

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: A Modern App Developer and An Old-Timer System Developer Walk Into a Bar

I see the bottleneck being running nmap on all the 4B ips. The rest looks simple for a postgresql server with a ssd and 32GB or ram. Encode the ip in the int32 ID. Scanning a /24 that has a firewall took more than a minute when I just tried it. So with a single host scanning that’s a few years to scan the whole internet…

2

headgasket 2 years ago | link | on: Bashhub

Anybody else was primed into initially thinking this was something about bash-github from recent open letters to github?