I don't understand why such an important appeal/topic touching on public health was flagged the previous time I tried to post it here. Gagging views/research does not put this community in a very good light and it is something way beneath the standards I've seen in the few years I've been participating here.
Now - there was another similar topic a few days ago that was focusing though on the views of a single scientist that has been painted by many as a crook. This topic is about an appeal that has a lot more signatories to be dismissed lightly.
Thanks
PS: Flagged again. OK - seems that the admins here are on somebody's payroll.
Users flagged it. Moderators never touched it or even saw it. Probably users flagged it because a closely related story was on the front page all day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21310867. Follow-up or copycat submissions aren't exactly dupes, but people read HN for topics they haven't seen recently, and HN basically never wants two front page submissions about the same thing.
Your comment breaks the site guidelines against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. A story getting flagged is evidence of nothing other than that users flagged the story. Admins conspiring to suppress it? that is pure imagination, and it's pretty nasty to imagine something about someone and then accuse them of being paid to do evil. The guidelines exist to prevent HN from degenerating that way, so please read and follow them when posting here from now on: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
So, you're telling me that watchdogs users (on a payroll I'll add) roam this site and flag anything that they don't like and that is OK for you. Super.
The post on front page was focusing on what a single scientist was saying. This particular scientist has been attacked and defamed repeatedly which in effect rendered _that_ post ineffective to base a serious conversation for that issue. TLDR, people (and keen watchdogs alike) were focusing on _him_ rather than the issue at hand. Which is why I posted the appeal, signed by numerous other scientists, so that the discussion won't focus on the strawman scientist and focus on what might be a hugely important public health issue.
Of course the watchdogs on duty flagged it immediately because it was much harder to attack and defame.
I've said it again. You have a problem in HN. Mobs and lone rangers and downvote armies. You might be innocent (as an admin) and try to let everyone speak but it is evident to me that nothing that _really_ matters can be discussed in this community. That is because things that _really_ matter hurt some big pockets or a few cretins stuck in their adolescent rigid worldviews. In any case the gist of it is that the rules of the site allow them to drown any voice they don't like in a form of public opinion manipulation.
So, thanks for the hospitality all these months. I think I've no business here.
There are no "watchdogs on duty" or "on a payroll". Users see submissions and flag ones that they think shouldn't be on HN.
In this case your submission was, though not the identical article, exactly the same topic as another submission which was one of the most prominent stories of the day (the third most, in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-21). The natural place to add additional links and make the argument that discussion shouldn't center around a single researcher, would have been as a comment in that thread. Posting a new submission about amounted to a dupe, which fragments discussion, so there's an easy good-faith interpretation for why users might have flagged it. Note that the site guidelines ask people here to "Assume good faith." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That's because the downsides of assuming bad faith are orders of magnitude worse for the site than the downsides of assuming good faith.
Kudos for landing a better job. I guess you were quite young at the time and I hope you matured more than to put yourself in such a harmful situation again.
If you deem that something is senseless, impossible or on the verge of abusing you must say so and stand your ground. It is the right thing to do not just for you but for your coworkers and the larger ecosystem you are moving about. It's what that general said about 'The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept' only this time it was about the standard you put up with.
"..chip companies are definitely in a whole different world when it comes to documentation, compared to the software world I'm now in!"
Makes sense though. SW is a much more agile/faster iterations artifact than HW. Documentation is very hard to keep pace in this env, so much so that people are actually trying to infer it automatically from the -ever changing- code.
Hundreds of them. A 20x60cm nest inside the window case. After bitten for about 10 times and trying every household spray I could fit in the opening of the case with zero results I called professional exterminators. For a hefty price they nuked the room (no idea what kind of poison they used but 4 days afterwards and it still stinks) and killed them all. My most hated thing in insect kingdom rubbing shoulders with mosquitos.
That is a naive opinion IMHO. In all but the core SW roles you would merely be a simple cog being told what to do. If for example you'd be coding for an archaelogy department you would be the code monkey of the professor heads. Even worse you would have to battle their ignorant views on SW. My guess is that you'd hate playing that role and that you would run as fast as you could back to a SW house doing fragmented work with people that at least understand a bit of software.
At least that's my experience of venturing into a non-hardcore SW field (health sector).
I've worked both ends of this 'spectrum' several times in my career and your experience doesn't match mine at all. I've rarely had the problem of domain experts treating me as a cog, and certainly not more so that in a 'normal' SW house. If you come in humble, ask a lot of questions and listen to people you'll quickly become a respected member of the team.
The important part is to understand, enjoy and respect the domain you are working in. Then working with domain experts to use software to solve problems you both care about can be both fun and rewarding. And
You are right that you will have to 'battle' their ignorant views of SW development. But those battles are rarely hard to win if you're a bit diplomatic, because people don't care to much. They might not have any version control in place when you start and might not see the need for it, but I've never experienced anyone forbidding me from using version control. Most of the time they even come around to it as being pretty good idea.
From my experience, with a bit of back and forth I'm helping these non-SW departments systemize things in ways they might not have thought of. Through the power of my business ignorance and having conversations, I'm rubber ducking these people to good systems.
PS2: Haven't used C/C++ in our tech stack for quite a while now but from what I see it should work if you provide the relevant switch '-fsanitize=undefined' plus a gcc version that supports Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (gcc 4.9 and later).
I tried again, it was a problem with the -fuse-ld=gold flag. I was trying to set it as an argument from the build script, but the solution was to configure it inside one of the internal files. I don't understand the details, but IWOMM :). Now that it is working, let's hope that one of the main developers with more understanding of the internal parts of the build process can cleanup it before merging.
cheers