skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've been stockpiling nukes for a half-century, and only ever used two. I would contend that the two which were used were a net benefit in terms of what it would have cost (in both American and Japanese lives) to invade the islands.

Of course, the threat is only good if the nation doing the threatening is willing to use it, so the merits of stockpiling are still arguable. With that said, they were something of a tool for a while. It has been argued that Wilson lacked foresight due to his decision to drop nukes, but what would you have done? Would you have been willing to condemn a half-million young American men to die, given the choice?

It's the classic argument, debated since the time of Pericles: is a javelin gone astray responsible for a death?
It's free (libre) software; you don't owe anyone. Eventually you will encounter a bug or translation/documentation error in some free software; taking some time to fix that would help everyone. And so would making software to fix a problem and then releasing it under a free license.

It might not happen in the near future, but chances are eventually you'll get to contribute something. And even if you don't, just accept uBO as a gift from a nice person.
In Germany, I pay about 12 USD per year for a travel insurance that covers an unlimited number of trips up to two months each, including repatriation if medically advised.
I can't get it to work with my custom certificate authority (which I use to analyse traffic coming from my phone every now and then to see if any apps are leaking personal info). Also, though I know better, I also have some intranet services running with a certificate signed by that authority because the domains are dynamically generated and I can't automate my DNS to get wildcard letsencrypt certificates.

Normal mobile Firefox has their own cert store, so you can import it by clicking a link to the certificate and hitting OK. Other apps use the system certificate store so I have imported my certificate into there as well. Sadly, it still doesn't work.

My specific use case may not be very common, but certificate authorities in BYOD companies aren't uncommon either. I can't use this for my daily driver until I can import my certificate :(

The new system is very interesting though, the idea of separate browsing behaviours between devices can be a game changer if they implement it smoothly.
Kim Philby lived in Moscow for decades, I don't think he went to any great lengths to dodge his former MI6 colleagues. I would bet the US government knows exactly where Snowden is living. It won't be that hard: he'll be surrounded by secret police keeping tabs.
People in area where their friends die of diarrhea are depressive too. They get sad, they suicide, they have traumas and mental problems. They self medicate with alcohol, drugs, excessive risk and what not to make pain go away.

That does not make it impossible for rich countries people to be depressed due to economy going down relatively.
I also think they should fix zooming and un-zooming with the Mac trackpad for desktop Firefox. I had someone switch and they were so used to zooming in using the trackpad, they couldn't stay on Firefox. There is a 3rd party extension that fixes this, but should it not be built-in?
Wild speculative hyperbole hurts the case of people like you and I who care about doing something positive on the ground today.
If the v3 script is supposed to be installed on all pages of the website, in order to track the user's actions, I don't understand how that can be done without explicit user consent under GDPR.
People are trying to solve this with a new, community-driven registry. Here is more information:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO8hZlgK5zc
The Wikipedia article on photosynthetic efficiency[1] is informative.

TL;DR: since extracting carbon from CO2 is energetically unfavorable, it needs to be powered by sunlight. Typical plants are 1-4% efficient in their overall usage of solar energy to generate sugars, and it's not possible to get above ~11% without using some totally different biochemical process.

Some plants are adapted to be more efficient than others, but I think we can be pretty confident that there are no simple tweaks to radically increase efficiency that billions of years of evolution haven't already stumbled on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
Also, they should integrate Firefox Preview into F-Droid if they are serious about privacy/freedom.
Not that I want to defend them, but it does have a nice side effect that web developers must run their sites in some browser other than Chrome (even if they ignore Firefox).
Pedestrians were in cities hundreds of years before, vehicles should never have been promoted to first place.
How to fix this in the cities? Remove almost all instances of cars getting near pedestrians by:

1: Removing one way streets. Having to drive all the way around to go somewhere nearby keeps the car on the road that much longer and doubles the number of crosswalks to pass through.
2: Removing left turns. Cars invading the pedestrians' right of way from the other side of the street is dangerous.
3: Reducing city speed limits from 30mph to 15. 30mph is ridiculous.
4. Enforcing carpooling. One person driving a huge SUV is such a waste of gas, space, and contributes to highways doubling as parking lots at rush hour.
5. Promoting city housing as much as possible for all new growth. For every honest baby-boomer suburb created with proper planning, there were two white-flight suburbs hastily created without.
6. Demanding companies in the city limits revise the need for employees to commute. Employees who can do their job at home deserve that privilege.
Hold up. I've seen this conversation play out probably half a dozen times over the last few years and it just occurred to me...

If you can convert a nondeterministic automata to a deterministic one, doesn't that mean they are all deterministic?
Have you tried a new version of android Firefox recently?

Experiences from years ago aren't really relevant any more, as Firefox has gotten a lot of work done the last couple of years.
> I would strongly prefer anxious person in the same room over violent one. It is that simple.

False equivalency. "More violent" does not mean "violent". Kids rough housing are technically being violent. Are you really worried about that?

> All of these are kids making better choices.

Or it's kids not having natural impulses that are inherent to all human beings. And that would be a serious problem.
This is how a therapists' training distinguishes them from a friendly ear. It's very hard to get through the pattern of behavior that you describe, because the combination of empathy and pragmatism required to facilitate growth requires a fine balance. Too much pragmatism will push away the self-victimizing friend, and too much empathy will never facilitate growth.

Professional therapists often fail in this, which is one way that people can see a therapist for years and never make progress on their issue.
Does anyone know why there is a flash of light and a puff of smoke when the gun fires? Since it's electromagnetic, you'd think you wouldn't see anything.
Something something golden goose.

I understand that HK is an asset and I presume china wishes to keep it an asset but they must, at some level anyway, realise that they will choke it if they grab it, but grab it apparently they must.

ISTM china can either have some of what it wants, or try for all and eventually get none, and they seem to be heading for the latter. I don't understand the thinking. So can anyone enlighten me as to the economic and political theory behind it?

Edit: I may be plain wrong and they genuinely can have it all, I just don't see how.
>1) Sent me back across the San Mateo bridge unnecessarily while driving to a date

Woah. I felt bad for you just reading this. That's at least a hit of 30 min (if you have to go to cross the bridge and come back). If this happened during commute hours, this could be a 1.5 hour delay!

EDIT: I guess it happens a lot to people unfamiliar with the area going to Foster City via 92 east. If you miss the last exit, you have to take a 14 mile U turn!
I don't remember punk lyrics focusing on drugs and violence any more than mainstream rock did. (Which, admittedly, was also blamed for those things.) Which bands/songs are you thinking of? I'm assuming you have some in mind, and aren't just parroting stereotypes?

Also, are you sure you've got the cause-and-effect right way 'round? Delinquents do seem to like punk, but that doesn't mean that punk made them delinquent.
> But if your goal is to discover new, deeper laws, you need to mix with philosophers again.

Some reading in this direction:

"How Hume and Mach Helped Einstein Find Special Relativity", Norton

"Range", Epstein. Ch 1 discusses Bool's influence on Shannon for the discovery of information theory. Ch 5 includes anecdotes and research for "Thinking Outside Experience", including the methods of analogy used by Keppler regarding theories of planetary motion.

> Then there was this pragmatic turn, where the dominant mode of physics became anti-foundational, anti-philosophy.

Related papers:

"Analytic and Continental Philosophy, Science, and Global Philosophy", Tieszen

"Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy", Hanna
> Seconded guessing hard decisions is a privilege of existing in the future after those decisions were made, a privilege that one might not otherwise have had

I dunno... I think a very small percentage of people alive at the time of using nuclear weapons on Japan would have actually done so. My own opinion is that the same percentage today would advocate for using nuclear weapons on another populace. The problem is that the people in charge of these things aren't in the majority - they are psychopathic power-hungry war mongers. Have you ever heard of an instance where a pacifistic head of state ruled a nation, beyond Tibet? I have not - those types of people tend not to interested in becoming head of state in the first place. People who aspire to dominate a nation(ie presidents, prime ministers, emperors), don't have a huge moral leap to make(if any at all) before they are willing to murder another nation's people.

tldr; anyone who is capable of being made a leader of a nation, should never be allowed to do so. they tend to be willing to murder people to get what they want, and that's generally bad for the rest of us living on planet Earth.
That's with ballistic shot, yes? What about firing a rocket that lights off at the peak of its railgun throw arc?
> If you use big bang theory, the universe existed prior to observers perceiving it.

That would depend on the definition of perception. Does a nail perceive being struck by the hammer? To say otherwise would presume that humanity's form awareness is somehow special, and not simply a more complicated interaction between ourselves and the universe than is the nail's with the hammer.
Sources of more information.

Reddit AMA by one of Sikh drivers here - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/be99o8/hi_im_satnam_s...

Untold America episode here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKXf89yNDP4&list=PLZd3QRtSy5...
"2) Railguns are going to be the equivalent of WWII naval cannon -- They won't be nearly as important as something else."

Railguns would completely surpass missiles for StS warfare, which can be intercepted by other missiles, whereas a railgun shot cannot at this time.
The article isn't even focusing on that, AFAICT.

> It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.

The only thing that was that early, that rapid, and that devastating was the diseases introduced by early European visitors that preceded their colonization by decades and leagues.
It's been a gift to me, since I really just can't help but install extension after extension and FF is just not good at that in my experience (plus the selection is narrower but I don't put that on FF). Another thing is that Brave has the Chrome url search which I've come to realize is actually pretty central to me, I just can't stand the 'prepending a letter' type search. Overall it's the closest I've felt to chrome with the stated goal of addressing the the primary reason I feel uncomfortable with chrome, so I'm happy for now.
The spammers can also use cheap overseas labor to update the bots.
No, but these are things you can’t build because of zoning (and other) laws.
Checklists were life in the USAF working on heavy bombers and the nuclear PRP program.

I’ve done a procedure 100 or a 1000 times? Still going down the checklist in the Tech Manual every single time.

Humans can’t multitask well and if you miss a step, people can die and planes could crash.
Same usage here, and happy with it. Using both Firefox Focus and Firefox Android, Firefox Focus being the default browser
How does it work, how should it work, and what are we doing about it?
Unfortunately politically acceptable regulation only deters new ventures because it makes the costs of compliance too high.

The right vehicle for this is antitrust, but if you think you can sell that in this climate then I’ve got a great deal for you on the London Bridge.
Show HN: Posture correction and desk stretches for hackers/desk workers
You have my sympathy. I have been searching for the annotated version for years now. Any readable versions seem to have disappeared.

This is a good reminder for me to make backups of the ebooks I do have.
I have been working the past two years trying to understand how would be possible to create a simulation of the universe and a lot of what Lee Smolin says resonates with some of the conclusion that I have got at the moment

for example, he says that the wave function describes an ensemble of possible states of a system, example an electron, and this is equal for all the other electrons of the universe, I will more specific and say that there is a Functor that describes all the possible states of the surface of any observable system and it behaves as a wave function when that system tends to the stability. (this can be related with holographic theory)

Lee Smolin that the universe is looking for maximum variability, which I think is not correct, the universe is looking for maximum stability in all matter hierarchies because it allows describing any possible surface with a Functor, and makes the simulation more easy to carry.

this is big because it means that is not necessary to simulate every electron on the universe to create a good simulation of itself, or every atom, or every molecule, or even so every planet, imagine the natural numbers, we don't need to create all the sets of the natural number in memory in order to use them and we can peek at any moment at any region of the natural numbers, while the memory support it, and we will be able to make any computation over them, so why the electron can not work like that, or any kind of matter?

those functors, are passed between two systems when a system observe to another system using what we have called photons. also when the universe can't describe the surface of the system with a functor that can easily be transported to the observer, this system appears as a black hole.

I am 100% sure that we live in a simulation, not necessarily made by "gods", but it could be a fundamental way in which the universe behave
This is a ridiculous argument. Advanced technical competency can not be a prerequisite for maintaining personal privacy.
> We're sorry but theoldnet-browser doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.

This doesn't look much like the old internet to me...
Thought of this. Regular buses drown out whatever music/podcast I'm listening to, and terrify my dog. A quieter bus is much nicer to ride in too.

That's not really a reason to switch on its own. But if electric buses get close, it's an additional point in the balance.
There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is.

Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).
I don't remember what forum software it was, but they'd render a number or word using all periods (kind of like ASCII art) and ask you to enter it in a text field. I wonder how well that worked.
I am a bit younger, graduated HS in 1995. But I'm essentially of the same generation and learned on the same stuff. QBasic -> Turbo Pascal -> C in high school. I made a simple video game in my senior year of high school that cemented my decision to study computer science.

My father had internet access well before the web as an engineer so I was sometimes able to get stuff. I remember buying some programming books to get started and sometimes getting access to text file tutorials that must have originated from BBSes.

But yah.. that was back when our abilities to concentrate were greater, there were almost no distractions, and most of us were working alone.. no product managers, no co-workers to disagree with or have them sow doubt, almost nothing to hold back someone who was talented and motivated.

I almost feel like I got cheated as what I thought work was going to be like basically doesn't exist unless you found your own company.
That's surely one of the biggest negative consequences, for cyclists and pedestrians, of increasing car safety the last couple of decades. The pillars, and blind spots, have got so huge.

You see a typical car from the 80s now, and the A and B pillars seem to have nothing to them, rather than the great chunky things current cars have.
NASA to Announce New Mission Live at 4pm ET
Reasonable for the product, which is not the same as the organization.

At Microsoft they make Windows. At Mozilla they make Firefox.
It is not within the rights of Texans or Americans anywhere to shoot people on sight merely because they're on their property.

Edited to include the relevant laws:

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.9.htm#D

https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/PE/htm/PE.9.htm#C

From this source:

https://guides.sll.texas.gov/gun-laws/stand-your-ground
Basically this. I was all like "yeah man I want to get a license" then I studied some, decided I couldn't afford the gear. Couple years later, oh hey man I'm gonna do this this time, money is better now and stuff, started studying agian and bought a cheap baofeng just to listen.

Spent about 15 minutes listening to a repeater.

"Jesus, these people are abrasive as best, all they are doing is saying their call over and over and complaining"

Stopped studying, couple weeks later was at a friend's house and near a different repeater, same stuff different people. Now I just keep the battery maintained and it tuned to a weather broadcast in the event I lose power during a storm.

I mean, in the event of a natural disaster it's pretty cool and you can help replay information and be of use to your community but ehhhh it's an awfully expensive hobby for that unless you want to just buy a cheap handheld and have no range whatsoever since you have an antenna the size of a drinking straw a few inches away from your body.
Outside of large cities with functional mass transit, most low income people do own (or finance) cars. Otherwise they would be no-income. You can find a lot of low end job listings that say “reliable transportation” and they don’t mean a bus ride sandwiched between two several-mile hikes. Their cars will be perhaps 10-15 years old, depending on whether their state has winters or emissions laws. They can’t afford the latest fuel efficient vehicles and might be getting 18-25 miles per gallon. Fuel will be a significant fraction of their transportation expense compared to anyone with a higher income, so a fuel tax will necessarily be regressive.
> You could either stop using these services or

How do you stop using a service when you have little or no indication that it does something like this before hand, and afterwards the privacy is already gone?

If I use a site and view my profile page and the url contains aa account id or username and some google or facebook analytics is loaded, or a like button is sitting somewhere, how am I to know that before the page is loaded? What if I'm visiting the site for the first time after it's been added?

It doesn't even matter if I have an account on Google or Facebook, they'll create profiles for me aggregating my data anyway.

> quarantine them to a VPN/incognito interaction

Which does very little. I spent a few hours this morning trying to get a system non-unique on panopticlick, but the canvas and WebGL hashing is enough to dwarf all the other metrics. There are extensions to help with that, but for the purpose I was attempting, were sub-optimal (and the one that seemed to do time-based salting of the hashes wasn't working right).

So, I don't have any confidence that a VPN and incognito really does much at all.
Wow! Sadly, I’m not surprised.
> It's really not at all likely that the US could assassinate somebody in Russia _and_ get away with it.

What does this stipulation mean?

They certainly could kill him, and even when it was a far more closed society quite difficult to get people in and out of Russia the US was able to do it. These days it wouldn't be hard at all.

And it's not like there wouldn't be someone willing to do it for money...
I understand reminders as a generalized practice, but this metaphor is one I'll have to meditate on:

"Every day, he wears a silver bracelet that symbolizes a handcuff. “Remember, you are handcuffed to God. Remind yourself to not do bad things,” Pal says. It reminds him to be kind in the face of ignorance and hatred."
Seems like he made a lot more work for himself by trying to save a bit of space on the original capture and doing it at low resolution and with an unsynchronized v-blank.

I did something similar to this many years ago from a screen recording using a copy of gocr and netPBM. Cutting out blocks of text using netPBM tools and feeding them into gocr ended up working out quite well and didn't take enormous amount of cpu training some ML model.
Let's just wait for who's it gonna be! And how will it look when "books stop working".
As a data processor, this is probably a violation.

Question is, who will bring the hammer down.