skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two-Line Element Set Checksum Controversy (1992)
"Sex With Tech"

Found the name for my new AI-powered sex robots startup. Who's in?
When people make these claims, they never supply links. What's an example of "claiming legitimate questions are a personal attack"?
The link I always see referenced on social media is this one:

https://www.gaia.com/article/5g-health-risks-the-war-between...

I always then point to the author's scientific qualifications. Clue: he's not a scientist, engineer, IT specialist, medical expert.

His qualifications:

> Paul Wagner is a 5-Time EMMY® Award Winning writer, an intuitive-empath, author of The Field Guide to Human Personalities, and creator of The Personality App and Personality Cards.
Meh, I worked for one of those Fortune20 behemoths (Not tech) and all the presentations from a fresh intern up to the CEO were made in Power Point. 99% of business analytics? = Excel. Same in a big government organization (non US), I am as much a nerd as most people here, but being outside in the real (non-tech) world helped me to realize how much the tech world can blind you.
To the large extent this is how Amazon Video (or Hulu) works - you can subscribe not only to Prime Video, but also to HBO, Starz, CBS, etc. Which have subscription services of their own.
The first approximation is an approximation only. The closer you look, the fuzzier it gets.

There are many pairs of species which can interbreed, and sometimes be fertile, and as a result genes can get from one to the other. But for the most part they don't interbreed, even when they share a territory. An example today is tigers and lions. (They no longer overlap in the wild, but they used to before humans shrank both their territories.)

Similarly homo sapiens and neanderthals coexisted for tens of thousands of years. And yet we only have evidence for a handful of successful interbreeding events. That's pretty good evidence that they were separate species.

For these new ones, whether they were fertile or not is subject to dispute. However we can estimate how far back the last common ancestor of their chromosomes and ours is. And from that gap, we have reason to believe that they are similarly distant from homo sapiens as Neanderthals were. And so they likely were a different species, even though some interbreeding was possible.
I am also an optimist and a techno-utopian...

BUT:

1. This has not been tested on a single human yet, as it has no FDA approval.

2. Preliminary trials in full quadripilegic patients are several away (these are also not yet approved)

3. Should these trials succeed, this will still not be available as an elective procedure for healthy people (that will take much more time)

3. The skull exists and is a hard barrier that is not going away. A decade or so from now, should this be approved as an elective procedure, patients will have to have a hole drilled in their skull (note that most people find LASIK invasive, even after decades of successful surgeries)

4. Patients will also have to become comfortable with thousands of fibers being inserted (albeit in a minimally invasive way) through brain tissue by an automated surgical robot.

5. Should the procedure be successful, patients should finally, at long last, be able to control a mouse, or keyboard, or smartphone using their brain and imagining the movements instead of using their hands.

There is perhaps, a cyberpunk future where crime syndicates mine Bitcoin in the brains of their victims, where malware pipes gigabytes of extremist political memes in seconds through the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of young adults.

Maybe that will come one day, but this technology is only using the signals generated by the brain to control a mouse and keyboard. This existed twenty years ago in chimpanzee studies. The real innovation here is in materials science and surgery.

This is amazing multi-disciplinary science in the pursuit of advanced medicine, and we should be applauding it for what it is.

So, thank you Elon for funding this -- but more importantly, thanks to all the scientists, researchers, and engineers who have dedicated their lives the advancement of our science and medicine.

I will not be electing to undergo this surgery in the future.
Can we add "[video]" to this title?
Washington Life Sciences Research
4K screens with instant, unlimited access to almost all video content humanity has ever created are a relatively new thing. Instead of accepting "lack of evidence of harm", I'd prefer to wait for proof that it's not harmful before letting my kids indulge.
Every generation finds something to panic about because it's going to destroy their children. The article points this out: in the 50s, it was Elvis shaking his hips, the 80s had Dungeons and Dragons, the 90s had video games. And every generation is convinced that while every previous moral panic was nonsense: this time it's different!
Chill people. We survived hips and tabletop games and videogames - "screen time" is no different and we'll be just fine with that one too.
As someone who currently works in wireless comms I think we can say "5G" is a pretty meaningless term. I presume, as you suggest, it originally referred to the new LTE but honestly the definition "literally any wireless tech created between about 2015 and about 2020" seems to be universally accepted!
I bet the average person presenting products is still very attractive with perfectly groomed hair and a fortune spent on teeth whitening, probably with tight and suggestive clothing too.

Only the degree has changed.
Far fetched is an under-statement. It's not possible unless they're planning to do human trials of some non-invasive technology related to the larger product.
I'm a CS engineer graduated from a college in Kerala (South-India). The whole course is 4 years long and in these 4 years, the administration didn't allow students to bring Smartphones to the campus. Yes even for the students who are majoring in computer science. And even laptops were only allowed from 3rd year onwards.

Their justification was laptops and smartphones are just a distraction for students. And the rules where quite strict and if you bring any of these to the campus they would fine you heavily. All because of the notion that internet and digital presence is bad for you even if you are studying about these devices.
There was one in particular post I was referring to, it looks like someone has vouched for it since my noting it. Thanks for pointing that out, I was unaware. I'm not sure I have the rep necessary however.
1080p is ok, though? Or is it the fact that you can access too much video? Like, if you could only access every 3rd episode of Cheers, then 4k is ok? I guess we'll have to wait for the scientists to weigh in on this one!
Uber Eats to change 'unfair' restaurant contracts after ACCC investigation
There's such a tiny amount of people who want audio-in, can't use a USB adapter, but want to use an RPi that I am pretty certain this will never be addressed.
How to watch Plasma and exit when errors occur
300mbps is no where close to s3 throughput. Try 300MBps per node and much higher when you access the same bucket in multiple nodes
Did you know that there is a direct correlation between the decrease in pirates and the increase in global temperatures?
We encrypt files:

- For offsite backups (disaster recovery), mirroring object stores and filesystems to cheap cloud storage.

- For encrypting secrets needed for maintaining IT systems (eg. all those shared passwords we never seem to be able to get rid of)

- For encrypting sensitive documentation for transfer (email attachment, shared via filesystem, shared via HTTP, shared via pastebin even)

Despite the awful UI, GnuPG does all of that in a standard way. We have tested disaster recovery with no more instructions than 'the files are in this S3 bucket'.

And the same tool is also useful for other tasks too:
- public key distribution (needs care to do it securely, but functional)
- commit signing, signed tags
- package signing (per Debian)

We could use custom or multiple tools for all this, but a single tool to learn is a big advantage.

I think all use cases boil down to 'encrypt and/or sign a file' for one of the stages. In the article, 'talking to people', 'sending files', 'encrypting backups' are all really just 'encrypt/sign a file' followed by transmission. And some sort of keyring management is needed for usability. A tool that can pull keys from a repository and encrypt and/or sign a file to a standard format could be used to build all sorts of higher level tools. I imagine it would be quite possible to build this on top of libsodium, and if it gained mindshare, replace uses of GnuPG.
I'm reminded of Ted Chiang's short story Catching Crumbs from the Table HN linked to a little while back: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
The fact that most MAC addresses are not visible to the ISP behind NAT anyway is not the point, given the Department is not renowned for doing its homework.

The real concern here is the insight provided by this submission into the sort of thinking that is clearly going on at the most powerful ministerial department in the country. These people don't understand the technology, and fundamentally do not care.
Has search became so hard these days?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=screen+time+im...

150,000 hits
I am excited thinking of all the type of experiences NeuraLink will enable. I am confident it will still take another decade, but the video games of the future will be wild.
Working at a large bank, a Cobol programmer once told me the use cases are very narrow, but that it's extremely dependable once deployed into production. To be a little blunt though, to process statements and track transactions with high dependability, it works well when you repel anyone with a low attention span or someone has a strong desire for learning new languages and programming paradigms. You need and want programmers who are more about making the same kind of sausage day in day out rather than innovation because at the end of the day, the bank statement and transactions are trivial but extremely important problems. In other words, it's an older programmer's workshop.
>Do you believe the ends justify the means?

In the colloquial sense of that phrase, certainly not. Any honest calculation about the ends includes _all_ events that cause it. That necessarily includes the costs of the means.

> If you do, we are not talking about anything other than straight civil war.

I don't believe that is possible under any circumstances. The pattern being followed in the US is not at all unique. It is essentially identical to several other nations which are going or have gone down this path. There was never more than a broken window and burning trash can or two. (which of course are always portrayed as world ending violence justifying yet more authoritarian behavior)

In the end, either the public notices the situation in time and somehow gets enough ballots counted that they return the country to sanity (enough ballots to overcome gerrymandering, the electoral college, the unbalanced senate, systematic disfranchisement and foreign interference)

Or the country follows the same path that Hungary and Poland are on now, towards a hyper nationalistic, xenophobic kleptocracy. Essentially the same choice soon to be faced by several other western countries (and India and Turkey btw).
Be that as it may, none of this is a good justification for moving further towards oligarchy or totalitarianism. There has been much talk about how support of big-tech censorship is skewing left, which I consider to be quite ironic since I had always associated the left, at least historically, with egalitarianism.
I've seen that CS and EE are the most math intensive majors outside the math department. Many students go all in and get the minor or double major.

But they do learn a certain kind of math. Personally I think a strong foundation in statistics is warranted. The calculus goes far beyond what is useful on the job.
Was there a post-mortem about it?
A border patrol agents reveals what it's like to guard migrant children
The article starts right off with a cliché often repeated in American media: that this is a 'crackdown on U.S. giants'. This is not targeted at US companies, the Commission has fined plenty of European companies in the past year. But the big giants just happen to be American and so obviously abuse their market power. Corporations don't really carry a flag (except for convenience), they are disloyal to all of us. So let's make this about what it is: standing up for consumers, no matter where the company comes from.
It only hurts kids as much as it hurts everyone else.

My 60 y/o mom is on social media for hours per day. That's harmful.

My 80 y/o grandma plays Pokemon Go four hours per day, which we initially thought was good because it got her to go walking. Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.

My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.

I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.

Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages. I don't think that our current old-timers lacking screens when they were kids made them any better at life. It only made them worse at using modern technology. The current crop of youngsters may miss out on face-to-face interaction, or maybe their eyes will be shaped poorly for long distance sight. But they'll be better at navigating the digital world, which seems to be where we spend a lot of our time regardless of age.
Technological R&D doesn't get you anywhere on its own. It's an important prerequisite, sure, but just as necessary is the next step, where a company is formed to commercialize/productize novel research through years of schlepping through market education and government safety trials, to pave the way for the technology to become a "safe" product category for other companies to follow on to. There are many technologies stuck between these two stages—thoroughly "researched and developed", but not yet commercialized.

People like Musk (and the people he co-founds these companies with) are important because they're taking nascent product categories that are "stuck" in the R&D stage with little attention being paid to them, and directing large-scale consumer demand onto them in a way that brings profit-driven industry interest—and therefore industry talent—into the picture. Even if it's not Musk's offering that end up winning the space, these efforts redefine the public perception of the category in a way that means that every company in the space wins.

(For another equivalent example: the creator of Bitcoin did more for smart contracts by creating one platform that lead to competitor platforms that actually had smart-contract support, than a thousand academic smart-contract systems projects ever could have.)
Have you tried using the Blender 2.8 release candidate UI though? As someone with approximately zero artistic skills and minimal 3D background, I was also turned off by Blender's inscrutable UI patterns 10 years ago.

But with the 2.8 RC news on HN last week I recently tried it again and I have to say that now it seems like the UI is pretty decent. Left click select, a move tool that works like every other move tool in paint, a clear hierarchy view with obvious nestable layers - it seems like many of the weird things I remember (like "drag the divider between the viewport and the menu bar down to see a secret option pane") are gone or redesigned now.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU for some example usage or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww for a preview of the UI/UX changes.
Some of them were real however, smoking really was a terrible idea as was sugar, fast food, and many other things.
Totalitarianism countries will use this to take surveillance and censorship to a new level. Now, people can't speak freely. In the future, people will not be able to think freely ...
> entertainment back then was so feeble compared to today's high voltage stuff

Read that sentence back to yourself in your head and then tell me that doesn't sound ridiculous.
To be fair, not everyone "survived" videogames. I know plenty of people who got "trapped" by them as young adults and some lost years to it or never really moved on. By which I mean, had them as an addiction/escape from developing social skills or confronting other responsibilities.
3 years ago I learned that large insurance companies in India still use COBOL. That fact blew my mind. This fact (Estimates as high as 80% of financial transactions use... COBOL) further blows my mind as I thought only Indian financial institutions are rigid. Clearly not.
Identity is an unsolved problem. Even outside of digital use cases.
> RF can raise body temperature

Yes. Radiation can raise body temperature. Like the radiation from a hot sidewalk. Or the radiation from, literally, anything. Heat is nothing new. Are you calling for studies of sidewalks?
Out of curiosity, did you intentionally choose examples reminiscent of the Titanic and 737MAX?
Back before the internet I remember flicking through tv channels being bored because there was nothing on, I have never really felt there was nothing left to do on the internet.
The thing is, it's not everyone in tech. It's once in a while, some single person in tech denounces some service and there are a million articles written about it. It's anecdata, not data. You shouldn't base your decisions on that fact that some single person you never met and have no reason to trust, decided to say some particular thing that was fun to report on.
People can't think clearly now. They are clouded always with bias and the limitation of the neurobiology.

Powerful tools can be used for both good and bad.
Thank you, that's very interesting to know. I had guessed that there wasn't much, based upon its vintage, but I'd have thought that it must be very robust at some level to have dominated a mission-critical financial niche for so long.
Their implant sounds impressive . I m not sure about their answer about plasticity though. IIRC , previous implants like the braingate had issue with the tuning of neurons shifting over time, requiring patients to retrain the model.
Thanks for posting this. I'm doing research in this area and this is fantastic
Which are all out of walking distance from the average persons home.
> All because of the notion that internet and digital presence is bad for you even if you are studying about these devices.

Uh, ok. A number of colleges also have curfews and gender segregated dorms. Those aren't good ideas either.
"You can't prove a negative" is just a saying and not actually true.
I think this is a really bad argument, mainly because it ignores the things that people "panicked" about that actually did end up having horrible consequences for society.

Three examples:
1. The American diet. You have an epidemic of kids with obesity and things like type II diabetes (previously referred to as "adult onset" diabetes).
2. You point out video games in your examples, and while I don't believe that video games are "rotting our brains", kids have become much more physically sedentary over the past 50 years with lots of measured negative consequences.
3. Smoking.

And the thing I think that is particularly frightening about "screen time" is that apps and programs are designed by some very intelligent people whose sole goal is to hook you into spending more time in the app.
Yes, and that is why I tell my daughter no screen unless necessary (FaceTime to her grand parents) or time to time "TV" (max one hour of watching something on iPad or TV a week).

The difference with other kids we know is huge from a behavior, physical and intellect point of view. She'll go to school only this fall.
Gig workers often get an unfair deal. This firm says it’s different
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is building tech to control computers with your mind
Same here in Australia.
I meant to segue into a realistic lower bound, not a zero bound, though I definitely wasn't clear about it.
They specifically say they build on the concepts from the Utah arrays, but that their tech is much better (presumably "trippy" references were from lower res external monitors or feedback from the brain array?)
Because we don't want to export internal fields of structures in our API or we need to perform initialization logic before considering the structure ready for use?

That's a pretty common use case but ignore that for a moment and just distill the problem down to it is possible to have null pointer issues in Go code.

Another example eith sufficient use of goroutines and channels it gets really tricky to debug something when a receiving channel blocks because something isn't sending.

There's plenty more. I don't find Go any simpler to debug than Java, Kotlin, Rust, or Python and in many cases it is significantly more difficult because you're constantly fighting the type system or working through huge amounts of boilerplate.
Musk just (unexpectedly?) announced that the team has been able to make a monkey control a computer with its mind...

Wow, I would love to see this in action...
> Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages

Better close your browser window real quick! Don't want any more of that nasty screen time to harm you!
I think what the comment above is getting at is that a Sedentary lifestyle can prevent you from activities that may prove beneficial to your health.
Alternative Health What Causes Sexual Dysfunction in Men With Type 2 Diabetes?

Diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, commonly causes sexual problems in both men and women. Erectile dysfunction is a common concern and occurs in approximately 60 per cent of diabetic men. This condition is characterized by the inability to sustain an erection adequate for sexual intercourse. This could be an ongoing or occasional problem.

Aging is also one of the known factors that influences the likelihood of developing erectile dysfunction... it has been found by age 65, two-thirds of men have been affected. However, in diabetic men the disorder may occur 10 to 15 years earlier than in non-diabetics.

Why do sexual problems occur in men with type 2 diabetes?

Erectile dysfunction in diabetics is caused by damage to the nerves that travel to the penis or damaged vessels within the penis. It is the result of years of elevated blood sugars. High blood pressure and high cholesterol levels also increase the risk... these conditions are usually present in type 2 diabetic men.

https://healthadviserpro.com/blood-sugar-shield-review/
A lot of these things are assuming a traditional model of well-being (that being fit and smart and long lived makes you happier). This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water. What if our model of well-being is wrong?

An obese person can be happy as long as they don't peg their happiness on being able to do a bunch of physical activities. Plus, all the time spent not working out can be spent on pursuing other interests.

A dumb person can be happy. There are billions of us.

A short lived person can be happy- it's more about the quality of life than the quantity.

So if I can live in a world in which I don't have to do a bunch of physical activity, can play with the screens that I want, and can enjoy my life? I don't actually need a lot of the things that a doctor says I need. To be fair, an obese person has a higher chance of being hospitalized, which sucks, so being dumb and obese will probably lead to me being less happy.
I feel sorry for you, if you live somewhere without a park within walking distance :(

I feel that the average persons home would generally be within walking distance to some sort of public open area.