skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lots of drivers in the U.S. have military seals or decals on their vehicles, often to show support for a particular service branch that they or a relative is associated with.

I've also heard of journalists and PIs using vehicles that look like undercover/unmarked police cars to get access to areas that might otherwise be off-limits to civilians - they sometimes get waved through perimeters or won't be ticketed/towed if they park in restricted areas.

Could this be someone showing support for Chinese police with over-the-top decals? Or was the driver actively pretending to be a Chinese police officer or is a police officer claiming some right to operate outside of China? The article didn't make the circumstances clear, other than the car obviously has the markings and seals.

ETA: Just remembered another odd situation/use case for fake police cars - as art or performance props. The UK band/art collective I used to work for, The KLF, featured a 1968 Ford Galaxy police cruiser in many of their videos, with the lights and paint intact but modifications to the seal and motto (using "To Serve and Protect" and the band's Pyramid Blaster logo). You can see a picture of it on the back of some of their 45s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctorin%27_the_Tardis) and I know they drove it around London for the 3 A.M. Eternal video.

And in the Boston area there are owners of old Ford LTDs with Boston Police logos from the 1980s and 1990s which are used as movie props (see https://www.universalhub.com/2018/old-boston-police-cruisers...).
If this is true, it's pretty egregious of the Chinese state to be so blatantly interfering in the affairs of American residents. I mean, if you're going to harass HK supporters, do so ... clandestinely?
I don't think that's accurate. Most devs and thus companies treat NPM as a utility. Maybe very large companies would not feel it, but if NPM went down tomorrow there would be utter chaos on the internet.
> Amazon can be an evil empire, AND their opposition can also be evil corporations that do evil things like organize fake grassroots campaigns. These are not mutually exclusive ideas.

I'm perfectly aware of that. The point is that everybody is echoing with the message, and not really worried about the delivery at all. Furthermore, if the delivery is suspect here I'm trying to suggest we should examine why we hate Amazon so much, and whether it's justified.

> "Violence" is a word with a meaning, ... If you have to resort to this sort of sophistry to make your point, your point is probably not correct.

I'm aware of that, thank you. If you have to resort to such sophistry maybe your point isn't correct! (Although I'm not actually saying that yet lol)

> and it isn't happening here. No one has been so much as bruised.

Not right now, obviously. But where does the government's power to enforce things come from? Violence. Whenever you are trying to use the government to force people to do things, it's from a position of the threat of violence. That's the nature of the beast. That's also why I qualified it with "institutionalized", which you seem to have conveniently ignored. The government represents an implied threat of violence used to back the power of an institution that abstract actual violence away (most of the time). This is why people often can't see the violence; and because of that I find it helpful to point it out more explicitly.

> It's clear that you do not understand the concept of a monopoly.

I know what the government defines as a monopoly, and would say Amazon skirts that line VERY closely. But I'm trying to get people from just saying, "it's a monopoly" and leaving it at that. That lets the connotation of the word do all the legwork, when we should be examining exactly what the real behavior is and whether it's actually wrong and something we should be attacking them for. It's all well and good to talk about the Law, but sometimes we have to talk about ethics and rights, too.
China's Lunar Rover Scopes Out Weird Substance on Far Side of the Moon
> Conferences don't exist to convey information

In this I agree with you. I have yet to give a talk where the technical content couldn't be better conveyed in text. Different people comprehend information at different rates. Some people like to pause here and there and think about what they've just read. People read faster than they listen to the spoken word. Blog posts can organize content with footnotes and links to allow people to explore.

I can go on and on. A spoken talk does exactly two things a blog post cannot do:

1. I can communicate emotion--like enthusiasm--better in person than on video, and better on video than in teh written word.

2. A bunch of people watching a talk together spill out into the hallway together.

The point of most conferences is the "hallway track." If a talk motivates people to be interested in something (point 1) and to talk to others who are also motivated (point 2) while the iron is hot, then the ideas can become sticky.

All I try to do in talks is convey enough information to let people decide if they want to research the topic on their own. My job is to sell them on how interesting it is, and then the audience can use the hallway track to follow up.

I am NOT trying to teach anything in a conference talk.
You should find this interesting/useful as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowlby

I have Bowlby's books as well, so can recommend them.

Based on my experience, any therapist ought to be able to offer a reduced rate - the first session or at least inquiry can be used to establish such things. And I'd recommend trying to see someone in person vs. over the Net, if possible, but that has its own drawbacks (transportation etc)
They say the list is the most popular extensions by category. RES is in the productivity category and presumably was omitted in favor of the 10 extensions in that category with 10M+ users. And productivity is the largest category so there are probably dozens more in the gap between 10M+ and 2.2M.
^This exactly!

8 deaths now? Which, CDC and others dont know the root cause yet. It seems to be an issue with e-cigs, and people smoking them excessively over and over and over. Who knows the oil they used and its quality.

While those deaths are unfortunate America has bigger issues killing WAY more people daily. Look at alcohol for example. We all know how bad it is, but it gets a pass.

Although, DOJ has gone after several of those responsible for "Fueling Opioid Epidemic" there is still major issues when Docs get a kickback for pushing Drug A over Drug B.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-11/purdue-op...

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/762455218/as-drugmakers-face-...
That's a self selecting group though. All of the Americans I met while travelling and living outside of America seemed disinterested in pop culture too. It's not the "Chinese" part of your observation that's relevant.
Hilarious to me we are now seeing basically the fall of MIT. Couldn't happen to a more deserving university.

Wealthy donors are pulling out of MIT left and right. Students are opting to attend other schools, and faculty are leaving the troubled school like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
NPM CEO Bryan Ejects from Biz
Plenty of such compounds in existence.

But getting a recreational drug « approved » for sale is difficult. But maybe not impossible.

And chances are the attributes that make it relatively safe in 500mL-beer-equivalents probably make it possible to consume 10x amounts for 10x pleasure but still 5x worse negative effects than that 500mL beer.

Alcohol’s side effects contribute to its self-limiting self-administration for a good chunk of the population.
https://archive.is/8Oeqz
...and where does it come from?
Remove the safety nets from you life. You work like you do because you have the privilege to do so. Get rid of what's holding you back.
There's a ton of FUD going around about this in games journalism - claiming that this could be the end of the game industry as we know it.

Problem with this reporting is - console games have been re-sellable since the beginning, and console gaming (from a fiscal and number perspective) vastly outpaces PC gaming. That doesn't even include how much more prevalent pirating is with the PC gaming market.

If the console market can survive this, so can the PC market. Yes, even indies.
It is well understood that sleep effects weight loss.

My point more succinctly:

8 hours of being awake + urination = similar weight from 8 hours previous.

8 hours of high quality sleep + urination = less weight from 8 hours previously.

A simple repeating of the test will prove me wrong.
> Yeah, it makes ad blockers less powerful. It also makes them less of an enormous security risk in that all of your web traffic is redirected through them, and a compromised extension could do whatever it wanted with that.

This presumes I trust Apple significantly more than authors of any conceivable blocking plugin — by large enough margin that it would be worthwhile to lose functionality over it. That isn't really the case — I only trust Apple marginally more and, if anything, making such decisions on my behalf erodes that trust.
> it should be the default for how we treat each other

What should be included in the set of "each other"? You're suggesting we include entities that are totally amoral, who happily destroy other sentient beings in the most painful ways, and who are incapable of reform. There is no imaginable social contract that could possibly include such monsters.

Surely there must be some element of symmetry as a condition of such a set membership. It's implied by the very phrase "each other".
> The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government.

The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not.

The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban.

The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11

Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day.

US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.
I don't mean that it sends the actual web traffic through some uBlock server, I mean that the uBlock browser extension sees all of the requests to load a webpage and decides what to do. It can decide to block them or not. It could also decide to scoop up all of your personal information and do bad things with it.

If someone were able to compromise the developer account and get a malicious version distributed through the Chrome browser gallery, that would be a huge problem. The kind of thing that has been making headlines with compromised npm modules recently.

Google has reviews in place to prevent malicious extensions from being distributed, but they can't be perfect. We've seen that repeatedly with both Chrome extensions and Android apps.

Every extension with permissions set for "This can read and change site data on all sites" has a huge target on it, and the fewer things using that level of access the better. Ad blocking extensions are an obvious place to look for improvement because they're so popular.

I hope that Google can put a blocking system together that will be able to perform as well as existing solutions without adding any huge security risks, but I also agree that it's problematic that their incentives are to do the exact opposite.
HN Search Is Down
While I agree with you, the driving factor in most of these shootings is the fact that the AR is one of the cheapest platforms that one can purchase. You can get a functional AR for a little over $400, Mini-14's are closer to a grand.

The Columbine shooter used a Hi Point rifle which at the time where much cheaper than the AR-15 platforms offered. The driving factor in most of these are that the guns used are the cheaper platforms.

I have always said one of the deadliest firearm platforms for mass killings would be a Saiga-12 with a bag full of 20 round drums loaded with 3 inch 00 buck. But you don't see them being used because a decent one that has has the ports drilled and has been converted is over 3K and the drums run close to $100 each.

If the AR is eliminated the shootings will not stop they will transfer over to the next cheap platform, or handguns and honestly in a corridor setting, such as a school and unarmed civilians with no body armor, a handgun is going to be just as effective as far as body count is concerned. They just don't fit the image that these shooters want to portray. there is a reason that most of them wear a bunch of tactical gear when they commit these criminal acts.
Thank you for clearly elucidating the difference between what we had and what we're going to have moving forward.

I'm so tired of this trend where folk keep pitching significant reductions of technical capability as some kind of "win" for the consumers and developers of a platform.

This is about exploiting platform owner privilege, no more and no less.
What sort of idiot impersonates Chinese police in the United States? To the point of trying to actually pull people over?
While I'm sympathetic with the idea this seems like a lot of woo to me.
Not necessarily only good actors, I lived in an era where technology was more unreliable then it was today.

It’d be pretty bad if a single software bug froze everyone’s video. Please don’t assume default installation.
The Future Looks Like Salt Reactors – Might Change How You See Nuclear Energy
> you lumped me with the left wing climate change, socialist group but I'm much more skewed toward the right-wing views like Charles Lindbergh, Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola (anti-technological progress, connection to the soil, to your local community, to the seasons, etc.)

Well that's basically just pastoral socialism, and very similar to what the left advocates anyway. I didn't actually know what you believed when I wrote that and tried not to assume, I was more processing my own experience with that. Furthermore my bigger point, using hysterics and fear tactics to push an agenda, still stands.

> suicide rates and drug addiction in our modern society say otherwise

Is that because of overconsumption though?
Are women coerced into doing and accepting things that they would rather not due to misogyny. Absolutely.

But they still have free will and a choice. At the end of the day, sexually harassed women make a Faustian bargain. They didn’t have to. But they did. It might be the devil but when you choose to consort with the devil, you play in hell.

A lot of times(admittedly not always), the solution is to walk away. Walk away. The damage to the ego can be dealt with and maybe even vindicated. But it’s wiser to walk away to a place of strength to strategize and wage a bloody war to win rather than engage in puny battles for fragile hollow victories. It’s easier to nurse a wounded ego and come back to fight another day than endure systemic harassment that rips your very spirit apart. Stupid battle of the sexes.
Zooming out, here are some points I've been considering:

1. A repo intervention on this scale hasn't happened since the 2008 crisis.

2. Experts seem divided on what's causing the extremely tight overnight liquidity phenomenon.

3. The Fed refused to budge from its tepid stance on long-term rates and restarting QE in its recent meeting. This stands against a backdrop of a stagnating world economy, the collapse of foreign sovereign bond yields, and unprecedented browbeating from the White House.
My HN profile about text just includes my personal website url which has a contact form which emails me. Hope that suffices, looking forward to hearing from HN users!
> They recalled an incident earlier this summer wherein another Asian driver with Chinese markings on his car was arrested following an attempt to pull over an off-duty police officer.

That's beyond just having decals.
Not in the UK I guess...
Heatpump efficiency is quoted versus heating with resistive electric heaters. In northern europe most modern houses are heated by heatpumps and good ones achieve 5-6x efficiency as opposed to "dumb" electric heating. It's basically a reverse fridge - you cool down outside and dump the collected heat inside. When outside temps drop the efficiency drops dramatically though. Google "heat pump COP curve"
I follow mostly tech, artists and gamedev people and I get very little of the negativity. Don't follow any of the big public figures etc.

Unfortunately, a few of the programmers that I'd like to follow retweet a lot of the cultural warfare crap (left vs right, white vs nonwhite etc.), and there is no feature to filter that out specifically. In the end, I decided to just unfollow them, as the agitation created by vitriol and stupidity was just not worth it.

The other kind of negativity I see is people tweeting dumb/argumentative things at the people I follow. The solution for that is to only read replies that the people I follow replied to and ignore the rest of the randos. This makes my daily Tweeter routine very quick BTW.
> Not "everybody" hates Google for it. People who don't understand the security implications inherent in allowing browser extensions that have nearly-unrestricted access to the user's behavior -- even if well-intended -- may hate the Chrome team for it.

...this is a fantastic argument for disallowing installation of custom browsers. I do hope y'all like IE and/or Safari.
There's one very key reason that traitors, spies, 'turncoats', and others have been been so harshly punished throughout history (and present). It entails a violation of good faith and trust. That has nothing to do with 'tribalism'. Compare your reaction to the notion of a person killing a stranger to steal their watch, and another person killing their coworker to steal their watch. Exact same crime which is absurdly vile in itself, yet one is somehow vastly more repulsive.

And so I do fully support Snowden but only because the tremendous magnitude of bad behavior he revealed compensates for his treachery in doing so. By contrast I think individuals like "Reality Winner" simply lack ethics. She violated trust on what seemed to have been a very poorly conceived whim to reveal something of relatively minimal benefit to the public good. Indeed checking out the Wiki to see what came of her case I'm rather unsurprised to find that she apparently wrote in her diary of support for Bin Laden and the Taliban. [1]

In military and such organizations this is even more true as individuals take numerous oaths. And one who would break an oath without very substantial reason, is a person the world would be much better off without.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner
"Over all, air travel accounts for about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — a far smaller share than emissions from passenger cars or power plants."

2.5% means we should focus on reducing somewhere else in the near term.
I'm curious as to how this gets handled in practice - does Valve get forced into adding a feature to transfer game rights from one account to another? Does it merely make selling your account legal? At the extreme, does this cause Valve to just pull out of the EU market entirely - this is doubtful, but stranger things have happened!
Stop fucking flying everywhere. If you think you have to travel far enough to justify a flight, think again. Do you really have to be there in person? Telecom technology has matured enough to make personal presence unnecessary. Your instagram vacation can wait until we have cleaner travel tech.
I love the internet. I posted this question 20 years ago. Got an answer right away. And even more interesting answers today. Thanks!

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!searchin/alt.math.re...
Anything that weakens Google’s ad-targeting advantage is bad for Google, so I could see them interested in restricting telemetry.
Lol no. Not gonna happen.
Eeeeh, it depends. People in the US are going to go totally librarian poo if someone comes to take away their cars.
You might try a different approach, like cognitive behavioral therapy. It's less seductively appealing because it doesn't promise to dig into the root cause of mental health issues, but it's much more scientifically validated.

The idea is that you have stimulus->response, and while it's impossible to know root causes, you can identify stimuluses and change the response.

Analogous to ML engineering, versus Chomsky for AI. Not as pretty, but (currently) more effective.

edit to add - there are good books for CBT and other Positive Psychology approaches. Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis is accessible and interesting; I got good value from that.
What is the methodology for determining that an account is part of a state-funded manipulation campaign? Also, is 'state-funded' necessarily worse than 'privately-funded'? How does twitter know who funds an account? Twitter has a history of banning people simply because their opinions are unpopular, so these claims don't hold much weight.
I'm starting to hate the internet
Just goes to show that it's extremely trivial to clean up the final product with a few passes for quality assurance.

Single handedly, even. This is something one person could do on their own.

And yet they didn't even bother to try.

If they really intend to sell such images, it's extremely unprofessional to leave the botched examples in the mix, despite efforts to rationalize why they should be included.

Based on that, I suspect it's one person acting alone, and it's a get rich quick effort to take the money and run.
> It's their product, it's their labor, they can offer to sell it to anybody who's happy with the terms.

No they can't, and there's precedent for that: food regulations, warranty regulations, refund regulations, regulations on sale to minors, tax regulations etc. - this is in recognition of the fact that without the resources provided by the state and civil society, they wouldn't be able to sell it (or, in some cases, even produce it) in the first place.

> But I could do it with the advantage that their version includes using the machinery of the state to call a restriction of a freedom a freedom.

This is rather ironic, not only because restriction of freedom is what gives us what we regard as higher freedom (almost by definition, e.g. the case of the savage society being less free than ours since there are no laws against murder and theft, thus people cannot pursue their "higher" ends freely) but also because Orwell was himself a socialist![0]

Restrictions on freedom are not merely trade-offs, they are essential to the functioning of society. The point I'm making is that this restriction on the freedom of the seller in this case is based on a conception of freedom in which its opposite (unfreedom) is held within the noun itself. When you speak of the freedom of the seller, you're also speaking of the unfreedom of everyone else.

[0] "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." (George Orwell, 1946, "Why I Write")
Yeah I'm a dev with bad color taste (i.e. backend engineer...)

It would be nice if it said..use this color for acknowledge font, warning font, background, menu...etc...
Honestly with the way chrome and firefox behave nowadays, even grandma looking at facebook benefits from multiple cores