skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with what you say and perhaps what I am trying to say ineloquently is they have focus on what they want to do first and when they need a solution they go searching for it leveraging what others have done and reviewing it etc. I can’t speak for you but I am a regular visitor to hn and the content it shows and in that sense I am here first looking for ways to improve and then hoping to apply what I have learned to something when it’s needed and may be it will never be needed. Former is focused to unfocus as needed and latter is unfocused to focus someday. If that makes sense.
Almost everything can be read by an OBD2 reader. Or there are also some homebrew options.

Tractors and such start to get tricky and I am sure there are aspects of the cars which you cannot control but from what I have seen you can get by without a reader on older cars (flashing the obd light) but on newer ones you need a decent reader. Which largely are about $100 depending on how in depth you want to go.

On my VW I use the OBDeleven reader...but I believe there is a generic comparable one also. It allows you to test sensors, modules, even door switches/lights and the radio.

I understand the added complexity is confusing at times but really once you have a reader it is easy enough. Code readers are actually a fairly accessible and cheap addition to your toolbox.

I do agree though that the "black boxing" and DRM of hardware needs to be addressed. Especially in anything that is relied on. If you buy a machine you should get full schematics/docs/etc upon request IMHO...but that isn't really a common thing anymore.
If by "I need a haircut" you mean to say "I am unemployed, verging on destitution and eviction, along with 30 Million other Americans" then maybe you have a point.

The trivialization of other people's causes, especially those that should engender sympathy (literally 10's of millions of those in the weakest economic situations), is a 'root cause' here.

If a very serious healthcare issue is politicized, we're all in trouble.
I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.

And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1]

It fails two ways:

1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.

2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).

There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats.

Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs.

A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased.

What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this.

Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems.

________________________________

Notes:

1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409
Your framing of the situation is biased.

I could say: "One group is holding signs that say 'Let us reopen. I have 2 children to feed' and another group is calling for police abolition while smashing in the windows of small businesses and murdering people" and it would be just as valid of a description as yours. It's not a fair description though.

Maybe your framing is the result of not having a wide enough array of news sources.
African Union Releases 2019 Education Innovation Handbook
They said 80 unarmed, meaning the rest of the 1043 were armed.
1.) I don't agree with taking such "both sides" a view of equating the two: BLM protests are about protesting police brutality, religious congregations are not. Quarantine protests are underplaying the dangers of coronavirus: people participating in BLM protests, by and large, have no misconceptions of coronavirus. Whether or not you prioritize this above or below police brutality is of course something you place on your own moral scale, but trying to equate the two like this is super disingenuous.

Additionally, what are you even going to do? Use the violence of the state to tell people not to protest against the use of violence conducted by the state?

2.) Lower income minorities are the ones who are often afraid to call the police, due to the widespread racial bias in policing across the US. Do not speak for them if they themselves have very low confidence in the police: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...

3.) It's not racist to criticize the Chinese government. It is, however, racist to misattribute the actions of the CPC to the actions of "the Chinese", which happens far too often.

4.) I don't even understand this point. You can't easily pick and choose what people are deciding to protest about: there is nobody at the top saying "we should protest about BLM and not the Chinese government." And especially don't conflate property destruction with what these protests stand for.
Might have been this. The style is usually attributed to Arthur Whitney:

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
An alternative interpretation is that crime rates are so high because police spending is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Money that could be spent on drug treatment programs is instead being spent 10x on a paramilitary organization that openly admits and jokes about its policy is to shoot first and ask questions later.
Have a look at the ($3000/core) enterprise version of Microsoft SQL server and check the field and row level permissions with full inherited RBAC... It's a feature that has some need in the entreprise world. Ignoring these features because you can do it in the application is a bit of a sabotage... take the logic far enough and you'll eventually get to the conclusion that maybe you should build your own DB too.
You'd think that a machine-learning thing would be called ‘mockingbird’.
I think this applies to a whole lot more than tech. ;)
Sure, but the Mayans vaguely knew about them.
Be nice if there was a DNS that blackholes websites that break the back button.
While development has not stopped, there haven't really been many advances in improving the syntax. Many of these tools are stuck in awkard, unintuitive syntax, which is cumbersome unless you use them frequently. I feel like the renaissance has lately been one of usability, which I personally really appreciate. Obviously, hard-core daily users would disagree, but considering I use `awk` at most once every 6 months, I hate that I need to spend 20 minutes re-learning how to use it every single time, particularly for basic purposes.
Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police.

That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
When I write an MVP I usually don't write unit test. What I do is write testable code with dependency injection and whatnots in mind, so when the product is mostly finalized, I can write unit tests with little or no modification to the original code.
It will play out quite predictably: more crime, organized and otherwise.
The rest of the original title was, "[and] Invest in Proven Community-led Public Safety". That part may be even more interesting, at least on the surface. I'm really curious what it means. Minneapolis could become a testbed for radical new approaches to this problem.
I use Spectacle to do this, like it a lot: https://www.spectacleapp.com
Historically police department reorganizations have actually often involved increases in "policing," in addition to structural changes in what "policing" looks like...
Actually WhatsApp only uploads numbers. Ironically, Signal is contemplating uploading your full address book to their cloud for “easy recovery”. Which is a nightmare if they follow through with it.
That hardly seems comparable.
im not sure how i feel about this. "fire everyone" is too large a scope, but "charge 1-4 officers with murder" is too small a scope.

both measures are too extreme. firing everyone is only useful if you restructure the training pipeline and system of accountability, but if you do that you dont need to fire everyone.

i suppose a nuanced approach is outside public reactionary purview so this is probably the better option. charging 1-4 officers with murder without changing the leadership accountability, culture, or anything really will have very negative impacts on policing.
another ~140 were armed with "toy weapons", such as the infamous shooting of Tamir Rice. But it's unclear whether that should go into the category of "unarmed" since this is still a threat perceived by police. Here is an image of Rice's toy gun: https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_Dlh...
You're normalizing to raw population. You want to normalize to "armed conflicts with the police" or similar.

Using the above FBI 2018 homicide statistics, blacks committed 3177 homicides in 2018, while whites committed 3011---in other words, blacks account for ~50%, despite only being 13% of the population.

Taking that proportion as a rough "criminality index," and multiply 53.5 by 13/50, and things look very different.
I didn't post the original link. MS collects analytics - which I am not comfortable with. Capability matters and intentions can change later. :)
Same for coronavirus and for economic hardship.
According to CDC policy, a person's state of residence is where their death should be reported. That mitigates the likelihood of double counting, etc. Unfortunately, that does create a delay but that's neither a new nor deceptive practice.
I think you would enjoy this book if you're truly seeking this knowledge.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
> Unfortunately, the greater group of protesters is incapable of understanding nuanced policy or democratic change.

Please elaborate.
My mental image is the Arsenal Bird from Ace Combat 7 :)
I've worked in places that had millions of dollars worth of infrastructure deployed and just by enabling NUMA awareness gained 50% again capacity.

It's something that I frequently look for and more recently seems to be the default rather than not.
Other armed (or even merely suspected to be armed) people see a more violent, not less violent, response by police.

Correct, and we're being told that the solution to that is to take away their arms. This is, of course, perfectly consistent with the original political motivation behind gun control.

Statistically speaking, if your death has a violent cause, it will happen at the hands of your own country's police or military forces. That's not a concern here in the modern-day US, but this is a historical aberration, one that may not prevail for much longer. Unilateral disarmament probably isn't the best strategy.
They rolled large blocks on logs via the same methods you see with all the pyramid building cultures.
This is not the religion but the people in that congregation. Christians sometimes get a bad rap but we are not all bad people.

I'm sorry you experienced that.
> replacements for "White Hat Hacker" and "Black Hat Hacker".

There are context dependant replacements.

A security researcher is always white hat. A black hat is called an attacker or threat actor etc.

I presume “white hat” and “black hat” come from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy so it isn’t black and white whether removing those terms is just whitewashing.

The term black hat usually implies a security context. A “black hat hacker” is a confused usage, and should not be in any training materials IMHO. Depending on your social circle (or context) hacking may be always good (hacker news) where you might use cracker or attacker for the bad sense, or the popular usage of hacker where they are always bad (and white hat would be an alien term to that crowd). I re-edited this comment for clarity.
"Solving Jepsen" is kind of a misleading way to say "debugging issues found by Jepsen". The former made me expect some kind of general solution to distributed consistency.

> And ultimately, adding quality tests is the best you can do to improve your software.

Tests are great, but that's not "the best you can do". You can redesign things to be simpler, and there's even an example of that earlier in the article:

> By re-architecting the design, the code could be hugely simplified. So, I had rewritten the whole thing from scratch over the past few months.

> The rewritten, simplified codebase did fix a variety of Jepsen issues. The last major stronghold was the bank test.

A better design can make it easier to informally "prove" the absence of certain issues.
>but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving

There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-...
Are you honestly suggesting that applies to WSJ headlines in general, and this specific instance in particular?

I suspect not. In which case, what—exactly—are you trying to accomplish with your comment? Muddy the waters? Convince people there's no problem? Waste people's time on irrelevant info?
Before you edited your post to fix your typo I thought that was a clever pun.
YouTube's Algorithm Distorts Truth
The US has lots of different police forces – city police, county police, state police. Many other countries have more centralised policing with fewer levels. I think, a smaller number of bigger police forces might promote more professionalism, more professional management, oversight by more experienced politicians (state political leaders tend to be more experienced and capable than local political leaders, especially when talking about smaller cities). That would suggest abolishing city-level police forces and merging them into the county-level police force, even abolishing county-level police forces and merging it all into state police.
I also argued that about equifax. Corporate death penalty is extremely underutilized. Organizations die all the time due to missteps they inflict on themselves, it shouldn't be controversial to apply the same outcome when they inflict harm on others.
Thank God I don't live in Minneapolis.
Anything which leaks when you inhale doesn't protect you.
If you take a deep breath and don't feel the mask pulled against your face, it's not working.

There's now a huge supply of poor to useless masks available, many with phony approval markings.[1] That's most of what's being sold on Amazon. It's moderately hard to make a mask which seals tightly, doesn't offer too much resistance to breathing, and filters to N95 standards.

A real N95 mask (3M 8210) is about $1.25 if you can get it. Some of the fakes are much more expensive.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-files-charges-against-chine...
> That don't need to be armed with firearms

You're asking police officers to be less armed then the general public. 43 states are "shall-issue" and allow residents to conceal carry a firearm after completing required training and submitting an application.
And far more harm than just one year's worth. We've seen 400 years of structural anti-black racism here, with no end in sight. The USA has had more than 240 years to fix that. If people are finding the timing of the current protest inconvenient, well, they've had their whole lives to fix the problem. They shouldn't blame the protesters for their own lack of action.

I'll note that in 1964, people were calling civil rights protests "unwise and untimely". [1] Somehow it's never the right moment for justice. Anybody suggesting an indefinite delay should be aware that their arguments are indistinguishable from those of people for whom "later" actually means "never". If people really want to end these protests now, instead of arguing for delay they should quickly enact deep structural changes.

[1]https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
Many PDs have bodycams as-standard already.
I've been exploring pretty much the same questions for the last few years. The first couple years felt distressing because I didn't feel like I was making progress quickly enough and I had way more questions than answers. Lately, I feel more positive about the direction of travel, and I've made peace with this being a slow, difficult journey. Seems like it should be "easy", but it's really not. Accepting that and not feeling too hard on myself helped a lot.

I haven't figured out a Grand Unified Theory or anything, but a few ideas that seem important to me:

1. Altruism & Relationships - covered extensively here already. Cultivating a few deep relationships and picking altruistic goals seem to be the scalable approaches to escaping the Hedonistic Treadmill and they're probably necessary components of any post-financial independence life strategy.

2. Growth - I'm not sure if this is a universal human thing or just something entrepreneur types are predisposed to, but I've realised that I'm much happier when I'm learning and growing. When the learning curve flattens out, I get feel unsettled. This seems to line up with your observation that you intensely take up a hobby, then shift to something new. Startups scratch this itch well because the company's growth forces constant personal growth. Initially, I tried to transcend this need to always be in motion thinking it was unsustainable over the long term - but lately I've been more accepting of it.

3. Change the Game - the trouble with growth as you approach the peak of whatever career/goal/journey you're on is it becomes exponentially harder to level up and satisfy that need for motion. I think the solution is to pivot to a totally different journey where you can start as a beginner and have a lot of attainable learning & growth ahead of you. I suspect this is a big part of why successful people tend to pursue philanthropy at the height of their careers - it's a whole new game, with new challenges to overcome.

From those ideas, I decided to pick a difficult, new domain to focus on with a goal of figuring out how to do some meaningful good. I happened to choose climate change, but health, education, poverty reduction, democracy, or any number of other issues fit the bill of "hard enough to provide years of learning/growth + focus is helping others". By picking something and committing, I avoided getting stuck in and endless loop of trying to decide what the optimal area is - a bias to action helps a lot when you get stuck with too much choice.

For me, the concrete starting point was Googling "best climate change books", reading half a dozen of them, and trusting my curiosity to guide me from there. I've spent the last year learning, and now I'm converging on starting a startup - although there are plenty of other structures that could work too (non-profits, volunteering, working on open source, consulting, advising, etc). The journey hasn't given me total clarity or magically solved everything - but by imposing some structure ("work full-time to figure out how you can help with climate change") on my life, things are at least less confusing.

Happy to discuss more privately if you'd like.
Painfully true, and very well put. I hope for the day that twitter realizes most of America is not actually on twitter and trending hashtags do not represent the common sentiment.
Reforming the police doesn’t work. It was tried in the 60’s and it only strengthened the policy and lead to the creation of SWAT teams, DEA, and a militarized police force. More info: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abo...
In as much as the other members of NATO (particularly the US, who is the primary funder of NATO) care about those commitments, yes. Which is to say, I’m not sure how much it maters historically when the US did not seem to particularly care. Now that the US has brought up the matter, to not make an effort to spend more is disrespectful to me.

(But the concept of disrespect aside, I would consider allies not fulfilling the agreements of a treaty made to lower my trust in them to fulfill the obligations of current and future agreements. And that trust is also quite important.)
thisIsAField thatThoughtCamelCase wasASensible idea
All those things have been tried and reform is more limited. The biggest problem is that unions protect all the bad applies in "solidarity" so even with body cams and abundant evidence of brutality nothing happens.

If you actually think body cams help, ask yourself why Derek Chauvin felt comfortable murdering George Floyd in broad daylight while being filmed.
From Rust to Svelte, what tech stack will I use
There seem to be too many 'bad apples' though. I had family killed during the troubles in Belfast, and though I was too young to take action I am sure it would not lead me to deface statues and burn flags on the cenotaph.

Britain has arguably been amongst the best places to be an aspiring black person. Weaponising race is directly acting against them.