skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If someone wants to home in and destroy you, they've always been able to do that without total surveillance.

This isn't even about that. Yes, if someone powerful wants to make your life hard, your life is going to be hard.

Now consider what happens if they just don't care whether you live or die. Some system is set up to "solve crimes" as "efficiently" as possible. The same sort of system that gets used to issue YouTube copyright strikes against the original creators or public domain works because Hollywood put a copy in a motion picture, or mark every email sent by a perfectly legitimate small private email server as spam.

The police increase their "solve rate" dramatically -- by putting a ton of innocent people in prison. Because now instead of unsolved crimes they have "evidence" which, even if it's all circumstantial garbage, is enough to coerce guilty pleas out of defendants who can't afford a good lawyer or don't want to risk having the penalty quintupled if they demand their day in court and lose, or would rather spend six months in prison than pay six years worth of wages to a lawyer.

> If the records exist, and you're not guilty of the crime, hope exists that you could be cleared.

Only you can't get access to the records, because they're sensitive for all sorts of reasons, e.g. because having them in the aggregate would allow you to locate people in witness protection or unmask undercover law enforcement or case targets for espionage or theft. So you can't give access to everything to everybody, which means it only gets used as evidence for the prosecution because they can get it and you can't.

> Doesn't it make more sense for one's worst fear to be accused of something for which you are innocent but have no alibi?

In principle they still have to prove your guilt even if you don't have an alibi. Think about it, a large proportion of crimes are committed at night when most people are at home asleep.

Meanwhile, data under your control is generally only useful as evidence of guilt, because otherwise they just argue that it was under your control. If your phone was at the location of the crime, they argue you were there. If your phone was at home 200 miles from the location of the crime, they argue you knew you were about to commit a crime and left your phone at home. It's used to hurt you but not to help you.
>I'm an atheistically and scientifically inclined type, non-religious, without a mystically-oriented mind

I believe that events such as these can be explained by science if we allow for other mediums beyond purely the physical.

What is quantum mechanics? What if there's another medium by which information can travel, one which we don't fully comprehend? Does mysticism attempt to put a name to these concepts, which have been observed but are not always repeatable because humanity doesn't comprehend these ideas yet?

Just some questions. I think they're worth seeking the answers to.
I suppose you can't really answer that question for sure until you're fired. Do you still feel like friends? Then you are friends.
Each Nano account is its own blockchain. These accounts interacting form the block lattice. So it's not as though there are competing block lattices in Nano. In Bitcoin there can be a sidechain that can overtake the main chain (if the sidechain becomes longer than the main chain) and then cause a reorg of some blocks. But I don't think anything like this is possible in Nano. You'd have to ask the devs though to know for sure on the official Nano forum at forum.nano.org

In terms of the incentives to keep the network running without mining fees or proof of stake rewards, the Nano community and devs think that merchants and other services using Nano will save significant amounts of money by not having to pay credit card processing fees. This will incentivize those merchants and service providers to run their own node (which only costs around $60 per month) in order to keep the network healthy and decentralized. The lack of mining fees and proof of stake actually disincentivizes the kind of centralization we are seeing with Bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin technology was never decentralized, merely distibuted, despite ideals about how the software could be used.

What is decentralized is the currency at the user level. It has taken the power of control away from a central authority.
Any tips on making time go faster on the treadmill?
Maybe!

I always found Shimizu delightful, but worked in Tokyo for about 12~15 years (depending on how you count gaps), so I certainly can't criticize anyone for choosing that path!

If I had it all over to do again, I would probably choose a blend of Tokyo and Shimizu and Nagoya (maybe 3~4 years each?), but I really hate to move, so I probably end up with one and just stay there and hang out with yakuza in akachochin, because I fall into ruts of behavior.

EDIT: I have kind of a life-time pass, a marriage pass and a couple of kids that ended being able to be citizens, so it is surely a lot easier for me to come-and-go than it is for you - and I don't intend to be glib to the fact that you are probably trying to get a work visa (I started there!)
> PRISM is a program that allows them to download account contents via a special app, which is integrated by these companies, with the cooperation of the companies participating.

No, it isn't. Where did you get this ridiculous notion? PRISM is a data integration program between the NSA and the FBI. It shows this right in Snowden's leaked slides. https://zdnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2014/10/05/c3fe17c5-4c...

The FBI sends a data request for specific accounts' data to the data provider. The data provider's lawyers review the request and if nothing is amiss, they configure a wiretap on those accounts that sends data to the FBI. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

> Note that being American or being located in the US is insufficient protection against PRISM due to the way Section 702 works in practice as applied by the NSA.

Huh? There is no secret interpretation that allows Section 702 requests to violate the Fourth Amendment. The only program in Snowden's leaks that illegally collected Americans' data was the phone metadata program.
They're immune from being sued in the way I described - so they can essentially cause (monetary) harm to someone else (in this case, the victim of a patent troll), even if inadvertent, and it can be proven that the work they (the PTO et al.) did is invalid (patent gets invalidated), but still get off scott free while the victim ends up with all the costs of cleaning up the mess the PTO created.

Yes, they can get 'fired' - I was simply meaning that they can screw up a patent application so badly (letting it be accepted when it should not) without repercussions, where that type of screwup would get non-government employees fired (probably for lesser screwups, too).
Higher level languages which rely more on "zero cost abstractions" are much further removed from CPU and memory.

Higher level languages are much further removed from C's model of the CPU and memory. And despite that "distance" there is virtually no difference between C's and C++'s (and often Rust's) performance. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how low level your language is if it isn't getting you any performance uplift.

Sure if you dive down into memory-model and CPU-internal details like micro-ops and pipelining then this model quickly falls apart, but on the surface, the "C abstract machine" still maps pretty well to what's happening under the hood.

A core part of the "C abstract machine" is sequential execution. Instruction-level parallelism is par for the course in modern processors, many of which have hundreds of instructions executing at any given time. So C hasn't been reflective of typical desktop/server CPUs for the last 30 years at least.

Hardware vendors spend a lot of money to make C code execute quickly, but we're now seeing the absolute limits of that.
Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving Capability' Falls Short of Its Name
As an independent email server operator for almost a decade I can tell you the big three email providers are boiling that frog.
A fraction or proportion in general doesn't have to be representable as a ratio of natural numbers. That's called a "common fraction", and as it happens, floating point representation stores the value as a ratio of natural numbers anyway. It's like asking someone to cut you 1/pi of a pie. It isn't total nonsense, but it is weird and you're going to get an approximation. They might get confused by your odd request and give you half a pie instead a third of a pie though!
Do you(/they if you're not from the US) not have breathalyzers?
Yes, for sure. It's also the case that our understanding of ancient texts has changed a lot over the past 20-30 years as more archaeological finds have been discovered (e.g. Mawangdui). I once had a Professor who tried to discourage me from focusing so much on ancient literature because he joked that all my research would be out of date in 20 years :D
>I'm not talking about people, I'm talking about companies behaving badly.

Your main claim was that the "old web" has been destroyed.

The web is not eroding. It has expanded dramatically, and now includes huge amounts of stuff that were not part of the (say) 1994-2000 version. It continues to contain large amounts of stuff that are directly connected to that earlier stuff, albeit in massively greater quantity and quality.

Mobile is locked down. Nothing to say about that. Mobile is not the web, it's just the platform that most people interact with the online world on. Nothing more (or less).

Data is not deterministically locked in silos, although many people take the easy path toward certain functionality (e.g. email) that has that result. But this still a choice.

Ditto for tracking, though arguably less of a choice. You can do a lot to stop it, but you shouldn't have to.

The software/IT/web world is massively more diverse than it was in 1995. The available material, the participants : way, way more diverse.

Interoperability was never there: we had the Unix wars, Unix vs. Windows, mac vs everyone else. We had Intel vs PowerPC (soon to be revisited as Intel vs ARM).

Unless you've been using GNU since 1986 (I have), your tools weren't open.

Google, Apple and Facebook are doing bad things. They have not destroyed the internet that you loved, they've made it harder to see.
It's nice to not know it's not _actually_ just my imagination haha.
This is such and interesting point of view. For example, what if China, Switzerland or even the UK declared they were going to make a conceded effort to back their currency with a basket of precious metals or other commodity, hell, maybe even blockchain based with a private key on very bill.

If the us doesn't or can't follow suit how long before bad money starts chasing good out if the country?
A third of American companies say they don't know when they'll reopen offices
I imagine it's fun for the officers to watch a drunk person try these things too.
It started out that way (you might have noticed this is a throwaway), but it seems this resonated with people.
Worksnaps on Sourceforge.net
Yes, they’ve already made up their mind about what they want to do, so once you’re suspected the testing is just a formality.
Honor Announces MagicBook Pro at IFA 2020
Your friends who were exchanging winamp skins? Total enthusiasts. You didn't notice it because compared to the hardcore nerds who had been online for 15 years before you, you felt like regular people. Fast forward, and it turns out otherwise.
> Painting everyone with this giant brush of hypocrisy is over-simplifying a complex mix of people.

Was momokoko saying that anyone was a hypocrite?
It's pretty amazing Alex made that Mastodon to Pleroma migrator. Moon had some early scripts that didn't work out so well and he ended up loosing them anyway. Seems like an insane amount of work. I still maintain both a Mastodon and Pleroma server. I'm not sure if I'll ditch one eventually.
Another good argument is trying to define a function pointer without typedefs.
Yep, just zone out. Try to cultivate some equivalent of highway hypnosis.

Or just actually go walking out in the real world instead of using a treadmill. It's way more interesting. Bonus points if there's some offroad / bushwalk type stuff in there, it's great for all your control muscles.
Sure, and let's let the marketers make any changes they want directly to the master branch.
What problem does he face that a personal website is the best solution to?
It's also entirely conceivable they didn't, and parallel reconstruction has been well-established to be a part of the US justice system for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
Even if it just for one person (which does appear to be what they asked for to me), asking for their entire search histories from all their devices seems like fishing. Particularly since they used it to charge him with new crimes (lying to FBI, etc) rather than the crime they were supposedly searching for.
Watch a movie or listen to a podcast, you'll zone out if your brain finds it interesting enough. And when you zone out time flies.
Indeed, and there are already search engines like https://wiby.me/ and https://millionshort.com/, which offer more direct access to content off the beaten track.
> without a warrant

You're claiming the feds don't have to follow the law. There is no evidence for your claim.
How is global consensus not global state?

What are we consensing on, if not a mutually agreeable set of facts (state) that we can use as a basis for future decisions?

If the answer is “nothing” then you by definition have a toy, not a tool.
That violates my organization's NAP, or "No Acronym Policy". No way I'll get an LGTM on any PR that includes that!
So like in say 1000 years the world will still be the same?

It'll crash one day. The world will change. Statistically speaking when it does it will likely be for the worse too.
I have never seen an engineer who understood the issues be 'as pliable as wet noodles'.

What you're asking is for an engineer to be stuck in a place of legal culpability if they do the work, and to be fired if they don't. Added bonus: you mention whistle blowing, but who the hell would they whistle blow to?

If there's a proper industry or governmental group to blow the whistle to, that will also see the engineer financially compensated until such a time as they find a new job, then fine, it's fair to make engineers culpable. Otherwise, you're just making engineers suffer for the bad decisions of those made above them, by making them either legally liable, or risking their jobs.
Given that we have writings from Indo-European speaking empires since 1000 BC that we can mine for phonological clues and trace evolutionary changes with while the languages of supposed Altaic only began to be written after 700 AD, it's not surprising that there's less evidence to be found and not enough for a hypothesis bold enough to link those disparate cultures together. The idea that Hindi, Persian, Latin, Russian, and English are linked together is already very surprising.
Let them work hard even if you have nothing to hide. I'd refuse to disclose any private info up until the law requires me to. Intimidation is a trick they use to cut down on work.
People should be encouraged to stop using non-unique passwords for anything they remotely care about. Password managers are awesome.
The issue here isn't legality but performance royalties. Music played over the internet is considered a performance. These royalties should be collected and paid out to recording artists, or whoever owns the master recording copyright, whenever that song is performed publicly. It's seems that FB doesn't want to pay artists these royalties.
It's more than that.

When it becomes just a breath test, next step is to set up road blocks and breath test everyone. We know because it happens in countries.

The idea is human beings should be considered innocent by default and allowed to live their lives without being medically tested at random.

Suspicion -> suspicion -> breath test -> blood test.
Most children do not take on the responsibility of setting an alarm, getting up in the morning, cooking for themselves, and then walking to the bus stop to take the bus to school (or their own car).

Pretty much every adult does this as a matter of course.
Sometimes people aren't aware what can be pieced together from the information they haven't the need to hide.
I think “persuasion” is a good neutral term in this case. That’s what it’s called when someone tries to convince you of something.
Then you also get into the problems of multiple independent discoveries, or convergent research. Or whether someone's discovery is relevant at all if nobody learns from it -- that is, what is the value of popularizing a method over its mere discovery?
One half of what you're demanding

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...

After that was published editor of The New York Times' editorial page James Bennet was forced out.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/media/james-bennet-new-york-t...
You cannot delete your search history in any meaningful way from google. You can delete it locally and they have some account tools. They also have all of their request logs, trends, and other compiled data. The best thing you can do is set up your own VPN and do other steps to anonymize as a constant practice.
> The art of turning 6 lines into 92 lines by replacing if-then-else and switch with objects..

> ..In summary, traditional branching is often a student’s tool until a more suitable, polymorphic approach is discovered.

I can't tell if this is serious or a straight-faced joke. The article did not convince me at all - in fact it dissuaded me further from the kind of approach taken, which I often encounter in the wild: a class for every condition, with slightly differing implementations.

A similarly questionable article was posted a couple days ago:

Anti-IF Framework - https://blog.arkency.com/anti-if-framework---if-slash-else-b...
There's a Gap Dream song called College Music which goes: Too many soft machines / No relation to the world / Unnecessary wall / ... / It makes me sick sometimes.

These are literally all the lyrics I could find, but maybe my Google fu is weak: https://www.spin.com/2016/06/gap-dream-college-music-stream-...

Luddites were against not receiving a piece of the larger pie, not against technology or progress.

https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-f...
The tie as we know it, was a streamlined version of the cravat. Which was popularised in Europe during The Thirty Years War (1618–1648), by Croatian mercenaries.

That knowledge has always pleased me, when I’ve had to wear a tie. That it’s descended from these swashbuckling, brightly attired, mercs.
I don't think FaceTime has the societal impact you think it does. it's just the evolution of the phone - very nice, but doesn't solve our real challenges. When you think about it - the computer itself wasn't an insane concept since the 1950s. The technology evolved with major improvements much like anything else, like cars, planes, boats, etc, but the theory behind it pretty much remained the same. Once the right materials and manufacturing of chips were figured out, is it really much of a jump to guess we'd have amazing computers today?

And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause.

> I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.

I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"
I know the author of meander, and I kind of doubt they'd describe it this way. I will ask them, though.
Helicopters without tail rotors (Kamovs, Chinooks, etc) are typcially faster than conventional helicopters - They aren't loosing ~20% of their power to the tail.
Something of note, Hangul was generally rejected among the literate elites in Korean society for centuries, which were mostly men. However, it found unexpected life as a written language for women, who otherwise didn't have opportunities to learn Chinese script. While some written material exists of Hangul being used to communicate between a man and a woman (usually a husband and wife), evidencing that men could read and write Hangul as well -- which is not surprising as it's fascinatingly easy to learn to read -- most ancient Hangul documents we find were written by some for women.

It wasn't until the 20th century, partially as a counter occupation rise of national and ethnic identity against the Japanese colonizers that Hangul became modernized and accepted as the general script for Koreans.

In North Korea, as further assertions of national identity, all remnants of Chinese characters were purged and many loan words were provided with "preferred" native Korean words. In the South, Chinese characters were/are still seen as a prestige study and was even commonly mixed in with Hangul in newspapers but the use of Hanja is rapidly declining in print.
Elon Musk demonstrates Neuralink brain implants in a live pig
People are "allowed" to be frustrated with the situation, and I think it's a little dismissive to accuse them of having "victimhood".

It's perfectly reasonable to miss direct interactions with coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with being friends with your coworkers. Video chats really aren't comparable for most people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated that you're stuck in a crowded apartment with roommates and no office space. The WFH change happened virtually overnight for many people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be fearful that a junior contributor's career may stall during this. Most companies' cultures weren't built around this system, so it's pretty rational to expect companies to struggle recognizing junior employees.

Obviously people can and will adjust, but criticizing an imperfect system is the only way it will improve - it's not a sign of weakness.
It's magic thinking to suppose that profit and general goodness always match up. There's no logical reason to think that would happen.

What often happens, fortunately, is that they match well enough that the relative simplicity of the market system makes it a net positive. But to think that capitalism works wonders for society and customers is just silly.

Theme Park parodies this fact of life very aptly.
Well it is what it is. One of the "odd" things is not really knowing how long you've got. Doctors hate to put a date on it, and clearly everyone's trying to push things out - but it makes planning difficult :-)

For this course I now have a small team of helpers authorised to look after the subreddit, the GitHub and the domain name. So hopefully it'll keep going strong after I bow out.

I've also changed the licensing to CC by SA 4.0, so if you think this is a good base you're welcome to develop it as you see fit, including commercially.