skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The functional manifestation of the American democratic deficit is that the Republican party is able to maintain a near-permanent lockhold on power despite commanding only the support of a minority of the population. Any reform that maintains the status quo by protecting the tyranny of the Republican minority is not beneficial.

Notwithstanding the original purpose of the Senate, shifting population demographics mean that, by 2040, 70% of the Senate will represent the interests of only 1/3rd of Americans. The other 2/3rds of the US population will be forced to live with control over 30% of the Senate[1]. This is not avoiding tyranny of the majority; it is allowing the (Republican) flyover states to dictate to (Democratic) urban areas how they should organize their societies and live their lives.

Meaningful democratic reforms in America mean making its institutions reflect the makeup of America, and that means less representation for rural areas and fewer Republican in power.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/28/b...
There's a lot more horrible things happening in Yemen and absolutely nobody in the West cares. But everything is political nowadays, anything that's related to Trump gets high coverage, while there's probably somewhere like 200 000 people who have died so far in this ongoing conflict and it barely gets noticed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%9...

You gotta love the journalistic bias out there.
Why do you compare mpg/passenger for the jet and just plain mpg for the truck?

Since you assume the jet will be fully loaded, the Ford is 63 to 126 mpg/passenger fully loaded. That’s a more even comparison.
Well, the article notes:

Even attacks that target patient data, and don’t directly impact medical devices, can hurt patient outcomes: one study found that a hospital’s death rate from heart attacks goes up in the years after a data breach. That’s probably because hospitals have to divert resources to respond to the attack or upgrade software in a way that changes how doctors operate.

There are tough choices to be made here. An attach that spurs them to divert resources to security causing deaths means that diverting resources to security before the breach would cause deaths also. Knowing exactly how much to spend on things other than patient care is tricky. We can say they were negligent because they didn't spend the money, but there weren't any attributable deaths yet, so they would have been spending money with an idea it would probably cause some adverse patient outcomes and not knowing if it was actually needed. That's a hard position to be in.
I’ll buy a non iPhone, easy
Die out and be replaced by what?
I think this might collapse at the edge cases: If I'm a black man and the opinion is that I'm an animal, and the person with the opinion uses this reasoning to abuse me, then I may be ethically correct to not listen or keep myself in their presence.

Or, say, I'm a disabled person and someone tells me they think social services should be cut so people like me can die off for the good of humanity. It may be actively emotionally harmful for marginalized people to be listening to toxic opinions that they are worth nothing.

(EDIT: To be clear I think listening to opinions I disagree with in good faith is a good thing that we need more of in society. However, I also believe marginalized voices are, by sake of being marginalized, are forced to engage in a significantly higher volume of significantly more emotionally taxing opinions, and therefore may need to protect themselves, and that isn't wrong.)
In this case, it’s going from Point A back to Point A.
The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce SEO: Get More Sales from ‘Free’ Traffic
With Hollywood Accounting they would have inflated the costs as much as legally possible.
Speech isn't violence. Lack of speech isn't violence. People lazily regurgitate these postmodernist bumper sticker phrases and consider themselves informed activists.
Although not a solution for tab problem, apps like Historyhound may help to some extent getting over that losing all the information fear.
Basing the choice on the result we now see in the cinema is a fairly tautological affair. I mean, when you’ve made the decision to go with a real one then you might as well include as many shots and angles as you can get and milk it for all it’s worth.

The real question is if the movie could have been done with fewer angles and interior shots.
I'll grant you "the gutting of the Voting Rights Act". It's both a well-defined target for me read and it seems like a legitimate erosion of rights. Still I would like to read the majority opinion before I make up mind completely. Thanks for bringing it up.

Aside from the Voting Rights Act various voter-suppression activities were going on for decades and I don't see a change there. Wrong? Certainly. But not erosion.

Citizens' United seems like a legitimate court decision to me. I'm not sure I am a fan of the outcome, but the law is what it is. The Congress can make new law if they do not like it, and I might support this change.

Everything else you posted is a grab-bag of complains rather that an actual erosion of rights. I'm sorry. "FBI interference" swings both ways - some of it against dems, other against reps. I would rather they stayed out altogether, but we're far from Hoover days. In any case it's more dirty political infighting and pretty much nothing to do with citizen rights.

So end of the day Voting Rights Act is the only thing I can agree with. Meanwhile we've have also gained significant rights, e.g. gay rights, healthcare rights, women's participation in society, free speech (in particular "indecent" speech).

Bottom line is that I am not buying the "the alarm bells are ringing for America as a free society".
Can you not Google?

Here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallag...
The Electoral College is specifically intended not to line up with the popular vote. It is the final chance for the conscience of the people of the United States, unfettered by anything, to weigh in on the merit of those the masses have chosen as candidates for the highest office. The Faithless Elector was a feature; not a bug.

Or at least it was until it was perverted by the two major National Conventions. As mentioned earlier, read the Federalist papers for more context; but be prepared for a let down when it starts to sink in how much care was put into the system just for things to go off the rails, and I don't mean because of things like suffrage or the Civil Rights Movement either; but by the slow degeneration of the integrity of the system through the death by 1000 cuts of self-centered legislation, dismantling and delegation of Legislative authority to the executive, excessive politicization of the Judiciary, non-mandating of sunset dates for legislation, and the cancerous taint that is the lack of House or Senate limits on consecutive terms.
The voice? I think there were many voices of reason that had his back. It was very enlightening to see what extremes people will go to at times.
Completely BS. When I was walking through shopping mall in Beijing, for a moment I thought I’m in New York, all western brands. What are you talking about?
Yeah sorry, do you want fascism? Cause that's how you get fascism.
Here's the thing, even if testing was instant, people are likely to get tests only after they have symptoms and symptoms appear after people are contagious. Basically the test numbers we get today show us what the spread was like two weeks ago. And it takes time to shut things back down.

This makes it really hard to open up, unless the situation is really good, because there's a good chance of overwhelmimg system again before you have a chance to lockdown.
Report this to your company and law enforcement.
Do you also believe Joe six-pack should be in any way trained to be able to use that M60? Should be held to some standards, be they ethical or professional? Maybe require a license? Or does the 2A mean all bets are off?

I'll be honest - after the last few months I don't know if I trust an armed American populace any more than an armed government. Simply putting guns into the hands of vigilantes doesn't necessarily lead to a freer state. I certainly don't want idiots like that couple in St. Louis to have even more firepower.
>third attempt to appoint someone to that seat.

That's called compromise, and it is how a government should function, but Republicans have lost all ability to do that and so we have stalemate after stalemate, no covid stimulus, no attempt to compromise on anything. Democrats are fine with compromise, to a point, but the republicans have to meet in the middle, not take their ball and go home like they always fucking do.
It is for this reason I have chosen not to have children.
That's not true. To pick the first example I was able to find:

In United States v. Lopez, ___ U.S.____, 115 S.Ct. 1624 (1995), the Supreme Court invalidated, as beyond the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause, the Gun Free School Zone Act, which criminalized the possession of a firearm within 1000 feet of a school.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Telling half the people you're on the phone with to STFU for 20 seconds while a plane takes off (sometimes multiple times in a single call) can be annoying af.
Also, having to miss out on news or dialogue when watching tv.

I had to live with that for two years. All very annoying.
I am not American and I am not familiar with the legacy of justice Ginsburg. Looking at it from a non-American perspective, I would find it very odd for a supreme court judge, who is supposed to be non-partisan and neutral, to favour one party over another, even just in the matter of choosing a successor. Wasn't justice Ginsburg of the same mind?
2013 then
Do you think maybe the issue is that not only you’re reading out loud, but you are also thinking about the fact that you are reading out loud?

By the was “allowed” a typo or a joke? Genuine question.
So half dead babies?

Right to your own body every other week?
Last name starts A-H get abortions, rest don’t?

Or maybe by race, undesirable races get genocide? Or maybe the rich ones?

It’s not a topic with much “in between”
Windows Server Vulnerability Requires Immediate Attention
The war wasn’t started by Obama so I’m not sure what your point is. In fact the current administration has been supplying the Saudis with all the armaments they need making the situation even worse.

Check your facts before posting blindly about media bias.
Very consistently I’ve found engaging with replies to your own comment will get the original (even high ranking comment) downvoted.

It could be just a reflexive thing to seeing a given username show up too often. I wouldn’t presume it was any deeper than that.
Come on. Kennedy was confirmed in November of the year before the election.
I wonder how many kids have Macs due to their parents, and played Fortnite until this happened. Imagine them looking to buy their first computer in the future, and weighing the pros and cons of the available platforms..
You attempt to prevent a literal war of all against all by making various alliances and deals that please all but all small rump of violent extremists.
But the marketing isn’t done by the studio, it’s undertaken by the distributor. Different pockets, right? You can’t reconcile line items across different accounts (although I hear Hollywood is very creative with accounting).
Ask HN: Recommendations for a more productive web framework?
Hello! I'm currently working on a little web-based finance software for my side business, and I'm finding it a little bit tedious. I wanted to ask if you had recommendations for something that feels more productive.

I'm writing the backend in Go, and the frontend in Vue. I'm also using GraphQL. So my development looks like:

- Write logic in Go

- Write GraphQL resolvers in Go

- Write relevant Vue components for GraphQL

- Look up the syntax for Vue-baesd web components I'm using (eg, Vue+Bootstrap)

- Compile/minify my Vue code

- Run my Go program

If I had chosen to write this as I have in the past: server-side HTML templating and rendering, then I'd be done with the project by now! How can I improve my productivity without spending so much time in documentation or switching between different languages and code bases? My pain points are:

- It would be nice to use mostly normal HTML, or web components, without having to look up the syntax for every element every time I want to create a button.

- It would be nice to have some sort of automatic binding between form elements and server side processing. GraphQL makes this easy, as does DOM binding in Vue, to avoid the tedium of writing POST form parsing logic and special templating for indicating errors.

- It would also be nice to be able to use the same language, or the same code base. Right now, the server and client really do feel like distinct code bases, even though they're in the same repo.

How can I implement this such that my code feels as productive as using plain old HTML and templating, but with the UX touches, and developer productivity gains, with more modern tooling?
Actually, it doesn't.

Wyoming (the least-populous state) has .183% of the US population, so it should have .183% of the US House seats if they were fully proportional. It actually has .230% (1 / 435)--about 1.25× the power it should have. Rhode Island getting two House seats gives it about 1.34× the power it should have. Montana having only one seat leaves it at about 0.673× the power it ought to have.

As quantization errors go, the House's quantization isn't terribly distortive.
CS50 Lecture by Brian Kernighan (2010) [video]
1/3 to 2/3 of the Senate is lame ducks. They are only in power because the utter devastation of the Trump era won't hit their ballot until 2020 or 2022. The "blue wave" of 2018 didn't wash over the Senate, only by mere luck of the random distribution of election years across Republican Senators.

The Republicans are on the way out of the Senate, and McConnell knows it, which is why he's trying to ram this through now.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/...
Trump and the GOP plan to steal the electrion via the Supreme Court, just like GW Bush did in 2000, except this time they will need SCOTUS a lot more because it won't be as easy for them to justify nulling a landslide for Biden - but they will do it anyway because they have no shame, and if they have power, and they have SCOTUS to do their dirty work, then so be it.
The only reason Mitch Connell withheld the nomination was to prevent a vote he would lose. Kentucky's representative prevented a vote where California's representatives would have had a say. Kentucky decided that California did not need to be consulted on this matter. This sort of behavior is hostile to representative government.
People read intention and emotion into statements of fact or opinion based on their own mental situation, and there are a lot of people who are unhappy about this right now and downvoting something you don't want to happen is a way to 'vent'.

But I think Trump will nominate someone and they'll be approved by Senate, perhaps making Trump the most impactful president in terms of the judiciary in recent history.

Three supreme Court judges, roughly a quurter of all federal judges(194) of which 50 something are appeals court judges,and a hundred something district judges (that's not that many). They're fairly young for judges as well.

It's dark times for democrats as a conservative judiciary is going to be around for a while now.

If Trump wins another term and they republicans hold the Senate conservative judges being appointed will continue for another 4 years.
Advances in semiconductor fabrication are no longer increasing single-threaded performance of general purpose CPU code very much. It's still possible to increase performance by orders of magnitude, but it requires giving up flexibility by using dedicated hardware acceleration blocks such as tensor cores, plus going massively parallel with various combinations of SIMD and threading. That all makes software immensely more complex and less portable.
I just updated a 1 day app, it took a couple hours. No Vue.set/this.$set, significant changes to render functions, changes to much of the boilerplate. I was thinking that most of the deprecated behavior could be easily emmulated. The performace improvements are worth the pain, but I have a lot of code to update. Hopefully the migration build will solve it. It would be nice to avoid a python3 situation.
The miles flown is also more than one would drive in a day trip.

You need to compare total amount of fuel consumed per person for a fun day trip. Also, adding more people to a Ford truck doesn't dramatically increase the fuel consumption.
That was not too long ago that we had a Peace Nobel Prize president who actively continued conflicts and initiated new ones. I hope you appreciate the irony of the whole peace prize theater.

- Afghanistan (from which he promised to stop the conflict, did not happen).

- Libya. (death toll, about 20 000 depending on who you believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2011_Libyan_...)

And let's not forget the systematic use of secret drone strikes to kill targets on president's orders.
> I entertain the cognitive-dissonance of being "anti-racist" and "not having ever done anything that was anti-racist"

The systems and histories in place we battle with are much bigger, and much older, than we are. Unless your explicit goal is to set out to change the world (which frankly is a shitty goal and usually leads to some kind of genocide), literally the best advice is "think globally, act locally", as "outdated" as that saying I suppose now is.

Except that it is especially true when what you want is positive social change. Think about the implications of someone who first implements your initial original post ("just stop and think for a sec"), and then also implements your second ("is there anything I can do here?"). That's enough. Literally that, when applied on a large scale, would change the world, in a way far more positive than riots and social justice movements.

See, humans are really terrible creatures. We have a bad habit of overcorrecting and, you know, killing millions of people in the name of an ideal. We've done it what, dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of times.

It's the difference between water carving a river, and a nuke carving a crater. The first one takes longer but is alot less destructive.
A serious question - if I may. Where do you work? Sounds like a great company.

If you cannot respond - totally fair :)
because neither of those things are meaningful to him? He doesn’t think he will lose, obviously, so saying he does is meaningless- and because he doesn’t plan to lose, a “sweetheart deal” is similarly meaningless.
Being alive is bad for the environment.
Bravo Nolan.
You're right. Unfortunately this is a natural result of having so many different veto points in this process and in the US governmental system in general.

I was just thinking today about why Canada's Supreme Court isn't remotely politicized in the same way as the US. Part of it may be that we're just not as partisan, but I think the main thing is that with our parliamentary system, if the party in power has a majority—which they do the majority of the time—they can basically pass what laws they want. Of course, they generally refrain from doing deeply unpopular things since they'll pay for it at the next election, although even that does happen: eg. the Mulroney (conservative!) government implementing a 7% goods and services tax. Probably played a large part of them being out of power for a decade+ immediately following, but was great for the country fiscally from there forward.

Anyway, since the government can largely do what they want, there's much less need or reason to essentially try to enact 'legislation from the bench'. I couldn't even tell you the political leanings of our SC justices.

There are still plenty of downsides to this system of course (lack of proportional representation comes to mind), but it does appear to be more functional in a lot of ways than the US. And probably not by accident—the Canadian system was developed almost a hundred years after the US, and had it and other more recent governments as models; it was also soon after the US Civil War, which played a part in Canada adopting a strong federal system with less provincial power, relatively speaking.

Of course, it's easy to say all that. Much harder to actually enact significant reform!
Using the I2S is a clever hack. I didn’t know I2S could drive at 40 Hz!
I think the reason is because we read aloud so infrequently that we're just out of practice, so our time is spent focusing on the mechanical process of creating the words rather than retaining the text.

I happened to accidentally run this experiment when I was reading Spanish aloud for months to get my pronunciation skills back in order. It started off rocky like you say—constantly forgetting what I'd just read—but it definitely improved like a muscle I was working out.
That's not helpful. There are "rules", and there are "norms".
People follow the rules assuming that everyone is operating in good faith, and that everyone agrees the rules exist for the benefit of everyone. If rules are only there to be exploited, you end up with a disaster.

I mean, sure, you can force through a nomination now and produce a wildly lopsided court. But then the democrats might just win the senate and presidency and decide that they can add four more justices. The rules allow that, too. Is that the world you want to live in?
A hidden "SQL injection filter" in cloudflare seems like a truly awful idea.

What happens when an incompetent developer codes up a vulnerable website, and it seems to be protected through this feature, and this goes unnoticed for many years until cloudflare is phased out, the feature is disabled, or some other change to the way things are done outside the original dev's control comes along?

And what happens when you can bypass it as soon as there is some other way (i.e. base64 encoded, or not in HTTP at all) for user input to reach the API?

And of course, what happens when you can bypass it due to it having a bug or being deficient by design?

The lesson: do NOT "sanitize" your inputs, ever. Just keep your data types straight (by using things like prepared statements to convert a string to an SQL-escaped string) and block all inputs that should never end up in the database in the first place.
Show HN: YAES – Yet Another Eleventy(11ty) Starter
I'm curious: does anybody seriously think that if the positions were reversed that the Democrats would honor this?

Let's say that Biden wins, then Trump runs against him again in 2024. Somebody dies or retires right before the election, do you think the democrats would seriously wait and risk allowing the nomination to be done by Trump?

None of these people are in any way signaling their actual virtues. It's all just slogans. Also: the Democrats didn't grant this to the Republicans over Scalia. The Republicans were in power in the Senate at the time and used this power to their advantage.

Yeah, this is all terrible: this is the world you get when our politics seem to be regulated by twitter. If you want this to change, get rid of cable news talk shows, and get rid of twitter. Until then, this is what you're going to have.
You mean the 500,000+ killed in wars started by GW Bush?
You just described bats that live in caves, like vampires and only come out at night.
Of all the fouls you could call...
These proportions should change a lot in the coming decades, between wind/solar/storage and EV revolutions addressing about 2/3 of the "energy generation" part, at least.

As for food, the major potential revolutions are vertical farming and "lab meat", and those are very far from large scale implementation.