skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peak capitalism: when ad companies own your communications infrastructure.
> Facts are still important to those seeking truth.

What about the people that don't want to seek truth?

> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...
Happy to provide a vital service to society.
More like -

Everyone can be killed by COVID, everyone can be killed by terrorists.

However it is unlikely your dunkin donuts in farmville, North Dakota is going to be the target of the latest ISIS attack.

Likewise your likelihood of dying of COVID is not equal to others. If you believe it is - you have been duped.
How do you know some of your coworkers haven't upgraded their setup on personal equipment? Or optimized their lighting setups?
You're right about cars, but I'm unsure whether that's from ads or not. I rarely if ever see advertisements for cars, unless you consider TV shows like Top Gear/Grand Tour to be advertisements for cars.

I think the difference is that I live in a different country. I don't consume much local media and even if I did there are few enough local products that you would've heard of all of them by word of mouth. Take the soda as an example. I've certainly seen Coke and Pepsi ads, but I've not seen (or at least can't remember) ads for about half the sodas in my local supermarket. Even when Coke released Coke Zero the first time I found out about it was seeing it on a shelf in a store.

But let's say that all of what you're saying is true. The effect from it seems quite small. I'd estimate that I spend at least 5 minutes a day seeing ads.
I think a lot of the problem is that it isn't familiar. People use intuitive reasoning, they don't see disease and death, it must not be a problem. But it spreads so fast that it's dangerous long before you see it (because it quickly gets to the point of being uncontrollable).
We built a Christmas video generator to spread around some joy during this crazy 2020. We made the code available open source if anyone wants to create something similar themselves: https://github.com/shotstack/christmas-demo-2020

Onwards to 2021!
I always like to say that we live in an exponential meritocracy, where your accumulated merit enhances your ability to accumulate more merit, eventually resulting in a small minority rapidly pulling ahead of the pack. Goes with the old adage: turning $100 into $120 is work; turning $100 million into $120 million is inevitable. Perhaps we need a linear meritocratic function.
Yes, and it could simply be a matter of things like postural cues that you think aren't aggressive but nevertheless are asserting behavior that other dogs don't like.
Thank you for helping in all these emergency rooms, and I’m sorry that some people are downplaying the virus’s effects on mortality in the USA in 2020.
So which dog breed do you like? If I send you one or two videos of that breed involved in a bad fight, will you have an open mind and be persuaded?

For that matter, do you drive a car? I could show you a number of videos that demonstrate the danger of cars.

And so on. Maybe folks are down voting you because a collection of videos isn’t a good argument. Maybe they have a pitbull in their life that they love. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a closed-minded SJW. If you are open-minded yourself, you must accept that maybe they disagree with you because they don’t find your argument compelling.

I get why you are passionate about this. I understand you want to keep people safe. I am sure if we could discuss this over a beer, we could find common ground.
I'd be more pragmatically worried about XfiniWarner than a municipal broadband provider. The former operates at scale and can escape accountability by fallaciously invoking private property, whereas the latter has at least some democratic oversight at the town level. Although really all communications companies are effectively organs of the state, regardless of their governing charter.
I opened this thread on my PC earlier, and saw upon refresh that the title has been changed. The original title was:

> Nintendo “stalked” hackers with private investigators, coercing into settlements

This seems like corporate whitewashing to me. Has HN become a tool for corporate PR? It feels dishonest considering the evidence of this scary behavior by Nintendo corporation.
To be fair, beamforming is a thing now on some consumer wifi 6 routers.
The personal risk of getting seriously sick is very low. The risk of spreading it to others is very high. And the hospitals are overwhelmed.

Sometimes your personal risk is not the end of the story.
Here is a different way to put it: I don’t recognise woman that I have known, loved, made love to etc. in your description of woman. Which makes me believe that your arguments are not correct for woman in general. Unless of course the woman in my life (by some extraordinary coincidence) happens to be the only woman on the planet not fitting into your description. Highly unlikely but of course possible. I by the way recommend reading the papers showing that most “evidence” in Psychology is not reproducible i.e. not scientific. I would caution against basing your conclusions on them.
Grammer seems to be another Achilles heel.
You don't give up a board seat for $100k. At least, you definitely shouldn't.
> what someone else may call a utopia I would surely call some sort of nightmare.

The very definition of a utopia (colloquially, regardless of where the word actually came from) is a state where nobody feels like its a nightmare.

Where everybody has basic comforts and the freedom to do what they want (as long as it doesn't harm anyone) and decide their future and has safety nets against misfortune.

You can still have plenty of interesting trials and tribulations in such a setting (competing in sports, getting good at art, exploring the cosmos) and I'm sure that if done right it will be a refreshing change from the usual tired old trope of "Everything's fucked! And will always be fucked!"
When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago. Yeah, it feels like people are angrier than ever, especially online, but Twitter is not real life.

A combination of increased tech surveillance, longer prison sentences, and bank tellers holding very little cash--all of these factors make bank robbery much less lucrative than it was in the past.
Unadversarial examples: Designing objects for robust vision
As a developer I'm saying I would prefer QML to HTML anytime. :-D
What assurance do you have by understanding how networking works? Have you actually dug into the software on that Google router to make sure it isn't backhauling the output of conntrack -L, perhaps for quality assurance and product feedback purposes?
Some of this is COVID, no doubt. Most of those deaths are people in their last decade (if not last few years) of life regardless. We had a baby boom in the 1950s. So we should be too surprised to have a death boom starting right about now.
I don’t think gaffer’s tape and duct tape are the same thing. Gaffer’s tape needs to be easily removable, which duct tape generally is not.
> it is Apple [...] track record of execution

Granted! My personal guess is this turns out much like Google Fiber: a capital- and regulation-heavy endeavor that Apple (and their investors, used to tech margins) aren't culturally or financially willing to commit to for a long enough haul.

But an effort which eventually pays off by frightening existing players into cutting better partnership deals with Apple.

From a quick peek, Apple runs ~25% pre-tax margins. For reference, Ferrari has ~20%, as the highest in the industry. And ~10% or less seems standard.

So in the end, if Apple is more successful than Ferrari at selling vehicles profitably, they'll still be making less money than they're used to on the investment.

That doesn't seem like something investors are going to be willing to let Apple endlessly torch cash in pursuit of, competing against firms with decades of experience, when the alternative is returning it directly to them via dividends, buybacks, etc.

And that's not even getting into the optics of labor-relations with manufacturing that Apple would have to very publicly expose, vs their more hidden technology supply chain.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like the only viable "Apple car" is a limited-volume halo project, built on top of an existing manufacturer's platform -- which would mirror their approach to technology, in many ways.
They’re (poorly) trying to emulate Blazor Server.
I completely agree! In a not-overly-large flat in Hong Kong, we have three APs to provide complete coverage, and only two of those are connected via Ethernet. The third is a repeater!

~10 other networks are also visible; the density hurts performance as well.
The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
The other poster is actually right - there are some categories that fit, such as cars. However, from the categories you listed I can't really name anything. I assume companies like Samsung make the things you mentioned, but I'd have to look it up. I certainly can't think of seeing an ad for any of them (except toothbrushes).

There are only a few brands of toothbrushes in supermarkets here. I've seen ads from them, but the reason I know the brands exist is because I've used their toothbrushes or paste. In the store I pick whatever's cheap.
A QALY-based analysis would provide a different historical perspective.

https://www.healthguideinfo.com/health-informatics/p6185/

I haven’t seen a QALY-based analysis of the fatality data. Odd, because our State is reporting underlying condition stats and age (by decade) and gender of death daily. Pretty easy to take expected years of life remaining, and quality of life given age and underlying conditions and estimate and come up with an estimate to first order of the “quality life years” lost due to COVID.

No one seems to be providing such a QALY estimate.

So, let’s do a quick one.

For 1917, the comparison year, let’s assume excess deaths were from combat and the Spanish Flu.

Combat skews young. So, say, 50 quality years per death.

I don’t see any age-specific bias or bias towards underlying conditions one way or another in Spanish Flu cases given this information. And a lot of cases of healthy adults dying, e.g. Australian miners.

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

So let’s say 30 quality years lost per death.

COVID skews old.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

The median age of COVID death in my county has been in the late 70s

Life expectancy tables for US suggest ten years of life remaining for folks in their late 70s. I’ve seen statistics that find degraded quality of life in the last 3 or 4 years of life.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-healthy-lifestyle-age...

Even without underlying conditions, that puts quality life years lost at 8. Underlying conditions predisposing to COVID death will only make it look worse, driving the 8 down to 7 or 6.

So, for 1917, 50 years lost in combat combined with 30 quality years lost to the “Spanish Flu”...IDK, let’s say 40 years lost per death.

For 2020, COVID excess deaths...6-8 quality years lost.

Even after quibbling with numbers, the quality years of life lost are a factor of 5 higher in 1917 as compared to 2020. Based on this, admittedly rough, “analysis”. (You get what you pay for.)

I really would like to see a formal QALY analysis of COVID, instead of the ones that many people have already done in their heads.
This too. Or just people's perceptions of "overwhelmed." I know people who don't think hospitals are having issues because "nobody is spilling out the door, so they still have room in hallways."

They went to a local hospital and looked through the window to make this judgement, as if the resource constraint was physical space in the building.
Having multiple access points is perfectly reasonable. I don't think it's fair to blame the Wi-Fi spec for this.

If you want anyone to blame, maybe blame the ISPs or router manufacturers that market the idea that a single router can cover multiple rooms because that's just not possible with nowadays' interference levels and bandwidth requirements.

Having multiple access points should be considered normal and expected. Maybe we should understand and embrace the laws of physics and their limitations instead of trying to pretend they don't exist?
So long as you don't live in a crater or have skyscrapers blocking your view line of sight should not be an issue for a majority of the population. Starlink wouldn't require a specific southern view of the sky like a GEO system does but it won't do well in 'urban canyons'. MEO consumer things you might be familiar with that experience reduced signal in the described conditions include GNSS (GPS) and SiriusXM.
But how would you test the inference with that data? You don’t need to know when the dog crossed the road but why.

Which reminds me of this Far Side cartoon: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/251990541629282256/
"It seems this role is too much for you to handle which is why we need someone else, we'll let you keep 3%, sound good?"
Is key word "alive" or is it "conscious"? Or at least "sentient"?
Couldn’t one take the view point that the formation of a transient ribosome could have created the conditions to solve replication?

This route would be much more of a dance than what you’ve implied. A transient ribosome makes a protein-based RNA replicase, replicase copies all local the RNAs including the RNA ribosomes. This process would eventually result in a large number of ribosome RNAs and replicase proteins without the need to have a “perfected process” prior to either step.

The whole process would be much messier than what we see today after millions of years of refinement, of course. The stability of an arbitrary RNA polymer is also increased by the presumed lack of RNases as well.

It has been a few years since I took a grad course covering the ribosome, so excuse my lack of currentness if new research has discounted this.
>>And they are also moving to a distribution model where the owners gets to mint and sell too.

You're conflating the multitude of individual ETH owners, who now have the ability to stake ETH to get a right to become a validator and earn new ETH, with a singular entity in control of the vast majority of XRP.
I can just repeat: That's a problem with the specific manner of software distribution on some operating systems, and not a general argument in favor of web-apps.
Yeah, they now rob you safely from their computers.
And once hospitals are overwhelmed, your risk of dying of any cause increases regardless of your age, location or health.
Then came the police state and the party was over.
get a fucking lawyer
Sounds about right for a technology that operates on unregulated frequencies - as Shannon's law dictates that there is only so much bandwidth in the air. The primary reason for bad wifi in any densely populated city is not construction material but the two dozens of routers trying to yell on top of each other.
Anyone else get boxed in by Waymos throughout their daily routine?

I’m a former software engineer now homeless in SF, and man do I feel like a Truman with these things sometimes.

God willing, I’ll document the formations I’ve seen and see if I can cross referene a CCPA request with my info at times/locations that I happened to catch interesting dashcam footage or made a mention of it.
Oh wow, I love that. Thanks for that fact
A reciprocal view is that all sci/tech advances which led to those saved lives has also led to urbanization (=> vastly accrued need for antibiotics), automobile (=> need for seatbelts and other automotive innovations)...

We may (or may not) be "more something" (for example "more happy", "more self-accomplished"...) thanks to all those advances.
Censorship by private entities is fine but surveillance by them is not.
So... now we are having a conversation about why one group of 400K people is more worthy of saving than another?
Wouldn't we generally expect any given year is the deadliest year on record? If we assume (1) the population strictly increases year on year and (2) deaths are proportional to population in a given year, then it would be true. Weaken these assumptions and it should still be true for the most part.
I agree with this. I'll add that if you want him to work and still receive aid you're probably better off moving to a state or country that doesn't treat their disabled so badly.

Of "first world" countries US is the worst place to be if you have disabilies.
GitHub DMCA Takedown Notices
Hey, good news. We have pretty strong evidence that our policy choices have been geared towards letting the elderly die.

(I'm talking about all the elderly that died if it isn't clear what evidence I'm referring to)

Of course, the awful thing is that controlling the virus in May (I mean actually doing it, not just having a pause) would have been better for the economy. But we are too stupid for that.
Just a point of clarification for those not familiar with the heist, the weapons used were -not- legal in CA or the US. It was also during the time of the Federal Assault Weapons ban. They were not owned nor able to be owned legally during that time.

It was also the inspiration for Heat’s shootout!
Just adding onto your comment, Apple probably recommends use of wifi because: 1. They collect AP's for their mapping/location crap. 2. The wifi chipsets they use are basically their own self-contained computers that can manage scanning at low-power without taxing the CPU. 3. At least for new HW, some of the 5G-NR stuff really isn't well optimized yet, not as bad as LTE originally was... but it's entirely possible the new modems for now are a little power hungry. Turning on wifi makes the cell chipset track less carriers, typically it'll just hug to one low-band carrier for status/push messages instead of as many as 5 or 6 carriers.

EDIT: Phones usually only transmit on one channel while receiving anywhere from 1-7 different channels at once, only the recent flagships transmit on 2 or 3 right now.
It's never a good decision for Apple to buy Tesla, even in hindsight. Buying a capital intensive company within a heavily regulated industry is not the same as buying a social media company or a messaging app.

An increase in the stock price has little to do with the success of the actual business. Tesla hasn't gotten 600% better at being a car company. So far, Apple would only benefit from a Tesla purchase by selling the stock--which would defeat the whole purpose of buying it in the first place (Apple is not a hedge fund).
"The first chapter of German broadcasting ended with the National Socialists, who systematically used radio for their anti-Semitic and militant purposes. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, there were personnel "purges," as the persecution apparatus called it: Political dissidents and Jews were forced out of their positions."

One of my theories of the current political turmoil is that social media is playing the same role as radio did for the Nazis.
I’ll take an AP in every room gladly, for me it’s about less wires to the individual devices not less wires throughout the house as a whole. But it does suck if you live somewhere that doesn’t have wired Ethernet ports on every room.

However I’ve found that mesh works surprisingly well these days. With 3 access points I’m able to cover ~2200 sqft with no problems, and it works well enough that I haven’t bothered setting up wired backhaul even though I have Ethernet ports in every room.
>The risk of spreading it to others is very high

So? The risk of that other person become seriously sick remain the same.

>And the hospitals are overwhelmed

If the hospital are overwhelmed, keep in mind that most hospital are not overwhelmed, then yes it need to be fixed, nobody said to do nothing, some that can be done:

- increase capacity

- redistribute patient to less busy hospital

- better treatment method

- don't test everyone for covid

- don't admit people with mild symptom

- etc
And, somewhat randomly: A list of countries and what they claim to be the IPs in that country on a subdomain:

http://countries.openportstats.com/
Oh wow, so there actually is something called Duck Tape. TIL
Especially if the cat rolls a 20 and crits...

You better have 16+ CON!
Grammer and speling.
There were regular phone numbers, you had to call these numbers with the phone (no dialer on the minitel). All voice calls were billed per minute, variying by distance ("local" vs "national") and by the time of the day (cheaper on weekends or after 7PM).
The key part is the "by far."

The article addresses this in the first few paragraphs:

> U.S. deaths increase most years, so some annual rise in fatalities is expected. But the 2020 numbers amount to a jump of about 15%, and could go higher once all the deaths from this month are counted.

> That would mark the largest single-year percentage leap since 1918, when tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers died in World War I and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in a flu pandemic. Deaths rose 46% that year, compared with 1917.
Oh it’s just a random tablet? Do you know what software (code) it uses? I always thought it was IOS which is the same as IPADs I think
Short range of wifi is intentional, unfortunately. They picked frequencies absorbed by water vapor in the atmosphere. On top of that, they picked high frequencies that cell carriers don't want because they have little penetration.

The short range is intentional to allow many networks function in dense areas. Multiple AP's is really the only option
And "Deaths usually rise by about 20,000 to 50,000 each year, mainly due to the nation’s aging, and growing, population."
I decoded some more of the indirectly referenced parties in this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/kiddap/sec_...
It sounds like the 80s were more fun.

We had Miami Vice, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica back then.

And homes were still affordable places to live in.
crickets... :)
Research should be reproducible but some research would be too constrained by the cloud.
> Treat fines like payments
> e.g. park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of the) fine as a parking fee

This doesn't seem like something you're "allowed" to do. Maybe more like "able" to do, in the sense that you can violate other laws, and maybe the payoff or the risk/reward ratio makes it worthwhile. My understanding of "allow" is that it means people will accept you doing something. The existence and enforcement (like fines) of rules that prohibit doing things seems exclusive to something being "allowed".
A good "secret" is to use the DFS frequencies most routers won't choose by default. High end consumer routers will allow you to select these frequencies, and usually there's no nearby interference.

I have ~70 nearby networks visible but none on my DFS channel. Your signal can drop if the AP detects radar but unless you're near a weather radar station or airport it works fine IMO
"The Computers Chronicles" had an episode about it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUx7dP2S7h4
Like Telegram Desktop? Why not if it would result in a similarly smooth experience.