skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This myth that the US constitution is in any way "good" is weird. It's one of the earliest; and fortunately others leared from its mistakes. Including the US itself, when it had considerable influence in drafting the WW2 losers constitutions, which uncoincidentally are quite different from the US.

Checks and balances essentially don't work in the US. The best bit is simply a decent judiciary, but that was mostly copied from the British. And even that is more poorly executed than elsewhere, due to the political nature of judicial appointees, and esp. due to the tradition of direct elections of some judges. I'd say it's arguably worse than the British model it was copied from, not because the Brits were psychic geniuses, but because of the not entirely unrelated fact that the UK model is much more open to reform; it's aged better because it's less crufty. When lead by a dangerously populist government that might be risk, of course, but so far even populists have turned out not to do too much consitutional harm - might differ in the future.

It's more like: the US constitution was grand it its aims, but pretty v1.0 in its execution. It's full of unintentional (or at least unfortunate) indirect effects that didn't work out too well; such as that congress is likely to deadlock; that the constitution isn't sufficiently amendable; that its form of democracy is subject to unproportional divergence as state population sizes diverge, that by contrast adding new states is way too easy, that elections at all are in no way shape or form necessarily fair (and I don't there there has ever been a particularly free&fair election in the states) due to gerrymandering, state size disparities, imbalanced voting registration requirements, and lack of constitutional protections for elections in general; the presence of systematic biased introduced by winner-takes-all approaches; the lack of a checks on the presidency (clearly not intentional, but impeachment is a purely hypothetical check). I'm sure actual scholars could name a bunch more. Then theres the more general flaws in legal republics, such as that there no systematic mechanism for reform; laws just accumlate leaving extremely outdated wordings on the books forever, and with ever increasingly large rulebooks.

Seriously, name 1 check/balance that's actually particularly good! (I mean, I guess there by sheer scope might be one... but I can't think of one anyhow).
The federal government is the government of the individual states. A state is a sovereign entity. Each vote in the United Nations general assembly is identical regardless of the size of the country voting. Ireland’s vote is just as valuable as India’s. That’s the point of the United States — it’s a republic, not a democracy.

As far as 1 WY vote being worth 4 Texas votes, that’s also irrelevant because the president is elected as president of the republic, not the president of individual people.
Some passages that stood out to me:

> Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.

> Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.

> One is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others.

> Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence, we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots. And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us. But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking…can’t confront themselves in thinking because, if they do, they risk undermining the ideological beliefs that have given them a sense of purpose and place.
I would recommend not linking to jwz's website. Use web archive or something if you have to. jwz dislikes Hacker News and intentionally shows an NSFW image when Referer header shows Hacker News.
If you don't study what people have done in the past, you're going to be severely disadvantaged when you have to deal with them in the future.

Santayana was pithier.
Not sure where you're getting these figures. Here's an analysis which estimates CO2 emissions from Starship for E2E will be roughly similar to those from a 777 flight based on fuel consumption. Depending upon how the methane is generated it could be a carbon-neutral flight. This doesn't include support vehicles, but that would be quite speculative at this stage.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-rocket-emission...
> "But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."

To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before.

This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.
If you only need PDF reading, SumatraPDF is far faster than Adobe Reader.
This how politics work in China. When the government is unhappy with someone, they go away for a while and often reappear at a completely unrelated event they had schedule long before and don't acknowledge their disappearance. Everything happens behind the scenes and never officially.

If they ever acknowledge it, it will be as a public apology for their past conduct. This is what Ma's protege Justin Sun did after he got into hot water with the Chinese government for promoting his crypto currency project too loudly:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tron-crypto-founder-justin-su...
While a good argument in favor of the vendor locked-in serverless services can be made at the start of a project, it looks like a net loss during any other phase of the project.

It comes down to if you want to have generic and reusable sysadmins vs. cloud serverless specialists.
While they were figuring out the EU's ePrivacy Directive, Facebook Messenger turned off certain features to all chats with an EU user in, whether or not there were non-EU users in that chat.

(I assume they have or will come up with a work-around, as far as legally possible)
Pay attention to that list, each pardon has a list of people who supported each pardon.

Nobody from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU is on that list.

We are wasting our time and energy caring about either of those organizations. Let them stick to filing Amicus Briefs in courts, but they clearly have no pull or influence or backchannel despite our tech scene thinking they do.
Here's the last reply before the thread was locked:

> I don't see the point of pressing the wrong series of key combinations nine or more times in a row constitutes a "Login Window ScreenShot Problem" any more than dropping my MacBook from various heights until it breaks is a reliability problem.

Why do people hold computers to such a lower standard than other complex devices in their life? (Serious question -- I don't understand people very well here.)

Can you imagine a car that wouldn't unlock or start if a passerby without the key plays with the door handles too much? If this has happened and is documented, that alone is a testament to its rarity and people's unwillingness to excuse the behavior.

Unless it happened to early Tesla, because they were held to the lower standard applied to computers and OSs. That doesn't seem to be as true anymore, thankfully.
I think there should be stricter rules for subreddits whose names sound "official" or "primary".

There is this subreddit: r/india. Which is full of toxicity towards Indian culture. But people are more likely to stumble upon that subreddit. There's also a hard-right subreddit that's equally biased, but at least that's not named r/india.
If you see a significant difference, it's only because you want to see one.

The Gulf of Mexico already has the highest amount of helicopter traffic in the country. It's always cluttered. I'd expect most of the local helicopter services and pilots that ferry the oil industry would be also be ferrying for SpaceX.

>Tesla's use case

The SpaceX use case is based on high frequency launches. You don't get high frequency by sticking to Space Shuttle blue-sky launch requirements. (And the safety-obsessed oil industry isn't flying in weather it shouldn't be.)

But it's still coastal weather, and even blue-sky launches are going to require pre-dawn (or after dark), foggy and/or windy flights out to the rig (and back to shore).

If it's point-to-point rocket travel, daylight at the launch site means it's likely to be dark at landing, and vice-versa. Otherwise flight windows are going to be very restricted.

If anything, time windows are likely to be more constrained for launches than for the oil industry (who might have a day-long+ window for personnel changes), which means more flying when you have to, not waiting for when conditions are ideal.
USA here. Second this, thank you for the well wishes and pulling for us. We're trying to turn it around!
"It's a Linux system! I know this!"

smashes keys

Unlocks
Thanks, this is really good advice - thankfully, it's not entirely novel to me :)

I don't mind that it's not a book recommendation, either. As long as it's useful in understanding how to make and maintain friends. Thanks for sharing it.
Never directly link to jwz from HN.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210117212403/https://www.jwz.o...
> Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes.

It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.
> When nothing can be believed, all opposition is neutralized.

I'm gonna recommend watching Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis. In it he talks about Vladislav Surkov basically turning the Russian political scene into a bizarre post modernist theater, where he would publicly proclaim to fund left wing, right wing or other, centrist parties and NGOs, to give the impression that everyone is working for Putin.
I'm tempted to buy it, but I don't know what I'm getting. What will this teach me? Do I already know it?
> Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's team has released a report about a sprawling, opulent Black Sea palace allegedly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The video was posted less than two days after Navalny's arrest.

The emphasis is on "alleged". Navalny is just another so-called Kremlin critic who is actually just a crook, but if you blackmail/character assassinate Putin you're a hero in the western media.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

> Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the allegations were old but that the property, near the resort town of Gelendzhik, did not belong to Putin. The allegations were first made in 2010 by Sergei Kolesnikov, a businessman with connections to Putin before his time in politics. On paper, the property appears to be owned by businessman and billionaire Alexander Ponomarenko.

At least DW did post the response.

PS.: Sorry I wanted to say, that Putin is an evil person. I don't have any evidence, but the accusations are true and he is a monster. /s
Yes. And it also means the passengers don't have to wait around for the rocket to fuel up on the platform. I think that takes at least an hour or so?
Canada has appointments that last until the judge turns 75. Seems like a better system to me.
There's a lesson in all of this ring-around-the-rosy-FOSS-and-Amazon-business in continued investment of infrastructure in large corporations that allow this level of power and the ability to unfairly punish those creating the software they deploy. I'm sure we'll continue ignore it for easy to use control panels.
Please stop typing. I don't need another reason to learn LISP! I've been successfully stopping myself from entering that rabbit hole for years in order to prevent yet another "hey I should rewrite all my projects in LISP!". Also looking at you, Rust.
Have you tried contacting the developer?
Naw, the moment SpaceX starts capturing astroids or mining on Mars there's a whole new world, literally, worth of economic value unlocked. There are other defensive strategic reasons to have many launch pads as well. They're creating a manufacturing line for Starships to be able to "mass" produce them. Elon gets exponentials, and he'll build whatever technology or follow whatever strategy he figures out that's needed to make what he's doing self-sustaining. There's plenty of opportunity to tap and revenue streams, profits, he can direct towards SpaceX if needed.
And the NIMBY / NIH lobbying

I think you meant no supersonic overland
I wish one day the West is brave enough to freeze (or seize) assets of putin’s cronies (for example, a lot of them have real estate in Florida and London). But the West instead choses to punish the ordinary Russians and Ukrainians via non-personal sanctions like they did with Crimea.
I'm glad you've learned to restrain yourself because that mistake makes sense if you're not used to imperative thinking. It doesn't benefit students to have instructors who are shocked by common/natural errors.

Math, as commonly encountered, is a collection of facts and relations. Their notion of variable is very different than in CS and programming.

To a mather (one who uses/does math), this makes sense:

x = 7 * y
y = 6
therefore x = 42

To a coder (of most conventional programming languages) that's an error, y is undefined when x is assigned a value. And even if it did have a value, changing it later wouldn't change x so who knows what x could be.

It makes sense to the mather because each statement exists at the same time. To the coder, each statement is realized over a period of time. To the coder "y = 6" hasn't happened yet when "x = 7 * y". This is the part that has to be communicated to the novice with a mathematical background.
> Look at what happened to Canada after they arrested Meng Wanzhou for the rationale behind these views.

The Chinese government treated the arrest of Meng Wanzhou as a political issue because it was clearly tied to the US trade war, and more generally to the US government's attempts to undermine the Chinese tech sector (which we see from the ever-widening US sanctions against Chinese tech companies). Donald Trump himself even suggested that the US might drop the prosecution of Meng Wanzhou in exchange for Chinese concessions on trade.
I wonder how all the Trump supporters on HNs (maybe 30% or so of commenters, no idea about lurkers) are reacting to this.

Levadowski pardon, the spy, the swamp, etc.
Thankfully, he end up being the first presidential candidate bankrupted by the position. The dude's primary asset, his brand, is not completely toxic and can no longer be used to prop up his other failed ventures. And the only bankers wiling to finance him will the the predatory ones, who will all extract every penny left then leave him with nothing.
At this point, I would gladly pay good money for a browser that prevented ads and tracking, provided most of the standard plugin functionality oob and vetted the rest. This whole mess is a massive time suck.
@ ~0:13 "On August 18th 2021, the court unlawfully arrested Alexey Navelny and sent him to prison".

What? What is this? How long have I been asleep?

- ed

I'm an idiot - I'm guessing this is a typo - should have been 'January', right?
Should we have them shoot a few more white people to match the overall population makeup by race?

Police:

+ Shoot and kill more unarmed white people than any other race

+ Overall shoot more white people

+ Shoot and kill people by race proportional to the recorded violent crimes stats

+ Shoot less than a hundred unarmed people per year, total

And, none of this is really surprising. White people make up more of the population so of course they're going to be a majority of police encounters, including Use of Force (UoF). Not every UoF encounter is illegal or unethical, even if the other person is unarmed - life is not an action movie where you can vulcan pinch someone unconscious.

Whenever somebody brings up that UoF incidents by race match the violent crimes committed by race, usually it ends in a shouting match of who can claim racism the loudest. Yet we can recognize over-representation in violent crimes by any race is probably due to lack of resources - and we know the things that reduce violence in any population (marriage, having kids, being meaningfully employed[1]) are less accessible to many minority populations.

We'd make a bigger dent in UoF incidents and crime in 5 years by just making pre-K childcare free and widely accessible than any amount of angry protests will ever accomplish.

[1]: This doesn't mean low paying temporary or part time work, but either a trade or profession with longterm gain
They plan to use high-speed ferries, not helicopters.
To which some of us older Americans would say, "Which one is the centimeter?" It's so hard for me to think in metric.
> The GDPR covers EU citizens wherever in the world they are.

No. In law, EU GDPR absolutely does not cover EU citizens who are physically outside the EU.

GDPR makes no reference to citizens or residents and is understood to apply to any person whenever they are physically present in the EU, and to data which is created/located physically inside the EU's borders (and to data which has crossed the border within the rules).

Citation e.g. first search result https://www.hipaajournal.com/does-gdpr-apply-to-eu-citizens-... which suggests only that businesses might find it easier to give GDPR protections more widely. I would not expect that advice to be taken by Facebook.
They have this "private" feature now where you have to list the email addresses of people that are allowed to use the extension. I don't see why that couldn't be coupled with "no review required", so long as the list is relatively short. But, yeah, likely will never happen.

Fortunately for me, I can re-do my extension to use the JS postMessage api which won't require hardly any permissions, and thus, not much to review.
As of November 2020, Trump utilized both pardons and clemencies much less than any president in modern history according to Pew Research [1][2].

He granted clemency to 143 more last night which places him closer in line to Bush and G.W. Bush, but there's no way your data here would include that (and that still places him at a very low number), so I'm wondering where you're getting this data, and how you qualify "corrupt."

If we look at a handful of Bill Clinton's corrupt pardons on his last day in office alone as mentioned in the gp comment above:

(1) Susan McDougal who went to jail for contempt of court for him,
(2) Braswell who paid Hillary $200k for the pardon,
(3) his brother Roger Clinton Jr,
(4) Democrat Mel Reynolds who was granted clemency after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor.

Thus, Trump must have had at least 40? Where is the source?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/24/so-far-trum...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FT_20...
In order to understand why things are the way they are, we first need to understand how they came to be.
I've switched to Affinity from Adobe and what I most like about their products is that they make me actually enjoy using them. And this something that is pretty hard to get right.

When using Adobe software, there were so many moment such as "Why doesn't this work?", "How do I use this tool?", "How do I do x?", "Where is x?" and I had to search for solution. With Affinity however, everything works just as I expect them to and it is very rare for me to actively search for solutions.
> it turned out to just a bunch of disorganized wannabes

... who were trying to get an election overturned at the behest of POTUS. Motive matters, even if they were too disorganized to stand a chance.
Our internal research found that clear error messages confused our users, so we removed it.

I have no idea what KDE is or does, sorry.
>That doesn't matter if you made the methane by extracting CO2 from the atmosphere. Then you are just putting the CO2 back from where you got it.

It's not that simple. What you're describing is free energy. We're still burning fossil fuels to extract the methane. Maybe that could be powered by renewables one day. But as of now, it is not.
And so does everyone else who values their privacy. The issue with Whatsapp is about trust and peripherally, if at all, about Trump.
They visited, saw Golang and left.
My father was a rig worker in the 80s in the gulf. He has a lot of interesting stories to tell.
> It's important to note the reason the President has the power to pardon anyone for any reason is it's one of the checks and balances

Is it though?

I went to school in America, I know what they teach and elevate as sacrosanct.

The developed world laughs at our "checks and balances".

This last term, the judiciary was the only "check and balance" left and it did its job, but it didn't have to.
I never thought I'd say this, but you've got to give props to VB where you can declare the starting (and ending) index of your array to be whatever you want!
Can he at least update the text? HN was full of entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs years ago. It is mostly big- and mid tech employees now, tech bureaucrats if you will.
At least in the US market (I don't have experience in other markets), Apple is definitely not the cheaper laptop company. The average laptop sold in 2019 sold for ~$700.[0] The cheapest laptop Apple currently sells is $1,000. Apple only sells high-end luxury laptops. Most laptops sold are cheaper than even the cheapest Mac.

When you compare similarly spec'd machines from other manufacturers then yeah they're usually in the same ballpark numbers. I don't know I'd say Apple is always more expensive or always cheaper when looking at only the high-end price range.

[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/dont-be-so-cheap-fiv...
To complement, dynamic arrays ("array of ...") are always 0-based in Delphi and Free Pascal. This was apparently introduced in Delphi 4 (1998).
It is really crazy how ugly and tasteless that whole thing is. You would think the most powerful man in Russia would have access to better designers.
If we're being pedantic then [3,3) = [x,x) = {}
An Emergent Pattern in Randomness
Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand.

A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensive paperweight.

In my opinion, other than doing it for the sake of learning and the challenge of it, this will lead nowhere in the long term unless you get any kind of commitment or support from Apple. And I hope I'm wrong but that's very, very unlikely to happen any time soon.