skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> in favor of prohibiting the use of menthol cigarettes, but they're also in favor of legalizing marijuana

Cigarettes are sold at every convenience store in flashy packaging. They are made by deep-pocketed multinationals with generations of lobbying experience.

Legal marijuana, on the other hand, is sold with minimal advertising in licensed, purpose-built stores. If you gave tobacco companies a choice between banning menthol and forcing the sale of cigarettes in tobacco stores only, I think I know which one they'd pick.
I wouldn't mind changing this.
Oddly enough smoking actually saves the State money in the long run. Smoking citizens don't live as long and thus save money on medical care and entitlement payments.
>You’re not allowed to put something deemed bad in your body because the “people” have to pay for it.

Has any country with socialized medicine actually banned tobacco fully? Genuinely curious.

If they haven't then I don't understand why regulation isn't continuous with the current regime, where smokers have to pay a lot more for health insurance. These problems do not go away in a free market system, insurance companies will always try to incentivize you to take on less risk.
From what Ive seen, smokers are cheaper on Medi-* because they, on average die, so much younger.
Thanks. I never would have thought “we encrypt” to mean “your browser encrypts”.

I think a few pictures showing how passwords and data flow between the user’s browser and the backend when you do various things would make your technical description easier to understand.

Lacking that, using phrases such as “our code, running in your browser” rather than that ambiguous “we”, would have made things clearer for me, too.
It does. You're mistaking reparenting with another concept: the concept of an absolute parent PID.

The concept of an absolute parent PID is nonsensical. Having an absolute parent PID would reduce the maximum number of processes effectively infinitely by creating a linked list of parent IDs even if the original parent process is gone.

Imagine if PID 2 is a parent process. It spawns a child. The child spawns a child. That child spawns a child... all the way down to the maximum number of PIDs... the final child is PID n. Then, all of the intermediate processes exit.

The final child process with the maximum PID wants to look at its parent process... but it's gone. Now, what do you want the kernel to do?

Should the kernel tell you about that PID n-1? What if another process has been created and has inherited PID n-1? Does your check now think that the process's parent is still alive? Your check is incorrect and will lead to very aggrevating bugs. Should the kernel prevent PID n-1 from being reused? Congrats you've basically just reinvented zombie processes.

No. The solution is to just reparent PID n onto PID 1 and tell you that process is the parent now. Then you, as a developer, have to actually deal with an aspect of computer science: lifetime management of your objects processes. And the kernel is therefore more efficient for the vast majority of processes who don't need or care about their parent.
is this about some excursion/idea from 2011/2012? I know it's just been posted but it's about a pretty old thing

can mark it (2012)
impressive ;)
In France, taxation accounts for 80% of a cigarette pack. [0]

Yet tobacco costs 120 billion euros a year for only 16 billion in revenue (to the government). [1]

It is almost infeasible to tax cigarette to the equivalent of their burden on the health care system.

[0]: https://www.boursorama.com/patrimoine/actualites/les-taxes-s...

[1]: https://www.reseau-hopital-ght.fr/actualites/patients/campag...
Seems like a really oversimplified idea of what freedom is. It's not a binary where you're free or you aren't. You're never _completely_ free, or you wouldn't be able to pulled over by cops, forced to file taxes, or whatever, anyway.

Like, yeah, you could stick to the "absolute freedom all the time" principle and do nothing to make people healthier, but if you had just done it anyway life would be better for everyone involved. And you're stuck with your rigid adherence to principles saying "well at least we were free" while the world is crappy compared to what it could be. Give me the slightly paternalistic government that makes its people healthier and happier every time.
> Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life.

How do you know this was the biggest factor?
If I were a federal contractor, wanting to make more from my cost plus contraction, what better way than generating text files full of dependencies that will cause billable meetings to discuss why we should be ok with some old insecure library being used... that will always end with even more billable work to update the old, insecure library. Even better would be if I had to incur some billable time and cost on certifications. Cost plus FTW (unless you are a taxpayer).
> Or if they can't then maybe solve that instead of this.

Why not both? If a problem is identified with our culture, its not exactly a strong argument to say "Well, here's another problem I'm more concerned about".

All I'll say is: lets solve both problems simultaneously. There's many problems in the world, and we should work on solving as many of them as possible.

I've got friends (who were with me in that knife salesman gig work) who didn't understand the difference at all, no matter how many times I explained it to them. People's brains just don't work the way you say. Sure, I understood the difference and how to do my own taxes, but not everyone has that capability unfortunately.
Masks during flu seasons is already the norm in various Asian countries: Korea, Japan, China, etc. I think their previous experiences dealing with SARS and MERS have taught a valuable lesson for the masses.
No, the press release does specifically target black people:

> One studyExternal Link Disclaimer suggests that banning menthol cigarettes in the U.S. would lead an additional 923,000 smokers to quit, including 230,000 African Americans in the first 13 to 17 months after a ban goes into effect. An earlier studyExternal Link Disclaimer projected that about 633,000 deaths would be averted, including about 237,000 deaths averted for African Americans.

Then they go on to rationalize those positions about African Americans because that progress hasn’t been experienced by everyone equally.

I am not stating any position whether specifically targeting black people in this ban is good or bad. I am only pointing out that this group is specifically mentioned in the press release.
Perhaps there should be a way to opt out of taxpayer subsidized healthcare if you smoke, eat excess sugar/carbs, drink alcohol, smoke crack, etc.
The entire "paternalistic" argument rests on the premise that the choice to smoke, or not, is for most people purely rational, and totally discounts the predatory nature of tobacco companies and the addiction that comes with it. Menthols are targeted at blacks, and especially black children, since the menthol flavoring makes them more pleasant to smoke. Of the 20 million American menthol smokers, 17 million of those are black. That's not by accident, it's intentional.
> If I am being driven somewhere I certainly care about what condition the car is in.

Right, so sounds like Uber sensibly wants their representatives on the street to project their desired corporate image.

Thus, employees.
We should consider risk versus reward though, not just harmful effects, buttressed by some measure of individual liberty.
Agreed. Unfortunately the social perception of alcohol is still at a place where banning it would be impossible, though. People don't even want to talk about making it more expensive. Alcohol still doesn't have nutritional labels in the US!
There's a huge difference between regulation and criminalization.

I think you'd find that most people who support abolishing the war on drugs, and who support drug legalization, are also supportive of regulation the legalized drugs.

The lack of regulation and criminalization are two reasons that the US has a fentanyl epidemic. It's too risky to import heroin because it weighs a lot, while 1 gram of fentanyl is 10,000+ doses.

Meanwhile, regulated heroin that's used in hospitals is pure and free of adulterants.
Nicotine is a harmless nootropic on the level of caffeine, it's inhaling combustion products that is the big problem.
Astronomers are frustrated with Elon Musk’s satellites
Best Advanced Web Analytics Tools/SAAS Supporting HIPAA?
There seem to be an explosion of online behavioral tracking tools, the default for most companies being Google Analytics. Its hard to find real reviews of these systems - Two I'm looking at are for more advanced featuresets, including Snowplow Analytics, and Adverity. Would love to hear any reviews about these, or other SAAS in practice, challenges, or otherwise, or other recommended tools. This includes tracking, ad performance, optimization, attribution, segmentation, filtering, storage, visualisation, APIs.
You should probably never research eyelash mites.

One thing I always like about human parasites (and no, I don't mean your coworkers) is that you can give a rough date to the invention of clothing.
And here comes the childfree brigade again.
Writing Darwin
I'm of the opinion that 2022 will have a glut of job-seekers who are looking for remote-only positions, all of whom are looking for software jobs. I can't be the only one expecting this either, so if you plan to do this, don't expect easy going.
I agree. I had been using OpenSUSE for years, then converted to Kubuntu about 2 years ago. No regrets. KDE is currently excellent; quality is high and they are thankfully being very conservative in design and development. This has produced a pleasant, complete and stable DE.

The only real problem KDE has now are the scars of past mistakes that have kept people away and all too often mired in Gnome.
Statsig launches A/B testing engine inspired by Facebook’s
If I'm on Kubernetes already, what does this bring over something like ArgoCD? Is it just a managed version of the same feature set, or does it do things Argo can't?

It seems to hint at some sauce to swap in production-like data but I can't see much on that usecase. (https://releasehub.com/use-cases#migration-test-environments)

Having a tight integration into Github would be great (https://docs.releasehub.com/whats-new/january-2021#github-de...), this is definitely an area that has room for polish in ArgoCD for example.
Ecological surveys.
Disturbing a delicate ecosystem by driving a roomba the size of a bulldozer through it is one of those, "that's obviously gonna fuck things up", things where you just need to look at prexisting scientific data.

Much like the question: "is eating half a kilo of table salt a viable cancer treatment?"
related from today: Facebook Joins Rust Foundation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26982890
Welcome to the new world ;)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7ny.com/amp/free-food-vaccin...

You actually get a donut per day! The foundation of a healthy diet.
We drink a lot of non alcoholic beer. I want something more exiting than water even on work day lunches and I don’t like sweet drinks and I’m trying to reduce my caffeine intake. Not that much left to choose from then.
What makes sense is to socialise medicine, and then have the body responsible for running that:

1. Run public health awareness campaigns to make sure that people (especially children / young people) are aware of the health risks. You can do similar things around healthy eating.

2. Treat drug usage and addiction as medical rather than criminal issue (so the police might confiscate your weed if they catch you with it, but they won't charge you with anything).

Both of these minimise healthcare costs without actually banning anything.
Is it, though?

COVID-19 is scary because you can't reasonably eliminate your risk of contracting it without significant mental, social, and economic sacrifice. But I'm not worried about getting lung cancer because I just don't smoke. You can't just accidentally give lung cancer or a nicotine addiction to someone at a social gathering.

It's impossible to smoke in the United States without knowing the addictive and carcinogenic nature of it. The warnings are plastered all over the ads, the counter, and the product itself. If you know all that and still choose to smoke, that's on you. People take risks with their lives for things that make them happy all the time. As long as you know the risks up front and you aren't bothering me with it, why should I care?
Post, physical NFTs that could keep homeless people from freezing to death.
There's a lot of arcana that you're skipping over. It's easy to get CORS partially working on your development machine only to watch it fail in production or only fail on certain browsers or certain ports. There's silly things that need to happen if your application receives traffic from multiple domains. Our CORS middleware is ~100 LOC.
I don't understand all the downvotes to this. Any harm reduction initiative is by nature paternalistic and somewhat arbitrary.

In most societies, a "vice" is a just a habit that the upper middle class disapproves of. In the 1950's, the upper middle class enjoyed smoking cigarettes so that was fine and dandy, but marijuana was the devil. Today, the upper middle class loves marijuana and finds cigarettes distasteful, so we have smoking bans alongside marijuana legalization.
Influenza is a specific thing. I'm not sure why you're trying to argue that COVID-19 is influenza when that's observably factually incorrect. Perhaps you're not aware that "the flu" is a specific thing and not just a way people say "people who get sick all at once from a thing"?
The simple answer is very carefully.

Deus Ex (2000) had similar issues. The game's story was originally intended to branch much harder than what actually shipped. Still, it's widely considered to be one of the best games ever made, owing in no small part to its emergent gameplay.

I think we're going to be entering the era of emergent story soon. After all, AI Dungeon exists today.
> How are menthol cigarettes more harmful than regular ones? The menthol just makes it easier to smoke more. Is that the crux of your argument?

It gives more pleasure so it hooks you on more. So yes, it’s more harmful, no? When I was smoking cigarettes back in the day, my fav was West Ice. They tasted really good and didn’t have bad aftertaste. It was easier to smoke more and smoke one only for the menthol taste.
Who ever is intently committing war crimes against diplomats on American soil. did you not read the brain damage part?
These all appear to be studies on the effectiveness of dark mode on legibility.

Where are the studies about dark mode being a "gateway" to "useless stuff?"
Exactly, or at the very least, pickle/serialise/export/whatever the models so that the computer can survive a reboot.
Doesn't the Kindle have a browser too? If you'd like to pay mess and be able to do even less, you can try reMarkable.
True, but of itself that's not necessarily a health problem. I was talking about the limited evidence that it can harden your arterial walls and such.
rustc is already exempt from Debian's policies to not update most software after a stable release. It's still not enough because Debian lags behind 2-3 releases. It has a high standard for supporting various niche targets and there are regressions every now and then, and often there is simply no volunteer time to package all the libraries.
> but they're also in favor of legalizing marijuana? Very weird.

In every state that it's been legalized in, weed is heavily regulated. Weed must be tested for adulterants, heavy metals and mold contamination before it is sold. Some states even regulate the amount of active compounds that are present in the marijuana.

In the states I'm familiar with, it's also illegal to package, market or sell marijuana in manners that might entice children to use it. Sometimes that means banning THC laden candies or vapes that children can recognize, and banning the use of colorful advertising or cartoons, as well.
Trader Joe's (and maybe others) uses the word "beverage" to describe a lot of its milk alternatives.
QEMU6.0: The first version with added to support out-of-process device emulation
Unlike other drugs, it is legal to grow your own tobacco in the US - even if you’re too young to buy it. They’re restricting what big corporations can sell, not what individual people can do. There’s nothing in this change stopping anyone from buying loose tobacco, adding their own flavor, and rolling cigarettes with it.
Once you go down this road you end up with social credit scores. First it’s the obvious stuff like tobacco, then not exercising enough, then not sleeping enough, and eventually you reach the paradox that free will is a lie anyway and there’s no functional difference between insomnia and “choosing” to eat a donut
Well, at least in the SF Bay Area, you are not allowed to install a new wood burning fireplace. And you are not allowed to operate one on “spare the air” says, unless it is your only source of heat.

https://www.baaqmd.gov/rules-and-compliance/wood-smoke
I seriously hope not. It completely defeats the purpose of insurance, which is to spread risk.
Yeah, the point isn't to compensate insurers - they for sure get theirs and charge smokers more. It's to compensate healthcare systems and governments who foot the bill for 1) productivity decreases from smoking in the form of more sick days, more breaks, etc. and 2) people who don't have insurance and get cancer and are treated at the taxpayers expense
The mystery of the Amber Room: the greatest lost treasure
Another very happy freenas user, been running freenas (now truenas) for 8 years. Other than hard drive upgrade and one hard drive failure it has been pretty smooth. My overhead in last year has been maybe 5 hours of upkeep.
> Thank you Walter Shao, best engineer ever! This is really good for your CV! Oh, and you owe a few people 0.01 BTC...

Best line of the thread
Am I the only one that thinks that connecting the NAS directly to the internet is a stupid idea to begin with?

Don't get me wrong, I can totally understand why people (without much technical background) are tempted to do this. But with all the complexity these NAS systems nowadays have it was only a matter of time for something like this to happen.
>Nobody smokes because it tastes good, menthol or not.

I was just talking with some online friends yesterday who smoke and say they would never have started if it weren't for menthols, so I think you're wrong about this.
I must have missed the memo that Prohibition worked after we banned alcohol and weed.

This is a ridiculous overreach. The end game is for people to stop smoking altogether, and while that would be good for American health, this is so unnecessary. It is not the prerogative of our peers to maintain our health.

It is our free right to poison ourselves in the ways we desire. In ten years from now when cigarettes are fully illegal and those "darn ignorant poor people who just can't help themselves because they don't know any better" continue to swell up and die from overeating, are we, the wealthy class, going to dictate what they are allowed to eat?

I wish these were rhetorical questions but as we continue to socialize the cost of medicine we need to be very explicit that we are OK paying for others' bad decisions as part of the package. If not, we should not socialize the cost. Dictating what risky behavior is allowed is the wrong move, because there is no limiting principle.

For example, in a world where we dictate like this, how long until we ban climbing rope because it makes it too easy to climb rock faces, which leads to injury and socialized health-care costs?

This ban is a serious assault on American freedom and a return to puritan morality.

EDIT: some phrasing, may affect the comment below :(
Can you please report back on your progress? I love to see novel approaches to technical documentation that can make the content more digestible.
On the Record with Edward Snowden – April 24 2021
Exposing Sunil Tulsiani's Ponzi scheme on live stream
Some are. Stealing this from a post above

A 10% increase in tobacco price results in a 4% decrease in tobacco demand: https://www.who.int/tobacco/economics/taxation/en/
>"Are you also against seatbelts? The police? Building codes?"

Obviously not, but those are different arguments about the concept of "freedom" and government regulation. A more relevant comparison would be about outlawing trans-fats, regulating the size of soda, portion sizes, flavored e-cigs, etc.
I'd like to see a source for this.

If you take away transit and rely on personal car transport, there's going to be a point where there's no price that will stop the congestion.

Using San Francisco as an example, the Bay Bridge carries around 250,000 cars/day, while BART's transbay tube carries around 300,000 passengers/day.

If you put those BART passengers into cars, even if you build another Bay Bridge, how are all of those cars going to fit onto city streets and where are they going to park? Even if they are magic self-driving cars, that's going to double the amount of traffic on city streets (one trip to drop someone off, one to pick them up).

Assuming that you don't count "not having a functional city" as an acceptable cost, if you don't provide any alternative to cars, I don't think there's any price that you can set that will stop congestion. At higher prices, you may as well just call it "travel rationing" since a price of, say, $500/trip would price commuting out the reach of almost everyone.

You can certainly use congestion pricing to shift some portion of traffic or drive people to other modes of transportation, but if the only choice is driving, then congestion pricing isn't really a solution.
Are you suggesting that anything over 10Hz is perceived with the representation of a rate, rather than direct stimulus?
Thanks for the citation.

I should mention I oppose these bans regardless of whether menthol really is or isn’t dangerous, but interesting to know it increases cellular permeability. And seems like a good bit of increased heart/cardiac effects.
I agree. We are mostly targeting startups that have been funded but for those that aren't and are interested we definitely find ways to make it work for them. Much like how larger companies offer credits for early stage companies we are capable of making it work for them.
There are only 42 million black people in the US. Are you really saying that 40% of black Americans smoke menthols specifically? And presumably some percentage smoke something without menthol? That doesn't seem right.
I would hope the answer is, through more advanced building blocks - like variables, procedures, functions; through more advanced abstractions - like sequences, associative containers, maybe even state machines; through means of enforcing and verifying correctness - like a type system, or unit tests.

Interactive fiction markup language is a programming language - just with a weird syntax that's tuned for content-rich, control-poor programs. Kind of like SGML/XML is a format good for storing text-heavy, markup-lean data.

The same is the case with an interactive movie script. In both cases, your story forms a directed graph[0], and the reader/viewer traverses it. But you don't have to, and shouldn't, write out the whole graph![1]

Personally, when I see "managing complexity", I read "writing code". Because, once you look past all the minutiae of programming languages, build systems and computers, this is what programming is - managing complexity.

I don't think everyone should be a programmer, but I do hope the concepts used in software development will eventually become common knowledge.

--

[0] - Possibly infinite.

[1] - For the same reason you don't put your whole program into main() and don't write out conditional jumps as your only control structure.
Why Square's PM teams don't celebrate feature launches