skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To Bernays, propaganda was an essential tool in a democracy. He didn't regard ordinary people as qualified decision makers and saw influencing the masses as the proper function of people like himself. This is what he literally says in the opening paragraphs of his 1928 Propaganda:

> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

> We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

It's pretty clear he is talking about propaganda in the modern sense - using rhetorical and persuasive techniques to bypass the target's rational decision making procedures in order to achieve specific policy goals.

Remember Bernays was an alumnus of the first truly industrial scale propaganda effort, the Creel Committee, set up to convince US citizens they should support US entry into WWI.

According to him, it

> bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice.

> Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...]

> The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed.

(- Bernays, Public Relations, 1951, via [1])

Bernays indeed saw this as desirable and necessary, and very much cast himself as a member of the "invisible government."

If you grant impeccable intentions and absolute probity to the "invisible governors" this might still seem a cogent viewpoint, though offensive to most modern sensibilities.

Realistically, though, modern history should have taught us the devastation that can result from adoption of propaganda as the primary tool of government, and its inimicability with true democracy.

Democracy proper relies on informed consent, and consent under a propagandising state can only ever be misinformed consent.

1: https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays
If you know what song is playing, then it's somewhat trivial to remove it from the audio, no ML needed.
Posting from throwaway.

In my previous role at a large payroll provider, Equifax and few other players in the space over last two years were extremely interested in getting access to SMB payroll data, as it was the most economical way at scale to verify income for half of US labor force employed by SMBs.

Equifax was by far the most aggressive in both offering very generous compensation for that data and insistence as part of the deal on an opt out mechanism.
Computed GOTOs in C are just pointer arithmetic and casts.
Is the source of this a single Amazon review?
Dang your right.

I figured the TPM was part of secure-boot validation. But given some extra thought, it is clear that verifying a signature does not require any secrets.
> Why should a social media provider, who is ultimately a dumb conduit for the public town square like any other telecom service, be able to do so?

Do you think that Hacker News is really a "dumb conduit" for the public town square? Or how about your internal company Slack or message board? Review comments on your local retailer's website? Your local newspaper's comments section? These are all examples that would absolutely be classified as social media per Florida's law (modulo size requirements). If you're going to argue they're not social media, then what is the basis for drawing the distinction?

The problem with the law is--especially as the commentary of the legislators and De Santis make clear--it's really about punishing Facebook and Twitter, and not about protecting users at all. Indeed, if you followed the actual hearing itself, the state effectively tried to defend the absurdities of the law by basically saying that the only sane way to interpret it is that the only way for Facebook et al to violate the law is to not follow their own defined policies.
Ada? Newfangled nonsense. :-)) Pascal! http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/SUNWspro/3.0/pascal/lang_ref/re...
No its not. Absolutely nobody, in the entire world, would ever be brought to court because they played a couple seconds of music, on their phone, while walking down the street.

Don't pretend. Don't make up funny narratives, because you think that a police officer "deserves" it.

This silly hypothetical just isn't going to happen. And people are lying to themselves that something like that would happen, because it sounds cool.

The law is not a piece of code that is run through your computer, and if you can find some technicality, or "well actuuuaaallly" argument, then it means that someone is going to go to jail.

Instead, the law is interpreted by normal, human beings.

And any actual normal human being, is not going to fine someone, or send someone to jail because they played a couple seconds of a song, in a public street, on their phone.

The technicalities, and debates, and loopholes that you think that you found in the law simply do not matter.
We are entering the dark ages rapidly. Soon you will no longer be allowed to install what you want. Sorry! That app is illegal now. All under the bullshit reason of safety/security. We can have both without setting everything up for an orwellian state.
There’s a lot of extra legwork with Atlas even outside the extra state level work. We essentially had to hire a lawyer to redo or to create a lot of the documents we got from Atlas (IP agreements, employment agreements, etc were all not adequate). I mean it doesn’t even handle beneficiary signatures for stock agreements correctly. Just overall seems like a half baked product - either that or our business just wasn’t a fit (typical VC backed startup).
This seems like an interesting use for crypto-style staking. Rather than simply paying Elsevier or Springer to publish, which is a transaction that increasingly makes no sense, instead take those fees and put them in an interest-generating escrow account. If the paper is retracted within some window of time (say, 3 years), the money goes to the group that found the problems. If not, it gets returned plus interest to the authors or their organization.

This would create an economic incentive to hunt scientific fraud, and possibly even replication studies, while also over time putting the money that's currently just being gouged by legacy publishers back into science.
In what sense is it good that a company can make profit through a business activity in some country, but instead of paying the tax there, it pays it somewhere else?
The classic offshore approach is that Apple USA doesn't make any profit because they find a way to make the accounting work such that Apple Ireland actually made the profit. It only becomes income or dividends when it gets transferred back to the USA.

An example might be to assign the patent ownership for the new M1 chips to the Ireland subsidiary. Sell them for $1. Then charge the USA based firm $1 billion in licensing costs. Make $1 billion in income selling the chips. Boom $0 profit. Except now there is massive profit in the Ireland subsidiary, which can pay very low taxes. The problem is that the money is stuck there. If they give it back the parent company as a dividend, then that is income to the parent.
I’m not. The default Ubuntu installation media boots with UEFI and secure boot OOB with no action required by the end-user.

It literally couldn’t be simpler.
Not really. But if you’re doing scientific computation it’s still a really good language.
I wish there had been three polls instead: One for gas, one for heating and one for flights... O:)
The number of TVs thrown out because of a bad capacitor must be outrageous.

Did you hear the one about the ribbon cable that only worked with bright light shining on it?

https://hackaday.com/2016/01/22/fixing-broken-monitors-by-sh...
Yet the first video on Youtube shows that you can boot from USB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EARdWsgvAXo

I give the benefit of doubt that the person just didn't know how to do it (also the source is this single Amazon review? Pretty low for HN tbh)

Here is another video with Ubuntu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap386n98j0U

There is even a Hackintosh tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpJmttuumVU

/r/linux_gaming also have several positive threads

Edit: And of course I'm instantly downvoted
I found Abacus much easier to use. Expensify was extremely convoluted, you had to create reports and then submit them, instead of just submitting expenses with a couple clicks.
If I play it at my desk it seems very different than the office piping it out to everyone as 'background music.'
Verimatrix | Software Engineers, DevOps, QA/SDET | Full-time | San Diego or Remote

At Verimatrix we're building robust and easy to use security solutions that enable some of the biggest media companies in the world to securely deliver their content.

This could be a really interesting position if you're looking to work on high availability microservices in a continuous integration environment.

Our tech stack: Backend: Python, Java, Typescript, AWS Lambda, Api Gateway, Dynamo; Frontend: React + Javascript, Cypress + Jest for tests

Check out all our open positions here: https://www.verimatrix.com/careers/
I think "people" aren't given enough credit. They're actually pretty smart. They know that, when they're questioned by a surveyor, they can feel better about themselves by claiming that they'd be willing pay to address climate change. They know they can get that psychological benefit completely for free without having to do anything other than just answering the question in a certain way. So that makes surveys about the issue seem pretty meaningless; their outcomes have very little to do with the actual issue being surveyed.

Also, people are actually pretty smart because they know that every other individual in the economic arena will act in their own best interest. So they make the correct decision of saving money for themselves. That's exactly why any sort of individual brow beating always strikes me as totally misguided and counterproductive. People are not likely to spontaneously move to solve such a large problem when doing so puts them at an individual loss. It doesn't matter if you think that sort of behavior is immoral or unethical.

On the other hand, it seems to me that large organizations such as corporations and governments have many more incentives to mitigate large scale issues like this for a couple of reasons: 1) They can more easily coordinate since there are fewer organizations of that size that have to cooperate; 2) They are in a better position to quantify the risk of failing to act. There are probably plenty of corporate strategists that are starting to raise the alarm about a possible future world in which it's impossible to make any money as a result of a climate catastrophe.

I've never really been able to get on board with ways of arguing about climate change that fit the mold of this article. Individuals simply are not going to act to solve this problem. Get over it and move on.
This is why economic growth is key to climate change. As disposable income grows for the median household, adoption for socially acceptable goods will increase. When you increase taxes and regulations everywhere, you decrease the ability to adopt pro-climate consumerism.
And you can use the parallel ports to read analog voltages/sensors using integration techniques: https://www.cedarlakeinstruments.com/archives/841
It's not never. Look at generative art. If you like the output, great. No need to know how the program did it (except maybe for copyright infringement issues :-)). Or if the AI proves the correctness of a program. The output is the proof, I don't need to know how the AI did it. And so on.
There's a reasonable argument that deepfakes are challenging our ability to rely on video evidence in general, but saying any editing at all removes credibility is pretty out there. Almost every video on the internet has been edited in some way.
Okay, but they should pay damages for the time everyone would need to waste on this bullshit.
1. Carbon tax
2. Cap and trade

The problem is NOT that there have been no good proposed policy solutions. The problem is that voters don't want them. This is why I'm pessimistic on the environment.
> People want unconstitutional things all the time though, and sometimes they even make them into laws. Then they go to the SCOTUS and lose.

And there's no penalty for it, either. You get to suppress whatever you want for however long it takes to reach the Supreme Court, and if the law gets struck down, well, at least you stopped those abortion clinics/gun owners/protesters/whatever for 5 years and you can push through another law next month.
> I thought a state entity referred to the State government. Police departments are run by the local city or county government.

For this purpose, city- and county governments and their various departments are regarded as subdivisions of the state.
Full text of Xi Jinping's speech on the CCP's 100th anniversary
Yes, but very smart people are often hyperfocused on their own particular bellybutton lint like I said.

For someone whose whole job revolves around the quark structure of nuclei they may see it important enough to "correct" someone who only thinks of nuclei as protons and neutrons flying around each other in relative isolation like planets.

Add a dash or ten of Asperger's (we're talking about nuclear physicists here) and that's how you wind up with an expert "correcting" a non-expert about a casual fact which is 99.9% correct.

Thinking that the expert was too dumb to know that fact is probably the wrong interpretation.

Thinking that the expert was making a social/communication mistake is probably the right one.
I just emailed yall and received a message blocked bounce back. The email did not contain any files etc.
So I can install Windows 11 previews, then when the definitive version comes out I would need to downgrade if I don't have a TPM hardware (or if I don't want to enable it for not loosing the possibility to dual boot Linux)? It's nonsense.

I want the old Windows back, couldn't Microsoft just stop making OS and support Windows 7 forever? The last Windows version that just worked, buy a license and use it, no updates every 6 months, no requirement for secure boot, TPM and stupid stuff, no apps, or whatever other stupid thin they invented.
Nope, and it’s why police regularly get away with abuses of power that would have (rightfully) landed me in prison if I tried it while deployed in Afghanistan.
Trump's former top aide launches GETTR, a new conservative social media platform
I just watched the video in the article. Seems like everyone is calm. But the man with the gun on his hip seems to be demanding the crowd change their behavior due to some issue with a banner. Whether you call that harassment or not I suppose is a matter of perspective.
I don't think you're an odd one. YT has many disadvantages compared to written instructions, especially when it comes to coding. Just off the top of my head, YT has uneven video quality & when you pause videos, there's a bunch of stuff that obscures the video. So, it's hard to read text from a video, or even see something really specific (and maybe tacit) at times.

YT also doesn't allow for notes, no way to easy make an "offline" version, no way to compile its contents into your own knowledgebase, etc.

You can also read text at your own pace, which is really useful for learning things in steps, while videos go at their own.
Note that this is an oversimplification, as

p = Path('a.txt')
q = Path('a.txt')

p is q # False

since p and q are different objects and "is" equality checks if the objects are the same (this can be interpreted approximately as "have the same memory address"), so it'll almost never be true. And in the cases where it is ( 2 is 2), you shouldn't rely on it, as most of them are optimizations.
Honestly, fuck all new laptops. I'm working on a custom PC case that's 36x29x15cm and can fit standard components so I have a proper computer that I own and can carry around in average sized luggage.

Would anyone be interested in something like that btw? Fits mATX boards, most graphics cards (sadly not the top end), 4x 2.5 drives (plus onboard NVMe/mSATA), standard ATX PSUs and has a BIOS reset button.
Microsoft signed an open source bootloader called Shim, which can run out of the box on any PC. You can use Shim to load your own GRUB2 and set your own keys. Shim is used by Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian so far. A good writeup is available here https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot
Absolutely. Privatizing the profit and socializing the risk is the wrong model.
Hi! What's the best way to get in touch about the junior engineering role?
Like many others it seems (for example here [0], or this issue [1] that amusingly seems to think it's a problem caused deliberately by the VSCode developers), I have been wondering why this recent change has occurred in GitHub's activity feed and whether there was a way to disable it.

The linked thread provides both some insight into the first question (from a GH product manager who explains the dubious case for including unwanted information in the main feed), as well as a number of hacks and workarounds to resolve the second one (using Block element in uBlock Origin with ##div.release as suggested by ozon2 seems to work perfectly).

I would be interested to hear what others here think about the proposed change in direction for the activity feed (i.e., to make it more about "news from your wider network" rather than "notifications you have intentionally signed up for").

[0]: https://github.community/t/release-notifications-from-starre...

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/125951
Awful. Truly awful. So much of today's world reduces humans to playing a bit part in their own existence.
One nice thing about lazy languages is you get the desired operator behavior for conditional operators, short-circuiting logical operators, etc “for free” without having to build it into the language.
Utterly incompetent article, basing all its conclusions on this poll question:

“Suppose a proposal was on the ballot next year to add a monthly fee to consumers’ monthly electricity bill to combat climate change. If this proposal passes, it would cost your household $10 every month.”

It then assumes that voting against the proposal indicates an unwillingness to pay for climate change.

This completely misses the obvious - which is that a $10 monthly fee will not solve climate change and so people are right to vote against the proposal. Indeed it would be ridiculous for people to vote for such a proposal.
Ultrafast Delivery: The $28B Market to Build the On-Demand Bodega
>Fall wanted the story to be titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” and when she eventually retitled it “Helicopter Story” as a vague gesture of goodwill, many people assumed she had been pressured into doing so. Fall wanted the story taken off the internet, and when it was, many assumed she had been “canceled.” Both narratives framed Fall as an unwitting puppet of forces beyond her control.

How are the above not examples of Fall being coerced into doing things she did not want to? No one thinks that when an Internet mob causes someone to pull a blog post that that mob actually logged into the author's account and pushed "Delete". It doesn't change the fact that Fall was forced/coerced/strongly encouraged to do something the author would not have done otherwise.

(Reading further) Ah, I see. Fall isn't against cancel mobs in general, and believes that one just happened to accidentally throw a glancing blow at one Isabel Fall, powerless (and thus someone undeserving of any Internet mob's wrath, unlike those with actual power) author in this case.

>“The story was withdrawn to avoid my death,” she says. “It was not withdrawn as a concession that it was transphobic or secretly fascist or too problematic for publication. When people approve of its withdrawal they are approving, even if unwittingly, of the use of gender dysphoria to silence writers.”

The level of copium Fall displays is over 9000.
My line is that its not wrong for a private company to censor a politician or entity that calls for violence and attempts to overturn an election without evidence. People claiming that all republicans are being censored are disingenuous. The only people being censored are those spreading unfounded dangerous claims that threaten the very heart of US democracy. Everyone else is still posting and tweeting without a care in the world besides the crosses they choose to bear in order to get clicks and eyeballs. No political party is being widely censored currently despite what certain media figures would have you believe.
Corporate motives can usually be reduced to one of three things: cheap (ideally free/forced) labor, cheap resources, and limits on liability.
A lot. Changes in policy cut the effective corporate tax rate down from ~40% around 1950 to where it is today. Lyn Alden covered this in an excellent post: https://www.lynalden.com/tax-shift/.
I believe that the assertion of absolute artistic merit is more dangerous than nihilistic relativism.

A critic can be relativist and still be informative. Their goal is not to assign a score to the art, but to communicate about it in an informed, meaningful way. Even if you have a completely different set of values from the critic, you can still appreciate criticism that informs you of what they saw and what it meant to them.

Roger Ebert famously hated having to give stars to films, because he was afraid you'd be misled. He could give a move five stars for being a very good slasher film, or action movie, or anything else in a genre he might dislike. Film critics see that aspect in spades, since they have often seen so many movies that even a "good" example will bore them simply because they've seen it all before. But that just gives them a reputation for only being interested in the obscure and outrageous, which appeal only because they're at least different.

A good critic can communicate what they see, without having to put an absolute judgment on it, because their judgment is unimportant to your decision to go view that piece of art. What you want is a preview of what that piece might mean to you, a thing established by your relationship to the critic.

Some critics write for the audience of people who may go see a piece, and others write for posterity -- the first draft of art history. Either is fine, though they're different modes.

This is a postmodernist view of what criticism means, and my point is to show that it doesn't have to be nihilistic. Art still has meaning to you, or not. But the art critic's job isn't to rank it, but to talk about that meaning -- and there's a lot to say. A nihilist just wouldn't say anything at all.
Homosexuality and transgenderism, no, because they aren't choices, in my opinion based on the evidence I've seen they are biological/genetic in nature. Religion and cultural attitudes, yes, they're choices. I'll admit I'm in the minority here, but it's the only way I've found to have the view I have and be consistent.