skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point in the future it might become possible to design viruses that target human genotypes with great selectivity, and at that point this will become a risk. But we are a long, long way from that future, and even then most people's circle of concern includes significant genetic variation, so very few people could release a virus designed to kill, say, all Slavic people, without killing at least a few of their own close friends and family members.

Historically, biological warfare research has focused on pathogens like anthrax that have very low human-to-human transmission risk, for two reasons. One is that, if your germ-warfare bomb starts an epidemic, it barely matters which sides of the battle lines it falls on; if it thins your own ranks less than those of the enemy, it's only because your troops (and their families dying back home) are in better condition or have better sanitary measures in place. The other is that, if you can't stop the deaths when the enemy surrenders, the germ-warfare bomb doesn't give the enemy any incentive to surrender.

Evil things do happen fairly regularly on a grand scale. But doing things on a grand scale has historically required a centralized government to organize them. That's still true for a little while longer.
How come ubiquitous swarms of camera-equipped private and governmental drones are not a reality yet? I'd assume technology is far enough to make this happen.
> Homomorphic encryption

Explain please to me how homomorphic encryption will protect someone from basic laws of physics.
They hash the files on your device.

The hashes are then sent out to for comparison to the hash table.

Right now they are only comparing to the CSAM table but they can add other later.

Also, how are the hashes sent? Can they be intercepted?
Why is everyone assuming this is Apple's choice vs the best option they've been handed by USG? Google has scanned for years and apple has clearly come under some pressure on other fronts.
I don't think Apple considers the web as an alternative platform for apps that are designed to alert you at any time of day for any reason, including when you are not actively using your devices. I think this is a very, very good thing, and doesn't mean that web apps are not a viable alternative to the App Store.
> I appreciate your opinion. But even as an American I understand 2, 10, and 100 meters just fine. And that is really my point.

I guess my point is that you may be an outlier, and in mass communication, NASA should have an eye towards targeting the masses [1].

[1] And given it's an American government agency, by masses I mean American masses, not metric-using global masses.
About Sizes
Argh I feel like I'm going mad here. What did Tether actually do that people are mad about then? Everyone knew going in that it was basically an unregulated bank! The only thing I've heard is that they used to claim they were 100% backed in cash and maybe weren't but regardless aren't now. Which is super shady and the epitome of "growth hacking" but their current state is fine, right?
Opera is Chrome based. WebKit is the other.
The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”
>They charged him without any evidence.

The article explicitly says that the police did not charge him.
Growth in wind and solar production is really really high, we are roughly on course to produce enough electricity for current needs by 2035 entirely from clean resources.

We could expand production even more, but private producers would probably need some guaranteed buyers for that expanded future production.

Fossil energy is on its last legs. The question is not if it will be phased out by 2050, but how many more years of new fossil fuel infrastructure we let FF companies invest in before banks stop backing it entirely. Already, large institutional investors and banks are demanding changes. It's only crony capitalism that allows for new extraction, and this will end up hurting share holders in the long run. FF companies are already taking our loans to pay dividends, so as not to spook investors. The future is clear.

Africa and other places will skip over thermal fossil fuel electricity generation, just as they skipped over sites telephones to cellular networks. Micro grids and batteries will be far cheaper to deploy than large transmission lines and large central generation.

As for carbon dioxide removal, we will probably have to start that in the 2040s, but the best tech is not yet clear. You are right that trees are insufficient, and recent fires are showing that forests can by carbon sources in addition to climate sinks. (I believe that Canada's "managed forests" have become net carbon sources this year, for example.)
This has already been happening since 2012, just for blu ray players so far rather than within the TV itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
Can you cite links that support your assertion that there were fewer fraudulent H1B applications?
> all banks function on fractional reserve, but we don’t immediately call them scams.

US (and many other) Banks have capital requirements, regulations, regulators, and insurance that covers the deposits!
> I managed to get logged in to the SDF MetaArray, open mutt and send an email. Within minutes, the fire brigade had been called and were on their way to rescue me.

All I can think of when I read this is Maurice Moss (Richard Ayoade) from the IT Crowd sending an email about a fire in the office.

Edit: Here is the clip for those who haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBfxjSFAxQ (Here is it queued up to the most relevant bit: https://youtu.be/1EBfxjSFAxQ?t=110)
There is universal truth (though there may be many perspectives - some biased purposefully, some merely imperfect), and that truth is rooted in the fact that the real world is an objective thing that exists. Claiming that "there is no universal truth" just feeds the recent concept of "alternative facts" and lends validity to absurd worldviews that don't take the objectivity of the physical world as foundational feature.

I agree that it's good to try to see things from various angles, but "there is no such thing as universal truth" seems like a very damaging idea.
If the price is justifiable or not depends on your use case. But if you flash drives systematically, then you will spend way more time if you use USB hubs. Apart from the actual speed, UX is a major point. For instance, often enough drives fail during flashing and with a USB hub it is difficult to tell which ones failed and which ones succeeded.
I think the only reason we haven't seen the MPAA/RIAA suing people already, is the backlash from the crazy p2p lawsuits a while ago.

Just search HN for TV, and you'll see plenty of companies uploading screen shots and file lists and who knows what else.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I suppose that is likely true. I just put myself in the poster's situation and started breathing real shallow, haha.
> why Etcher in particular always attracts these 'i dont get it' comments when this exact microsm is the basis of our entire profession

Because if you are creating some bootable media, it's not difficult to assume you are installing something on a raspberry pi, creating some bootable disk to mess around with your or someone else computer or phone, working on an embedded device, etc, etc. Basically I assume you know what a terminal is.

Maybe I am just too old, but I can't imagine downloading and installing a 430MB (just checked) GUI tool that runs one command.

Your example (gamers) makes sense though, and this should be a lesson for me.
> English Wikipedia is considered by many researchers to be almost, but still not quite as accurate as traditional encyclopedias.

This is garbage. No one's claimed this for years. The citations are all over 10 years old.

What is fun and productive is reading Wikipedia in the language relevant to the article. So read about German beers on the German Wiki as well as English.
Really confused by the initial -4 votes on this comment... If that's not sufficient proof downvotes are misused..
People can accept anything peacefully, even death, if they are committed to doing so.
For what is worth 'Krabouillator' most likely should evoke Ekrabouillator which would be an orcish spelling of écrabouillateur (not a real word either) which is someone who "écrabouille"/crush/stomp. Écrabouiller is a real verb.

So: To stomp > stompa and Écrabouiller -> Krabouillator.
I see your point here, but I'd counter that it's technologically trivial to check that the text matches a reference. If you already have a copy of the contract that you've read and agreed to, and this email claims to have included the same contract in a standard form, then nobody needs to sit down and read the thing.
No where in the article does it say they charged him with anything.
You're assuming that if there's no explicit law there is no other avenue governments have to put pressure on Apple. This seems to go against previous stories that have come out about the relationship between eg government and google.
>The statute of frauds was adopted in the U.S. primarily as a common law concept—that is, as unwritten law.

I found that part pretty amusing
I meant that as an aspiration: "I sure hope that MathML is designed/considered safer than SVG." Why exactly SVG is considered unsafe now, I'm not sure, but I understand that this is why gmail doesn't allow it. It seems like SVG can contain semi-arbitrary HTML and javascript? (I'd love to have a less-powerful but more trusted version of SVG, too.)
It's not so much that the slippery slope didn't exist before — Apple has just greased it.

> we aren't "closer" to that being a reality than we were before

I want to believe this but it feels very much like we are. And I don't think it's purely psychological or alarmist.

> it is and always has been one software update push away from being a reality

As a software engineer it's hard to shake the feeling that we're now just a patch release away from misuse, where as last year we were a major update away.

It's still only “one software update push away” either way if you're counting releases, but it's not if you're counting tickets in a product backlog. It's easier for governments to expand an existing feature than to pressure companies to build one from scratch. Apple already built the feature security services dreamed of even though it had no legal obligation to (it has to report CSAM it finds; it does not have to actively search for it on your device).

It's also easier to normalise the use of client-side scanning when one company has shipped it (without talking to the rest of the tech industry, and after declining invitations to talk to Cyber Policy/Internet Observatory teams at Stanford who are trying to help the industry as a whole with an improved collective approach). That pressure and the likely additional implementations of client-side scanning we'll see further expand the potential for abuse.

I really enjoyed the Stanford discussion available on YouTube[1]:

> @8:07
> …the other issue being that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to expand this client-side system to do all of the user's photos so we kind of have to trust the software to only apply this to things that are backed up to iCloud.

> @17:24
> I think it's inevitable that some government — quite possibly the U.S. — is going to want to expand this to counter terrorism and, well, I think for a lot of people that sounds reasonable. The problem is that the definitions of terrorism are somewhat malleable…

None of this feels alarmist to me. Yes, proprietary software is only ever an update away from throwing us all down the slope. But the slope is not a pure binary thing that is or isn't — companies can increase the gradient by decreasing the work it would take to hurt us, and that's what Apple has done here.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbYZVNSOVy4
What, like the North Koreans are rebelling en masse?
Potential dumb question ahead: how, or does, this relate to the Uncertainty Principle? My five-year-old brain says that freezing the electrons in a lattice so that they don't move means that there's no momentum or velocity, and therefore we should have an infinite? uncertainty concerning position.

Obviously something is wrong in my understanding or in the precision of the article's discussion. Can someone ELI5?
Tunneling electron microscope

A single facility for TEM comes with $10,00,000+ pricetag, and usually they amount to few dozens per a developed country, in use in places like universities, and research institutes.

China has probably more of them than the rest of the world combined.
Past related threads - mostly but not all about this story:

The Machine Stops: Science and Its Limits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234104 - Feb 2021 (14 comments)

Forster in Cambridge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23960924 - July 2020 (2 comments)

E. M. Forster, The Art of Fiction No. 1 (1953) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21264355 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops (1909) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20461514 - July 2019 (17 comments)

The Machine Stops (1909) Is an Omen for Our Technological Age - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215311 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19125021 - Feb 2019 (3 comments)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124608 - Feb 2019 (29 comments)

What I Believe, by E.M. Forster (1938) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874412 - Jan 2016 (4 comments)

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198 - Nov 2015 (17 comments)

The Machine Stops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9544256 - May 2015 (26 comments)

The Machine Stops (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637635 - April 2014 (24 comments)

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5041305 - Jan 2013 (1 comment)

(This Day in Tech) Nov. 1, 1909: ‘The Machine Stops’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856254 - Nov 2010 (1 comment)

The Machine Stops : E.M. Forster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1114384 - Feb 2010 (1 comment)
I've had good experiences with

https://github.com/jakearchibald/idb

It's basically a promise-based version of the standard API.
> I doubt the Android renderer is really broken and no-one has noticed until now, so I’d guess the font either has bad hinting, or more likely it’s just being displayed at an awkward size and vertical positions are being rounded in an awkward way. You can see the slight deviations from the baseline in the iOS screenshots, it’s just much more subtle as it isn’t being hinted.

Having developed for Android off and on over the years, I would absolutely not rule out the possibility that there's been a really basic problem with font rendering, reported in 2008 and repeatedly closed as stale on each version release then re-opened, with the most recent "any progress?" post dated 3 weeks ago, that everyone's just been quietly working around.
But it doesn't belong to that Jack. You can interpret the “smart contract” one of two ways:

• As a device to programmatically ensure the “owner” of some resource is the one who controls it; or

• As a system that decides who controls a resource, whomsoever controls the resource has a right to it, there can only be one.

The sensible interpretation (imo) is the first one, unless we're doing away with our conception of property rights. (Which would be an interesting experiment, but given the philosophical background of a lot of this cryptocurrency stuff I don't think that's what's intended.)
Different societies have different social standards.
This is assuming you are none British/English/etc.
Look at the essentials and you'll see we've actually been going backwards, ever since the 1970s:

Housing:
Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.

Cars:
MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.

Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.

Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?
Strange Stories from the Other Side of Midnight – Volume 2 – Podcast E1
Indeed I have no real hard data on this, could very well be just a sort of Baader-Meinhof situation where the headlines that are common in both here and r/worldnews end up jumping at me more immediately.
Are you trolling at this point? I'm not saying you can't criticize the government, I'm saying you clearly lack knowledge of how the government works. Roasting the DoD for spending money they were allotted by elected representatives is literally how the process works. Complete waste of time and a total misunderstanding of how the government functions.

Elect better politicians, pretty simple.
Westworld, stuck in a theme park with a killer robot (the 1973 movie, I haven't seen the new show)
Very clear the writer hasn't taken a course on optics:

"Rather than follow the curve of our eyes, the sensors in conventional digital cameras are flat. This results in an unnatural curvature in the image, and so the accompanying lenses have to be made in a way that corrects this distortion."

.... The aberration that curved image sensors helps mitigate is spherical aberration. Not distortion ....

Better, cheaper, and/or smaller lenses if the design is made specifically for the curved sensor.
Maybe try DomTerm (https://domterm.org/Remoting-over-ssh.html) - it uses plain ssh on port 22. (See separate response.)
Apple became the biggest corporation in the world because they worked out how to build humane interfaces into the technologies that shape the future. That you believe Grandma will be just fine nerding around with system internals, or will care what ROM is(!) shows just how far out of touch so many hackers really are. I'm sorry, but no: Android is not a solution.
Stores that are baked into vendor images are granted special privileges to act as app stores.
> They charged him

Eh?
They never had the hope that their descendants could escape poverty permanently snatched away.
I don't know yet, I'm aware of the Librem 5 and Pinephone, the former being more attractive to me because of the isolated baseband modem. But let's be real, the user experience of these devices doesn't come close to an iPhone, so it will be a tough transition I reckon. But one I deem necessary.
Taliban still has significant influence in Pakistan. If OBL wasn't killed back then, you can rest assured he'd be leading the charge today into retaking Afghanistan.

Its better that OBL is dead. But the new wave of leaders of the Taliban are still stronger than expected.

----------

Hell, ISIL / Daesh has splintered off of Al Qaeda and the two occasional get into skirmishes with each other. The leadership was in fact fractured successfully.

It may not be enough for a lasting peace, but I wouldn't say that its completely worthless.
There's already a standard that's been in place for ages and ages:

./configure

make

make install
> Go deposit 1 million in a bank, and then ask for it in cash the next day. You won’t get it.

But, you will get it. Try that with Tether, and you might just get laughed at. They would have already put your million dollars to other uses outside of being a deposit for you.
You raise an interesting point. I'd definitely want to test them under water main break scenarios, when a bunch of mud and sand &c make their way through the lines. A clear inspection port (whole side, really) would be super cool.
Technically, our "empire" started after WWII, so it's more like 80 years.
Ah ok. Fixed. Thanks!
Writing a Nodemailer plugin while ranting on the SaaS analysis paralysis
But at the foundation, there is a universal truth. Whether you describe something as a "massacre" or an "incident" is a moral judgment, but whether the event happened in the first place is a fact that continues to be true regardless of the strength of anyone's delusion to the contrary.

Plurality of information and perspective gives you the richest knowledge because (a) the knowledge of which judgments different people apply to the same facts is a fact in itself and (b) all sides lie and omit information to further their own agenda, so you have to try your best to interpolate the universal truth from what everyone else is saying.
What I always find funny about people with young children is that they seem to think their situation is somehow normal.

It's not, you'll do it for 8 odd years of your life and complain about how awful it is to everyone else. Constantly. Then tell us kids are the best thing that ever happened to you, no, really, honest.

And then it's done and a few years later you've got teenagers living with you who despise every fibre of your being.

The mystery is quite easily solved too. It used to take a village to raise a child, but we're now all doing it alone, isolated from our neighbours, and that's why you've got no time.

Hope that helps you to not bother reading any productivity articles until your kids are 8 or so.

TL;DR Stop reading them, they're not aimed at you.

Edit: Also, I'm only saying this to you, because I can't say it to my friends/sister :) Feels good to get that rant off my chest!
> Is there a specific genre name given to movies that have only a few people throughout the entirety of the movie in a closed environment?

In TV this form is often referred to as a "bottle episode"[1], and there's at least one article describing Alien as a "bottle movie"[2]. Presumably, this was done to maximize what could be done with its $11M (!) budget.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_episode

[2] https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/alien-disney.html
Weird take.

If your employer is obligated to withhold taxes from you per pay period, then they can do that and still pay you the rest in stablecoins.

If your employer is not obligated to withhold taxes because you are a contractor, then not having taxes withheld has nothing to do with earning fiat or earning stablecoins.

If you are trying to avoid the record of payment by earning stablecoins, this is neither an efficient way to do it nor is it legal.
> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned.

An anti-piracy scheme that respected legitimate use would need this. History suggests that breaking existing media so that you have to buy (or rent) new copies of the same content over and over may be seen as a feature rather than a bug.
I'm not so sure. Obviously, more competition means lower prices, but software has proven very resistant to that bit of conventional economic wisdom, with a few exceptions of course (namely, places with very high CoL).
This setup can work well. EtcherPro is using the standard Etcher app too. The performance and the UX won't be the same, but as you said it will be much cheaper.
I would go as far as to say that it's awfully hard not to sound like a dick when you are, in fact, a dick.
Modern use for it:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277794-century-old-wat...