skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're getting at the Münchhausen trilemma.

You are technically right, so let's just pick a pragmatic and useful definition of root cause: the preceding event or circumstance that is at right the level of abstraction and proximity where knowledge of this will be maximally helpful to people in similar situations in the future.
I agree that 'digital minimalism' is an extremely vague and, what's worse, generally paired with unscientific new-age Zen broscience bullshit, but I do think there's a legitimate point: we should question our tools.

It's easy to use gadgets, technologies, apps, subscriptions, whatever, just out of habit, without actually being conscious of the tradeoffs they involve.

I used to have social media accounts, but I deleted them after I realized they weren't valuable to me.

My phone is now a dumbphone, because I thought the additional mental energy one devotes to apps, notifications etc. wasn't really worth much to me.

Of course everyone needs to draw their own conclusions, I'm not claiming my decisions have universal validity, but the general principle "use all the tech you need, but not more" is a good one.
My favorite bit of folklore along those lines is that of the Hadza:

"One telling of Hadza's oral history divides their past into four epochs, each inhabited by a different culture. According to this tradition, in the beginning of time the world was inhabited by hairy giants called the akakaanebee "first ones" or geranebee "ancient ones". The akakaanebee did not possess tools or fire; they hunted game by running it down until it fell dead; they ate the meat raw. They did not build houses but slept under trees, as the Hadza do today in the dry season. In older versions of this story, fire was not used because it was physically impossible in the earth's primeval state, while younger Hadza, who have been to school, say that the akakaanebee simply did not know how.

In the second epoch, the akakaanebee were succeeded by the xhaaxhaanebee "in-between ones", equally gigantic but without hair. Fire could be made and used to cook meat, but animals had grown more wary of humans and had to be chased and hunted with dogs. The xhaaxhaanebee were the first people to use medicines and charms to protect themselves from enemies and initiated the epeme rite. They lived in caves.

The third epoch was inhabited by the people of hamakwanebee "recent days", who were smaller than their predecessors. They invented bows and arrows, and containers for cooking, and mastered the use of fire. They also built huts like those of Hadza today. The people of hamakwabee were the first of the Hadza ancestors to have contact with non-foraging people, with whom they traded for iron to make knives and arrowheads. They also invented the gambling game lukuchuko.

The fourth epoch continues today and is inhabited by the hamayishonebee "those of today". When discussing the hamayishonebee epoch, people often mention specific names and places, and can approximately say how many generations ago events occurred." [1]

There are some obvious parallels here with our modern scientific understanding of human evolution. If it's not just a coincidence, we're talking about an oral tradition that is tens of thousands of years old at least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadza_people#Religion,_myths,_...
Does china really have designs on Afghanistan? For what purpose?

(I mean this as an honest question, i don't know that much of the geopolitics of the region)
Ask HN: Why does Windows 11 require TPM 2?
Why does Windows 11 require a TPM 2 chip? Why not make it optional?
Remember that it was trump who initiated departure from afghanistan, and deals were signed.
They are surely sick of 20 years of useless war so they will support the new leaders.
I think it’s common knowledge that the Conservative party in the UK accepts large donations from Russian citizens[1] and that a section of the London property market is swimming in Russian money.[0]

It would be a stretch to say Johnson is kompramat, but there is certainly little appetite in that party to get actively hostile with Russia.

Somehow this lightweight was defence minister during Salisbury[2]

[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/russia-report-real-estate

[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/amp/gavin-williamson-the-man-who-...

Edit: Formatting
While I can see the logic behind that, what you are giving up is proper credential support (profile, env, instance, pod, etc) and a decent built in retry/exception policy. Using boto3 the entire library becomes something like:

s3_client = boto3.client("s3")

class S3VFS:
def get_range(self, from_, to_):
return s3_client.get_object(..., Range=f'bytes={from_}-{to_}')['Body'].read()

with apsw.Connection(..., vfs=S3VFS())

That's drastically simpler, and safer to include from a library consumer point of view.
i own an electric scooter which is a 250 Watt motor and has a 48V 24Ah battery so 1KWH. this gives me about 50 Km for one charge. on this scooter, i put over 220 KG of load and it runs so there should be no problems putting two of those motors in a three wheel design. about power, i am sure this is just for "topping up" the battery because one can have a battery bank at home which charges from sun which can be swapped for next day. that way you can put even a 330 watt panel and that should charge this system during the entire day. then you have to account for cloudy days and such so maybe bump the solar up so if you put something like 500 Watts or more with a second battery pack of 2+ Kwh, that should be comfortable
I've a good example for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715

Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged.

I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic.

This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219

Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it.

Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned.

What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know?

If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
This is very true. There are plenty of people that probably consider the Afghanistan war a resounding success.
> USA can't now fight half the world dominated by solidified group of corrupt regimes.

If there is anything the past few decades have shown, it's that the pocketbook and the sword are both useless tools when it comes to any kind of Middle Eastern policy.
You can share on mastodon. Or even better, write a blog about it. Another alternative is to write in a journal, but that defeats your purpose of wanting to share.
I'd like a phone with the only apps being:

- Signal

- Web browser

- Email

- Podcast app

- RSS reader

- PDF/EPUB reader

- WiFi Hotspot (for occasional use)

- Mapping/directions/traffic (only Google app I use)

That's all I use my phone for. It covers everything I need.

My current phone is basically the above with all Google apps disabled, where I can, and the rest not updated because I don't use them.

Think my next phone will be a Google phone with graphene os and no gapps
Considering A Sphere – why is its volume 4/3 pi r^3?
Sounds a lot like the Italian mercenary armies in the middle ages, where they mostly maneuvered for advantage rather than fought. Being mercenaries, they had little interest in dying for their employer's cause.
Any idea if the accidental damage protection in the EU covers has international coverage? Probably the most annoying thing about Lenovo is that all their insurance partners are different depending on which region you buy their devices from.
Ask HN: Features to help getting things OUT of the TODO list
The existing todo apps are very useful to add things to a todo list and to organize them. These apps push us to keep adding things to the todo list. Indeed, some people confuse a) adding things to the todo list with b) actually doing them. We can go crazy about the organazation (colors, labels, projects etc.). There is a lot that goes into the list and not a lot that goes out from the list. The list grows bigger and bigger until we reach a point of: "I need to start again".

If you were asked to imagine some features that help taking things out of todo lists what would you suggest?
> Over the past 200 years, the British, Soviet, and American empires have all failed to pacify Afghanistan. Probably the Mongols and Alexander the Great struggled too, I need to dig into the history of those campaigns for more specifics.

I recommend checking out this thread, as the whole Afghanistan = Graveyard of empires meme only applies to quite recent history.

https://twitter.com/Alex_Khaleeli/status/1425608335726940166...
To state the obvious, the Afghans in aggregate, were not willing to build an army and were not willing to defend themselves against the Taliban.

This Is What Winning Looks Like (2013?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja5Q75hf6QI
Plenty of those that helped the Americans and other troops are now facing gruesome execution by the Taliban. Translators, people working for them in any capacity, teachers, they're all on the run fearing for their lives. Turkey is overrun by a wave of people getting out of Afghanistan.
> multi-decade delaying action to stymie Chinese expansion for as long as possible?

That wasn't in the original brief, and I've never heard it before in the 20 years?

Frankly if it's an expensive unpacifiable area, let China have it. They can sink effort into an unwinnable war instead.

Also, having consulted a map, how do you expect China to physically get there?
Everyone who's calling out Lenovo should be calling out apple and talking about how they can't use any apple product lines, for the same security concerns.

Nothing is safe!
The amount of support Pakistan provides Taliban is severly overblown. Did they provide them refuge when Taliban was on the back foot? Sure, probably.

Is Pakistan aiding them in this current offense? It really doesn't seem like it.
Adani has been making and selling solar panels in india for the last 2+ years, the duties are a late step to stop Chinese dumping that wiped out solar panel manufacturing being done by companies like moserbear in Greater Noida a decade ago.
Perhaps they wanted to be difficult to find using a Google search. Like the ".NET" framework.
We had the exact same situation in my own country: our government suddenly decided to triple minimum wage, to triple taxes. A lot of small businesses were closed because of this sudden change. We had protests, but they are too late. Sadly, US embassy did not help us.
And then there were "phantom soldiers"- it's the practice where officers would just create non-existent soldiers to pocket their salary.
This was always the view of Americans: Monry can buy everything. While it may be true for their democracy it is not true for other things that people value.
Very unlikely, a version of Algeria 2.0 is far more likely than Vietnam 2.0.
Why would they not use old solar panels. Certainly in a country as big as India, there must be a tonne of them for students. I understand you wanted to complain about the tariffs. It's still a valid question.
The British actually got their war goals despite losing most of the time. That's why the Pashtun are divided by a line the British made. The Soviets managed to create a state that outlasted them, stopping the equivalent mujahideen attack in its tracks[0]. That state only fell when the USSR itself fell. The US failure is exceptional in the amount of resources cost, the quickness of collapse, and in failure to reach objectives.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1989%E2%80%9...
Wars are won by men willing to die for their cause. The US, Canadian and many other soldiers who helped liberate Europe in the 2nd World War were willing to die for freedom. And the Taliban are willing to die for theirs.

I wish a safe return to the very professional troops from more than 20 countries still on the ground. Once again they are victims of incompetent politicians.

But it 20 years, was it not always obvious, that a young Afghani, that just got in the Army because it was only available well paid job would not be willing to die for some very local nebulous cause? To defeat a group that embodies the cultural heritage that prevailed in the country for the last few centuries?
Actually Slimbook is from Valencia (Spain). But AFAIK they send worldwide. At least I got mine in Finland at a reasonable shipping price.
I would imagine humanity has hit the asymptote of the natural growth curve. War and famine were the only forces that kept population in check. And those are dramatically reduced in modern era.
In good dry Norwegian summer weather, at a steady 90 kph on the flat, my 2015 Model S 70D will consume about 170 Wh/km, that's 3.4 kWh for 20 km. So 6.8 kWh for urban driving with what is probably a much less efficient drive train sounds a bit high but not wildly off.
Certainly, Afghanistan was for the containment of China/Russia and Iraq was for the containment of Iran/Russia. Still, were those really successes?
Starlabs systems as well.
I remember back in the early 2000s, I built a whole set of scripts to automatically download the next set of files from aminet, unarchive them, play them, let me give each a rating (0 to 9), and store that away so I could later tell it to play tracks with a rating of X+ in random order. I think I made it about 1/3 the way through all of aminet. The vast majority of tracks were awful, but there was a decent number of absolute gems in there.
Potentially with the belt and road initiative, which may now even expand into Afghanistan with the US redrawal.
Taliban is certainly more popular than they were 25 years ago.

Last time there was a pretty strong grassroot movement against Taliban, particularly in the northern parts of the nation. Taliban didn't have to fire a shot in many of these places this time.
I am in constant awe of Lars Magne. He is both one of the most productive people I know and one of the nicest.
I think humans have enjoyed framing stories in this 'stroke-of-luck' genius protagonist style for a long time.

In startups the initial moneybag investor needs a brilliant story to repeat to everybody in their network. Later, everybody who works in that risky venture wants to repeat that story to explain the risk they're taking to have this adventure. Finally, consumers who are initially convinced to buy the thing also need to tell themselves stories of how this product is somehow special, unique, made by brilliant people.

It's like the origin story is an accumulation of all the narcissistic energy accumulated in order to swallow the uncertainty felt by everyone involved.

I would question the importance of focusing on the story - it should naturally follow and result from all the work being done, not be invented ahead of time to fit in with expectations.
I don't know that much about the region, but the us-supported side had 20 years and lots of money to prepare for this day. I would assume if they enjoyed more popular support in the near past they would have built something that would less obviously be the losing side today, and people wouldn't have jumped ship so quickly.
So will the Taliban stop the opium production again?
Distributed System Engineer | India (Remote) | Full-time| https://loconav.com/

LocoNav, a Sequoia Capital backed fleet-tech startup, is looking for passionate developers to join our software development team. With presence in 25+ countries and market leadership in India, we recently raised a Series B for $37Mn. We are now growing exponentially and want to work with awesome engineers at many levels to solve problems in IoT, ML, AI and more. Developers with experience in building products at scale can email resumes directly to me at manik.singla@loconav.com.
ISI help is significantly more than refuge. That said, the Taliban didn't need help for this offensive. They've been handed the country on a platter.
The Biden administration doing this so haphazardly is irresponsible and with little to no reward - political or anything else.

Moving away from US centric debates on the economic value of this war and attempt at governance; I fear Afghanistan will again become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism atrocities and also put increased pressure on Europe in terms of migration.

To the latter point, Europe is already on the breaking point here and further stress will probably - judging from recent experience - lead to further success of conservative and anti-immigration political parties.
I stand corrected. Although lambda calculus is apparently considered by some to be a term rewriting system, apparently. So I'm not sure the connexion is so distant after all.
I don't buy the whole premise about storytelling being the big thing. In particular I think doing the thing is much much much much much more important than telling the story. If you do the thing then the story tells itself.

I was 1 of a team of 2 or 3 on every pitch in 2 or 3 separate processes to raise over 1bn dollars and make the company I worked for (OakNorth) the most valuable fintech in Europe at the time. We did about 30 investor meetings covering everyone in the PE world, some of the big tech investors, some key VCs, some family offices etc. We ended up massively oversubscribed so and picked the investors we thought were the best fit. In every single pitch the most important things were:

1. your company should actually do something important/valuable. Solve an important problem etc.
2. you should have a plan for a future where the unit economics work, and you should know the plan inside and out
3. you should have thought through something about how what your company does intersects with *this particular investor's* interests, and be able to articulate that clearly
4. You should have clear asks - not just money for valuation but what else you're looking to get from them (strategic advice, intros, synergies with other companies in their portfolio etc).

The deck, pitch itself etc are much less important than doing something important and actually knowing what you're talking about. In particular, avoid the thought that you can hack the process with a slick pitch and a cool-looking deck. It may take you to a first meeting, but it's not going to get you to close with anyone of substance.
Fear not, for the vehicles were left without keys, so they were useless to everyone including the Afghan army.
I know that. But there was always some travelling over the Inner-German border. Not convenient at all for those wanting to travel from the East, could lead to losing your job and even imprisonment until the West paid to get you free years later. But possible for those who were persistent enough and accepted the sometimes severe consequences. In Korea even that is not enough.
I am also not fully sold on the idea that getting out is a good idea, but for different reasons. The growth of Afghanistan's economy (300-400% GDP) and the quality of life improvements since the Taliban were removed has been notable, and if this regresses then there will be a real human toll.

But not pulling out seems to be just delaying the inevitable, and a continued presence is expensive and arguably incendiary/destabilizing to the whole region, so I can understand doing it.

This isn't a commentary on the specifics of how it was done, merely on whether a withdrawal should have been done.
The US built their side so as to maximally depend on them and then pulled support abruptly, while all but grovelling to the Taliban in public. There could have been no other result the way this withdrawal was done.
MHH maybe you are right. I can't exactly say when it started with my touchpad. Is your https://xkcd.com/243 also affected? Are the buttons of the mouse pad also affected?
I believe you're identifying simple and fundamental, which is risky, because it's not explicit for whom the code is supposed to be simple (reader or writer).

Writing good code for a reader is about abstracting to the fundamental level of atomic logic. But this requires quite a lot of practice and experience, not to mention discipline.

If the code is _simple_ from the writer's point of view it's probably filled with tacit assumptions (future breakage) and lazy decision made to get where this thing just works.

Good code requires insight and planning. _My code_ is written from the top of my head to solve a specific issue. I'm an amateur in programming with a long enough academic education to know in detail how I suck :)

If asked I'd probably say I write simple code. But I don't necessarily intend well structured and stable, just that it was straightforward for me at the time of writing it (+ n days).
Other countries don’t have the same problem in the same way.

Stop manufacturing fentanyl.
There's a sobering assessment of US performance in Afghanistan, What we got wrong in Afghanistan [1], in The Atlantic from a few days ago.

It was written by a retired veteran: Mike Jason retired in 2019 as a U.S. Army colonel, after 24 years on active duty. He commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

It pulls no punches and, in my opinion, is worth reading.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/how-americ...
Because of this:

"Afghanistan may be sitting on one of the richest troves of minerals in the world, valued at nearly $1 trillion, scientists say."

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/rare-earth-afgh...

The Chinese will ask no questions, will do the work, and wont bother the Taliban with annoying issues like freedom and democracy. A perfect match.
Capitalism?
> Rejecting accepted definitions in discourse and propaganda has proven intellectually and politically dangerous in the past, even when the redefinition is made honestly and explicitly. Devastating when made dishonestly and opaquely.

And if the accepted definition is already the dishonest and dangerous type?
The buck stops on the President's desk.
I think the "best effort" no guarantees thing is due to Twitter and how they deal with API users like this. They have a reputation for shutting down 3rd party extensions so if more than 50 people use this in a 24h period they get suspended for example.
Jealousy is never the right word. Feeling of loss is. Losing faith in yourself and losing a close friend. Buddies will always be buddies but it will be harder to connect from now on. Most likely will never be like it was. True connection happens between peers.

Just let go. Nothing to do there.
But most probably CL developers you'll be able to find, will be more skillful then an average developer on the market.
Return to Flight
Is this good for synced music transmissions or is it another simulation of the 1950s telephone sound?
I don't think there were designs on Afghanistan, but these strategies usually work like chess, where having an opposing piece in one place constrains actions in another. Afghanistan is next to Xinjiang, where some subversive actions were demonstrated, so China ended up having to pay a lot of attention to the western front and therefore had less strategic flexibility in the near Pacific where her main interests lie.

Having said that, it didn't work at all. China patiently used those 20 years to develop its economy and infrastructure, locked down Xinjiang against subversion, set up Belt and Road, and gained strategic tempo in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait while the US got much too carried away in Central Asia.
Some KLM aircraft were flown to Britain at the beginning of the war. They operated a Bristol-Lisbon service under BOAC registration. I presume it was one of those fights that's being referenced.