skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The publicly stated reasons for going to war, and the actual reasons, are different, though obviously related.

Regular citizens generally are not going to buy into complicated arguments or vague, geostrategic issues, they often need clear, more unambiguous line of reasoning. Especially those that align with their supposed values.

The proles need to hear stories about 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' and 'Evil Tyrants' and scary things about 'Masses of Chemical Weapons'.

US leadership wanted to enter WW2 long before the American public could be convinced. It took an attack on American soil, and dead Americans to tilt public opinion.

The US used a 'False Flag' (Gulf of Tonkin) operation in Vietnam to help build public support and credibility for intervention in Vietnam.

George Bush proposed a 'False Flag' UN airplane incident apparently, an idea that was quashed.

This is the case in every war, without getting too controversial, even the US revolutionary war.

It all seems kind of Machiavellian and duplicitous, and it is, but it's also the reality of leadership in ugly scenarios. Imagine that you're the leader of a nation that really, really needs to do something that the plebes don't want to do? It's a weird kind of moral dilemma.

FYI I'm not justifying any of these decisions, just illustrating the incongruity between actual planning, and the marketing / communicating of it.

COVID is an example of that, it's a massive exercise in 'Public Communications' where the stakes are existential. What we are being told publicly i.e. the 'Narrative' isn't a lie by any means, but it's definitely designed to create outcomes.

So:

" The reasons we went to war were very clear, 'Saddam was stockpiling WMDs and was a threat to world.'. "

No, that's just what they said publicly. That's how war was 'marketed'.

Also - they used the term 'Terrorism' a lot with respect to Saddam, i.e. 'War On Terror'. Of course, Saddam was definitely not a radical religious terrorist, he was basically the opposite of that.

Everyone pushing for the war knew that the material evidence for WMD's was pretty weak.

PNAC made several publications before Bush came to power, and the public members of PNAC literally filled the White House.

Those who were against (or more Dovish) on the war i.e. Colin Powell and Condi Rice - were the not part of PNAC.

So imagine if there was this 'Think Tank X' that wanted to push for some thing, 'X' and then when Biden comes to power, more than 1/2 of his Cabinet is literally from this special 'Think Tank X' and then after 1 year, the all push hard for this 'X thing' but communicate it to the public as 'Y'?

You can hardly say it's about 'Y'.

It's about 'X', it's fairly clear.

There were 17 members of PNAC in the White House. And the President's own Brother.

[1] https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_PNAC_Members_ass...
This you?

https://github.com/bradrn/brassica/blob/master/README.md
When you click the first link, here's what the U.S. Embassy tells you:

> Event: The security situation in Kabul continues to change quickly, including at the airport. U.S. citizens should continue to shelter in place. U.S. citizens seeking assistance to depart the country should complete this Repatriation Assistance Request for each traveler in their group. Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens in Afghanistan who are awaiting immigrant visas should also complete this form if they wish to depart. Please do so as soon as possible. Please do so only once.

So, in the absence of any better information, a reasonable deduction is that there are civilians left behind.

Plus, there is Mark Frerichs[1].

[1]: https://www.wjol.com/lombard-man-is-last-known-u-s-hostage-o...
40% isn’t really “almost half,” unless you squint and turn your head sideways.

I’m a little suspicious of surveys that have only two choices that add up to 100%.

That said, I’m not happy with the way that facial recognition is being deployed, and a lot of HN readers are the ones that are crafting the tools.

When a blacksmith makes a sword, they know what it’s for. Things get fuzzier, after that.

I watched a (terrible) movie, a while ago, called Monsters of Man, and it featured this team of geeks that developed AI-powered killbots, and were forced to get “up close and personal” with their work.

Needless to say, things didn’t end well for them.
I'm honestly perplexed by the discussion here. Why should I care that a grocery store is using this? They already have camera systems - what is it about feeding that data into a facial recognition algorithm that is so awful?

They want to identify who their customers are and already do a good job of it with loyalty cards. I often have to show my ID when I buy beer. I'm in a public place where I have no expectation of privacy. I run into my neighbors in the grocery store and say Hi.

What exactly should I be trying to hide here?
My step-dad in Norway got his the 3rd of June, so they are out there.

I just checked the price of a MUSTANG 5.0 V8 GT, and the price is almost exactly double in Norway from what it is where I live in Mexico.
That is absolutely not true at all. Dropping bombs on things does not make them better. Large cities that were home to millions of people were bombed, vital utilities like power and water were 'taken out' for strategic purposes. Airports were destroyed, hospitals and schools accidentally bombed. The country fell into civil war. There are still many places that lack basic utilities like running water that existed prior to the 'liberation'. It is still a powder keg of factions fighting that include soldiers from neighbouring countries who have crossed the border.
I am not talking about JavaScript in general. I have been doing mainly JavaScript programming for the last 8 or 9 years or so (before that other languages like C# and C++ for many years). And I use those keywords all the time.

For this specific use case, they are trying to replace shell scripts. So I thought maybe some people might be willing to consider abbreviations for the async and await keywords for this case.
I believe Cloudflare in his case isn't acting as a CDN (though it's still is) but a way to use his own domain (vcmi.eu)
Man, seeing that in 2014 and knowing things have escalated orders of magnitude since then is frustrating.

I went to Target to buy stuff for a friend after they gave birth a few years ago. I made sure I paid in cash, but I imagine they still tried tying it back to me via license plate recognition.

Also relevant - Target sending targeted ads to a teenager whose dad didn't know she was pregnant yet. Such an annoying but prevalent part of life that's only really avoidable by shopping at local places, always paying cash, and never joining any loyalty programs even if they have nice benefits.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Afghanistan's All-Girls Robotics Team Tries to Escape Country
Being rational doesn't prevent you to be wrong. If your assumption is that the government tells the truth and you conclude that mask don't work. Then you have reasoned rationally.

But if you dont trust the governement, and for this specific case you followed them, then this is not rational.
You'd still probably be better off hiring a carpenter who already has the tools than doing it yourself. They can amortize the fixed costs over hundreds of projects.
A lot of professional programmers have no significant math background or have it but haven't exercised it so it's as good as absent. I'll even include many CS graduates here, whose college level math experience often ends with Calculus 2 (in the US) and linear algebra, perhaps a discrete math course. But then without any application to most of their other courses this information is quickly forgotten. I work predominantly with EEs and CS majors (my employer does not hire non-degreed persons for programming work, which does eliminate some really good candidates) and outside of the one teaching orbital mechanics, most would be hard pressed to solve even a basic linear algebra problem anymore. I've even had to re-teach boolean algebra to the EEs who seem to have forgotten even Karnaugh maps and how to use them.

And then there are all the non-technical majors who become programmers, like the many philosophy graduates I've worked with. This isn't to say they can't learn the math, but they often have even less exposure than the typical business major in the US.

And globally there are many people who come to professional programming without any degree at all beyond a high school diploma. And given the variance in high school curricula globally there's no way to say what level of math this group possesses, but they almost certainly lack college level academic math exposure, the majority at least.
Ransomware: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
How exactly is a tag-based system not a DAG, regardless of whether tags can imply other tags or not?

> It's got a root, it propagates from the root to leaf nodes, and there is no recursion.

A network of instances and tags satisfies the same properties. Do you have any counterexample? If not, I have to dismiss a notion that "tag-based systems" stand in opposition to "hierarchical systems" since every network of objects and tags is a DAG.
I think this is connected to another reason why so many seem to reject "rationality" today.

They are rejecting the authorities that in the past have tried to associate themselves with "rationality". The political think tanks. The seminaries. The universities. Government agencies. Capitalist CEOs following the "invisible hand" of the market.

All of these so-called elites have biases and agendas, so of course none of them should be accepted at face value.

I think what's missed, is rationality is not about trusting people and organizations, but about trusting a process. Trusting debates over lectures. Trusting well designed studies over trusting scientists. Trusting free speech and examining a broad range of ideas over speech codes and censorship. Trusting empirical observation over ideological purity.

This is the value system of the so called "classical liberals", and they are an ever more lonely and isolated group. There is a growing embrace for authoritarianism and defense of tribal identity on both the "left" and the "right" taking its place.
What I have heard (don't remember exactly where, but likely I read this in the Times or Post) is that there are an estimated 20,000 US citizens in Kabul.

Many US embassies encourage US citizens abroad to register w/ the embassy whether they are visiting or traveling. I imagine that was especially encouraged in Afghanistan.

I think I also read that the Germans want to evacuate something like 10,000 people, including some of their own citizens and some Afghan employees / dependents.

Other Western powers likely have similar numbers.
I was curious. F2 does nothing for me.
Congrats guys, exciting! How do you differentiate yourselves from other on-demand design services?
Sure, those are good for learning more about your own community.

But you’re not going to learn the same things you would from travel. For example, you’re not likely to learn another language if everyone you talk to speaks English. Similarly for learning about other cultures that aren’t near you.

But I’m not sure how much brief travel to see the tourist sites helps, and hanging out with expats might not help so much.
If we're doing "best of OSS games" in this thread, we can't leave out Endless Sky (https://endless-sky.github.io/), a very competent Escape Velocity style game. I played it a number of years ago and quite enjoyed it. Been meaning to come back to it now that (presumably) the galaxy and storyline is a bit bigger.
This was largely due to the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine (USA).
Dada would like to have a noise like sheet-metal asparagus.
Thanks for the extensive feedback! Really appreciate it.

We'll have to check out how we're marketing it.
It's interesting. I'm a developer who'd call himself a power-user (my .vimrc is fly as fuck), but I'd much rather a product that streamlines the experience as long as it does it well. Which is what we want users to give us feedback on :D

Yes, you can actually have todos for arbitrary text content and you can add your current page to the context of the todo. That way, you know where you were when you created the todo in the first place, which can be quite useful.
Having watched the demo video, I think this looks interesting. A lot of the (overly nasty) comments here are talking about the pricing for this from a consumer/individual perspective. Frankly, they're right: I think that, for individuals, the benefit over using a vanilla browser is pretty limited.

What piqued my interest in the demo are the 'multiplayer' features like super-fast sharing. Today, Sigma seems mildly simpler/faster at that than vanilla browsers, but I think there is a lot of room for growth and innovation here: browsers are mostly 'single player', but work is not.

OP, if I were you, I'd be leaning heavily into the more collaborative/social features of this thing and pivoting your GTM efforts toward companies rather than targeting individuals. I think there's merit to some of the comments here that $15/mo for an individual user is expensive. My advice: make it free or insanely cheap for individuals, but limit the collaborative features to paid business users.

You're a Slack replacement, not a browser replacement.
Lowes uses facial recognition tech in their stores. The camera is there all the same.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22576236/retail-stores-fa...
Is this a typo?

console.log(`Files count: ${count}`)

missing $
is this satire?

What all devs LOVE is documentation... Just throw some up and they will empty their wallets
Brex is not a scam, but they do overpromise and underdeliver. It's a charge card (money has to be paid back at the end of the month, and is automatically deducted from checking account). They have low credit limits, and the point thing usually doesn't materialize (we got 50% of what we were supposed to, I think.)
> promoted 'Pax Americana' in the Middle East

Is this another "Manifest Destiny" in disguise?
History of Mentalities
Antibody-dependent enhancement seems to be the latest hot trend among pseudoscientific anti-vaxxers, but they all conveniently ignore the fact that we literally have evidence that this doesn’t happen in humans. Even the study authors admit that the effect wasn’t seen in their animal trials nor in human trials:

> And the authors note that if antibody treatment led to ADE in humans, then it would have been seen in the convalescent serum trials and in its clinical usage. But it was not
Roblox Acquires Guilded, a Platform to Connect Gaming Communities
OK, yeah, that's not quite the same as what I'm suggesting. WinFS was intended to be used at the application level. I'm talking about using SQLite (or something like that) to store filesystem metadata, more like the resource fork in the original MacOS, except that the resource fork was per-file and what I'm suggesting here would use the embedded DB to store directories (in addition to per-file metadata). The schemas would be part of the OS design. Applications would not be able to modify them or add new ones.
Only $7/wk for rush jobs? Damn that sounds like a shit deal for the person actually doing the work, even if y'all take absolutely nothing off the top. I wouldn't touch that kind of deal with a ten foot pole, even if I was shitting out the most banal, generic work possible.

Oh okay that's just the first week trial period, it's a monthly rate of $500 for "graphic" work or $1000 for "product", that's not as shit but it's still like $16 or $32/day (not accounting for weekends, I don't feel like seeing if your rules cover that, and again that's before your fees and any payment processing fees), and that's still sure not anywhere near what I'd be charging for a month of 24h turnaround.
Shorter Chomsky: "Oil companies wouldn't destroy the world if killing the king's deer still meant spending a year in the pokey."

No man from henceforth shall lose either life or member for the killing of our deer; but if any man be taken and convited for the taking of our venison, he shall make a grievous fie, if he has anything whereof; and if he has nothing to lose, he shall be imprisoned a year and a day; and after the year and day expired, if he can find sufficient sureties, he shall be delivered; and if not, he shall abjure the realm of England.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magn...
I personally think the issue boils down to their use of the term "Autopilot" for a product that is not Autpilot (and never will be with the sensor array they're using IMO.)

They are sending multiple signals that this car can drive itself (going so far as charging people money explicitly for the "self-driving" feature) when it cannot in the slightest do much more than stay straight on an empty highway.

They should be forced to change the name of the self-driving features, I personally think "Backseat Driver" would be more appropriate.
Oversight Board overturns Facebook decision: Case 2020-005-FB-UA
And Perl (specifically "perlthanks") was just the first thing they found that worked. Bash had similar problems in the past, and I imagine there's other "installed by default" stuff that can be coaxed into running code in environment variables.
Don't expect good internet service until Starlink has a few thousand of their v1.5 and v2.0 satellites (with the inter-satellite laser links) launched and operational. And "Summer / Winter Population: 32 / 16" suggests that the local cultural amenities, dating scene, and school choices may be, ah, "quite limited".
Exactly, the only driving assistance feature I use is adaptive cruise control, and I don't have plans to use anything more. If I trust autonomous systems too much, I would not be ready when it matters.
For nerds who are dogshit at making music, but want to adapt the existing tools and theory to something they know. Its esoteric and never practical for anyone that wants to create music.
We're still workshopping pricing models. We have a 14-day free trial, so please give it a go and tell us what you think!
It is _a_ perfect choice.

I know a bit of bash, but I'm always looking up how to do things I know are simple in JS. I would love to be able to write scripts in JS because I'm faster with it, and I find it easier to read.
What is the nature of your outrage exactly? Bash is very difficult as a language to write code in. JS is very familiar to a lot of developers and its syntax is orders of magnitude easier to understand than Bash.
The 86.9-87.5 kg, 170-178 cm hat+mask guy without a cell phone wants to buy security and self defense items.
Hiring a carpenter is very expensive. The cost of tools is tiny compared to the cost of their labor.

(I'm assuming that we're talking about saving money in a way that counts your own time doing something you enjoy as free.)
A month ago Biden literally said this won’t be a new Saigon and that there wouldn’t be helicopters airlifting people off embassy roofs. Guess what happened.
https://www.newsweek.com/clip-biden-saying-people-wont-lifte...
This is all true. That being said, it's not completely a bad thing. We have to accept that different people are motivated by different things. To run a business, you need both people motivated by money and people motivated by building things. People only motivated by money we work in marketing and management but don't have the mindset necessary to build the stuff they want to sell. So you get people motivated by building things to help. The trick is getting all those people to work together.
If you already have an executorservice, calling createVirtualThread is all you need to use Loom afaik.
It depends entirely on the specific Walmart and the neighborhood where it's located. I've been traveling the US this summer and have stopped at many Walmarts. Some are well stocked, beautifully maintained stores that you waltz into and out of without a care or delay. Some are run like minimum security prisons, with cameras, gates, security and screens to show you you're on camera (mostly in the makeup isles).

Some Walmart are well stocked, spacious and clean. Some are ravaged, dirty and filled with tourists. It's really amazing the variety of quality.
Also why did choose to evacuate from Hamid Karzai International Airport? Bagram would have been easier to defend.
Oh hey that's my book. Feels great to see someone getting a lot of value from it :)
I do not know who Sean McClure is ... nor do I care. He seems to have a tune and he's going to continue playing it:

1) The author uses "penny pinching" to mean something other than its common definition[1].

2) By definition, the rich don't need to be concerned with pennies.

3) While not getting lost in minutiae is a good thing, not caring about details is not optimal in all circumstances.

Statements such as

> The best generalists have a very specific way of being so.[2]

and the blog post seem to constitute part of a personal branding campaign.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168440

[2]: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/142650253938255872...
The major version bumps imply breaking changes. Two major versions within a few months implies I might have to refactor my code every couple of months to stay up to date, or face a buildup of tech debt if I want to take advantage of a new feature in the future.

If there are no breaking changes, then I would feel better if they called it v1.9.
If you don't expect Afganistan to fall to Taliban, why would you pull out?

I'm baffled that they made this big of a mistake, but if you operate from the assumption that ANA does not fold, you have no reason to pull out your embassy personnel or civilians in general.
Ah that I missed, good to know.
Hey, thank you for noticing our name! We were initially named Pizdata which literally means "fucking amazing" in Ukrainian (where we are originally from).

We got a lot of local hype, word of mouth clients and even became an internet meme in Romania (where it has a very different meaning). Decided to change a name because of international clients not getting the joke (right after we tested early hypothesis).

Awesomic has the same meaning – "awesome on a cosmic level", by Urban Dictionary.

Here's a blog post where I described effect of such an aggressive naming – http://awesomic.io/blog/startup-journey-to-100-k
Because we didn't evolve to be rational. We evolved to reproduce as often as possible, not to thing as precises as possible. We're not thinking machines, we're reproduction machines.

That we are able to think somewhat rational-ish is only because we adapted by adopting extensive modeling simulations. The fundamental function of these simulations is to simulate other beings, primarily human. And in that our brainware is lazy as hell, because - to quote evolution; why do perfect, when you can do good enough? Saves a ton of energy.

The wetware we employ was never expected to rationally solve differential equations or do proper statistical analysis. At best it was expected to guess the parabola of a thrown stone or spear, or empate the best way to mate without facing repercussions from the tribe.

So, really. It's not that thinking is hard. It's just that we're just not equipped to do it.
...any very short lived concurrent task. A thread costs, what, 10 or 20us to create on a typical linux/x86 system? Perhaps it's more on the JVM?

Look, I'm looking forward to Loom as much as anyone. It is clearly going to be a big leap forward to the java ecosystem, and I'm looking forward to some threaded model being appropriate for any job rather than just most of them. It's just I see this terror of creating a thread or two out in the wider world and it seems a touch overwrought to me.
It would've required the US to do something more sophisticated than giving money to a bunch of corrupt thieves and hoping things work out. US military or civilian leadership is ultimately responsible for the failure even if the Afghan National Army was a complete failure. The ANA was organized and maintained by the US.