skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This could be asteroid that kills us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

Concentrated interests (oil companies) tend to win in battles against diffuse interests (individuals and their descendants who are threatened by climate change.)

An interesting corollary is that a "majority" oppressing a "minority" is not a going concern, but the opposite is. That is, black vs white in the United States vs. South Africa are entirely different things. (Think, 90% of the population can steal everything from 10% of the population and raise it's standard of living by about 10%. 10% of the population can steal 10% of the standard of living from the other 90% and double its own standard of living.)
Digital decays different.

There's the physical degradation of mechanisms and data storage substrates themselves. That's ... not insignificant, but a minor part of the whole situation.

The short-term strength and long-term technical debt of digital is dependencies. Sure, you can spin up some bare-metal or virtualised instance of a system from last month, or five years ago, or twenty years, ago, or fifty. Odds are that the emulation will run faster than the original.[1]

But with time and complexity, dependencies started to expand.

One of the underheralded changes of the 1990s wasn't so much Free Software as what it wrought: an ever expanding and accelerating increase in the number and specificity of dependencies. Tarball distribution gave way to packages, with dependency-resolution, some better (APT), some worse (RPM). Crucially, dependencies didn't simply have to be resolved at build time, once in the lifecycle of an executable, but at install time, once per installation.

The explosion of Web apps and frameworks triggered another violent expansion of the situation with both even more dependencies, more deeply nested ones, but runtime dependencies where prerequisites are identified and fetched from remote hosts.

At runtime.

Which makes the current appified-web immensely flexible and convenient, but also fantastically brittle.

(Of course, the old-school type scan extend this story back to interpreted vs. compiled languages, JIT, hardware-specific variations, high-level vs. machine langauge, binary, and toggling in programmes. It's been a long process.)

But as bits of that infrastructure fall apart, you'll find that digital does in fact decay.

________________________________

Notes:

1. At a gig some years back, a cow-orker told of a uni prof they'd studied under, who did work on the the B and BCPL programming languages. Those are precursors to C. Back in the day when auto manufacturers were looking at automated systems controls, he convinced them that C was far too complex and high-level, and that they should use the more performant BCPL. Which they did. And still do (or did as of a decade or two back), running under several generations of emulation. Faster than the initial hardware implementation. Mind I'm taking them at their word....
I was referring to this: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...
High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-Bit Floating Point
Exactly. Similar situation, though. Both countries are being unrightfully claimed.
It is difficult, only 8.17% were Han in Tibet according to the 2010 census (probably higher now, but far from 50%), not including military stationed there. Even with the subsidies they are providing, life is fairly hard in Tibet due to the high altitude. Even the high altitude areas of adjacent provinces (which were formerly part of Tibet) don't have many Han in them.
This article is right. Individual liability for climate change is a con. The absolute best thing you can do as an individual for the climate is to never have existed in the first place. This sets your climate footprint to 0. However, even in this case, this does not change the trajectory of climate change at all. The hypothetical best is not good enough. So, individual liability is much ado about nothing.
The article seems to be mostly based on https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232511.shtml which is about the release of that report, but includes bits from other sources, including unnamed local officials in Tibet.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53220713 :
"China forcing birth control on Uighurs to suppress population, report says".

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we... : China cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization
Gang of Four. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
I don't understand why cookie popups are a website feature rather than a browser feature. Wouldn't it make far more sense to just have the browser default to disabling cookies, and show a popup if the web page wants to use them? Then it would be simple to say "accept all cookies", or "always deny cookies" rather than having a new popup on each site.
I think there are two reasons.

Capitalism rests on the promise that inequality maximizes economic growth and economic growth in itself will sweep all other social problems including inequality away. Once there is a prolonged period without (high enough) growth, the promise becomes worthless. People see the inequality for what it is.

However, since there is no growth, they are barely scraping by. They have no spare resources to throw into caring about the environment. So they will all do the thing that hurts them the least today. Meaning they will prefer cheap and destructive products and services over sustainable but expensive ones. Mandating sustainability essentially forces expensive products down the throat of people but since inequality is high they can't afford them.

What truly perplexes me though is that even in Germany people will keep voting for parties that basically double "dip", they promise to ensure the availability of cheap unsustainable products but also enact policies that make inequality worse. Cheap meat and oil have basically become a form of welfare to bribe the population.
So if we reduce still further (the UK and the US have made significant cuts) you think China will think again about the 43 new coal-fired power stations now in the design stage?
I'm not so sure. While paying lip service to the Green agenda, my guess is that perhaps the Chinese don't really believe that the world is headed for armageddon. They are of course happy to see ideas like 'net zero' take off in the West.

https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/
Atmospheric data, pay an average to each person in the country.
Any service that broadcasts licensed music to users is going to have issues like this someday. See how tricky it is to have legal background music on a Twitch stream.

I think the best way forward for this kind of thing is to not broadcast the music but instead have each user use their own local player with their personal Spotify/YouTube account and sync the playlist through a shared service.
It gets even more complex when you look at the history.

The Yuan dynasty were ruled by the Mongolians. The Mongolians were devout Buddhists and revered the Tibetan Buddhists. The search for reincarnated Tulkas by the Tibetan Buddhists would extend into the Mongolian regions. The imperial family gave a lot of autonomy to Tibet.

The last Imperial dynasty, Qing, was ruled by Manchurians. The Manchurians were a foreign, non-Han ethnic minority, and the imperial family were also devout Buddhists. The Qin emperors gave the Tibetan region autonomy, though they asserted state power by changing the selection process of the lamas back in the late 1800s.

My point is that, even if I disagree with how the CCP is wiping out the Tibetan heritage, this is a outgrowth of centuries of interactions, religion, and politics in that region.

I could also talk about the many ethnic groups in Napal and Himalayan regions, from which the Tibetan Buddhists assimilated many of the shamanic traditions of the region. From those Himalayan shamans perspective, the "lamaists" ganked their traditions and practiced them for the betterment of themselves rather than the betterment of the community. (From the Tibetan Buddhist perspective, those practices were reified within the View of Mahayana, for the betterment of all sentient beings).
My understanding is that it may be due to the difference of time during the two shots. It's possible that 2 weeks between the two shots of Pfizer is too short. We're learning.
Probably just a ploy to make the payment processors think they would actually go through with banning porn on their platform. No one actually cares about the porn except a very small percentage of mostly religious nut jobs. They just wanted more money.
And while we're on the topic.

Why the hell were our monochrome displays not all white. What's the purpose of adding a color.
It doesn't keep me up at night. In retrospect, it was probably one of the most dubious things I worked on in a decade of advertising, but I (mostly) left the industry because it was morally neutral, not outright wrong. It just felt like a big waste of talent and money, rather than "insidious"
3LAU Raises $16M to Tokenize Music Royalties for Artists and Fans
I recently discovered that my car has 2048 on it courtesy of Android Auto and https://gamesnacks.com/embed/games/2048_v4 . I was pleased to waste a few minutes while waiting for someone in a parking lot.
Yes, I think it could be better, and these hostile practices do overlap. Author does mention telemetry, although the lede is buried.
No. Packaging is completed when you sign a package and upload it into Debian. Taking responsibility for its quality is part of the process.
Can it also get brought up there that you come across as a fascist?
And it's been very useful for exactly that purpose -- thank you for providing it (happy user here!)
Data is a liability. It's hoarded because it's also a gold mine, and the risk to those hoarding it is minimal even if it's stolen.

The risk for hoarding data needs to be made comparable to the harm that theft would cause to the individuals effected by it; or hoarding data needs to be strictly regulated.
Microsoft understands the value of being able to develop once and run everywhere. That's why both Java and the web almost upended their business.

It's not just a monetary/time/effort value to Microsoft or other developers either. It has value to me a user. I prefer applications that I can take with me anywhere I go and they'll be exactly the same on every type of desktop that I use them on.

The list of native desktop applications which can actually do this well for me is pretty short.
https://archive.is/UrD4k
I've worked for manufacturing companies my entire 30+ year career. It's not a dumb metric. It's usually pulled out in response to the silly complaint that "the US doesn't manufacture anything anymore."

Sure, our share of global manufacturing is smaller, but that's hardly surprising when many more countries up their manufacturing game. A more interesting metric would be US percentage of total worldwide manufacturing as a function of sophistication: I'd rather be building complex medical instruments than toasters.
Tibet is a brutal place to live, short of forcing people there I doubt they will get a lot of takers.
I'm really glad that Mozilla is developing Rust. Even though I'm not using it (and haven't even learned it), it looks like a net positive for the world of software development. This is exactly the kind of thing that a nonprofit should do.
Of course Cambridge didn't add significantly more people than it added housing units. People aren't going to move to the city for a job only to live in a tent down by the railroad tracks!

Instead what happened is that new residents came to the city for high paying jobs and bid up the prices for local apartments. Basically a cruel game of musical chairs where low-income households were forced from their homes and into cheaper neighborhoods in the surrounding cities. (Those poor neighborhoods actually did grow in population faster than housing: people were forced to pack into overcrowded living conditions)

If you're curious about the numbers, over the last 40 years Cambridge added about one housing unit for every four new jobs
Antigen targets aside, there is also a difference in the production of antibodies in the mucosal system.

Current vaccines are intra muscular and lacks a robust mucosal response while natural infection will provide mucosal immunity as well.

As one can imagine, mucosal immunity is very important in an upper respiratory track disease w.r.t. symptomatic infection and transmission.
What do you think ASICs are made of?
One of the biggest problems in the security industry is a misconception that security and computer science are the same. They aren't at all.

If you're doing low level design of crypto algorithms, you need to know math. If you're doing appsec reviews or pentests, then a background in software development might help (but is not required).

But there is an entire world of security roles out there that are essential to implementing security that have nothing to do with math or compsci. The security industry right now has a huge problem with gatekeeping, where they think you can't even begin to think about security unless you're already a top-tier principal engineer, and it's led to a huge drought of talent in security roles across the board.
I don't think this belongs on HN, can someone explain to me why this does, seeing as this is number one on the front page? This doesn't seem to stimulate good and curious discussion to me.
I think the argument goes: Google is paying a massive $15B (or ca. 15% of Apple's profits) AND they are only doing that because there is more than $15B in value to them.

So if default iOS search has value in excess of $15B, Apple should just build their own and capture all of that value.

It's not an argument I agree with, and not one I think they will pursue.
Seeking early signals of dementia in driving and credit scores
You are being unfairly downvoted, because what you are saying runs contrary to people's gut feelings.

At this point, we have enough statistics on people getting COVID a second time with or without vaccination, to know that vaccination reduces your odds of re-infection by ~2.3. [1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
Not OP, but China does many shady things in the Uighur region. For example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/ch...
> enacting policies to suppress the population numbers of non Han-ethnic groups in the country

It is terrible.

It is also common, although thankfully not so much in the 21st century as in previous.

Of the top of my head... Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, Spanish South America, Germany, Russia, Various Balkan countries. My African history isn't very good, but I'd imagine there too.

And these are just examples of state-sponsored and facilitated, non-genocidal (so leaving out direct murder) attempts to shift the majority ethnicity within an area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantation_of_Ulster
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/australian-histo...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Uruguay
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Poland_(1939%E...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Balkans
A reminder of how great life was for Tibetans under the feudal, theocratic serfdom of the lamas [1].

[1] “In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. 15 The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care, They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord's land--or the monastery’s land--without pay, to repair the lord's houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand.16 Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama.”

…

“ The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery.20”

…

“There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off.”

- http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
The SSD will have a much better latency, and will in practice lead to shorter load times, even with slow QLC.

But if you need a lot of storage HDDs still have the better price per GB.
Not sure of the point of this comment, other than textbook whataboutism.

Yes, the situation with the Native Americans wrt the expansion of European settlement in the Americas is similar.

At the same time, chattel slavery was widespread and common amongst most nations in the world. Should we tolerate a nation today having slavery because it was a thing for us previously?
There's nothing preventing us from living in a similarly 1-2% growing economy but with net zero GHG emissions. Yes, free resources lying around was amazing, but since then our economic surplus is abso-fucking-lutely enormous.

We merely opt to allocate that on other things instead of decarbonizing. Eg. we spend it on silly things like paving half the world, giving everyone their own car, building small (actually gigantic) cookie cutter houses in suburbs, building new fabs every few years to get more transistors on chips, cramming even more photo gadgets into phones, producing more and more Netflix Prime content, etc.

Building a ton of wind turbines and PV farms, spending years (and billions of USD) reviewing nuclear power plant permits, instead of building more efficient power plants.
Would anyone else on here be willing to pay money for a data feed that showed you real-time measures of semi manufacturer capacity?
I think Discord strikes the balance of your two mistakes well.
It would pretty much guarantee that YouTube would kill youtube-dl access.

The music content industry is very aggressive with using legal pressure to make sure they get their dime.
In replying to

> Native Americans represent 1.7% of the US population

I think the analogy between (Tibetan people, China) and (native American people, US) makes sense.
>Additionally, those who moderate these subs (nnn especially) have repeatedly, and seemingly intentionally, failed to enforce site wide content policies.

Let's not pretend that "we just want NNN to enforce these policies and we're fine" is going to satisfy the critics here. This seems to be a boilerplate complaint that is lodged against any sub that is attacked for obvious political reasons.
Only smartphones which provide good, open documentation and specs can run alternative OSes. Pinephone is the only such smarptphone apart from Librem 5, and it can run PureOS: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9361.
Also Tibetans aren't the majority in Shanghai, just Tibet - Like native Americans on current reservations, which continued to shrink in size for a long time.
I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.
Does anyone have a good solution for sites that only support SMS 2FA? I'm mostly using Google Voice for 2FA right now, but I'm iffy on tying access to my entire life to a Google account.

Ideally I'd like a dirt-cheap, just-for-2FA phone number from a provider that's got decent security (specifically regarding SIM swapping).
I've come to the same conclusions with the added step that I believe we should focus our efforts on creating platforms and protocols to protect anonymity, encrypted communication, alternate payment mechanisms, and freedom of speech. As a conservative I've seen all of these things attacked in order to control what is allowed to be said and who is allowed to be compensated.
I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.

Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.

Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.

(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)

In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.
electric grid based on renewables require fossil fuels to be both made and as backup to be reliable. Electricity is not going to solve the 80% of the energy needs, its not going to allow them to do manufacturing and agriculture at large scale either. Its the wrong approach to turn developing nations into developed nations. I know most people dont like to hear it but that is the reality.
https://archive.is/mtwun
This seems to miss the point, engineers need to communicate with business stakeholders to understand the business needs and where they are in product development. Then adjust your engineering efforts based on that.

The worst case is you delay learnings by over engineering a product, make things more complicated, bake in a lot of rules and assumptions that aren't true, and generally build a Ferrari the business needed was a go-kart.

Engineers tend to optimize for the engineering experience and miss the broader business experience. I love it when I have to go back and clean up technical debt that we leveraged to move faster, learn quickly, and find product market fit. That is a high class problem. I also love it when we have to scrap under-engineered products we built, because we learned a lot and need to change directions. What I hate is when we have to scrap an over built system that was costly to build, took a long time, and I burnt a lot of political capital to build.

If you are in a mature product, and the business is confident in the direction, absolutely spend the time to build out and think through all the abstractions and really build an enterprise grade solution. But that shouldn't be the default, and it seems like a lot of engineers default to it because it's "best practice" or it optimizes for reducing future engineering pain.
From a colonial perspective, colonists got everything they wanted

it's a good template for anyone looking to take sovereignty over somebody else's land.

If you're trying to do that, youre already dropping ethics