skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fragmented communication. Depending on the person I'm contacting I either have to use Signal, Messenger, iMessage, Email, Slack, Skype, IRC, SMS and I'm probably forgetting one or two others.

The fact that most of those are not interoperable is so frustrating. We all know the only reason they are not interoperable is because each one tries to keep us in their walled ecosystem. Such a waste for the users.
I don't know enough to comment on "healthiness" of assumptions about ones' self and where they fit into analysis like in the OP's link. My commentary is purely on how we communicate with each other in a time where divisiveness, misinformation, and polarization are common and pervasive.

It's hard, but if we want to have productive discussions we need to treat each other with empathy and talk to the best possible interpretation of each other's arguments. This assumes people are coming to a dialog in good faith, but everything needs to start with a little trust somewhere. Trolls are also not too hard to spot.
Friend is a hobbyist blacksmith and he said it really well.

Japan developed their hugely overdone turned-steel technique because the ore they had to work with was so bad: hammering the garbage out was the only way to get the quality of the steel itself into acceptable levels. As a result, Japanese smiths developed something very close to what we'd now call layered steel.

European swordsmiths (think: Toledo) had access to higher-grade ore, and as a result never needed to develop techniques to work around fundamental problems with their source material.
I used to think this, until I happened across FullStory. With that tool you can replay a website visitor's exact session as if it was recorded live on video -- everything they typed (even if it was cleared and never sent in a request), where/when clicks happened, the contents and response of every request, etc.

As a backend engineer, I had no idea that frontend monitoring was this advanced, but apparently it is. So now we all have to be extra paranoid, because _any_ website could be using this tool to "spy" on everybody.

Of course, it _was_ very helpful to us in tracking down some issues (ever tried to tell a customer how to send you a HAR?). And I assume that operating with an adblocker and blocking nonessential cookies will prevent or hamper the output for us more technical types. Even so...
No problem! And yeah, I had a moral philosophy professor who had endless examples like that, including that one. They were hilarious and so intuitively potent, I just wish I could remember more of them. He could spend a full 5-10 minutes in a lecture just retailing dozens of those ridiculous counter-examples. (It was especially funny because he was a very urbane old Oxonian professor - think Richard Dawkins for a pretty close analogue to his general mien - whom you wouldn't expect to start enthusiastically talking about gang rape.)
Car key fobs that fail silently on cars that have no (visible) door keyhole and no ignition one. The first time it happens is an education you could do without.
I think the problem is that we allow any kind of advertising unless there is some problem. We should turn this around: ban all advertising unless there is something for society to be gained.
So…when does NYC ban fat people from eating out?
Fox News is a master of this tactic. Any time they showed Obama, it was with a terrible, distorted, mid-expression face. Any time they showed George Bush it was a perfectly lit portrait of him in the Oval office or something. This is not a new technique, and Trump is hardly the first victim of it.
Watching movies at home.

Streaming services, while initially seeming awesome, offer way less selection than browsing through a Blockbuster or local video store. I suppose you can rent movies online as well, but the browsing experience is pretty bad if you're not looking for the latest thing.
> Turns out, by including "." in some part of the URL to this remote class, Log4j lets off its guard & simply looks up to that server and dynamically loads the class file.

No it doesn't. That was disabled by default in 2009, and was disabled by default in every release of Java 8 or later: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk8u/commit/006e84fc77a582552e71...

Unless i am mistaken, i don't believe the attack as described by LunaSec actually works against a default-configured JVM released any time in the last decade.
This might provide some hints (or not): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg#At_Microsoft

"In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# language. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced a new Microsoft project, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript."

I can only speculate that lots of skilled Borland developers followed Hejlsberg and participated in creation of C# and later TypeScript.
> if a tech union offered networking opportunities, resume-building help, internships, and access to companies looking for employees

And I would add, banning employers that use anti-labor tactics... Bring in "Scabs" ? Lose access to the best people until restitution is made.

Edit: I also think incentives can be better aligned by bringing more equity or corporate performance pay eg: you get $20 an hour base pay, but $15 an hour is actually in company stock or bonuses on profit etc.

IIRC westjet (canadian airline) had a lot of success making every single employee have equity pay ("be an owner/shareholder") ...
Recently I went to a 7-11, and the cashier wanted me to teach me how to use an app to checkout. Instead of putting my items down and having him scan it, I had to pull out my phone, scan items with a line of people behind me, then present a code he scanned to bill me. Took 5 minutes to do something that usually takes 30 seconds.

Just as in your examples, imo the key here is not "tech". It's that the tech is being used to offload work that used to be done by an employee to you, without passing on the benefits or the choice to opt out.

I think the frame of technology good vs. technology bad is not useful. Technology is a means distinct from the ends it serves. Many modern applications of technology don't serve customers, they serve company profit margins or governments or don't really serve anyone except the maker and that's why they suck.

Good technology is applied to eliminate work altogether like say sending an email instead of snail mail, or doing something fundamentally new & useful like having a detailed map of the world in your pocket.
Morbid obesity is the number one comorbity of Covid death.
I'm based in the UK, selling worldwide (with some exceptions https://paddle.com/support/countries-supported/).

Even before Brexit, if you wanted to sell digital goods to EU countries, you had to charge each country different VAT rates, register for VAT collection etc. Other countries have their own tax rules and other obligations too. Paddle lets me ignore all the admin for this which is awesome.

Does anyone know what you would do if you sold a product worldwide for a year while ignoring all this? Would you be in a real mess?
I think this is in part due to how quickly software is developed. Since reqs > mvp can be hours, days, or at most weeks, there is a lot pressure on designers for quick turn around.

My friend is an Industrial Designer, and works on Faucets, probably one of the last interfaces replaceable by a touch screen. Their design pipeline is years long. They build multiple prototypes and mock them with real humans, and get the space to actually watch people use them. I have very rarely seen a UX designer get more space to experiment than a InVision mockup. So of course what they design is disconnected.
> Cell phones and mobile devices in general have always been disposable items with limited expected lifespans.

I agree with your second point, but I want to push back on this first point a bit. While it seems like manufacturers benefit from devices being disposable, I don't see a strong reason why they should be.

The reality is that extending the lifespan of devices is one of the best ways to lower consumption. When it comes to changes like retiring 3G, we also have to weigh that against the environmental cost of maintaining the 3G network. Given the maintenance impact, it may end up being a net positive to retire these devices, but it's still an important cost to consider.

To be clear, we should also improve disposal and recycling, but that shouldn't be to the exclusion of reducing and reusing.
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/06/28/no...
Pretty sure all the radioactive ore refining we have done is going to leave a mark for billions of years. Never mind how we’ve displaced large percentages of the readily available rare earths already.

I doubt the dinosaurs shuttled away or buried all their geo-engineering marks.
Just last night I was thinking about how much of my life is wasted watching advertising on TV. 15 minutes is worth more than a few dollars to me.

I was watching a movie on the Roku Channel. Because the channel is free, it's got commercials. The more I watched, the longer the commercials got. At some point I gave up and turned it off. The movie is 132 minutes long and there are 10 stops for commercials. The last commercial was 2 minutes.

I'd rather pay for a subscription than watch commercials and I will definitely not pay for a channel AND watch commercials.
Really? I don’t have that impression—part of popular culture. I tried to watch it once and lasted about four minutes. I’ve heard people refer to it a few times, but know nothing about the characters nor anything else. Contrast the Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, for examples (the last also dreck that I never watched, but recognize as part of popular culture).
I cured my fibrillation by supplementing potassium. I work a physically demanding job and am an amateur athlete. For years my heart had been missing beats and beating erratically, especially at night or after drinking coffee. It was really scary. The effects of potassium are amazing, immediately lowering blood pressure and curing my fluttering heart 100%. I’m surprised more people don’t know about this. I think it would cure a lot of athlete’s heart problems. They are probably depleted of potassium from sweating, etc. Blood tests don’t really give a good indication of cellular potassium, which is ~25x higher than extracellular potassium and can vary more dramatically. And most people don’t get enough potassium anyway, and they are scared to supplement because potassium is in lethal injections. But taking 1/8 gram of potassium bicarbonate 1-2x per week (or less often after the initial 1-2 month phase) has been one of the best things I’ve done for my health. Another great one was supplementing chelated magnesium, because Mg oxide in most multivitamins is not very bioavailable.
I feel the massive amount of data companies have is making the world more hostile. When I shop for something I am getting really paranoid about the company manipulating what they are showing to me and at what price.

I am generally concerned about privacy. It seems if somebody is willing to pay for information about you they can find out almost anything. And often this is used against you.

In my opinion tech by itself is good but “big tech” is very bad. Too much data in companies’ hands is dangerous.
>Why is there such a large gap in these designs?

Because user interfaces in movies are designed to look cool in movies, not to be practical in real life.

Imagine if an application actually displayed a giant glowing green box with PASSWORD: in fontsize 200 right in the middle of the screen, hiding all other applications while doing so. How well would using a password-manager work in that scenario?
This is an under appreciated point about web3. We can get away from the ad-based business model. Web2 has an adversarial relationship with the user, web3 is much more aligned with the user.

https://www.jonstokes.com/p/web3-the-rise-of-the-aligned-web
I can't reproduce with log4j 1.2.17
>Suppose your house increases a nominal 5% and consumer inflation is 6%. You might say "Oh, I'm 1% poorer in real terms." But you can't say that if, as you seem to want, asset values are included in the calculation of consumer inflation. In other words, if the 5% increase is already part of the 6% increase, then you've mushed the concepts together to such an extent that the calculation becomes meaningless.

You've mushed them together, not I. We were talking about asset price inflation, and then you tried to mush it together with consumer inflation.
Even trivial things can have vulnerabilities. You can always substitute Criteria API in JPA with concatenation of SQL, but one missed check and you will get SQL injection.
About rotation and interpolation, I once had a bug in animated CSS transforms of all things, in which IE decided to rotate the element around another axis but still end up at the correct position. That one made me raise my eyebrows. No idea if IE actually was in the wrong, though, but in my head interpolating the xyz value I'm changing feels like the correct way to do it.
> Above a certain threshold, every veneer of civilization vanishes no matter what the country (some have a higher threshold than others).

> At this level, only power matters. And the first rule of power is: Don't embarrass the powerful unless you can call on a lot of power to defend yourself.

Steven Donziger is another great example of this rule: https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-...

Chevron has decided to make an example of him by ruining his life in return for a $9.5 billion judgement he won against them in Ecuador.
How do you navigate around sites that insist on you removing the ad blocker?
I agree, but to me it's troubling so many people simply don't care.

Every time I try to talk to my wife about what the government's doing/has done, she stops me and says, "I really don't care. So long as I can keep living my life without interference, why would I care?"

This also happens when I try to explain basic economics to her.

I find most people I talk to simply don't care so long as they get to enjoy living their dreamy lives.
This is exactly the issue with quotas like that.

For any action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

What often happens as a result of such policies is that the weaker or newer managers simply become an unwitting separation/firing mill, or the people who have to be managed out are simply those that are inconvenient in some way for the org, or are too new for the team (the infamous hire-to-fire phenomenon).

Also, as in this leak, what happens is that in order to reach a 6% URA target, they may have to put 15% of people through performance improvement, and some of these people simply leave Amazon to successfully work for Google and Facebook, defeating the notion that they had unrecoverable performance issues to begin with.

At the end of the day, if success in improving performance, is a fail in the metric, isn't that itself a fail? (This in turn provides an incentive for the managers to finish up anyone they put for performance improvement, making the whole process a sham, since it's virtually impossible to get out of.)
Retractions are generally published by news outlets that make mistakes while honestly trying to get it right.

Purveyors of intentional misinformation rarely publish retractions.

So when you're searching for reliable sources of information, the ones with the most retractions are generally the most trustworthy.
> $5,000 a year

> It's less than is spent on a single coffee maker

I really want to try this coffee maker.
> It's a real shame that people continue to focus so much on quaternions in this day and age.

No really, unit quaternions are nice because it's pretty clear they belong to a sphere, therefore you can fairly easily extend geometric methods on the usual sphere to perform filtering, averaging, interpolation etc on rotations.

With GA it's not so obvious.
Reverse-engineering Xbox REST APIs to backup game captures
Ah. Now I get it!

By repeating something to people a few times you can get them to start to absorb it and eventually understand it.
I think competing directly against Microsoft in the 90s was pretty tough, even if you were largely loved by developers
I like trade shows. “Pull” advertising, not “Push”. As an engineer and a professional, I appreciate trade shows as a form of advertising in a symbiotic sense. We need great vendors. Vendors need great customers like us.

The collaboration between suppliers and customers is the bedrock of how the world works. Without some form of advertising, it would be stagnant, dysfunctional and basically dead with vendor lock-ins and monopolies. Advertising allows exposure and enables a free market economy.

That said, most consumer advertising is toxic and pushed down the throat. But it works otherwise Google wouldn’t exist.
I don't know if this is unrealistic, but a couple of months ago I had a thought

As soon as AR Glasses start being usable and affordable, I want to buy an open-source model and try to develop a RL-Adblocker. I guess it would need AI, because I still have to see traffic signs and other actually useful things.

If AR Glasses allow me to replace every billboard with a picture of a family member or someting else, I will be happy. Hopefully we will get to use open-source ones to play around with.
> I see your compassion, but income inequality isn't driven by prices, it's driven by the employers not paying enough to their employees.

Not exactly, it's also driven by price increases. If employers give their employees a 50% pay increase, but prices increase by 50% then that pay raise is rolled back by inflation. Wealthier people more often have their money in assets, with values that increase alongside inflation. This is largely the dynamic we're seeing in the US: labor shortage means people get paid more, but those increased wages are getting eaten by higher prices.
Latch: https://www.latch.com/

It was a technology built for the convenience of building managers, but residents hate it.
Are you really 5% richer, if realizing that appreciation means selling the house, and buying a comparable one on the market that has also appreciated 5% in value? Plus, depending on your locality, your property taxes went up due to the new valuation. The only way you're unlocking that value is if you sell the appreciated asset for some good/service that hasn't gone up in value, say, televisions. Otherwise, you're just trading it for other expensive goods and your purchasing power hasn't changed.
is it possible, that the system is getting more and more vindictive and less liberal? I mean, Assange isn't saying more radical things than Chomsky, yet they tolerated Chomky somehow, for whatever reasons....
"Why do you do your own research? You don't trust The Science?" [0] [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/Y0sg9G5BBVU

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/30/you-...
Thanks, that's a very nice list! Although, their license texts aren't easy to find..
Man, this reminds me of how much I loved Borland's OWL in school. When I entered the workforce, I was forced to use MFC and I was probably the worst kind of coworker to be around at that time.
Airplane runbooks – turn scripts into internal workflow tools
At which time? Through the middle of the 18th Century they were active and aggressive slave traders.
This is an obvious driver for migration: why settle for living in a poor country, if you can migrate to a country with orders of magnitude richer opportunities? I really wonder why the global migration rate is only 3%.
Advertising: I don't get useful ads by default. The more ads I block (unconditionally, not attempting to filter by my preferences) on Twitter, the more useful they seem to become.

Photography: I don't like looking at other people's photos as much as I used to. Mobile phone cameras do all kinds of weird and unpleasant processing, and usually have focal lengths that result in bad looking portraits (they're usually no more than half as wide as the human eye's focal length.)

Arts, culture, and nightlife: It's harder than ever to find places where people aren't periodically checking their phones. I enjoy having random and serendipitous encounters, and phones and other mobile technology get in the way of that. I'm fortunate enough to live in an area where some bars and clubs outright ban cellphone usage, but it's one step forward, two steps back.

I can think of a lot of other things, but I think those three are enough grievances for a single post.
I used this site quite a lot just yesterday, and plan on donating sometime soon. It is hard to overstate how much value I put on this website.
This post and comments increased my confidence in my English skills.

I don't have issues with understanding my American colleagues and talking with them, but when I try to watch a movie without a subtitle, I feel that I'm far from being good enough in English. I thought I was alone in that, so thanks for posting this.
Holmes's and government's changes to jury instructions [pdf]
What do the colors mean? "Language proposed by Ms.
Holmes, and objected to by the government, is highlighted in blue. Language proposed by the
government, and objected to by Ms. Holmes, is highlighted in yellow."
On the flip side, it will benefit those who don't hodl $USD, those who borrowed dollars, and exporters of U.S. made goods.

Big opportunities in manufacturing and agriculture, risks in finance and communications.

https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system
I do not have anything specific in mind, because threats are constantly evolving. I am clear that you can never be 100% safe. But I am looking to protect myself as much as is reasonably possible.
Similarly, I'm trying to find high-quality retrospectives on Pascal vs C. (I'm still trying to understand today if there is good reason [other than Lazarus and GUI programming] to use FreePascal over C or C++.) Any links you know of are welcome!
I was just thinking the other day about how in the olden days you'd discover new music by listening to the radio. There would be a bias towards DJs and shows you liked, but musical tastes would be shaped and evolve by these DJs. Now when my music discovery is done by algorithms that are usually tailored to give me what I already like and not what someone thinks some people might like, how will it affect the evolution of music?

On the other hand, having so much music available has made me discover much more music, including a couple I didn't know about (shout out to Turkish Psych Rock!) but I could be missing out on whole genres. Now I'm not saying this as a boomer rant about how things used to be better back in the day. I do discover much more music, it's just a thought about how this affects the evolution of music.

Speaking of Turkish Psych Rock, a couple of years ago I was at a show of Altin Gun [1], which is a band that's probably seen (some) success mainly due to Spotify, and it looked like that when you looked at the audience - varying in age, dressing styles, etc - just random people who got this recommended a lot and liked it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9g_iyBR7xo