skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Our governments collect $2.81 billion in tobacco sales taxes federally (2), which is >1% of all federal government spending in 2013 (3) ... However, the direct and indirect cost of lung cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in Canada is $12.0 billion (2012 figure), of which smoking is considered to be the number one cause (4). That’s not a good trade-off, even if you only consider it economically."

Tobacco sales taxes show up in the current fiscal year, while chronic respiratory health costs show up decades down the road. Governments tend to be better than corporations at prioritizing long-term concerns over short-term accounting. However, there is substantial demographic that opposes regulations on narcotics. Specific ones, at least.

Look at how popular legalizing cannabis was in Canada over the last decade. Smoking pot is the most popular form of delivery for that narcotic and it's likely going to prove to have many of the same long-term consequences as smoking tobacco. Nonetheless, Canada legalized it. Doctors raised concerns and were ignored. The public willed it, and politicians don't stay politicians by ignoring the public's will.

Why do we still permit tobacco use? Because politicians have the power to prohibit it, not doctors.

Perhaps the doctors espousing prohibition don't have the right of it either. Narcotics have been a part of human existence across the globe for all of recorded history. Although many people successfully abstain from them, narcotics seem to fill a basic human need.

Research on safe, enjoyable recreational drugs is virtually nonexistent. Perhaps we should focus on filling that human need while minimizing the side-effects. To put it another way, with all the medical and pharmacological advances we've made in the last century, does it really make sense that people are still sucking on burning leaves to get high?
Chinese labor is less cheap than it once was, and rising.
> the other being they wouldn't dare attempt a third lockdown

A Marxist government will do 100 lockdowns, because a crisis gives them more power. Just watch. In fact, the only "successful" thing done by the Biden admin is lockdowns.

(Biden admitted that vaccination mandates were unconstitutional, then did them anyway. That's why they lost most of the court cases. The first case was literally laughed out of court.)
Many people would like to see their loved ones live in freedom, too. That means in probably almost 100% of the cases making sub-optimal decisions.
Tobacco has been grown and used both socially and ceremonially by native American cultures for thousands of years. I get that generally we white western Americans don't give a shit about native cultures, but it would be nice to at least acknowledge the indigenous heritage that literally all tobacco comes from and is still used in today.

Personally I like cigars and hookah. I smoke maybe once a year. I'm not saying millions of people should die just so I can smoke, but I'd be fine with chewing tobacco and cigarettes being banned, while indigenous and more ceremonial / social forms of tobacco are kept.
I agree with you, though you should consider means-tested loan bailouts targeting working class people, victims of for-profit colleges, and particularly people with relatively low (compared to NYU grads) burdens that didn't graduate. The median college debt burden is surprisingly low; the problem is that the media is preoccupied by the plights of people like those who work in the media --- high-earning-potential vanity-university graduates.

Relief for NYU students though seems pretty far-fetched.
China won't allow airlines to say they fly to Taiwan. Western media frequently defer to PRC rules (the latest one: Top Gun sequel removing the taiwanese flag). John Cena had to publicly apologize because he referred to Taiwan as a country. Chinese vessels regularly violate territorial waters, and there is an ongoing spat with India around their borders.

The PRC is bullying the whole planet, and people are letting them do it in name of profit.
It’s not irrelevant if a majority consistently feel their will is ignored. It’s not irrelevant if it leads to widespread discontent. The system set up 250 years ago is no longer sustainable. It’s needs to be changed.
It would be weaker though. Second hand bacon is not a thing. Unless one is a fecal transplant donor.
Please explain. Individual displays doesn't tell me enough.
I was just making the joke that these "timeless" articles all have times.
The US views itself as the enforcer of UNCLOS for all navigable bodies of water in the entire world, a treaty it hasn't ratified.

It has tons of military bases in the SCS, a region not even close to it, compared to the furor when it becomes possible that China might build a single military base along Africa's atlantic coast.

It seems like a bit of a double standard to me.

I wish a good faith discussion about China was possible here, but I think that HN swings pretty jingoistic on these issues.
You can't tax purchases out of existence. That creates a black market. Indeed, countries that have raised taxes to astronomical levels have significant illegal markets for tobacco.
http://silelis.com projectors and http://snaige.lt refrigerators are the first ones that come to mind.
Yeah I originally wrote this a while back and recently saw that press on twitter and HN. It's still the best example I've got so far, do you know of other programs that are doing a better job than Lambda?
Prohibition to the rescue! We all know prohibition has the consumer at heart. I'm sure smoking tobacco post-prohibition will be much safer and more equitable for everyone!
If it’s non-remote work, then you would have to live in Florida. This desire is not shared by all of the job candidates I fear…
Well this thread finally convinced me to set showdead=no in my profile. It's scary to see how much damage a few accounts can do to the erosion of discourse on this site, and especially to think I'm reasonable in worrying that some of them are state or corporate sock puppets. I am grateful to the site moderators and to other community members (in downvoting bad-faith comments) for asserting our shared valuation of this discourse space.
> the huge cost imposed on society by smoking.

On your last point, from what I've seen smoking saves society money because it kills people at much younger ages so governments don't have to pay for their health care for nearly as long.
If true, this seems to have profound implications for people working in AI.
> If we want to grandstand at all cost, then we have to wage war with China and force them into submission.

Who is we and they? Based on your Twitter profile, you're Chinese and your views seem perfectly aligned with the official CCP position.
Works for me in iOS Safari
A hugely important factors behind getting a job are: being likeable, looking good, not being weird, having a good sense of humor, etc.

If you are in the bottom, say, 10% in these factors, employers will pick other candidates. And obviously, they won't tell you why.
Fun fact, Ubiquiti started here (it’s not a Lithuanian company though). Another big one that’s founded and manufactures all it’s stuff in Lithuania is Teltonika. They make telecommunications equipment (mostly LTE based wireless modems).
Even with E2E, if both platforms offered the same standarized encryption, would this allow for cross-platform messaging? Of course, some mechanism for exchanging of public keys would be needed as well.
I agree with this ↑

If you want to play with something fun though, Richard Hipp (of SQLite) has althttpd which sparked my interest when I first heard about it - https://sqlite.org/althttpd/doc/trunk/althttpd.md
Farewell Message from Departing NIH Director Francis Collins
you read the same news everywhere
It is not difficult to rattle off potent externalities from the bacon production business!
No that person does genuinely sound creepily jingoistic and chauvinistic about it all.
Few drugs are as harmful as tobacco.
Yeah that's cool, taking one step further: the Metaverse might finally give us ugly people a chance for a fair and happy life.
Yes. On web2 you may need passwords and have to worry about how secure your users passwords may be. With web3 you can assume as a default that all users can use 256 bit keys with near infinite security. This is possible on web2 as well but isn’t feasible as it’s too hard to convince all of society to start using 256 bit passwords on existing platforms, whereas on web3 it’s a pre-requisite.
Oh nice, looks like we finally figured out the meaning of life, the universe, why we’re here, etc:

> a solid, practical job.

ffs

Edit to be a bit less flippant: As a holder of a “solid, practical job” for over a decade I definitely feel there should be more to life and don’t fault those who aspired for more than just practicality at the age of 17/18.
Tibetan people and culture
LispWorks is a little more facile for me, I don’t think about the IDE, just think about the task on hand.

It is the same way with Clojure: IntelliJ+Cursive is just more facile for me than with Emacs.
At least at Google, you get vested shares every month, and you start receiving them in about the 3rd month.

You can also have your broker automatically sell.

It is pretty close to cash.
This is excellent, may become my new source! Any other recommendations??
We just need to switch to measuring output.

The industry is full of engineers working 9-5 then going home and spending 4 hours on a side-hustle or open-source project (plus another 10 hours on Saturday/Sunday).

Those people can hold down two 40 hour a week software engineering positions. Timezone shifted, yes, but they can get their work done.
I think this can also be a good thing, as long as you also use software which makes sure you have a distinct 'unique' fingerprint for each session.

Not that I am a huge fan of Brave, but I think they have implemented something like this for certain (or all) APIs. You will still have a unique fingerprint, but it should not match to any previous fingerprints you had in the past.

Edit: see https://brave.com/privacy-updates/3-fingerprint-randomizatio...
The tree feature itself is worth it: https://the.exa.website/features/tree-view

I always install tree on a new nix machine, might try this one out.
I retired so I can focus on my open source project
I think it is rather the result of money printing, and particularly how it was introduced (financial system). Plus labour shortage for highly educated people which drove up their salary. As a result all the activities of the upper middle class have known high inflation: expensive restaurants, prime real estate, art, college tuitions, etc.

[edit] I guess also the explosion of the chinese upper middle class should also be a big factor.
As a cigar smoker I really hate articles like this. Not everyone that uses tobacco smokes 20 cigarettes per day. Cigar smoking in moderation (all the way up to one cigar per day) has been shown to be a fairly minimal risk multiplier for cancer. And many cigar smokers such as myself smoke much less than this.

Same goes for some other types of tobacco usage as well. Last I checked, the correlation between cancer and nasal snuff usage among non-smokers is extremely limited. Here’s a fun remark from one study:

“ The last reported case of nasal snuff causing cancer of the nose was described by John Hill in 1761. We describe here a case of a 69-year-old woman who developed a nasal vestibular malignancy after 30 years of snuff usage, and this, we believe, is the only reported case of nasal snuff causing cancer in the last 2 centuries.”

As far as “no health benefit” goes, I would disagree. Smoking a cigar is a highly relaxing activity that I very much enjoy. I am sure that it is good for my mental health.
If you are providing services online which programming is while being a non resident alien through your LLC you are owning 0% taxes to the USA. There are nuances and you should check with proper tax advisors, but that is how it should work.
Is university meant to be vocational training or learning the unchanging fundamentals and how to learn new things in the field? I think it serves a better purpose to teach the underlying fundamentals and not to do vocational training.

I don't think it's a serious flaw that you can graduate from a top university with a CS degree without ever having written SQL, react, or used revision control. To me, those are vocational topics and can be learned on the job or in [paid] internships.
Katyn or Rainiai or 1941 Deportations was a benefit to Allie’s too I guess :)
Given that schools are judged by tests results and students are judged by test results, it is surprising that both focus on the tests?
What is the most common iPhone? Should the common iPhone browser experience be scaled up to a desktop resolution, or should the desktop browser limit itself to the common iPhone resolution? What about mobile Safari bugs or misfeatures, such as webRTC shortcomings, or CSS bugs, or viewport resizing/scaling/zoom bugs?

There are so many possible variations that it seems like preventing fingerprinting by pretending you're something you're not would be an impossible task and makes you even more unique, not less.
The initial TLS handshake contains the hostname in plaintext, also DNS queries can be sniffed.
On the other hand, MITM would be like changing a certificate in an attempt to alter traffic, this case is simple traffic blocking by doing packet inspection. (Which is also not nice obviously)
I like this straightforward argument and an honest stance. I think it is OK for Gov to provide warnings to people. Put nutrition labels. Even Tax things to a certain degree (need to put limits on how much). But, prohibiting access is crossing the line.
Totalitarians are creeping into academia more and more. Little to no nuance in their understanding of human behavior or what allows free societies to function. We all maybe cracking jokes and pointing out flaws in the argument... but the real problem here is that this is a real paper, and a real view being given real consideration
This is generally true of writing in tech whether articles or books. You can usually make more as a side effect (or as part of a salaried position) writing than you ever will with someone paying you directly.
the basicest of basic

live laugh love as the user-agent
Right.

What actually makes them the bad guys is that they parlayed the goodwill of the original GNOME (2 and prior) which was very open to change and community contribution into the restrictive community hostile thing that it is today.

I don't mind that it exists, but they should have changed the name and been more clear about the direction.

And should just be less obnoxious all around.
In a system that nominally purports to represent the will of the people it is not relevant that you are opposed to the spending. You are not the dictator of the country. The will of the majority is being thwarted consistently by a minority. This is not a sustainable way to run a representative form of government.
Mandatory? If it was mandatory and it was not accepted, then the app should close when the option is declined. Otherwise, cynical me thinks they are doing what they want even without your acceptance. Just because you haven't notified them that you've read the change doesn't mean the change hasn't been implemented.
Strategic ambiguity makes sense because they don't want to encourage Taiwan to declare independence by saying they'll 100% back them to the end. Blank cheques are great ways to start wars.
Our (Bay Area, CA) school district psychologist told us - “Most of our 4 and 5 years old are behind 1 to 2 year on their language and social development”.

How this is not national news 24/7? It is a disaster.
So much about protecting the children…
Anyone can throw in a silly comparison but it doesn't really help. I'm fairy certain you're smart enough to reflect on the nuance that this topic deserves. Some bad things are legal. Some bad things aren't. It's a complex thing for society to weigh up and the linked article attempts to contribute to that discussion.
Both China and the US are trying to protect their interests, and both are aggressors. Making it look like this is some sort of US initiated warfare is insanely simplistic, and mostly wrong.
> Second hand smoke is dangerous too.

This is why we've banned smoking in restaurants and have designated areas. That's enough Government intervention although my personal take on this would be to leave it up to restaurants to manage this decision. If they don't want smokers in their restaurants, they can choose to ban them. If you don't like smoke in restaurants, don't go to ones that allow indoor smoking. This is a bilateral choice for a non-essential service (restaurants). But, we've handed over the power to Gov in this case. Too late. I would be OK for Gov to mandate a sign outside the restaurant that informs customers if it is smoking/non-smoking as it would be horrible if you sit down for a meal and all of a sudden someone next to you just lights a Cigarette.
> NOTE: This preprint [..] has not been certified by peer review

Says it all. Take it with a huge grain of salt.
Wikipedia mentions Xi studied chemical engineering at the University.
The prohibition of the sale of cigarettes, ready to smoke, would be a good start. Treat it like weed, buy it loose-leaf, roll your own.

That way people still have their freedom and it's not so easy to "just have another one" when you're a kid.

Also since legalization, I've eaten more weed than I smoke, the freedom to grow means I have surplus to bake with and experiment with. My inhalation is near 0. (Smoked weed and cigarettes for 18 years).

Stopped smoking cigarettes thanks to "vaping" and weed thanks to "baking".

Just because people are allowed to have it doesn't mean we should let them buy 25-packs, ready to go.
Ads are allowed to run arbitrary JS, but that doesn't mean they are allowed to do arbitrary things by policy. That is, the technical restrictions are not able to be as strict as the policy.

A bunch of us were working on a project where ads would be fully declarative, and so no longer able to run arbitrary JavaScript, but this received very little interest outside of Google (advertisers didn't want to move to a new format, publishers didn't care) and we moved on.

(Still speaking only for myself)
It should be noted that Xi is a son of a victim of Culture Revolution.
Statistically significant != practically significant.

It's almost impossible to deduce, due to this paper's horrid formatting.
> Signalling is how mating works

If you buy a jpg for 300k while you could have bought a nice house with that amount of money, you are honestly unfuckable and being unfuckable and gullible is all that you are signalling.

Besides, it's women who do the signaling, that's because they can't approach to save their lives.

NFT crowd should grow some balls, approach, get rejected and repeat until success...like real men do, instead of buying monkey jpg to "signal mating"
College was once a signal of competence. That cannot be true when you push half the population through the system; the normal distribution is still the same. Doubly so given the commodification of education, which creates perverse incentives for phenomena like grade inflation, further reducing the value of a degree as a signal.

The first assumption that needs to change in order to revert the status of the college degree is the well meaning but false idea that competence can be taught to anyone. It gives people a false sense of optimism which frequently results in angst, debt, and wasted years.
I'm scandalized!
It'll certainly be a lot more profitable!
The inventor of Self Organising Maps, T. Kohonen passed away
Actual survey results are a bit more mixed: https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7805&id=6962 Support for moving towards independence has clearly increased a lot since 2018, but many people still haven't made up their minds yet.
Oh sorry, I didn't realize that I was the asshole. Thanks for clearing that up.
Would love to give myself a vice ban occasionally.
I formed an LLC for 350$ through a service, online. Yearly I pay additional 190$ for maintenance and address.

edit: They also helped me open a Mercury bank account
I presume they're charging for knowing what to do & how to do it correctly, not just for the time spent doing it.
> These messages appeared in the JavaScript console on Safari while browsing multiple pages on techsparx.com. At first I saw it on one page, then checked other pages and got the same messages. This site is using Ezoic's advertising system, which in turn uses Google Ad Manager for some advertising.

Yeah he noticed it... on his own website.
I don’t disagree.

AOL bought Netscape (with stock) and the founders, Clark and Andreesen liquidated their Netscape stock. So did the investors. So did vested employees such as Zawinski.

Or to put it another way, if Netscape failed, then so did Viaweb. I don’t think the YC founders would describe Viaweb that way.
>> these powers are all thousands and thousands of kilometers away from the theater, which gives China a massive advantage.

The past 100 years of wars and military conflicts have shown that military logistics can overcome great distances if needed.

Great distances and economic consequences did not stop past wars. I doubt they would stop a war caused by the invasion of Taiwan.

>> This will be massively unpopular, kill tens of thousands in third countries that will be sanctioned as collateral damage, and crash the world economy, and still might not work.

The damage would be incredible, likely as bad as World War 2, or possibly worse.
Show HN: I built a Christmas themed NFT game
Taiwan is already an independent nation by all measures that anyone really cares about; the status quo is to their advantage. If China wants to change this, they are going to have to wage war by sending ships across the strait.

Maybe the Taiwanese can defend their nation mostly by themselves; amphibious assault is not easy, even for major world powers. Even more difficult with satellites watching your (extensive) preparations. Even more difficult with hostile submarines prowling the seas. The PLA can't march to Taiwan.
> The magnitude of latency isn't rewarded, just coming in first, so more and is spent on less an less absolute improvements, none of which have been relevant to human reaction times for decades.

So why are the HFT firms earning profits? There is no law that says people are obligated to do business with them. There is no law that says people have to buy at the prices HFT firms are selling at and sell at the prices HFT firms are buying at.
I anticipate there will be a lot of comments about how these folks should not have gone to an expensive private uni, could have made choices to avoid debt, the burden is on the borrower and it is their responsibility, etc - all true and valid points.

However, the US is approaching a situation where the student loan problem will be an "everyone" problem, not just a borrower - I believe a ~$1.6 Trillion debt burden is a significant enough drag on the economy to be felt by everyone, and will be more painful not only for borrowers who can not pay but also non-borrowers who are indirectly affected.

The money that could have been used to pay for housing, services, etc, will instead go to student loans. If I was a local business owner, I would think about that. If you are homeowner, imagine what the price of you home could be if buyers did not have student loans.

I hope people realize this soon.
I agree. At that price point, I expect that I can just forward emails from a customer complaining about an issue and said developer will understand the underlying problems, come up with a plan, talk to related coworkers, and self-manage rollout of the patch.

In short, they save me time and effort because I don't need to babysit them where cheaper and less experienced developers would need my planning and guidance.