skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects.

Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either.

So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
> Then at some point people, as adults, feel like they have to drink to enjoy themselves? I wonder what happened.

It feels like this question is disingenuous. You don't need fire starter to start a fire either, but wouldn't it be silly to conclude fire starter doesn't make starting a fire easier? Moderate alcohol consumption in an intimate environment is a lot of fun.

Put differently, if alcohol didn't present such serious health risks, I wouldn't be making an effort to cut it out of my social circles. As it stands, though, my friends, family and I have started referring to it as "poison", just to be totally transparent about what we're doing when we meet for drinks.
While I don't disagree with smoking being extremely harmful, most people addicted to nicotine can still function regularly. Regardless of which kills more, they both kill via proxy and that's where I see the biggest issue for both of them. Interestingly enough I've found that many people smoke when they're drinking.
That is faulty logic. We hypothesize that mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are safe but do not know the long term effects. Why should we exercise conservatism for some drugs but not for vaccines?

To be clear, I'm just using that as an example of logical inconsistency and I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated. I also think that all recreational drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized) because regardless of the potential long-term effects the failed war on (some) drugs is causing far more harm than the drugs themselves.
People generally don't understand how vast the difference is. The pro crypto narrative has pushed the idea that "Blockchain is more secure" because "it cannot be edited" when in reality that feature makes it much more of a target for attackers because once they transfer the coins the transfer cannot be edited. In comparison if an attacker gets a credit card that card could be disabled and or have transactions cancelled.
As I said, I don't know much about NFTs and I was just commenting out of curiosity. I have no stakes in NFTs.

But if the problem is legal (and not technological) then it may be just a matter of time, given enough adoption. Much like Bitcoins (now running as an official currency of El Salvador).

Perhaps it's a matter of establishing we run on this or that blockchain to make NFTs completely traceable?
Former USPTO patent examiner here. As the article suggests, the main problem with overly broad patents comes down to a lack of time given to examiners. Can't find it in the time given? You'll often be told to allow the application (that is, grant a patent). Other "solutions" like punishing examiners for making bad allowances (which seems to be the current focus at the USPTO) are just band aids on the problem. The amount of time examiners get was basically set in the late 1970s based on some IBM study from the 1960s as far as I'm aware. There have been some increases in time since then but if the number of documents to search is increasing exponentially in time, a modest increase in time is not enough, period, even accounting for the fact that searches are computerized now.

I wouldn't have minded staying at the USPTO for longer if I was given more time. The lack of time was the main reason I quit.

My understanding is that the time issue would be more easily solved by better funding the USPTO. Right now the USPTO is funded only by fees they charge, and the Department of Commerce diverts some of that funding outside of the USPTO. Fund the USPTO via taxation in addition to allowing the USPTO to keep the funds it brings in and I think we'll start to see improvements in the time given to examiners.

(There are other issues, like the fact that examiners barely get any more time for having more claims. Typical patent applications are 20 claims, but I only got an hour more for examining a particularly annoying application with over 40 claims. That's over twice the work with barely any more time! By the way, the USPTO charges the applicant extra for these extra claims.)

There are other patent quality problems that I think come down to the incentives of attorneys. Too many patents are written in vague legalese that no "person having ordinary skill in the art" would understand. As an examiner I was told that I could not do 112(a) rejections for those sorts of things (this is the sort of rejection it would fall under) and that seems to be typical USPTO policy.
Indeed, it is always good to know the science but we should balance that against the benefits. I like this quote from David Spiegelhalter[0]

"Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.

"There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.

"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401
...crap at the wall, sorry.

I'm not great at typing on my smartphone.
Didn't they say that 443 BTC was stolen? Isn't that around $200MM all by itself? Or did I miss a part of this?
Personally I don't rely on Spotify for recs, or even regular listening. I like finding things through online communities (including old ones), college radio, and in lesser cases the youtube algorithm.

My only purchases now are through bandcamp or at concerts.
Thanks for your reply. If artificial scarcity is perverse, does that mean also mean things like limited art print runs are also perverse?

Because it seems to me an artist who has the potential to print there work unlimited times but chooses to set the price at X for N prints would fall into that. But then, either because it's been accepted as a thing or otherwise, it's a common practice and personally, i've not seen it as a negative.
Assault is already a crime.

What happens when a person robs someone so he can buy a new car? You don’t outlaw cars.
I don't believe the poster above is saying that there should be no intervention, they're saying they shouldn't be criminally prosecuted.

There should be a non-criminal route for helping drug addicts that doesn't result in prison.
Drivel. The whole purpose of this is for Jakob Reiter, whoever that is, to highlight what a great leader he is. It's all about upward mobility, and having a showpiece like this is all part of the act. I don't know Jakob, but I know from reading this he is probably untrustworthy and will do whatever is necessary to succeed. These types have evolved over the years... in the 80s, they were sharp and cutthroat. Afterall, that's what was in vogue. Now they've adapted to today's cultural zietgeist, making sure that everyone knows how forward-thinking they are, how hip they are to inclusivity, yadda-yadda.. It's just a game that these inauthentic types are very good at playing. Well, we all share the same dirt in the end, my friend.
Some people like ready made Emacs distros, some people like hand coding their init.el (don't forget your early-init.el!) Some people like Arch, some people like Ubuntu. Some people like Linux From Scratch, some people like typewriters. Live your life, be free.
FF has presently 163 open bugs for localstorage-related issues. Some of them open for 3+ years.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=localst...
With a program split into multiple small compartments one does not need to crash the whole application on out-of-bound access. It will be enough to signal the parent compartment that one of its children performed an illegal operation.
The best software organization I ever worked for had internal tools that still blow my mind in both their features and reliability. Corners were cut in documentation certainly, but the main factors are the quality of the developer teams involved and the nature of their mission. Lots of developers nowadays are under pressure to ship features as quickly as possible for money, and if that is the whole job then of course the results will be spotty and modestly reliable.
Tools for Developing and Testing Microservices
You get it.

Another analogy I use for friends who ask (I have a sizable NFT 'bag'(investment)):

I say why do people buy Rolex watches and Gucci purses? Status. So you can't show off a 'real' Rolex well in the digital world. NFT's are that. Provably scarce. Verifiable.

The luxury industry is massive and people crave to have status and/or 'belong' to something. NFTs are no different and they are not going anywhere. It is early.
How does your (dubious) claim that most jews live in such fear have anything to do with how criticism of Israel is treated? You're not really contradicting GP's claim, and to back it up, I've encountered what seem to be bad faith arguments in defense of Israel (including flavors A and B) in probably every public-facing online discussion of it. I think the only way to be sure you're having an honest conversation about Israel is to have it in person where you can better tell biased rhetoric (either for or against) from honest analysis. Though, honest analysis is also undermined ahead of time by bias and dishonesty further "upstream".
"I knew a man who gave up smoking, drinking, sex and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself." - Johnny Carson
I think most people know this on some level. Alcohol cannot be good for the body. However, society encourages and even shames people that don't drink to an extreme degree that people go with the herd on this. Its going to be impossible to beat and turn around that societal pressure and acceptance.
No. Not even close.

Most victimless crimes have literally no victim. There is no victim without some sort of harm. The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal is because if you go overboard enough with them there is a high likelihood of harm. In the vast majority of cases people don't go overboard and there is no actual victim though. These things are crimes because our system of justice is not good at punishing people for "going overboard" with the consistency and fairness we desire.
NFT as tech gives objects digital autonomy. This is a big deal, but it does not entail rights, rights are something states do, not crypto.
>Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus?

Sure, I don't really have a problem with landlords benefitting from investing into a house and renting it. I'm kind of with Adam Smith on the problems of rent-seeking of the value of the raw land, but I'm not sure a better system than private property can be found for dealing with that.

> The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

Maybe somebody elses, maybe nobody's, maybe their own? I have no idea. If you aren't discriminating you can build a house brick by brick anywhere until someone with guns or a sledgehammer makes you stop, be it a land owner, gangster, government, whoever. I'd be interested in knowing myself.
Didn't know that, sounds terrible.
What you are thinking of as the side effects of drug addiction are mainly the side effects of prohibition. Alcohol addiction is a serious problem, with serious negative consequences. So we made it illegal. And then we had two problems instead of one. Drug laws do not decrease addiction rates. They do make drugs unnecessarily expensive, and force addicts to interact with violent criminal gangs to get them. The negative unintended consequences of drug prohibition are worse than the problem they purport, but fail to solve.
Netflix doesn't ship all the languages even with their own content, so it can't be the only reason. But good point, never thought of that, and truly sad if access restrictions again is the reason for legal services delivering less than piracy.
Yes. Also, don't put your own stuff in init.el. Put your own stuff in another file, and load it with load-file from init.el. This massively decreases the chances that Emacs will make a mess when it adds or updates its own stuff.
> Is age discrimination now all of a sudden okay?

Hasn't society already decided a while ago that, for some reason, age discrimination is okay as long as it's only against younger people?
I do a bit of the same and this seems to be a silly thing to communicate as part of a security audit. Ok, step 1 SMB insurance company paying me to audit - by not being in Afghanistan, you have a severely reduced risk of business invasion and extortion. Seems like a really wonky way to communicate a risk profile and first-exposure to security professionals by a SMB. Plenty of SMBs with janky POS systems get pretty nasty PII attacks.
> an infinite dimensional orange is all skin

Huh?
You're dead on. This is a "distinction without a difference" and is a classic logical fallacy. It is the heart of "weasel words".
Tom Cruise space movie producers sign deal with Axiom to build studio in orbit
We have already (as a society) decided we will no longer forcibly help people, so what do you do with someone that hurts others to feed their addiction?

Put them all in jail for every little offense? Fine them? (they have no money) Force them into rehab? (another form of jail) Let the roam the streets attacking people? (recycle through jail or rehab)

No, it's not simple.
Bank of Russia Calls for Full Ban on Crypto
That is one amazing quote. Thanks for making it known to me.
Fun fact: the total wealth of all US billionaires, at 3.4 trillion, would be enough to fund over one and a half Afghanistan wars
I don't know, the ways in which they stack up is like apples and oranges. Cigarettes are certainly bad for you, and it's known they cause cancer but cigarettes don't have the same severity when it comes to withdrawl in my understanding. Alcohol withdrawl can cause hallucinations, seizures, even death. Also, I would say the danger is greater with alcohol because it impairs your judgement in a far greater way than cigarettes... have you ever been scared of someone who is driving while smoking?

Extrapolated out over time, I would guess that alcoholism is a cofactor in more deaths annually than cigarettes (edit: that is to say, deaths not caused directly by drinking, including drink driving, but conditions such as diabetes and heart disease which are greatly exacerbated by drinking for example... I wonder if someone who dies of cirrhosis gets chalked up as a death by alcohol?)
Just my gut feeling.
I don't think they're useful to most people right now (or maybe ever), but there are some cool things in DeFi that are normally reserved for large institutions/not possible in traditional finance:

1. Being a liquidity provider to get a cut of exchange fees (https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/conce...)

2. Flashloans for arbitrage (https://aave.com/flash-loans/)

3. Autonomous governance for protocol updates (https://compound.finance/governance)

4. Decentralized perpetual contracts (https://www.perp.com/)

5. Decentralized mutual insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/)

Many/all of these depend on speculation to derive value, but there's added value nonetheless
Yes, exactly. Or would you rather live in a China or Russia dominated world? Good luck. (Again, I am not saying they are not bad, I am saying they are not the same.)
This is the first I've heard as it being some kind of "it's not traditional" argument

Everyone I've ever talked to that has an issue with it just think it's gross. And they're usually people that are not very big risk-takers with their tastes, and order the exact same item at a restaurant every time they go. And only want either cheese pizza or pepperoni.
Thomas Edison's version

> The manager of the circuit realized that the night operators might be tempted to shirk their work, and so he required them to telegraph a signal to him every half hour in order that he might be sure they were awake and at their posts. Edison's signal was six.

> This was a wise regulation, but Edison did not appreciate the necessity for it. He found it a great bother to keep his eye on the clock and leave his reading or some experiment that he was working out in the quiet hours of night, to report that stupid "six" every thirty minutes.

> He wondered if he couldn't make a machine attached to the clock that would save him the trouble. After a good deal of thinking and experimenting, he fitted up an instrument that could telegraph "six" as well as he could.

> This was a great relief to him, and he felt free to do what he liked with his time without much fear of discovery. He even left the office and made expeditions about town.

> One night while he was away, the manager tried to call him up but could get no response. He thought this odd as Edison was more punctual with his signals than any other operator on the line.

> He waited, and tried again and again, with no better success, though the signals came with their accustomed regularity. He made an investigation, and the young inventor received a severe reprimand for his cleaver contrivance.

https://www.gjenvick.com/Biography/ThomasAEdison/05-TheBoyTe...
Isn't it already legal if you have prescription? (In pill form ofcourse)
Background:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29682102
I bought an off-brand eink reader (there are a number of them, but I got a Boyue Likebook and run KOReader on it) and load Project Gutenberg books through Calibre.
This is a fabulously concise way of explaining the difference between the three. Bookmarking your explanation to share in the future!

A neat thing about reasoning is that we tend to use all three, too. Abduction → Deduction → Induction ... in cycles.

More on topic with the OP: to me, intuition is what happens when we skip through these steps. It's the heuristics we use to make good decisions when we don't have the time to "abduce" possibilities, "deduce" the likely answer(s), and "induce" the evidence of our deductions.
They've been consistent on the positive cardiovascular effects from mild consumption of red wine forever.

> 48 animal and 37 human studies were included in data extraction following screening. Significant improvements in measures of blood pressure and vascular function following RWP were seen in 84% and 100% of animal studies, respectively. Human studies indicated significant improvements in systolic blood pressure overall (− 2.6 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 4.8, − 0.4]), with a greater improvement in pure-resveratrol studies alone (− 3.7 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 7.3, − 0.0]). No significant effects of RWP were seen in diastolic blood pressure or flow-mediated dilation (FMD) of the brachial artery.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-020-02247-8
Dripping worked fairly well for us during the last freeze (Austin), although I still had a few frozen pipes (that did not result in a leak). The insulation is sufficiently poor that our indoor bathroom faucets will freeze after ~12 hours of <30 or so. There's pipes that run along the exterior of the home that have literally no insulation whatsoever. We'd have to do some targeted insulation in those exposed areas as well, unfortunately.
Not sure what your experience has been, but I've been using mine as my only phone for over a year and it's been fine. Running Manjaro, which it came with (although I've been tinkering with NixOS on an SD card).

It's been a smoother ride than my previous phone, an OpenMoko FreeRunner which I got around 2008. The default OS on that was already abandonware by the time I got it!
10+ years subscriber here, will keep subscribing it no matter what, even though I read less kernel stuff these days.
I dunno, everything the menu does can be recreated in the minibuffer (and you have things like apropos if you're really lost). Personally I like to reclaim as much space as possible, so I turn off modelines too (I have a bit of status info written into the minibuffer, but I'd kill that too if you could).
Last Sane Man on Wall Street
My exact thoughts, umm where is the root cause and explanation of the breach? They just reset 2FA as a reactionary measure. The attackers have compromised more than 2FA to be able to initiate withdrawals. This doesn’t add up.
And arbitraily gluable diffrrentiable manifolds!
There are lots of people who buy direct from the grid who would happily change behaviour when Y gets big...

For example, at $500/MWh, I'll shut down my glassworks and pottery factory. At $5,000/MWh, I'll shut down the datacenter. At $50,000 I'll hook up a diesel generator from my shed. At $500,000 I'll personally get on a treadmill and start running, because the 100 watts I can generate that way gives me a better hourly wage than I can find elsewhere.

In fact, the reason for grid failure when prices aren't capped is entirely people on 'fixed price' schemes who do not modify their behaviour when faced with extreme prices.

The future is electric meters which have a knob on the front for "max price I'm willing to pay" and shut off if prices exceed that. If someone is happy to pay more, they can set their max price higher.
I do agree with this argument, but most of the time legalising doesn't just make problems disappear. It needs to be paired with better access to mental health facilities, rehabilitiation, etc.

Making drugs legal doesn't mean people will start abusing them. I do not drink or take drugs, and both are easy as hell to access here in the UK.

The benefits for me of legalising drugs would be making it easier for people to seek help with less stigma attached to it, remove drug dealers out of the equation, make it safer to procur drugs if people are going to take them anyway, I believe it would also make scientific research much easier which in turn might help us to know the long term effects of these drugs.
I agree with the point on consistency, but must substances be viewed through the lens of "abuse" and "mental health"? It's not clear if you are implying that use of alcohol is generally a form of drug abuse related to mental health. In fact I'm not sure we can adequately define what is "abuse" in this case.

Take for instance Lemmy from Motorhead, who used alcohol and drugs heavily throughout his life and probably died an early death as a result; can that really be considered abuse when he, pardon my French, didn't give a shit?

For some people, things like alcohol are a serious issue and overuse can stem from both physical and psychological addiction. Then you've got people who use it sparingly. And yet there are people who drink heavily, know exactly what they're doing, and can't easily be classified as addicts without projecting one's own life choices unto them.
I'm not refuting and generally agree with your sentiment here in harm reduction but I tried to see the collateral damage of drug raids vs drugs.

In the US the CDC reported 100,000 overdoses from drugs in the 12 months preceding April 2021[1]. I can't find how many people die from drug raids specifically but this Al-Jazeera article shows 1,068 people being killed by the police a year after George Floyd died[2].

And for a little more context Statista[3] shows 21,750 people being murdered in 2020.

Police kill at ~1% the rate of drug deaths.
Citizens kill at ~20% the rate of drug deaths.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/...
2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-hav...
3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-a...
FoRtUn3 faVor5 th3 thE boLd