skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't new, there's been many discussions. But generally you spend billions making lasers, on the ground, in orbit, and on the moon has been suggested. You make the space craft with a sail a few atom thick surface tuned for the frequency of the laser to minimize weight and maximize thrust.

However even 1% of the speed of light means it's going to be too far to accelerate significantly on the order of 10 minutes to 10 hours. Sure we could put laser arrays on the outer planets, but that's not particularly feasible today.

So what do you do with your $billions of lasers once post launch ... of course launch more. Especially since you are likely to lose some due to radiation and space dust.

Launch once an hour and hopefully your communication system can handle hops of 4 or more ships, which would be 4 hours * 0.01C = 0.04 light hours or about 1/3rd the way to mars. With some fancy encoding that doesn't seem so hard. People get across the earth on a few watts with signals 20db below the noise floor, no line of site, and a message energy sapping atmosphere and bounces off not particularly reflective soil.

For some idea on the difficulty, with 1970s tech (45 years ago), voyager 1 has a 22 watt transmitter and is still communicating from well past pluto.
Your GP did not treat HN as a single person, they are simply pointing out population trends. And these trends are important when analyzing the dynamics of a democratic (upvote-based) content platform
I did but a /slightly/ more expensive but web-managed switch with the precise idea of playing with vlans... Needless to say, I never "found time" to actually do it :)

One day I will. In the meantime, could you please drop some links to some good introductory pages ?

Thanks!
More windings = more weight - you're gonna pay for it somewhere.
GitHub uses <details> for most of their dropdowns and it does generally work well, though you'll run into issues if you ever need to break out of the DOM hierarchy (for example, to have the popup overflow a scrollable container).
> encouraging this harassment

Did he actually encourage people to harass them? I haven't heard anything of that, because that changes the story if true.
it's not false

In reality almost no one bothers with secret chats (no syncing between devices, no backup and no group chat possible). Instead everything is stored online without E2E encryption, i.e. perfectly readable for the service provider.
Wait to see when you share the USB hub with other devices.
It's unlikely any of them will be sued civilly, as Jones was, because they for the most part weren't running successful businesses that profited by deliberately defaming the parents of shooting victims.
It does seem based far less on his actions than on their personal opinion of him. That ought to make everybody nervous.
But that's not at all what happened. Jones lied in a deliberate attempt to provoke harassment of these poor people. If owned a radio show and I go on and said you were a child rapist and should be stopped by any means necessary would you believe me faultless if you got attacked?
I am explicitly not siding with Alex Jones in any way.
If you lose your phone (and all other devices you might have), apple does have a secure (as in apple cannot access it) last ditch recovery path (see my other wall of text/word soup answer).

But in the absence of that the data is gone - it's one of the big concerns that come up in response to "E2E everything": people are not used to the idea that forgetting your password (or losing devices in a 2fa world) means the data is actually irrecoverable and it's not just a matter of reseting the account password (e.g. you can't go into a store with your ID to "prove it's you" because that isn't the problem)
Well OJ at least lost the rights to his book and had it renamed something like “I did it”
I agree, but with the following caveat. Sometimes hot takes inspire reflexive reactions from the crowd, reactions that aren't coming from a place of deeply well thought out reasons.

So if you get a mob of people all reacting the same way to something, who, upon examination, have arrived at their conclusion for a smattering of contradictory and inconsistent reasons, it can be a helpful point of information for diagnosing the irrational mob response.

Granted it's not always the case, people get to similar beliefs through different reasons.

But these are two phenomena that exist side by side and there are times when it's necessary and helpful to be able to diagnose the first.
It is semantics, but that was your whole point no?

> That's because they're not modelling anything

If we agree on "how LLMs work", then how can you claim that they aren't modeling anything? They are modeling language, and while it's unlikely current paradigms will be proving new mathematical truths, it's completely plausible to me that bigger models will be able to handle simple math word problems like those in the article, precisely because LLMs can model the "Alice", "Apple", and "Bob" entities.
I guess they were not able to buy VRchat.
That post is an excellent justification. Makes perfect sense and it's hard to find fault with it.

Wonder why the blog post omitted all of that and focused on nonsense instead?
It's not only your conversation but the one of others too. I like that it's hard to move it elsewhere.
The key here will be if they can attach any of his assets despite his pleas of poverty and filing for bankruptcy. The victims may end up owning the studio he is currently broadcasting from (and his cars, home and anything else of value).
Boom, he's on his back!
"But whatabout..."

Yes, we should everyone accountable for slander & libel. Even journalists.
Does he even have the money to pay nearly a billion dollars?
Or is the point to bankrupt him with what seems like lawfare?

America is not a place where people like being told to be quiet. Alex Jones went mainstream on the Joe Rogan show. Millions and millions of Rogan fans see Alex Jones are legitimized by this ruling. Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world.

Just some things to think about.
Unintended consequences.
My two oldest children - 13 and 15 - have loudly proclaimed that having a "green bubble" would be worse than death.
Defamation is a thing you can be sued for. The plaintiffs successfully sued Alex Jones for defamation. Him making money didn't have much to do with that.

In this phase about damages, the economics can be considered as a factor. It can also imply his motivations. The testimony given in this hearing showed direct connections between defaming Sandy Hook victims and money made by Alex Jones. He knew it was a money making story from the first day.

A true believer might spend their time and money on useful evidence instead of crappy photoshops and flashy nonsense. Alex Jones wasn't doing that. He was pushing the flashy nonsense, calling it evidence, and watching the money roll in.

He never really tried to prove his theories because that isn't a required part of the grift.

Essentially, he did an illegal thing (defamation) and made money by doing that illegal thing. Economic fines and damages are pretty common to dissuade people from doing illegal things to make money.
Washington as recommended by our counsel. REI is also based in Washington and the co-operative laws work well for having many members. Our vision is to have over a billion users, hence a billion members, and be the largest co-operative in the world.
I'm working on a startup that ingests logs, and you can easily consume them via API as that's how the GUI works. Shoot me an email if you'd like to know more... no charge if you find it useful w/out the GUI.
I think that it is not grossly excessive enough.
I regard EA as a means to operationalise an already chosen ethical foundation - and Yudkowsky's article as explaining how to do that while still being human.

I don't find 'grounding ethics' to be a particularly fruitful thing to attempt, and having looked at efforts to do so that clearly involved far more intellectual investment than I've put into it, the obvious holes therein suggest there are better things for me to spend my thinking time on.
Bringing up unpunished propaganda during the Bush era is irrelevant when most here would agree that was equally vile and punishable. Two wrongs don't make a right.

The predominant perspective here is that free speech should be protected, but if you are spreading lies to make a profit, society ought to take back that profit. That seems like a pretty reasonable take to me, but I'd entertain counterarguments if you have any. As for whether the punishment here fits the crime, maybe you're underestimating the scale of profit he's made off his lies?
> And even if it is what the jury just decided, Jones' company is already "bankrupt" (yet still on the air)

I was under the impression the courts were "unwinding" (perhaps not the correct technical term) some of his bankruptcy efforts for precisely this - being illusory efforts to avoid consequences, rather than functional lack of solvency.
The Z axis can be imagined to be infinitesimally narrow. There's no information in the stretching of the Z axis, so you can make that single color of data in the as visible as you like without adding any information.

Our eyes see in two dimensions, so a Mar1d world with a Z axis one Plank length wide would still have the same colors, but it's impossible to see.
Now take the tech and apply it to the next gen of Formula E!
> suppressing free speech is acceptable in this instance

Libel, slander, and defamation are not free speech. You do not have the right to repeatedly, knowingly, lie about someone else, especially when said lies ruin peoples' lives.

> billion dollar fine for some off-hand nutso claim

It wasn't a claim, he asserted it as fact, and it wasn't just once, he did this up until he got sued, and even made up conspiracies about the trials as they were happening.

> (that he subsequently recanted!)

If Jones truly did believe he was correct about Sandy Hook being fake, the moment he found out he was wrong, he should have delivered a formal apology and begged his audience to stop harassing the families of the victims. He should have publicly rebuked people like Wolfgang Halbig and any callers who talked about the "Sandy Hook hoax" and chastised the harassers.

But he never did that. Instead it's "I already said I was sorry, I might have been wrong but I'm right like 95+% of the time, why are people so angry at me? It's all part of a plot by the globalists to shut us down, buy my iodine."

> a very unpromising barometer for the health of free speech in our country

So "free speech" is when someone with a significant media presence is able to knowingly spread lies about you that lead to over a decade of stalking and harassment with no recourse?

If you're an American, you might want to consult a lawyer on that. Our civil liberties have been heavily curtailed over the years, but this verdict isn't threatening anyone's rights.
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/12/us/alex-jones-verdic...
"I think this is an odd view and one that doesn't generalize very well."

What part of my view is odd? I explicitly disassociated the financial penalty awarded from his actions.
I don't think you'd find traditional media companies routinely getting convicted of defamation this egregious. Although, FOX and Newsmax are both facing $1B+ penalties over their reporting on Dominion Voting Systems. And they're both pretty much dead to rights with Dominion able to point very directly to lost revenue as a result of their deliberate lies.

Just reporting something incorrectly isn't punishable at all. Publishing something poorly sourced isn't punishable. Stating a disagreeable opinion isn't punishable. What Jones, Fox and Newsmax did was done with active malice.
> If those were the reasonable standards, every media-company would be broke.

I think that's a very interesting aspect of this decision. Alex Jones is a very easy person for some people to hate, but will those same people cheer on Trump suing news outlets over the piss dossier and other fabrications, or Kyle Rittenhouse suing people who reported he shot three unarmed black people? And these were things said by actual purported news outlets, not just a guy whose entire schtick is clearly intended to be more entertainment than actual information.

This decision could usher in a new era of fact-based news reporting if it manages to set legal precedent for cases from both sides of the political aisle. But I'm not sure if I can trust either judges or the media to take the next steps required to make that happen.
Tip: You can vouch for the [flagged] [dead] and it may bring it back. You have to click the comment timestamp to see the vouch option.
> primary residence is in Florida which the homestead act prevents the courts taking

Under Florida law. Federal law, e.g. Chapter 11 bankruptcy, overrides it.
(a) Stuff like this is supremely unhelpful and corrosive to the thread.

(b) It's obviously not the case that Jones is getting a sympathetic hearing from this thread; instead, you're noticing mostly the randos posting pro-Jones stuff that lives briefly before being flagged to the bottom of the site.
why would ideological diversity in any community ever surprise you?
He went mainstream on the Joe Rogan show. It was one of the most popular Rogan podcasts ever.
Too bad mass layoffs don't target folks based on performance at Intel. They just lay off entire buildings.
Actually, this has been done: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11391
Would some be lost, likely. Would all have some holes in the large sails, sure.

But some on board redundancy should let a decent fraction of them to survive. Keep in mind the lasers will boost the velocity for just minutes to hours, so you can launch many of them.
Name a democratic country that does not have laws or torts against perjury and defamation.

"Free speech" has never been limitless. Fraud, libel, filing a false report, uttering threats, copyright infringement -- all grounds for a lawsuit if not a prison term in any respectable country.
> A reasonable sum

Is there any point to reasoning with the people who believe Alex Jones' absurd lies about Newtown?
There's a recent startup which wanted to take taste prediction of luxury drinks to the next level with ML:

https://www.mpg.de/18773206/the-signature-of-taste
Apple and other large businesses get fined nowhere near what they have in assets.... no matter how bad their actions are. One billion is just crazy in this case...
Is this a new thing? And if so, given that iPhone have been around so long why is this new?
It's just a line in the article, the data isn't provided. This is the source of the headline quote:

> 87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 31% of
teens own an Apple Watch

And sorry, but that's just laughably wrong. Even in my teen's upper middle class school of tech scions, the penetration of any kind of phone sits somewhere around 50%. And I don't think I've even seen a smart watch on these kids.
Asserting one's opinion is speculating.

Personally I don't see how you can say he knew it to be false given his reputation as a conspiracy theorist.

You can't both think he is crazy and think that he knew it to be false, that would assume he is rational.

Hanlon's razor and all that.
I think a big difference between then and now is how we interacted amongst each other. I somehow feel that the old days there were more community events and structures to keep people working together to achieve a common goal.

Now it just feels completely chaotic, with everyone trying to dismantle the system and structures that made life more “cohesive”.

The result is increased anarchy, and its pretty frightening
Imagine your child being murdered, and then a guy comes along and starts making a profit on the idea that you are a crisis actor and your child never existed, and he doesn't stop even when the crazy people who listen to him start to stalk you.

Most people would probably say that this sort of behavior should not be only not be tolerated by a civil society, but that there should be penalties for it. You, on the other hand, have decided that being sued for libel is a totalitarian death wish.
Those consequences being what, more people defaming the parents of dead children and losing their fortunes as a result? I don't think Rogan is dumb enough to make that particular mistake.
"Unfortunately being on-call 24x7 is the base expectation at big companies,"

Occasionally is that true, unless you set that precedent early.

If you set boundaries up at the start, in most cases, they stick. It's just critical to assess early and modulate occasionally (exceptions happen) but its better than living to their schedule on your dime.
did he really say go harass these people or did he just say they’re crisis actors and its hoax?

Im genuinely asking because i don’t understand how this works.

I was under the impression that saying “Trump is a murderous liar” is fine, if I say “Go kill trump”etc then thats incitement.

Does that make sense?
Btw, they carefully never said the gender of the person who BK was porking. I'm convinced it was a man!
He's doing it that way to grab the back of the sweater with a comfortable palms-up twist of the wrist. If he were to hold the sweater facing forward, he would have to grab the back by twisting the wrist down and toward the body, which is much less comfortable.

So, actually, that's a quite interesting technique that may be worth trying.
> I think it would require one eye above the other to have depth perception in his 2d world.

Is his world actually 2D though? Or a 3D world projected down to 2D? The latter is what I would expect.
If that's true, I'd love to see how exactly they calculated that.
Gaming revenue breakdown

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-gaming-proves-to-be-a-g...

As far as “bought digital music” vs music not bought from iTunes right before the iPhone came out, SJ himself said that most music on iPods were not bought from iTunes:

This was originally posted on Apple’s front page when Jobs was trying to convince the record labels to allow everyone to sell DRM free music (it happened a couple of years later)

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

> Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM
So I have owned an Android all my life and never daily driven an iPhone. The iPhone (edit forgot the iPhone part) screen seems more responsive and very bright and colorful. To me the freedom of an unlocked phone I can put my own apps on is very important for me for Android. Why should I get an iPhone?

edit: not sure most teens care or are unaware of Android's around 3 years support length for a phone.
> a deliberate attempt to provoke harassment of these poor people

That seems superbly unlikely. If that were true, what would he stand to gain from that? What did he have against these people?

I can't imagine he was just sitting there chuckling maniacally "yes yes I'm going to hurt these people who just lost their children". That's an imagined cartoon
They would rather be dead than be uncool! Yikes.
Yes, adding another app is a big deal. It is cognitive load, which may be negligible for some, but a lot for others.

Personally, I use only two of those apps you listed for messaging, and for all the others, I say, "Sorry, I don't use that one."
Such public accounting does seem to have value in reducing the number of people (present and future) not yet committed to his cult, but who otherwise might. And while there'll be more Alex Jones personalities, for a little while at least they'll likely moderate their behavior more than they otherwise might.
Yes indeed. They would have been very pleased with someone being charged 1 billion dollars for saying that a single event didn't happen. Clearly they would have agreed that Jones is liable for the actions of his viewers. It's all right there in the founding documents.
> For every good union story out there, there are an equal amount of bad union stories.

There's both, for sure, but I don't know about "equal".

Except in a cardinality sense, where you can get as many as you want if you keep looking indefinitely.
Well, not all of them, but usually you expect a young person to have all of them. Except Microsoft Teams, the company may use other media, and Discord.

Hell, even my aunt that doesn't know nothing about technology has WhatsApp and had me install Telegram because the church opened a channel on it!
Show HN: Reviewpad, a GitHub action to automate pull request workflows
The main benefit mentioned in the article is a $400 annual credit to Coursera. Everything else is "some education" or "some doctors", which usually translates to practically nothing useful.

They should have found out what the average pay is for union vs non-union, and then compared if the new benefits actually translated to something meaningful.

My guess is that the union members earn more than $400/yr in cash, and then they can spend it on whatever they want - education, doctors, whatever.
Whenever X happens there will always be people who believe X didn't happen. Society has to find a way to deal with this.
I had forgotten about this. Discussion from last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199330
Nick Clegg, Other Meta Executives 'Inadvertently' ID'ed in OnlyFans Bribery Suit
> your typical use of Signal doesn't do that

All centralised & protocol-locked messaging apps are subject to network effect. People moving away from Signal doesn't help the goal of universal secure messaging, regardless of whether those people are you or I.

That said, it seems they're between a rock & a hard place here since Google are defacto deprecating support for 3rd-party SMS apps.
It is definitely not new, at all.

Source: I am in my mid-20's.
>Say the wrong words and get financially destroyed for ever...

This is an incredibly disingenuous take on Jones' actions here.

Edit: For additional context, OP has a history of direct ties to conspiracy theories, Project Veritas, etc.. See: their profile.
(iPhone user here) It does seem to me that Apple isn't playing fair and this is no longer the technical issue it once was. Apple has so far refused to adopt RCS (the successor to SMS and MMS) which is now an industry standard for text messaging. Because of that, aside from the green bubble, the text messaging experience with non-iPhone users is subpar. Images and videos are compressed and things like tapback and group texts just stink.

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
> In sum, it's good to know that we're trying to hold him to account, but it seems unlikely that this stops him in any material way from just continuing on the way he has been.

It depends on if your goal in a trial about the horrible damages done to the parents of murdered children was only to compensate in some way those suffering parents for that defamation. If your goal was to attack Alex Jones because you don't like him (you're an anti-fan) and you don't like people who like him, then this will be disappointing. Really anything other than summary execution would be disappointing.
> I am not really interested in "Windows 365" because my PC has a lot of private data I would not want in the cloud.

"Microsoft takes the data protection seriously."
This is a fair judgement against Jones. A fair judgement against the people who lied about WMD's and killed millions via the war in Iraq would be life in prison, for a start.

Just because the criminals at the top get away with war crimes doesn't mean the criminals lower on the totem pole shouldn't be punished. It's a false equivalence to claim otherwise.