skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basing hypotheses on a single data point, let alone one whose outcome is not yet determined, almost invariably leads to wildly inaccurate conclusions in practice. As such, until we have more data, any questions about the Great Filter and the causes thereof will remain unanswerable.

Personally my bet is on either us being early as intelligent life goes, or extremely massive stellar expansionism on the levels that would allow for us to have encountered intelligent life with basically zero search effort not being something most civilizations would feel compelled to do.

Also assuming that any advanced civilization that exists would have to follow our development path is laughably anthropocentric and reflects a failure of imagination on the part of the people making said claims.
if we are going to talk about ethics I think ad ethics should also be brought into the conversation as well then, because not every website uses ads in a respectable manner
Brave advocates should spend most of their energy going after Chrome and Safari users. If Brave can convert them better than Firefox can (which, sadly, seems to be quite a low bar), they'll overtake soon enough.

Attempting to convert Firefox users is not a long term strategy, and doesn't do as much or anything to create a better web.
iOS? Do you have "advanced protection" enabled? Since some time ago standard content blocking rules are not enough and we need a WebExtension to be allowed to run on YT to block ads there.

Oh and one more thing: there's an option to "share" video from the YT app or YT webpage to AdGuard. This is probably the only possible way to get rid of ads when you're using the YouTube app.
>Can physical microphones be removed from Apple devices by a repair shop, while still allowing use of wired/wireless headsets?

There have been reports that the 2020 iPhone SE cannot be used without a microphone:

https://repair.wiki/w/IPhone_SE_(2020)
> If you're referring to MV3, then I think you've blown things significantly out of proportion

Have you read the blog post by AdGuard about their MV3 adblocker and, specifically, the limitations of that addon compared what we had before?

https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-mv3.html

I wouldn't call it "blown things significantly out of proportion", not unless you're okay with compromised ad blocking capabilities, which some people seem to be in the name of security which is oxymoronic.
Dear Twitter Advertisers from Elon Musk
That doesn't really work, either. https://abc7.com/shoplifting-video-san-francisco-walgreens-t...
It took the allies in WW2 almost two years to make 1 through 3 happen. Operation sea lion, the Nazi invasion of the UK, was canceled for failing at 3 after the battle of Britain.
Ask HN: Crypto skeptics, would uncancellable services change your mind?
I was recently listening to this podcast by The Defiant, a "DeFi" conversation. In it, Ali Yahya, GP at a16z, notes that blockchain applications are the first software applications that cannot be turned off by a centralized authority.

https://thedefiant.io/ether-goes-deflationary

For example, as we all talk about often on HN, Google often cancels services, services that might have millions of people using them.

You could imagine someone developing a "service" (in this case, a smart contract) running inside Ethereum which could not be turned off by a centralized authority. You could imagine someone designing a service that permits the developer to continue charging fees even if they have no control over the underlying VM, and even if they don't want to support it at all.

Yahya notes that it "used to be that hardware had control over software." You turn off the machine, and the software is off permanently. This means, until now, whoever owns the hardware has full control over the software in the end. Everything has to run in a datacenter somewhere.

In a CS Operating Systems class you learn that everything is virtual machines all the way down. Isn't Ethereum the first VM which cannot be turned off by an owner, and does not that change SaaS as we know it?

All this is highly speculative, of course, no services exist like this yet. But, in a few years, isn't this something that could change a lot of economics for software companies?

Putting aside all the concerns about energy usage and scammy things like NFTs, isn't this an idea worth pursuing?
With a 2.4% clearance rate on reported cases, most people aren't going to bother reporting thefts.
If you don't like roads with billboard, use the backroads instead!

This a poor argument, no HN crowdthink required.
I sometimes feel it's as if we were having a conversation about fire, with one side advocating for having building codes so fires are less likely to start in the first place, and the other advocating for having fire departments put out the fires. Or one side was advocating for safer road and car design so that people don't get injured in auto accidents in the first place, and the other side was advocating for emergency rooms to treat people who get injured in auto accidents.

Clearly we need both long-term solutions and short-term, and the police and jails are not the long-term solution but they are necessary, like fire departments and emergency rooms. If we have more fires or more auto accidents, we need more funding for fire departments or emergency rooms, at least until the longer term solutions have time to start working. I don't see why this is even a partisan issue. San Francisco (and many other cities in the US currently) need an increased police presence and more dangerous people put in jail, as a way of coping with the short-term consequences. We need improvements in police and especially jails, but that doesn't change the fact that an increase is needed in the short term at least.
> The legislature has delegated a vague do everything to the agency.

I should have been clearer here. I made a general statement about determining what an agency may or may not do based on a mission statement. This is always a mistake that you want to avoid.

But it’s not really relevant to this case!

The judge didn’t find that the agency overstepped its authority. Instead, the judge found that the agency had created an order that was arbitrary and capricious, because it treated certain groups of people differently, even though they were in the same situation.
Legacy of Computers, Gerry Sussman(YouTube)
Real energy output is just one of many possible ways of measuring PV, but it’s even less predictable than number of panels. Fixed installations produce less power per year than 1 or 2 axis tracking etc. Different locations mean different amounts of transmission losses etc.

But even the best model is going to get blindsided by politics. Europe would have been well severed by massively investing over the summer in PV to reduce it’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They didn’t do so but I was very much expecting a push for the fastest to install alternative to natural gas turbines which is PV.
> This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress.

That's a meaningless observation. If the rules were different such that the popular vote mattered more, then Republicans would play a different game. Roughly the same equilibrium would be achieved in the end.
A neural network doesn't panic, so there is no blue screen, only bad decisions. I think that's even worse, as that would be a strong signal to take over driving.

This might be mitigated if the result includes a confidence percentage, ie panic if confidence below threshold, but even then I'm not sure how reliable this metric is.
> Hype driven... you mean Andrew's 100 viewer streams? Or my 30 viewer streams?

More like release notes with 1,000 upvotes on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/rl87pr/zig_pro...
The police are only part of the problem, the criminals still needs to be charged and convicted. There was a reason SF recalled their DA. Also, many of these people are mentally ill, and the arrest can turn physical. In the current environment, police have very little room to make mistakes and even if they do everything according to their training, public opinion can really go against them (see Nicholas Reardon). Nobody wants to be public enemy #1 for doing their job.

Imagine reading an honest job description for being a police officer:

* Good benefits, poor hours

* Willing to risk life to save others even if they hate you.

* Must make split second life and death decisions and if you are wrong, you can go to jail for lifetime.

* You will be recorded and every important decision will be second guessed by people who have never done the job

* Even if you follow training perfectly, public opinion might go against you which could lead to criminal charges.

Can you image taking a sys admin job like that? Hackernews would laugh non-stop at that posting. But we expect less educated people to do that job for less money. Good luck with that plan.

Just like we have done to teachers in our schools, I think we have made the job almost impossible. In a more gentle society, I can see the plan working, but in our current cities, I think our expectations are complete fiction.
do you have any stand you'd recommend for that? I mean to hold it for scribbling?
I have Ratta Supernote which I love and would want to use it like that too
Host-to-Host transfer was added in 2019 in USB4 (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Version_history)

As to why it wasn't there initially ... why should it have been? How many people were going to put their desktops close enough together that a 1m USB cable could reach between them?

Peak speed on USB1 (1996) was 12Mbps - home and corporate networks were already operating at at least 10Mbps, and handle data transfer quite nicely (and over far longer distances)

If you wanted to go host-to-host with ethernet, you only needed a crossover cable to do it

USB access for external devices like Zip drives was available - and, if you used Zip disks, the media'd interoperate between internal and external variants

One of the first computers to exclusively rely on USB for peripherals was the first-generation iMac back in 199

USB thumb/external drives appeared about the same time (a couple "history of thumb drive" sites list it as 1999, others as 1998 ... I suspect is the difference is between "design/prototype" and "on sale")

In short, there was no reason to enable host-to-host transfers with USB
When I first saw Retro City Rampage I thought of Grand Theftendo, but I didn't know they were related!

Retro City Rampage did actually get "retro system" releases -- for DOS and Windows 3.1.
<on the slim chance anyone from Eidos or Embracer game devs are in here/>

Please can you continue with the Deus Ex series, the three games with their Cyberpunk storylines and tech futurism/pessimism are a real gaming treasure.

It would be a shame for the franchise to just become another IP asset gathering dust.
I don’t see the issue. Don’t all Ad blocking extensions allow you to add your own list of blocked domains?

When they are sued, take the “offending” sites out of the list of blocked sites and post another list of “sites we had to remove because of DMCA”.

Then add functionality “import list from text file”.

And let Barbara Streisand take care of the rest.

Edit: I see the original author did exactly this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33356940
> iMessage is encrypted, the encryption is end-to-end, there are no backdoors.

In Germany, we have a saying: "Wer glaubt wird selig." which could be translated as something like: "Blessed are they who believe."
ECB raises interest rates across eurozone by record margin
I only block ads for shitty multinational companies that are sadly essential for many daily tasks.

I don't lose sleep over that. Those companies ain't playing by the rules
This is true for now. As someone who bought the original ~3-4 years ago, I feel very nervous that the way I use my $500 device is not aligned with the company’s long term road map. Add the fact that I recommended this device to a bunch of friends and family (the v1 is a great product) and I am personally on the hook for figuring out how to get half a dozen annoyed friends/family to get ssh access. The cost of them changing this is high for me personally and I really don’t have a lot of faith that they will not discontinue this subscription waiver at some point in the future.
as i get older the number of services i want to operate locally dwindle. nextdns does a great job, has a number of great implementations that prevent fall through, and works for the entire family regardless of whether or not they're on the local network. great product, great team.
Regardless if they were “compeled” - nation security letter related activities have included actions.

For example, this included a room and split:

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

My understanding is that vendors that execute national security letters offer system integration technology to be locally installed to ingest the related data.

Signal has the data, it just requires them collecting it — hence my statement that Signal’s security is based on trust, not physics, math, etc.
Well, the only real way to know is by sharing the link and finding out. No plan surviving first contact and all that.
A local DNS server would be easier (wildcards as there's lots of FB domains).
Chuckie Egg ;)
>”Just because you don't like ads or tracking (neither illegal) you don't have the right to cost that website money (bandwidth, etc.) without anything in exchange.”

Why does this need to be a “right”? Let’s assume I allow advertisements but I ignore them completely. Am I likewise costing that website money without anything in exchange?

What if I hated advertisements so much that I had someone place post-it notes on my screen so the banners were not visible, ensuring that at no point in time my attention would given to the ad spaces - would that be unethical?
That's the wrong way to approach the problem.

The problem is not about engineers doing support but about the whole company being aware of the real customer needs and experience with the product.
They're political footballs because people don't want people they don't like or are who are doing things they don't like to have rights and monkeying with definitions is easier than the full frontal assault of amending the constitution.

How many times have you seen people on HN advocating, to much popular support, for infringing upon the 4th amendment for people who are involved in specific types of business or the infringing upon 5th amendment protections for people engaged in certain activities?
No doubt we had a very lucky roll, and I agree that intelligent life must be extraordinarily rare. But the galaxy/universe and its history is incomprehensibly enormous and dynamic.

You're right that evolution isn't a one-way street, but intelligent life is going to emerge as a result of a sufficiently complex, chaotic, and resource-limited environment - and nature is great at that. The necessary ingredients for life generally are time, elemental diversity to manipulate chemistry(the makeup of our planet doesn't seem extraordinary), and competition (once a self-reproducing automata exists at any scale, evolution takes over and life adapts- see Von Neumann's "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" to understand this further).

Intelligent life isn't fundamentally different, because intelligence isn't a bar that is attained, but a gradual and emergent phenomena once sufficient numbers of "logic circuits" are hard coded in organismal memory (the brain). For it to emerge, an organism must be continuously challenged via diverse mechanisms. For example, recurrent semi-apocalyptic disruption events which clear the way for new "ideas" (i.e. how the extinction of the dinosaurs made room for mammals).

Your last sentence hits the nail on the head but you reach the wrong conclusion. It is the need to invent that yields intelligence, not the other way around.
Now please correct me if I'm wrong but this is only an issue because these blocklists are constantly updated with new domains spreading malware. If we only wanted to block the major ad companies of the world we would not need such a high frequency of updates and everyone could manage with a stale list for months before an update would make a difference.

Personally I use noscript and other ways to protect myself against malware, so I'm only interested in blocking the major ad companies. Which I could do happily for months using any stale old list.
Technological advances during the middle ages made more land fit for agriculture.

>> During the medieval ‘agricultural revolution’, new forms of cereal farming fuelled the exceptionally rapid growth of towns, markets and populations across much of Europe. The use of the mouldboard plough and systematic crop rotation were key developments and led to open-field farming, one of the transformative changes of the Middle Ages.

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/agricultural-rev
That's similar to cracking phones.

Even though some folks would like to make it illegal to crack phones, they can't. They are, however, allowed to release patches and updates that "crack the crack," so to speak. As long as these patches don't violate the law, then it's a simple, perfectly-legal arms race.

For myself, I don't run an adblocker. When I go to a site that's overrun with ads, I don't return. Hasn't happened too often. I also have Reader Mode, which works on most sites.

I refuse to project my own values onto others. I really don't care whether or not anyone else runs adblockers, as I don't profit from ads, and I don't run them, myself, for my own reasons, which no one really cares about.
s/doesn’t/didn’t/g
And we go back to "how about you just enforce the law, catch people breaking it and put them in jail"
Pure fearmongering. Apparently if a buyshoesxyz.com shares with Google the fact that you bought shoes, and Google later uses that information to let you through ReCAPTCHA v3, that's "not safe". Not safe from what, exactly, is not explained. You're just supposed to take the author's word for it that something, anything, bad could come of it.

Also, the author gets something else that's very important, very wrong: ReCAPTCHA does not silently block people because they're afraid of "legal risk", but because studies show that silently blocking people after they sign up is much more effective at stopping bots.

Seriously, authors should do some research before making a blog post based on their first impressions and assumptions.
I also like it. plenty of the guys I collaborate with do too. what data are you going from?
> Otherwise you're breaking the agreement that the people hosting what you want to use have to make a living.

there is no agreement

in legal terms, there's no offer consideration or acceptance

if they want to lock it behind a paywall with an actual contract where they forbid me from doing that, then fair enough

if it's offered anonymously then I will render the page using my equipment however I want
Because the police are only as good as the people giving them their orders.
Obviously, if UBI is implemented, laws would still need to be enforced.
It's unrelated, but I wanted to nitpick this:

>safety comes first. Always.

The safest way to keep the airspace above the US would be to ban all general and commercial aviation.

Safety does not come first. Safety never comes first, because the safest course of action is to never do anything. It is always a balancing of risk.

It is very unfortunate that something like this is keeping you from your dream. I'm sorry.
I'm surprised that no one mentioned a pair of tiny functions to log each command before it is run. Nicer versions also print a timestamp. Of course, this setup assumes: set -e

echo_command()
{
echo
echo '$' "$@"
}

echo_and_run_command()
{
echo_cmd "$@"
"$@"
}

Then something like:

main()
{
# For simple commands that do not use | < > etc.
echo_and_run_command cp --verbose ...

# More complex commands
echo_command grep ... '|' find ...
grep ... | find ...
}

main "$@"
It's because it is not proven that element with the index 1 exists. Even TypeScript enforces bounds checking these days.

As for the first one - as i understand, this will spoil the original array, as it is assigned by reference; so by writing the string into `numbersOrStrings`, you also write it into `numbers`, thus violating the type.
Off topic : Twitter submissions tend to really struggle to make the HN front page despite many upvotes. I assume the HN algorithm is heavily biased against the bird site ; I'm not too sure it's such a great thing.
Yeah I don't really comment but knew it was relevant to this thread so figured I would for once
What does it say about the state of our industry that I can't tell if this comment is trolling or a genuine belief?
how is this helpful? it's not even correct
He was DA for two and half years, and was only kicked out two and half months ago, so give it some time.

Unfortunately, it almost always takes more time to build things than destroy them, so the damage may take a long tome to reverse.
Meta’s value plunges more than $65B amid falling sales, rising costs
I agree - Wordpress is amply good enough (or overkill...which is still "good enough) for probably >95% of all use cases
Currently it only works on desktop, but I'm working on it to add the mobile-support soon. I'll let you know here when it's ready.
In what forum today are politicians given an opportunity to speak/write intellectually?

Sadly too, there has been for some time an under current of anti-intellectualism in politics. It is my understanding that Barack Obama, as an example, is highly educated, no doubt could engage in lofty discussions… that would be political suicide.
EU Law is coming in in the next couple of years to make batteries in all electronic devices consumer replaceable. There must be reasonable availability of the batteries and only a fairly reasonable range of tools must be needed to do it.

For smaller electronic devices (e.g. my wireless headphones for my PC) that means that device manufacturer will have to make design changes to enable this sort of changing (I have actually changed the headphone battery, but I'm an electronic engineer and needed the soldering station at work). For larger devices like laptops, its going to affect battery supply chains.
How do you propose I know whether a website displays ads before I visit it? I'm not going to maintain a blocklist of every ad-using website on every device I use. I'm just going to use an ad blocker. Their crappy business model isn't my problem.
> The only way you can lose a democracy is by voting to stop voting, or voting to stop other people from voting.

Or for the people in power to ignore the actual vote and do what they want to do anyway. See the large group of election deniers currently in government or running for office.
Billboards dont pay for roads.

Ads pay for websites.
> Even into adulthood, I occasionally find myself making fun of people for being into specific things.

Yesterday I learned that there's an entire subreddit, dedicated to making fun of programmers. People take snippets of social media posts by programmers, and post them out of context (without links to the context), and everyone takes turns, making fun of the snippet.

That looks like a lot of fun... 


Hey, whatever creams your twinkie...
When citizens try to report crimes, the SFPD will just stand there ignoring them.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

When the district attorney is busy busting a car burglary gang, doing the SFPD's job for them, the SFPD refuses to help.

https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...

SFPD is a reactionary gang who are invested in making crime in SF be and appear to be as bad as possible.