skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> First, pregnant women are generally excluded from vaccine trials - this isn't something specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

This is perhaps not an argument in favor of the proven safety of vaccines for pregnant women.

> Second, what is the scientific basis for thinking that vaccination before pregnancy will affect women at the end of their pregnancy (that is, 9+ months later)? When you propose a possible harm, there should be a scientifically plausible basis for it. Is there one in this case?

We fundamentally do not understand the human body. We do not know why many common medications work, and many of the reasons we think others work are likely wrong. And we know that many chemicals carry future risks of birth defects.

> CoVID-19 was one of the leading causes of death across a wide range of ages. The idea that only the elderly suffered from it is not true.

This is because people in their 20s and 30s are so unlikely to die outside of accidents and malice, not because covid was a large absolute risk. The risk of death for someone over 65 was iirc 100x that of someone under 55.

When you limit the group to "otherwise healthy people under 40" the risk ratio skews even further. This is normal. But it means that those people receive a much lower benefit from vaccination.

> There is no known mechanism that could lead to these vaccines causing long-term side-effects

Spike protein accumulating in cardiac tissue leading to myocarditis. Antigen fixation, leading to reduced protection against future variants. The immune system identifying the mRNA delivery vector as a threat, preventing the use of future mRNA treatments.

"But those aren't proved" is really not convincing to me. For an EUA for at-risk populations, ok. For mandates? Heeeelll no, go cross those Ts first.

> and there are very good biological reasons for believing that they do not cause any long-term side-effects.

The whole point of a vaccine is to cause long term effects. That intended effect is immunity to disease.

"Nothing else could possibly persist" smacks of hubris to me.

> Vaccine side-effects occur within months of vaccination, for reasons that are understood. They do not arise years afterwards (also for reasons that are understood). Saying that there may be side-effects years from now is simply FUD.

This is medicine we're talking about, a bit of uncertainty and doubt is very much justified - especially when the process has been politicized.
"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

So the law can override it as they please? I prefer the US version that says "Congress shall make no law ..."
I don't live in America, so I don't know.
I agree its not the biggest thing in high school, but in pre-teenage gaming is big, at least where I live.
I love your blog, but I must say I can't read it for longer than 1 or 2 minutes. That probably says more about me than your blog for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a common experience.
Build a Python Program to Fetch Data About Any Country
Great!

The last time I evaluated it in Fedora (maybe 3 years now?) it was crashing under moderate use, and haven't had time to check recently. Perhaps when some time clears up I should give it another go.
In Finland you can hunt wherever you want, even on someone else's property. It's called "everyman's rights".
In my neck of the woods, "line" managers have a vested interest in growing their team sizes and taking more and more budget to increase their personal valuation.
> subject to copyright law.

This exact thing happened with Nintendo decades ago, and it turned out to be a nothing burger.
> Does Facebook have any reputation left?

Most people still think of WhatsApp and Facebook as separate. For a while, WhatsApp displayed a Facebook logo for a second whenever it started (and given how Android works, opening WhatsApp does not necessarily mean starting it, most of the time it just switches to an already started process), but even that does not happen anymore, since it was replaced by a "Meta" logo (and most people do not associate "Meta" with Facebook).
Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, Termination shock describes a near-future world where climate change's effects are becoming more visible and obvious. Without spoiling too much, it explores the politics of aerosol (sulpher) injection into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet.
> I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you. For this to be true, it is essential to show Twitter users advertising that is as relevant as possible to their needs. [...]

> Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise. [...]

So if I cut out the typical, empty "to make the world a better place" talk, the only useful information I can derive from this is that we can expect even more tracking, ads, and algorithmic crap littering our timelines?

Let us also not ignore that he is forced to buy it, due to his shenanigans.
I've been reserving judgment on Meta's decision to go all in on virtual reality because maybe Zuck knows something we all don't. But his vision reminds me of Second Life circa 1999. I didn't care for it back then and I don't care for it now.
Maybe there's something I am missing.
"Artificial Intelligence", when in reality it is un unintrospectable black box with always changing behaviour, and often not smarter than hand written heuristics.

We'll get another AI winter soon enough.
It’s never too late to start!
This article is pretty much just hand-waving away any cost arguments against nuclear power. The author is saying that if we had modern designs of nuclear reactors they would be much cheaper, they're essentially comparing hypothetical reactor designs against real, existing wind and solar power. That is hardly a fair comparison.

The section on waste also feels disingenuous, they are directly equating waste from nuclear and solar/wind power by amount alone. The kinds of waste generated are not comparable at all, just comparing the amounts here as an argument against solar/wind makes me doubt the entire section.
However, governments across the globe are run by people who lack the proper morals or intelligence to see what needs to be done.

So we should just put you in charge and then you'll sort it out?

Have you considered the possibility that it's not about morals or intelligence but that it's actually an intractable problem?
backblaze did used cables in at least one version of their storage pod, and they surely experimented with it before that..

and since netflix box known to have being inspired by earlier backblaze boxes it is not surprising they look similar..
Plus we don't know where intelligence leads. Maybe it's actually a catastrophe for the planet? Too early to say, but it's also possible such catastrophes happen quickly on a geological timescale.
I don’t view it as my role as a consumer to prejudge the business model of the websites I visit. If a website does not want my view, they can block me or use a paywall. That’s fine.

But a website could cover the marginal cost of serving me content with simple image adverts, sponsored content, donation mechanism, subscription or otherwise. They may decide that having X% of viewers block ads is a ‘cost of business’ and is worth it to increase viewership.

Modelling the situation as ‘honest’ to accept ads and ‘dishonest’ to block them may undermine the chosen business model of the site, and not visiting again models the monetisation strategy as static, which it is not.
As Investors Scramble to Buy I Bonds, TreasuryDirect Site Has Outages
There’s probably also a distance / lifespan filter:

(4) That interplanetary colonization is possible (using relatively low-tech means) given the lifespan of the species and the distance to nearby habitable planets.

For example, life could develop in a solar system with only 1 habitable planet and the next habitable solar system could be dozens or hundreds of light years away.

Now you need to invent a fully self-sustaining long haul space craft, plus have the technology to pause death (or have the will to confine hundreds or thousands of generations to life on a space craft, plus have the ability to effectively pass down enough survival skill information from generation to generation that won’t use it, but will simply practice it in order to relay it).
Well if all the end up with is the best hardware that's definitely going to be worth something. But what they really want is the app that people spend all their time on.
Facebook and Google got hit very hard in the recent quarter, but none of the articles point out one of the obvious reasons contributing to their drops: Apple made it significantly harder to track macOS and iOS users, which people tend to be high value targets for advertisements.
But not really :)
There is a native version of Pavlov available on the Quest, no PC necessary. One of my favorite games!
Apple will be the one to win VR. They’ll wait until the very last possible moment. All Meta is doing is making their R&D cheaper.

Google should bring back Cardboard. Even with crappy quality, people will try it out for $10.
Yeah, I can only do so much cold because of my hands.
DuckDuckGo has a timer.[1] It also uses Bing AFAIK. So in a roundabout way, Bing has a timer.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=3+minute+timer
Isn't there any kind of organization like the Pinkertons to hire? Or the mob?
Right. If I request they snail mail me a copy of some document, they are free to reject the request. However, if they send me the document, I am free to tear off pieces or color on it with crayons.
> Not a surprise, since co2 is an oxide, and therefore very stable in the athmosphere. It would take a huge amount of energy to remove it,

There is an exothermic reaction that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, the formation of carbonates from weathering of silicate rocks. As this is naturally very slow, there is currently ongoing research into multiple different ways to speed it up.
It is certainly possible that GNOME is only popular because of legacy inertia, and that it will eventually be surpassed by other desktop environments as, by definition, inertia doesn't last forever.

But it's worth acknowledging that it's also possible that a large number of people simply disagree with you and actively choose it on its own merits.
The idea of giving your boss Facebook level stalking into your working day isn't as appealing as Zuck hoped.
This! it is your machine at the end of the day. we should have an option not to use a company or their services which they are forcing on us.

I had a neighbor who was sent an invoice, he had cancelled his internet connection 3 months ago and was later told they need a cancellation request in writing. so he sent an equivalent invoice to them asking for rent for their modem which was consuming place in his house. he did not have to pay in the end.
The HN title is a summary of the subtitle (the first text after the picture and the byline)...

It's a better title than the article, as far as attention grabbing is concerned.
But this guy has 100k twitter followers so he must be right. /s
What comes to mind are the publications of the HOPL (History of Programming Languages) conference.

https://dl.acm.org/topic/conference-collections/hopl?sortBy=...

Sorted by most downloaded, the first page of results includes the history of Erlang, Haskell, C, C++, Smalltalk, Fortran, AppleScript, Lisp, Pascal, Prolog..

Many of the papers are written by the people who designed, developed, and maintained the programming language, its ecosystem and community.

What I find fascinating are their retrospective thoughts on what didn't work well, regrets of what turned out to be bad design decisions. The authors also often reflect on how far programming in general has evolved, what aspects and features have become expected, like package manager, etc.
> This analysis finds that new efforts to cut carbon would see global emissions fall by less than 1% by 2030, when according to scientists, reductions of 45% are needed to keep 1.5C in play.

I'm reminded of that scene in Dumb & Dumber when Mary has just told Lloyd his chances of ending up with her are one in a million:

"So you're telling me there's a chance. YEAH!"
No, I really do not.

And if we really want to speak about morals there is an unacknowledged moral issue here in that most websites using ads are hooked up to someone else's ad network and do not vet them for accuracy or safety. The website owner has seemingly no responsibility for the portal they opened to shove someone else's content into my face.

Until such time I can demand payment for damages when that negligently opened portal serves the latest zero day or scams my family or employees and tracks me all over the web while violating my privacy, I am forced to conclude the average webmaster wants the benefit without the responsibility. And with that, the blocker stays on, with a clear conscience and an eye to safety. Your business model that demands I sacrifice safety and privacy so you can make a few pennies is not my fucking problem.

First party ads are an entire different issue and do not have any of these concerns. They are also very rare.
Fighting climate change is, and probably always has been, a losing battle. The upside is that one of the remedies to the problems caused by climate upheaval is greater energy independence - which naturally steers us towards renewables. So, we might eventually end up with a net zero carbon economy anyway - but it'll be because of a desire for local stability, rather than to help save poor people in the developing world from environmental collapse.
In my family we still do gifts for immediate family and kids in the family. But for everyone else in the extended family we started a donate exchange, or sort of a secret Santa of donates. Everyone gets assigned someone else and you go make a donation to something important to you in their name. Then on Christmas we just open up cards that say who they donated to and why.
The treasury department isn't going to go after an adblock list. What federal agency do you think would?
So you are saying that I should respect some form of implied agreement with a industry that is rampantly engaging in the theft of my data? Isn't there some form of implied agreement that I get to name the price of my product?

Also, you are acting like all web browsing is by choice and ignoring the network effect that essentially forces people to use certain sites to participate in the society that they belong to.
If d["a"]["b"] is 42, then how could d["a"]["b"]["c"] also be 42? What you want doesn't make sense semantically. Normally, we'd expect these two statements to be equivalent

d["a"]["b"]["c"] == (d["a"]["b"])["c"]
Try as you may but you're not going to get me to crack, my friend. I've been on Linux since the mid nineties. Things were much better for us before i-things rose to prominence, UI wise. I still love you as a fellow nerd and human, however, I do have some wishes that your laptop be smote, if only just to give you enough reprieve to notice the err of your ways.
Matrix federation is hard because they want to support large IRV style rooms with consistent history and strong controls to prevent room takeovers.

Signal is more focused on 1:1 or small group chats. Federation there can be much simpler, more like email/xmpp than IRC.

It does still add friction and slows down youe development as upgrading is difficult.
Tom Scott interviewed him last year in a really wonderful video about microwaves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

> I found an article that said "The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments." And I thought, no it wasn't. ...was it?

At over 100 years old, the man was remarkably coherent and healthy. Quite sad to hear he's passed now.
Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.
I started my Oculus Quest a couple days ago after a small hiatus, and it forced me to create a Meta account and set up a Horizon profile. Looks like Zuck is pushing really hard for his Metaverse thing. Ah, yes please, I would love to be in a VRChat universe flavored with all that Facebook goodness, I can't think of a better way to use my headset.
I don’t think it has to be a bad thing. It be an interesting statistical problem. What is worse, a person who drives sleepy for 5 hours each day or a person who gives up control to a computer for 5 hours each day. Point being we are attempting to compare FSD to complete perfect driving, when the comparison should be with current drivers. If it is an improvement or reduction in crashes why not use it? Maybe it’s because we aren’t sure who to blame in case something goes wrong? I know back seat drivers that get uncomfortable as a passenger a lot even with a driver with zero accidents and would rather drive themselves, yet have crashed several times themselves at their fault. They misjudge their own abilities and the situation, a need for certain aggressive driving. I think many are misjudging the average drivers ability without self driving and we could be causing a lot of loss of life by not taking a statistically better option out of human hubris.
I find blocking ads online to be as immoral as changing the channel for a few minutes or getting snacks during the ad break on tv.

The ads are part of the their monetization, By this logic I'm not fulfilling my social contract by not diligently watching the ads?

The reality of advertising on the web is something you need to account for when building your site and content around an ad based payment model.
BBC did the mistake in summarizing the abstract of the UN report, HN title repeated it. At least BBC linked to it ( https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022)
Why would anyone rely on an undocumented easter egg in a product that has nothing to do with timers?
No, but hopefully that issue is resolved soon: https://feaneron.com/2022/10/21/the-death-of-the-meme/
Digital Marbling
It's just self-interest, really. The PR submarine in action.
I wrote this before and I will write it here again.

There is a burger place.

The burger place offers free burgers.

They are able to do this because Big Lettuce pays the burger place to put lettuce in their burger.

When I go and get a burger from the free burger place, what I do is I remove the lettuce from my burger. I just don’t like it.

I made no agreement with the burger place to eat lettuce.

They assume I will. They try to convince me to. They might even try to make the lettuce hard to remove from the burger.

But what has not happened, unlike you are implying, is an agreement that I will consume the lettuce.

I’m not going to stop going to the free burger place. I really like free burgers. And I won’t stop removing lettuce from my burger either. I deeply dislike lettuce.

So, instead of telling me to stop going to the free burger shop because I like removing lettuce, how about you tell the shop to stop giving away free lettuce?

If people really like their burgers, they will pay for them.

If their burgers aren’t really that good and people consume them just because they’re free, maybe the burger place should go out of business.
> focus on pivoting to renewables and developing reliable fusion energy...

You know that this would be accomplished through capitalism right?

The more we rail against capitalism and free markets (which every successful country from Denmark to Australia uses) the less likely we'll ever be to solve any problems.

The market is an unwieldy force that can be generally shaped in a direction by the people (purchasing decisions, sacrificing convenience) and the government (regulation, law, market fairness) to massively solve problems through innovation, technology, and other means. Ignoring the market, or restricting its capabilities leaves us with little to no tools to combat problems.

The much greater problem than "capitalist tendencies" is solving for people who absolutely refuse to modify their lifestyles (I must have my SUV and drive it comfortably and quickly to Costco on the 5 lane highway) to which market forces simply respond to, and who deny that humans are having a substantial effect on the global climate and would rather elect charlatans than people of substance.

On the other hand, we're trapped in a prisoner's dilemma with the very countries you mention.

It's a very bad situation we face, but I find that blaming capitalism or markets for failures of government to be counter-productive and in some ways actively hostile to working on addressing climate change.
You can read the DMV's complaint at [1] which is kind of the prior art here; I haven't found a filing for criminal charges yet. It cites 4 things from the Tesla website:

1) Usage of the term "Autopilot"

2) Usage of the term "Full Self-Driving Capability"

3) The phrase: "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long-distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver's seat."

4) The statement: "From Home - All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don't say anything, your car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigating urban steets, complex intersections and freeways. To your Destination - When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."

3 is probably the most damning, because it specifically promises features that do not work, and could not legally be used in that way even if they did without further licensing.

1: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22128016-california-...
Marijuana company sued for not making customers high enough
> Isolating a specific video that seems detrimental, and assuming that it has a huge impact over people's behavior, is just unreasonable from an empirical point of view. That's not how media effects work," Yotam Ophir, an assistant professor in the University at Buffalo communication department, told WIBV.

>”Most people don't know about these challenges, most people don't care about these challenges, and even if they watch these videos and find them amusing, it doesn't mean they're going to walk out and steal a car."
To actually do comparative politics, you need to regress over regimes not just call out counter examples. This is a quantitative problem, not a logic problem.
I own my company. We seek out people who need our services by talking to them, networking with them in places they choose to network, carefully reviewing then winning RFPs, and so on.

Word of mouth is actually the results of effective branding. Advertising is typically spam and a waste of resources. Branding <> Advertising, though they can have overlap.

How does your company find people to sell its products to?
> I only use it to select the n'th word in a csv-like line.

If it's not a CSV with quotes to allow for commas inside values (which I think AWK will also fail in), you can use `cut`.

cut -d, -f n

To delimit on a comma and select the n'th field. Reads a bit easier IMO for that common AWK use case (which I used to use AWK for all the time).
That sounds awesome! Wish I got the chance to do more hands-on interviews in the mobile dev space, most of my interviews just end up being run of the mill leetcoding.