skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not gonna pretend I'm an expert on EM radiation effects, but this statement:

> Our main takeaway from the current review is that approximately 1,000 hours of lifetime cellphone use, or about 17 minutes per day over a 10-year period, is associated with a statistically significant 60% increase in brain cancer.

Is pretty misleading. He's talking about odds ratio here, not relative risk, because these were case-control studies. And because they seem to have been conducted specifically looking for people with cancer, they do not conform to the rare disease assumption (in this case, the paper says cancer = 24,717, control = 41,358, nowhere close to the typical 10% cutoff at which odds ratio is considered to reasonably estimate relative risk.

Also they found no statistically significant relationship in any direction until they did subgroup analysis. That starts getting awfully close to p-hacking. "All studies overall don't find an effect, but if we limit to the studies that find an effect, we find an effect."

Finally, this seems like an awfully hard thing to study using case controls. I'm not going to try and find these studies being meta-analyzed, but it would seem they're largely finding people with brain cancer and people without brain cancer, and surveying them on how long they've used cell phones and how much. Unless they're actually going back and consulting 10 years worth of their own phone records before answering, which I am sure they are not doing, how accurate is the recall seriously going to be? And there is no attempt to quantify the characteristics of usage relevant to the mechanistic reasons to believe a risk might present, that is, how strong was the signal, how far away from their ear do they keep the phone, are they typically going hands free, do they keep the phone or on near them when not in use? These are impossible to study using this kind of study design.

I'm not some kind of shill for big telecom. I barely even use a mobile phone. I talk to my dad maybe once a week and that's my only regular call. My diet and workout tracking apps are the only apps I use aside from banking. I almost never bother to bring it with me when going shopping and don't sleep with it within arm's reach. So I'm following the recommendations here anyway, not because I'm afraid of cancer but because I don't see a need for having a phone nearby on any regular basis.

At the same time, through no fault of their own, these researchers are studying something that is virtually impossible to prove anything about, and even what they might have found if you squint really hard at a specific subset of a non-random, non-representative scene, still wasn't a lot. I don't see how this warrants a press campaign aside from Joel Moskowitz apparently being politically active in getting California municipal governments to warn consumers about anything and everything.
Another cliched^Wcommon joke relates to the werase ("word erase") character in TTYs. As you'd guess, it kills the previous word, and is typically bound to ctrl-W.
If you're asking people to perform arbitrary actions on camera (not just speaking), generating that to a degree that is indistinguishable from video in real-time is much more than 2 to 3 years away.
>So we already have evidence that something with long term negative impacts (and smoking has some pretty immediate easily noticeable negative impacts as well), can persist without this being obvious for a while.

I didn't say that we'd stop using cell phones if they posed significant dangers. I said that the abrupt increase in usage would make those dangers obvious if they existed.

To use your example, Tobacco was seen as bad from the git go because the impact was obvious. King James wrote a book against it in 1604:

>A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.
I think the hypothesis is Uranus is tilted 90 degrees because of a collision. Crazy to think of a similar thing happening to the earth.
T-Mobile advertises, last I checked you can watch the adverts for free.
Yet…that is exactly the argument of the original post. The banner argument is that VIM is wrong because it doesn’t use `~/.config/vim` and instead uses `~/.vim` … which it has used since before XDG was created. Vim also doesn’t use ~/.vim` on Windows (and the files aren't `.vimrc` and `.gvimrc`, but `_vimrc` and `_gvimrc`.

User expectations differ. The correct place to put application detritus is `~/Library` on macOS (`/Library` if it’s system-level with no user-level). I am surprised when a cross-platform library uses `~/Library` instead of XDG, but I am not unhappy with it.

Frankly, most programs should have a command like `show-config-paths` (`--show-config-paths`) so that you can see where the configuration, caches, etc. are on the platform you’re on, and possibly be told (a) whether they are overridden from default and (b) how to override them. It would be useful to have that output for both human and machine reading.
If its so wrong then why has no country or even a city ever achieved it?

Surely california has tons of taxpayer money in excess what is preventing them to do all that?
Would be wild if aliens had cameras on every planet and one day decides to show us what this looked like
The article matches my observations that I've seen across several teams and several companies over the past 40 years. I've seen these people everywhere.

The fact is these people exist - and they can derail a high-performing team. Some, such as the Lone Wolfe, are particularly toxic to a team. Most of the others the team is able to recognize and work around them. The Lone Wolfe? Management must deal with them. They're the most destructive individuals.
> On a separate topic: this is the second site in a row where the full-screen "we respect your privacy click here to agree" banner won't actually let me scroll down to any of the buttons.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay...
On the author, Moskowitz's website: https://www.saferemr.com/

He references a study: "Incidence and Mortality of Malignant Brain Tumors after 20 Years of Mobile Use" which also states:

>> While this study suggests a weak association between mobile phone users and MNB incidence and mortality, it is important to acknowledge that conclusive results cannot be drawn at this stage.
Electric fields in this context are different from the RF associated with cellular phone technology. The RF frequencies and power levels use by cell phones are not able to penetrate the human body more than one or two millimeters.
I find the indicator for how often an item has been purchased in the last month (on the European site) far more helpful. On a side note, galaxus.ch even shows you the return rate.
Haven’t we seen the same public discourse time and time again? A lot of people left FB half a decade ago, before that it was something else. I suspect we’ll keep seeing the same thing again. People want to be consumed by social network probably to their own detriment
I think if the people you're working with insist on narrowing it down to a single Root Cause, they're missing the entire point of the exercise. I work with large drones day to day and when we do an accident investigation we're always looking for root causes, but there's almost always multiple. I don't think we've ever had a post-accident RCA investigation that resulted in only one corrective action. Several times we have narrowed it down to a single software bug, but to get to the point where a software bug causes a crash, there's always a number of other factors that have to align (e.g. pilot was unfamiliar with the recovery procedure, multiple cascaded failures, etc)
Short of a police state, how would you enforce this?

This has napster -> subscription spotify energy. But the only people happy about that are Spotify and people who found it distasteful to download music illegally. There just wasn’t a consumer-friendly option for a while, so the black market was the only market.

So. The enforcement mechanism is what… a scary DMCA letter?

(There will definitely be a stupid DCAIA in the next congress)
Mistakes happen, things go wrong, for the vast majority of us a bug doesn't mean someone dies or lights go out or planes don't take off. For most of us here, the absolute worst case scenario is that a bug means a company nobody has ever heard of makes slightly less money for a few minutes or hours until it gets rolled back. Again, worst case. The average case is probably closer to a company nobody has ever heard of makes exactly the same amount of money but some arbitrary feature nobody asked for ships a day or two later because we spent time fixing this other thing instead.

It's really hard to drive a balance between "pushing untested shitcode into prod multiple times a week" and "that ticket to change our CTA button color is done but now needs to go through 4 days of automated and manual testing." I think as an industry most of us are probably too far on the latter side of the spectrum in relation to the stakes of what we're actually doing day to day.
Do Language Models Refer?
Even if solar would cost literally zero, then it does not solve problem that there is no place to fit such megasized pumped storage.

(I am speaking about central Europe or more specifically Poland)
Legally speaking, B&M retailers specifically buy things such as UL rated products just because they would incur legal liability for not doing due diligence before stocking and selling goods.

Amazon avoids all of that liability by claiming they are essentially, a flea market.

Hence why Amazon begrudgingly reacted to the FTC demanding the takedown of completely fake smoke alarm listings.
Free data recovery service for corrupted WD SanDisk SSDs up to 256KB
> What is "work" in this context?

I'm primarily interested in
1. having all hardware work out of the box,
2. working suspend to disk/RAM,
3. not having to edit `Xorg.conf`,
4. relatively painless upgrades.

Ubuntu gives me all of that and has served me well for 15 years. But their transition to snap forces me to look for something else.
Sure it does. T-mobile is less of a scumbag than Cox or Comcast. Switch en mass and Cox and Comcast will start to figure it out.
> continued its market dominance

Wasn't the smartphone/PDA market about evenly split between MS, Blackberry, and Palm by the time the iPhone came out (and Palm was losing its market share at a very fast pace over the last few years)? I would've bet that Windows Mobile would become the default option without Android/iOS

> I'm sure the feature set would have ended up similar because that's mostly just the intersection of what's possible to do with current technology and what people want to do.

Considering how much Windows Mobile improved between ~2000 and 2010, I wouldn't be that certain. Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, and higher-end Symbian/UIQ weren't really that appealing to most consumers, and I'm not sure any of those companies were really that interested in changing that without some external disruption. Of course, this would have come from somewhere eventually, but everything would probably have been a lot slower, and we would have been stuck with keyboards for a few additional years (if not more). On the bright side there we'd probably have more than 2 options now because alternative systems would've had a bit more time to mature.
Counterpoint: traffic congestion is almost entirely due to individual driver differences. An automated lane would be vastly more efficient and could potentially lead to fewer lanes being needed for vehicles altogether. This is assuming that most cars would be automated so I'm talking about a more distant future, but I see that as more realistic than convincing America to abandon it's car addiction.
Brownouts and blackouts lasting for weeks during windless winter weeks are hardly solution.
Wow if I didn’t use the app every day I’d stay totally clear of it after reading these quotes right from the beginning of the article. This really doesn’t represent my experience at all. Am I alone or has the experience actually improved? I don’t follow people who are toxic because I don’t enjoy their content. It’s mostly software engineers and the #buildinpublic community and it’s a beautiful place with them.

What has changed that has made the platform worse? It feels subjectively better in my experience.

> designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk

> interested in a less angry place for conversations.”

> interested in having a platform that is sanely run.”
Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf -- I was approached in an airport by a lovely old gentleman who essentially told me to read this book and insisted I take a photo of it so I wouldn't forget. Half a year later, I'm out of things to read and looking for a change (I never read historical fiction before) and gave it a shot. It has opened a world of a completely new genre for me.
I would be worried about carbonic acid production. What about a nitrogen charge instead? Could even improve creama.
But like... if you're joining a VR gym with a real bag you're giving up the main advantage of VR for exercise. A normal gym has a bag and a rowing machine? You're leaving your house anyway now. I still don't see it.
A good pairing is Atlas Shrugged and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I just happened to read at the same time but would recommend it.
Wow it’s crazy how he didn’t add a disclaimer to his original post.

EDIT: Did he really change his mind? Still seems like he thinks that book is pseudoscience, just that sleep is more important than he originally gave it credit for.
There's a reason you can still buy Z80s in DIP (and more modern) packages on Mouser, along with the better peripheral chips like the Zilog SCC. All in stock, all for reasonable (e.g. not Rochester "we know you have to have this and no one else does) prices.
Yes, but when? The problem is that his only route to staying out of prison is to become president again. So he’ll pull out all the stops. He’ll delay, defer and postpone this case as he has every one before, he’ll bluster and threaten and cajole maintain some semblance of his image.

So maybe he makes it to election season. (Look at his past performance in delaying tactics, he’ll make it)
If he doesn’t get the Republican nomination he will run independent. He doesn’t care that this splits the vote because he doesn’t give a shit about the party or anyone but himself. Which means the party either has to take a 100% chance or failure or a 20% chance that he can pull a rabbit out of the hat again. I can’t say for sure but I know what I’d do. It’s the prisoners dilemma solution where you straight up tell your opponent that you’ll defect and they might get something from you if they play nice.

So he tries again. And this time the kid gloves are off. Everything is on the table. Literally everything.

And that should be unsettling to anyone with a bit of imagination.

This isn’t over. This is just the beginning.
Yupp! It’s very tempting to try to make this a hobby and then try to perfect it. But coffee is one thing that allows me to force myself out of the house and experience the community around
me. It’s a $4 excuse but it’s a good reason to not be lazy about leaving the house.
Does it, though?

Aren't dot files just pretending to be hidden due to a bug in early Unix?

Unix v1 had a flat filesystem. Unix v2 added subdirectories. As an implementation detail, each directory contained two magic files, `.` for "this directory" and `..` for "the parent directory".

The command to list files was sloppily coded to skip them. If a name started with a dot, it was skipped.

Hey presto! Unix 2 had a way to hide files! It was a bug, but it was useful, so it stayed.

The history:
https://tookmund.com/2022/03/rob-pike-shortcuts

So, Gobo doesn't use `/etc` and `/var` and all that 1970s nonsense, but it keeps them around, empty except for shortcuts, for sloppy code that assumes they are there.

But they are hidden, just like dot files are hidden on every Unix-like OS. Because it looks better, no other reason.
> more efficient.

Beg your pardon? How is 2.5 tons of steel to carry a handful of people more efficient than a tram?
Great, can't wait for an AI powered captcha solving, ad blocker, EU cookies popup closer application.

Maybe we'll get back the good old web
The Vax-Gene Files: Have the Regulators Approved a Trojan Horse?
Irrespective of the point you're trying to express, it's extremely odd to criticize jews based on a quote from the new testament...
Java and .NET, because you can use SIMD primitives directly.
Fact. Its core is embedded in so many things.
>It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.

Two things:

The promise of self-driving cars is that they can operate themselves in an environment not specifically designed for them. If that promise is broken, and it's the position of the industry that things like traffic signals, construction, emergency services, road markings etc need to be modified for functionality with self-driving cars then I think public will to accommodate them dries up quickly.

That being said, I can imagine having a lot of fun with a physical token that can remotely stop an autonomous car.
I'm from across the pond so not "old" in any national sense, but I feel the same way. We have a lot of good tech, and then we have a lot of tech that's not "bad" but just doesn't serve any purpose other than feeding the ego of users. That's the tech from which we should be protected.
And if they lose connection on a foggy morning on a busy street and cause a pile up?

I agree that "stopping" should happen. But, they need to stop safely (pulled onto the shoulder/parking lane/low volume side road), not just abruptly stop in the middle of the street, blocking the rest of the traffic.[1]

1 - https://www.wsmv.com/2023/08/15/driverless-cars-stall-causin...
The title is wrong. It's 256KB, not GB. "[...] is offering to rescue files up to 256KB from corrupted SanDisk Extreme SSDs for free"
Since learning Go so many years ago it influenced how I build things in every language much in the way this article is espousing.

I MUCH prefer functions that take some kind of type/interface/protocol over methods on objects.

I committed many sins in my past in Python with mixins that added functionality before I understood how to use Zope Interface and with Go it all finally clicked for me.

I don't think any pattern is Right all the time but inversion of control and interfaces rarely bite me to the same degree other patterns have.
Ha! Intellectually I completely agree. This particular term has recently worked its way back into my social circle's lexicon because we all have young kids and are trying to swear less. I'm not sure I have ever used it in writing before, and I guess I never will again!
Introduction to Scala 3 (video course)
That seems to square with the content I'm frequently tested in. Crosswalks and traffic signs for self driving cars and stairs for walking robots.

I've also noticed that captchas are getting more difficult. Is that because the AI needs to sharpen recognition skills or because that's needed for differentiating human from 'bot?
As developer on one of open source projects I simply decided to spend time on it.

In case of paying for software system I would require it as part of a contract.

If I would be decision maker on software project I would also demand it.
That's highly inefficient though, and therefore negates all the cost savings in the process before. How much efficiency can you get out of burning stuff, 40% of the stored energy?
Even if hydrogen could be created with 100% efficiency it would still be very poor compared to just using electricity from batteries. The issue is the engines themselves are very inefficient, something like 20-30% and as such the same electricity will go a lot further directly compared to burning hydrogen. There are so many extra inefficiencies with transport and storage compared to existing and improved electrical infrastructure, its just not competitive.

It might have some benefits in certain vehicle types where energy density and being far from a grid might make it beneficial but it will be a lot more expensive than electrical vehicles. Portable charging infrastructure with and wind and solar will often be a better option.

I can't see hydrogen being anything but niche now unless substantial efficiency is found in the engine optimisation, generation and storage.
MX Linux is Debian-based but offers sysvinit by default (systemd is optional).
> Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics

It doesn't have nearly as much impact as other factors, such as abundance of the material, how easy/practical it is to work with it (which influences both demand and supply), whether mass infrastructure for it already exists (although this is more relevant in the short-term rather than long-term), etc.

These factors impact the economics of an energy source much more than efficiency, and economics is by far the most important factor in deciding whether an energy source will be used or not (and how much of it), not efficiency.

e.g. if hydrogen is only 10% efficient but there's 10 times more of it on Earth compared to a similar energy source that is 90% efficient, then hydrogen wins (all other factors being equal).

As another example, if hydrogen tanks in cars explode 100 times as often as gas tanks, then it would probably be a complete non-starter for powering vehicles, regardless of efficiency.
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

by James Bridle. James pulls an brilliant move of using various examples in technology as a tool to help us rethink our place in nature & reconnect with the (beyond human) world.

He weaves a fascinating tale with myriads of threads such as Cybernetics, Neural Nets, Internet, Random Numbers, Analog computers, Slime molds, Sortition vs Voting, Mycelium, Mysticism in animals, Turing machines, Personhood of non-humans etc.

A nice summary to whet your appetite, https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/07/more-than-human/#umwelt
If cell phones caused brain tumors in 1/1000 users we'd have millions of more brain tumors around the world than we did before. That's why it would be obvious.
It's easier to mandate hardware manufacturers to run only approved and properly signed code. Oh wait, we're almost there yet.
What is WEI?
YES

The problem here is dispersed responsibility so no one is responsible

The result is that no one takes responsibility for not actually creating blatantly dangerous events, such as blowing through cones, signs and other obvious indicators of a construction / no-driving zone and endangering construction workers & passengers (cones also initially mark a washout/bridge-out problem). To the software developers and managers, it is just some lower-priority edge case they'll handle later. To the corporate promoters, it's just a cost to be externalized on the public. To the regulators, obviously, they don't want to be seen as "Luddites", so they just approved MORE, not less, of these obviously-not-self-driving cars.

If a person actually had both personal responsibility (e.g., they will get fined or potentially imprisoned for approx. negligent homicide if death results) and authority (e.g., they can stop deployment until it is truly fixed after a car mistakes a truck for the sky and decapitaties the driver or blows through a construction zone) to prevent these situations, they would not happen as much. Who should have such responsibility and authority? Start with the CEO and board.

EDIT: stray words, tenses, added examples
Sure, they can regulate the behaviors of the people using the software, but what means do they have for regulating the software itself?