skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't a joke.

At one point, the narrative (2021) landed on this native insect whose frequency was so loud that you could "hear it from inside a car while driving [40+] mph down the highway" (paraphrased).

Was this debunked or just another conspiracy™?

edit:

> The heavily redacted report notes that “many” of those reporting symptoms described hearing “unusual sounds” but states that in only one instance someone experienced medical symptoms immediately after hearing the sounds. The report goes on to say that JASON could identify “no plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) [that] can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects.”

Instead, the scientists wrote that the most likely source of the sound heard in the recordings is the Indies short-tailed cricket, whose call, it says, “matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba.” Still, the report hedges, saying that “other hypotheses are plausible,” including that the sounds were created by a mechanical device or “structure-borne vibrations.” [0]

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-s...
Ok, but a lot of the footage is identical. Including you (red overalls?), the hardware (Sony cameras, the wood frame, panasonic monitor) the results (eg yt:14, vi:22), the warehouse location for much of the video.
You have to do more than just decode the the video stream to display it as smoothly playing video without dropping frames or audio samples or loosing sync. It requires always scheduling the context switches correctly between different virtual machines when using Qubes OS, performing multiple copies across protection domains.

Brute force helps a lot, but do you want a ≥5GHz multi-core CPU burning 150W just to watch a single video stream with maximum paranoia settings?
4 years isn't that old for a phone though, not anymore at least. I put one smartphone away after 3 years because a chip on the motherboard broke, but feel like that's the exception (never heard of this failure mode from anyone else) and most phones should last 4+ years if you don't get unlucky with the battery (I can't identify why some batteries are good as new after 6 years whereas others can barely hold a charge after 2 — but anyway, those are replaceable)
I believe we’ve passed this point many years ago. These are already extremely cheap and accessible to anyone, you can buy 20-30 small drones for less than the price of one firearm.

In reality there are hundreds of other ways someone could devise attacks like these, technology doesn’t really matter that much.
Intelligence agencies minimizing effects of deployed secret technology, that would be a first
Possibly because that isn’t computer science.
I think that “cargo cult” in how it’s commonly used encapsulates a certain kind of behaviour pretty well. If it was to be moved away from, then I’d at least like a similarly concise alternative.

Though I will admit, especially as a non-native English speaker, that there have been cases where changes in the terminology used have actually made more sense than the prior alternatives.

For example allowlist/deny list feels more concise and simpler to understand than whitelist/blacklist.

Also, naming the main version control branch “main” is also really obvious and clear, at least a bit more so than “master”.

Though once you start talking about further historical context, you’re going to lose some people along the way, who have not once considered it with much attention. A bit like some who used .io domains had never really heard much about Chagos.
TFA elides context that poor economic metrics started long before Brexit.

I don't have a horse in the race, mind. Just interesting to see 'damning statistics' that don't really hold up to scrutiny imo.
Maybe by design
Code review should really only exist to guide contributors to the owner of the code they are changing. A new contributor shouldn't need to know the team structure and history of the organization to get changes in. That should be solved by the tooling. Do whatever you want, and the tools will force you to bump into the right people before you can merge.

It's very strange that most companies (maybe GitHub is to blame for this) have something like a free-for-all where anyone can approve anything, as long as they themselves aren't the author. As other comments have mentioned, this reliably creates reviewer cliques as engineers seek out the path of least resistance to get changes in. Those who haven't figured out the game often lose hours of their time to nitpickers and pedants without anything better to do.

This also results in a slow decay since most of the code ends up being written by people who are good at getting code merged, and not people who are good at building the software.
> Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.

Yes, that's true. Yes, it is always more or less inevitable it these circumstances will happen. Most won't dispute that.

What climate change changes is the frequency. A suburb being wiped out once in 100 years is something we can collectively afford. But now, you have wild fires in the middle of winter. It's not once in 100 years any more.

Probably the best illustration of that is Great Barrier Reef, something in my back yard. People who aren't keen on blaming climate change repeatedly point out the reef has always suffered the setbacks we see now - like bleaching, crown of thorns that killed parts of it off. That's true. But is also true that now, unlike before, the reef is rapidly shrinking, especially in the northern regions where it's hotter, whereas before it wasn't.

The reason is the frequency of these die offs. Before, when a section of the reef was destroyed by something or other, in 10 years it would be recover, growing back. Now these things are happening at 5 year intervals and the interval is growing shorter. The reef is retreating as a consequence. It is no longer viable in the regions it once was.

The same is true for California. Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase. Whereas before you could afford to insure against 100 year event, you can't afford to insure against a 10 year event. Ergo, climate change is decreasing the amount of California that is habitable.
> how the fiscal impact was insignificant when it drastically increased the national debt

Because other things were far more drastic. The 8 pp the Afghanistan & Iraq wars raised American debt:GDP is simply swamped by the other factors.

The wars added to our debt with nothing to show for it. But it’s incorrect to say it’s even remotely the cause of our indebtedness—we were more than capable of absorbing an 8 pp hit to our debt profile.

> which was significantly purchased by foreign interests

For a superpower, this is the safest form of debt. It can be defaulted on without trashing the banking system.
It feels even more standard than it used to, with python -m pip and python -m venv making it so it can be used with a virtalenv even if only python or python3 is in your path.
Oh if we're going through that sort of list....

- Virtual Boy, Atari Lynx,

Hardware:

- AMD Interwave. practically ruined Gravis and left us with years of Creative gobbling up any competitor i.e. Ensoniq, Aureal... FFS we had to wait for VIA to make something competitive to Creative's offerings, outside of 3-ish beautiful Cirrus Logic 4624/4630 cards, before the Envy24 became a thing.

- Speaking of Cirrus Logic, The Laguna CL-GD546X series of chips; those things used RDRAM in the mid-90s and it contributed to Cirrus exiting the video market.

- Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.

- (Kinda) the Matrox M3d (and the VideoLogic counterpart). It wasn't a terrible product in and of itself but a Riva 128 was faster (if uglier) for most cases and gave you 2D as well, and they came out around the same time. [0]

- Most 'cartridge disk' drives aside from the Zip[1]. You can possibly throw SuperDisk/HiFD into this category too.

- Intel i820 Chipset (It's 1999!). I'm not referring to the 'lemon' aspect (i.e. when an MTH was used for SDRAM, the RDRAM was reliable... AFAIK with two slots instead of 3) but in general there was almost zero uptake due to the cost of RDRAM and Intel's recalcitrance led to both AMD gaining ground as well as VIA/SiS getting opportunities to be more competitive in the chipset space (SiS 630 was cheaper than 810E and just as good for normal users, Via's Apollo Pro 133A both supported 133Mhz FSB and gave an AGP slot, as well as IDE corruption with an SBLive... I think i815 was 4-6 months after VIA stuff was selling, and remember back then 6 months was an eternity...)

Also I should note that the Saturn was mostly a flop in the US (Can't speak for EU.) but in Japan it held up well thanks to native publishers, the Saturn had a lot of great 2D games we never saw here, (thanks to the same guy that ironically caused the relative dearth of good RPGs for the PS1 before he moved from Sony to Sega...) also the ability to play CD+G (gotta have that karaoke) and I think? it could do VCDs which were bigger over there... all that stuff helped a lot and the Saturn outsold there till around 1997 IIRC.

[0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...

[1] - Zip had reliability problems, but certainly was not a flop.
In China we have ways to obfuscate those unusual traffic into usual ones like WeChat video calling
You realize this is how basically every single scientific discovery ever has worked right?
Neurowarfare is the next frontier (*we’ve reached a ceiling in the realm of kinetic weaponry imo).

But the only reliable defense for that is gaining enlightenment, which is both very difficult to scale and somewhat ironic given the context.
Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.

A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps (2021)
Why come types?
Nope! Most people think this is a conspiracy theory.

Maybe it is maybe it isn't, but it's interesting for both sides to keep in mind the actual state of play as this continues to develop.

For you, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a weapon", it's interesting to know that no, your perspective is being skewed somehow, probably by the media you consume.

For me, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a paranoid conspiracy theory", it's interesting to follow the actual investigation into it, because maybe we're wrong.
They both did mass copyright infringement...
Inside my team, we generally review quite promptly (same day, or the next morning). Across teams — it's more variable and depends a lot on context (or lack of context). If I'm chasing down reviews, I'll usually tag people to start out, and then message them directly to ask for reviews 24 hours later, if they don't get back to me sooner. It's rare that someone doesn't review same-day if I ask them directly.

I often find the reviews to be helpful. People come up with edge cases I haven't thought of, or notice things to clean up. I try to proofread everything before asking for reviews, but after I've started at my own diff for a while, it's hard to read it with fresh eyes.

Sometimes we ask for reviews on more experimental PRs too, just to get early design feedback before wasting too much time on polishing the changes.
Runs Windows pretty well! I find that very convenient.

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/windows/
looks awesome! can't wait to see other languages like brazilian portuguese in the app
I miss pen island.
It's a weirder sort of flop though.

But it was a flop.
I don't think I've made any arguments at all, and definitely haven't said anything disingenuous. I'm not trying to sell you dogmas, and I'm not telling you how to live your life. I have only attempted to share a glimpse of the world you clearly have little understanding of - the assumption that I (not unreasonably) made based on your own words.

Perhaps my usage of pronouns in the last paragraph was confusing; I apologize for that. Since we're talking on a public forum, the "you" wasn't aimed specifically at your persona; I meant it in a generic sense, talking about a "proverbial" programmer.

> This site is full of toxic people who are offended that someone doesn't choose the same editor

I don't know where you're getting this kind of vibe from; my comments are free of toxicity. I think this particular website and the world in general is full of all sorts of people. And if you genuinely try to find helpful and beneficial thoughts and inspiration, you may find some - even within the words of criticism and discouragement. Conversely, someone who sees toxicity whenever they don't get conformance with their views may reap only bitterness and dissatisfaction.

Perhaps you should reflect on the source of your anger; just don't waste energy searching for it in my statements - after all, I merely showed you possibilities. I never forced you toward them - the choice to step through or turn away remains entirely in your hands.
I broke my dad’s computer editing the registry to configure Microsoft Bob to display “the computer is a toy, not a tool” at the top. He had to call an older kid from church to come over and fix it. I was hoping that kid would be impressed and rightfully got nothing. Good memories.
Another part of this is that these agencies by temperament hedge their answers and were remarkably unequivocal, noting "new evidence could change their mind" -and they have become less unequivocal. This strongly suggests new evidence, but since this is in the secrecy-strategic space, we're not going to know.

It could be somebody senior said "change tone of voice" or it could be something new was found. We can't know.
in some cases, but in others they may believe in a kind of sympathetic magic [1][2]. the John Frum's don't march around with stick guns and uniforms "simply to facilitate the delivery of cargo"

in either cases it's still highly apropos to the engineering analogy.

did you (hypothetically) add an unnecessary statement because you observed "good" programs doing it and believed if you did the same your program would be better? or because you thought you were facilitating something that was needed to be done to support something that isn't needed or won't happen? to me these are two sides of the same coin.

i've seen these kind of things (these are quick examples of the top of my head, not the worst things by far):

const char *str = "hello\0"; // make sure it's null terminated
if (ptr != NULL) free(ptr); // don't free if not allocated

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
[2] https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-322270499/view?partId=nla.obj-322...
And cooler magic to colour code your window borders. Effectively gives you a VM running Firefox and you only see the Firefox window.

This will let you run your email in one window, and click on a link to open it in another VM.
It would also be a crime for an artist to download all of libgen and imitate/learn from it. Zuck is just a billionaire and hence above the law.
Nailed it! The right stance in most cases is "I don't know, I'll wait until more information is available". Doesn't seem too popular in the social media era, but this should be the default.
> Adults use language in a less literal way than introverted engineers may be comfortable with.

How condescending. "Adults" in other regions often do not have the facade of overenthusiasm that America/SV specifically has. It is a cultural quirk, not something specific to if someone's an introverted engineer or not.

I've worked for SV companies as an outsider as well, and it was immediately noticeable. It was like everyone had a gun to their back and were being asked to say "I love the company!". It reminded me of a Japanese company, except without the deeper authenticity granted by older social protocols.
Blast from the past seeing h0no mentioned.. Brings me back to days of darpanet/m00/#darknet/dikline
If true, why did the State Department denounce foreign action in 2021?

> ‘Havana Syndrome’ Noises Were Likely Crickets, Not Super Weapons, State Department Report Says [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42679024
Magical thinking is a bit different than cargo-culting. Magical thinking is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected. For example, "I survived the car crash because I had my lucky charm in my backpack".

Cargo-culting is the belief that specific best practices which are causally connected to an outcome in one context will produce those outcomes in other contexts where the chain of causal reasoning no longer holds. For example, "I survived the car crash because I was wearing a seatbelt. Now I'll install a seatbelt on my bicycle too."

Cargo-culting is an important concept in its own right in the tech industry, because those best practices do get often blindly shared, recommended and even enforced into codes and standards, even when the context that made them a good idea is lost. Without a concept like "cargo-culting" to label the fallacy, it can be hard to argue against that proposal, because the side recommending the change has lots of out-of-context data in their favor. For example, "car-crash survival rates are much higher when drivers are wearing seatbelts. Therefore, we're now requiring bicycles and motorbikes to have seatbelts."
40 for a pen seems excessive for a regular budget even if 40 is not a lot of money anymore
Sounds fun. You would only have to provide listing editing if the plugin is not on the other site.

If anyone fills a complaint and can prove ownership a redirect can be provided.

Could maybe perhaps train an llm on a plugin and have it assist.making a free or not bloated version of some popular ones.
Unless you have a CPU from 2000, probably it's not worth the energy savings to have a new one produced:

> The report about the cost of planned obsolescence by the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential.

https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...

This is for consumer devices btw, probably not if you operate some server farm with high occupancy (steady load on all hardware)
I think it's actually a modest change, the diff looks much longer because registers have been renamed and swapped all over the place.
>How many % women are employed at Microsoft, Google or Apple ?

I don't remember but it is more than the average in the rest of the industry.

>Are the women to blame that Windows, Android and iOS are crap ?

Generally not, and neither are men as a whole as you seem to imply.
A key point I feel, is that psychogenic illnesses are illnesses. People who get them should be treated as ill, and should be entitled to support and respect.

Putting it into the "not a real illness" bucket is why people with ME, and Long covid are so deeply unhappy with the state response to their problems.
Keir Starmer is not helping Britain's AI businesses. He is again following orders from his new Washington overlords.

This recent grooming scandal brought up by Musk etc. is just theater to distract. Seems to be the new thing: Insult Starmer, then cooperate. Insult Netanyahu (with the Jeffrey Sachs tape posted by Trump), then cooperate. Just to maintain the illusion of disagreement.

So the data is supposed to be anonymized. That is a false promise and seems to be a research topic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19045-3
> dropped it because of bad graphics performance (only software rendering supported, many frame drops when watching HD videos on YT)

Around Firefox 92 or 93 the new GPU-based renderer ported from Servo was made default and performance under Qubes became much worse. Unfortunately, it seems applications increasingly assume the presence of video acceleration and don't prioritize software rendering.
"The solution at the time was for them to jam in a larger breaker"

I've seen some cowboy sh!t in my time but jeez, that's rough.
The UX is much snappier:

> We didn't do anything interesting with the AI here. What's interesting is the experience we built around it.

> I'm trying to take my expertise in building really good, really performant applications in a local-first way for the web and apply it to make other apps that deserve this type of treatment feel better.

> Chat is saying that this is pure UX. Absolutely! The goal here is to make make the user experience as good as possible not because those 5 seconds matter a whole lot but because the actual experience matters a lot. You should feel good when you're going around these apps navigating and doing things.

Much more detail in video announcement: https://youloop.leftium.com/?v=bIr7NtNRDmE&a=519&b=551
Is it possible for my IDE (vscode) to support this? Currently my IDE screams at me for using unknown packages and I have no type hinting, intellisense, etc.
I'd think "Synchronys SoftRAM" could be considered a bigger flop in terms of the actual quality of the product, but it was a successful scam.
It's not terrifying to take EM brain-damage, have no way of proving it even in principle, and alienate your loved ones, employer, polity etc.?
While I think you may be right, I wish you could find a way to say it which is evidence based, and something we can look at more deeply. Because right now, what you said carries the preface: "In my personal opinion"

I read the atlantic precisely because I am sure it doesn't align with my non-US, world view. I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think. I don't mind reading things I may disagree with. I'm tired of reading things grounded in fantasy which is what Fox sells. At least the atlantic is grounded in a version of ground-truth I can usually get behind, and is clear when its opinions, or reflecting opinionated sources.
The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.
Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.

You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.

And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.
(FYI: You've posted this comment twice, some seconds apart. I've responded to the older one)
> I was criticized for not getting enough story points merged

And I bet you learned to stop doing reviews so quickly.

Your coworkers may have already figured out where the disincentives were.
Directed energy weapons already exist, they are called guns and rifles. Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense. If you want to secretly kill someone, just get them drunk and have them have a car crash. This is spy stuff 101.

Havana Syndrome always struck me like they had people working too close to a secret transmitter by accident.