skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
COINTELPRO, beginning in the late 1950s, would insert undercover agents into various political organizations they deemed dangerous. On several ocassions the agents were exposed by the members of these various organizations, and initially this was thought to be a bad thing. What COINTELPRO noticed however, was that the revelation that an undercover agent had infiltrated the group was so damaging to group cohesiveness and trust that the targeted organization would typically break up anyhow. From then on, it became a strategy, and undercover agents would pick the right time to implicate themselves as imposters.

With Gen AI I guess this process of trust destruction, for artist communities at least, has been fully automated. I think we can ruin a lot more than just artist communities as things develop.
It seems unlike digital ads, the billboard ROI is quite low

Where I live it’s mostly ads for injury attorneys and strip clubs.

I’d be fine without them
True. All the more reason to make it an error, IMHO.
I agree to some extent, but many of the independent voices in that party have been discarded in favor of others.

Even in the early days of Trumps first term they struggled for weeks to shutdown Obamacare and … just gave up as they couldn’t legislate.

It’s a party that by design is missing leadership.
I believe there's a widespread confusion between a fictional character that is described as a AI assistant, versus the actual algorithm building the play-story which humans imagine the character from. An illusion actively promoted by companies seeking investment and hype.

AcmeAssistant is "helpful" and "clever" in the same way that Vampire Count Dracula is "brooding" and "immortal".
There are a couple in downtown Seattle maybe it’s on I5? Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/W6HbwSC4eFYYG3sW8
Huh - I didn't know that existed. Its not supported in firefox or IE11 though - and probably will never be.

(IE11 probably isn't super relevant now - but it was almost certainly more relevant when that tracking code was written. You could use feature detection - but its much easier to just use their hacky javascript everywhere instead.)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...

https://caniuse.com/ping
It certainly used to, but tbh C++ since 17 has been pretty decent and continually improving.

That said, I still prefer to use it only where necessary.
First Lotus Domino gig in 1998 and worked with it for several years until SharePoint started competing in the same space and pushing out Domino seats. Interest in Domino was diminishing quickly, and the companies that were using it were trying to get rid of it. I miss the excitement of reading through the red books, and new issues of the yellow technical books that would come out for it.
I think sum types in general and Option<T> in particular is nicer. But the reason C# has nullability isn't that they disagree with me, it's that fundamentally the CLR has the same model as Java, all these types can be null, even though in the modern C# language you can say "No, not null that's never OK" at runtime on the CLR too bad maybe it's null.

For example if I write a C# function which takes a Goose, specifically a Goose, not a Goose? or similar - well, too bad the CLR says my C# function can be called by this obsolete BASIC code which has no idea what a Goose is, but it's OK because it passed null. If my code can't cope with a null? Too bad, runtime exception.

In real C# apps written by an in-house team this isn't an issue, Ollie may not be the world's best programmer but he's not going to figure out how to explicity call this API with a null, he's going to be stopped by the C# compiler diagnostic saying it needs a Goose, and worst case he says "Hey tialaramex, why do I need a Goose?". But if you make stuff that's used by people you've never met it can be an issue.
What?

Article is about the Go compiler. On 64 bit arch Go int is 64 bits.
I just uped the wow factor. I will share more updates on it. I actually learnt so much
Because of cult like belief structures growing up around rust, it's clear as day for us on the outside, I see it from the evangelists in the company I work for "rust is faster and safer to develop with when compared to c++", I'm no c++ fan but it's obviously nonsense.

I feel people took the comparison of rust to c and extrapolated to c++ which is blatantly disingenuous.
Hey I’m the author of the article! Happy to answer any questions :)
How about instead we fix the local ordinances, many of which were originally installed to prevent Black families from moving into white enclaves, that allow public bodies to function as armed HOAs? Seems like a smaller lift than banning advertising.

I don't care about billboards, but the real complaint in this article isn't about billboards.
And there's always this amorphous blob of manufacturing jobs coming back being discussed. While the last time the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, things were made completely differently. The US can't just return to manufacturing, because manufacturing is fundamentally different from what it was in the 80s. All the knowledge is lost, and all the knowledge that was lost was already incompatible.
Even many of those small startups are in the pocket of some unfavourable characters.
My First Transistor Radio, 1963 [video]
Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution").
Wayback machine of Switzerland's trade vs. now
Explaining the Trump Tariff Equation [video]
yeah I don't think it should be banned
i agree, but not even a middle ground, like a small amount of exceptions for iconic advertisements, such as stuff on sides of buildings like the old Jordan jumpman thing in Chicago. or other stuff that ADD to a city rather than make it worse.
Billboards are obnoxious, ugly, and as the article pointed out, have basically no oversight from city design boards, meaning that they're not under any obligation to look nice.

In fact, there's almost a reverse incentive; if it clashes with the rest of the city's aesthetic, you're much more likely to notice it.

I don't really see how it's hurting "free speech" to restrict billboards. No one is suggesting we regulate the speech, no one is telling these companies what to say, we just don't want big ugly billboards blasting in our face and making our cities look terrible.

You're of course free to disagree with this, but you almost certainly draw the line somewhere. If I went and dumped a bunch of trash and feces into the middle of the street every day, you probably wouldn't be outraged when I eventually get a ticket, and I doubt that making a "free speech" argument would get me out of that fine, even if I explained the artistic merit of me doing that.
Why not both? These policies aren't in opposition. I think its great that lots of different people campaign for lots of different policies which will improve our cities.
So fascinating. I’ve grown up on the east coast and it never even occurred to me as a possibility until a HN thread yesterday.

Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are way ahead of the rest of the country on this, that’s for sure.
I think there's another point that makes this even more surreal. The United States is paying El Salvador to detain these people. So the DOJ claim includes that the DOJ doesn't believe the federal judiciary has legal authority to prevent the United States from continuing to pay to detain people in other countries.
I hesitate to suggest this but why not just contact anyone advertising asking them to not use billboards for the reasons you have, to the point where a lot of people will take down their billboards as they'll consider them to have a negative impact on their business? Suggest to businesses not to use billboards for the reasons you have, instead of trying to ban the practice.
good point, though a great LLM answer would DWIM here and explain both interpretations as you have done here, as opposed to (what presumably happened) focus on one and ignore the other.
Taking the Supreme Court argument that Property = Speech I see.
More money = More volume. There is no equality of "free" speech. Or rather, the speech if free, but the rich get to amplify their voice over the poor. You can say what you want if you're poor, but only if you're rich can you demand people listen to you without recompense or the right to block, and if you DO want to block you're "bad" and "anti-speech". (See Elon's how dare anyone have the right to block).

Driving is a captive audience, I don't have the option to "close my eyes/plug my ears" to avoid your "free speech" but with free speech comes the right to avoid hearing your bullshit. I can avoid buying a book, I can turn the channel on the radio, but a billboard doesn't offer that "right" to be free FROM your bullshit speech. There's more obligation on billboards in that regards, and it's kinda horseshit that you're allowed to hold me captive because you have enough money to spend on a campaign (whether it's commercial, political, religious IDGAF)

Wish "freespeechers" could understand this. I'm not saying we should just ban everything, and I'm not even sure I agree with a billboard ban (I would have signed up 25 years ago on that, adbusters reading chud that I was). I'm just saying it's really pathetic that people cry "free speech" when there are two things at play and the SCOTUS did a disservice on differentation between amplitude of property vs signal of speech.
The most basic billboard is a sign for your business. Can’t ban that.
Yeah I visited Honolulu a few years ago. It took me a couple days to notice why the city sort of felt visually quieter than my home city. I love it - and it was horrible seeing billboards everywhere when I got home.
I have ~2.5TB of photos in iCloud, via Apple Photos. Excluding the various sized previews, I doubt many originals have been accessed in quite a while. I also have about 1TB Lightroom library archived to a different service; representing countless hours of photo processing work spanning over a decade. Haven’t touched that one in years. Neither are crap. (Yes, both have other backups and, yes, I’ve probably forgotten to sync one of them).
From the article.
"A great part of discussion in comments on the original thread I've made was about soldiers on the battlefield and a heavy usage of devices close to the line of contact. Android users might turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and even remove their SIM card, thinking they’ve minimized their radio footprint. But NFC often remains active by default — and since most people assume it only matters within arm’s reach, they don’t bother disabling it."
US tax return filings drop by nearly 1M, extension requests rise
I dig that PCB design. The panopticon (?) artwork and how the decoupling caps are lined up perfectly along the circumference.
Why always jump to the extreme that will have almost zero political chance of winning. Billboards sound like a feasible incremental step in a good direction. Start there, everyone sees tangible improvements and is primed to make a bigger leap. Killing an entire industry as step one, is just simply never going to happen, dream on.

As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
> For example, today you are not reading Shakespeare in the way it was spelled in its first printing.

However, we call modernised Shakespeare “abridged”.
Cancer treatment is bad for health too, but it's worth it to cut out and kill cancer before it kills the host. Not everything that is "bad for the economy" is bad for the humans who have to live under it.
Feels like a possibly important but unrelated issue. Is there some connection to billboards?
Article notes this impacts soldiers (or I suppose others trying to be stealthy) who would have turned off bluetooth and wifi.
> In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery.

Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
Sopot in Poland banned all billboards. I'm excited to visit and see how it feels. Amazing I reckon.
Btw, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, banned billboards. I believe it is better now.

It incentived the spread of graffiti art thorough the city.
>intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.

I think the latter part of that is a huge jump. How is seeing a billboard for a plumber promoting bad behavior?
That is why laws like the ADA exist: to give companies a financial incentive to make their products accessible.
What was it that the US was making in the 80s that consumers want now? Even if we could magically resurrect American manufacturing, the world has moved on.
Ah, I understand you now, you're right.

I remember there was a lot of confusion when llvm started removing stores to read-only memory[1], some people got angry because it broke some kernel code (that only worked because being in a kernel the memory page wasn't actually marked as read-only) and thought it would break any code that cast away a `const`, which is very common and valid as long as it was gratuitously `const`, as you say.

[1] https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#notew...
It's token prediction, not reasoning. You can simulate reasoning, but it's not the same thing - there is not an internal representation of reality in there anywhere
Yes, still relevant. The same can be accomplished with other tools, but it will probably be more difficult.

The idea of Glamorous Toolkit is that it’s a collection of tools you use to solve software problems by making little explanatory tools. You might start out with some bigger problem like “I need to make this service fast”, come up with a question like “what does the flow of data I care about look like through the service?” and then try to answer that question by making tools that could analyze/visualize logging output or a stack trace or whatever makes sense in your software’s context.

The technique of “making little tools that explain to help answer a question” is Moldable Development, similar to how Test Driven Development is “make a failing big feature test loop, write little tests and make them pass until the big one passes”.

You can make little tools to explain away questions you have while you’re working with plugins or shell scripts or whatever you’re comfortable with and that’s “Moldable Development”. The Glamorous Toolkit just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools to help explain away problems.

Hope that helps! Lmk if you want to see some examples.

Source and bias: I worked closely with the developers before I had to take a break from work and computer stuff.
Dow futures sink 1,300 points after Trump defends tariffs as 'medicine' to fix
Does anyone have a good commentary on what's after what comes next?
As a relatively new Linux user, I often find the "versioning" of bundled system utilities also to be a bit of a mess, for lack of a better word.

A classic example, at least from my experience, is `unzip`. On two of my servers (one running Debian and the other an older Ubuntu), neither of their bundled `unzip` versions can handle AES-256 encrypted ZIP files. But apparently, according to some Stack Overflow posts, some distributions have updated theirs to support it.

So here is what I ran into:

1. I couldn't easily find an "updated" version of `unzip`, even though I assume it exists and is open source.

2. To make things more confusing, they all claim to be "version 6.00", even though they obviously behave differently.

3. Even if I did find the right version, I'm not sure if replacing the system-bundled one is safe or a good idea.

So the end result is that some developer out there (probably volunteering their time) added a great feature to a widely used utility, and yet I still can’t use it. So in a sense, being a core system utility makes `unzip` harder to update than if it were just a third-party tool.

I get that it's probably just as bad if not worse on Windows or macOS when it comes to system utilities. But I honestly expected Linux to handle this kind of thing better.

(Please feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood anything or if there’s a better way to approach this.)
The acronyms in that story led me down the memory lane - In the early 2000s, I worked at Microsoft building the Outlook to Notes connector. The theory was that we could introduce MS Outlook to hardcore Lotus/Domino/Notes shops and that would be a trojan horse to the introduction of Exchange (and its high priced client access licenses).

Reading through the article, it seems like that theory was proven out and along with the awful UI that Notes was, it led to many IBM shops adopting Exchange/Outlook and later SharePoint.

Something odd about Lotus Notes/Domino, and part of the reason for its awful UI, is that everything is a database (the NSF mentioned in the article). All UI is a view on that database. Viewing an email? That's just view on a item in the database. Sending an email? That's just adding a row into the 'Outbox' table. The entire product was built with this paradigm at the center of it all.
Similar here but sort of the opposite, grew up with advertising and I didn't think it could possibly get worse. Then I visited Florida for the first time in a long time and I saw a floating ad on the water. Killed the trip entirely for me.
You can just send your PGP key to your correspondents attached to an email. There is even a mime type for it. There is no need for any public broadcasting.

The big problem is verifying identities. The usability of that is an unsolved problem that plagues encrypted messaging of all kinds. So sure, signing PGP keys as a form of introduction is awkward, but at least it is possible. How do you vouch for, say, a Signal user?
Yeah I made a decent effort to dig in, as it seemed interesting, but I still have no idea what this is.
Last I checked, genetic programming wasn’t promising, and I’m a little surprised to see people paying attention to it here.

OTOH that was similar to what people were saying about hidden layers, so YMMV
How? People would still use their money to buy things. A lot of advertising is adversarial. If demand stays the same but neither you nor your competitors can advertise your products, everyone makes more money.

Of course, there are lots of products where people don't know they would benefit from the product - or don't think of it. For example, life insurance, business loans, university education, movie releases, etc. In those cases, arguably the advertising is creating a positive for society. (Since its resulting in a need being addressed that wouldn't be addressed otherwise.)
They're banned in 4 US states already, with seemingly no infringement on the 1st Amendment.

Legally speaking, the validity of banning billboards tends to be evaluated based on the Central Hudson test. More practically, there's numerous limitations to commercial speech... for example, you can't blare an audio ad from your rooftop.
"Wishful thinking" is exactly what it's called in SICP. You write the code to solve your problem using the abstraction you want, then you implement the abstraction.
This made me laugh. :)
Domino phased out when IBM OS/2 phased out. The old greybeards who did OS/2 and Domino died or retired—the same with COBOL and mainframes.

OS/2 is still made, you can find out more about it here: https://www.arcanoae.com/about/

IBM's latest updates on Domino: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=lotus-domino It looks like Domino is still supported.

I wrote apps in the 1990s using ASP and VBScript and Javascript and ActiveX. We didn't use Domino.
Over in Washington state the rule for most major highways is that billboards can only advertise something which is actually being sold on the same piece of property.

I think it strikes a nice balance, preventing the most egregious forms of attention pollution.
Storage being cheap enough that it's not worth policing doesn't seem very consistent with it being expensive enough to include much energy use (what I assume the "destroying the environment" hyperbole is referencing).
> Just don't see how this materializes in any meaningful timeframe in the United States — if it's even doable at all.

Many people, especially successful business people, believe this. And this both saddens me and puzzles me. I'm not sure if people still remember, China was dirt poor even in the 1990s. America's manufacturing prowess was the envy of the entire nation. They produced mostly low-end crappy stuff even in the early 2000s. They didn't have "talent density". Instead, their media kept telling people how professional and efficient the American workers were and how efficient the American systems were. I still remember people widely criticized the Chinese government for imposing too many regulations (too many stamps in local terms). By the way, I think that's the right attitude: acknowledge the problems and seek solutions, but that's a different topic. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Hongkong people, and westerners who brought in investment, talent, and know-hows to China to bootstrap their now-great manufacturing industry. That took only 20 years or less. And now we as Americans have to accept that we can never bring out manufacturing back? What kind of defeatism is that?

Now let's say that Americans and systems are indeed inferior to China's (I really don't believe that), what would happen? We keep deindustrializing the nation? Then what if a war breaks out? Who's going to produce all the weapons and cars and battleships and what not? China? And if we don't produce anything, why in the world would other countries use our services? Are they that stupid that they don't want to climb up the value chain? Case in point, we had this $20K toilet for our air force not because of corruption but because we had to manufacture them in the US! Our cost of manufacturing artillery shell is 10X of that by Russia. Russia! One of the most corrupted countries in the world, yet we still can't be cheaper than them?? It would cost us billions to make a battleship when it would cost China at most hundreds of millions because even a customized screw can be 10X or 100X more expensive if we don't use China's output. Oh, did I mention that our killer drones cost $90K a piece while Chinese drone of better spec would cost only a few thousands?

So, what I really don't get is, how can we believe that we can be prosperous and secure without a robust manufacturing sector. Note I'm not saying that the US must have everything. We can certainly share the supply chains with our allies, but Europe has even worse deindustrialization than us.
And yet the New Yorker article was the first thing that my Google search for “Paul Newman alcoholism” returned.

Apparently it isn’t so specialized that a pretty obvious old fashioned web search on Google wouldn’t immediately return an authoritative source.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/great-depression-online...
Gemini 2.5 Pro

Yes, Paul Newman was known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. 1 He acknowledged his high consumption levels himself.
1.
Review: Paul Newman memoir stuns with brutal honesty - AP News

apnews.com

While he maintained an incredibly successful career and public life, accounts and biographies note his significant alcohol intake, often describing it as a functional habit rather than debilitating alcoholism, although the distinction can be debated. He reportedly cut back significantly in his later years.
How does the E2EE happen if you're clicking a gmail link? One thought is the secret bit is tacked onto the anchor part of the URL, but the secret is in plaintext both on the senders sent email and on the recipient side.
Billboards? Banning billboards is fine by me. Banning all advertising is unconstitutional.