Lumich

Not the reason for this post, but while we're here I have to side with quotemstr, whose comments I've been subscribed to for a while because of their quality. There was, in my view, nothing personal about his comment, at least nothing to take issue with.

But I guess it has to do with that strange and hypocrite ideology that makes some people abuse grammar and employ plural personal pronouns when they fully well know that (a) the guy is singular and (b) the probability of him being female is almost zero as the climate on HN is toxic for women. (Maybe it's a way of pretending it isn't?)

Anyway.

So, my "karma" reached a new high-score, and it means that once again, all my comments are stillborn, dead by default, killed by software (obviously, no artificial or other intelligence involved in any way, not even simple text analysis).

How did this come about? Well, it's the work of bigots. They abuse the "flag" feature, which is meant to stop spam and trolls, to suppress comments, opinions and even facts they dislike or disagree with. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that close to two dozens of my comments have been flagged to death. Not a single comment was spam or trolling. Not a single one.

Even my very long and thoughtful post about my doubts concerning T-rex and, by extension, the science of dinosaurs was flagged (50089549). Why? What's wrong with these people?

While bigots may only account for a small percentage of HN users, they are effectively handed over censorship privileges to limit HN discussions to their narrow-minded vision of the world.

They're not religious bigots, of course. Instead, they're ideological bigots, or even scientific bigots (in as much as science has displaced religion as ideology for the educated classes).

It would be easy to change the effect bigots have on the site and the discussions that can be had here. For example, it seems users can look at other users' "karma", which is seen as a kind of "merit". Well, abusive "flagging" could be punished by negatively affecting "karma". Plus, next to "karma", some "flagging" stat could be displayed so "flaggers" would be seen as such.

HN has been around for a long time, and people with a mindset similar to mine must have shown up now and then and made the same observations and maybe complained about it in some way. I have seen some such comments and complaints. To no avail, apparently. So I have to conclude that the de facto censorship the minority of bigots are allowed to exercise on HN is fully intentional.

Then of course it is not a site for minority views, and not even for curiosity. It's not a site purely for bigotry either, of course, but, sadly, bigotry seems to play a more important role than curiosity.

« a bit of a conspiracy theorist rant by non-historians »

That's not at all a fair assessment of their work. They aren't trained historians, okay, but that's not unusual for authors of history books; it can even be a plus (unencumbered by institutional constraints and the need for ideological compliance). Docherty and Macgregor also provide lots of detailed concrete evidence, following the prosopographic tradition of Carroll Quigley. The topic of the book is the machinations of a "secret elite" (whose members are well-known high-ranking public figures), so yes, this is akin to a conspiracy. But it is neither a rant nor a theory.

Back then there was more lo-tech, today there's more hi-tech. I was referring to the money figures given. It was $11 billion of lend/lease for the Soviet Union, which today would be around $230 billion. The combined aid for the Ukraine (US+UK+EU) has exceeded $500 billion.

« The comparison with WW1 is instructive in that regard. Then, the view that conflict with Germany was inevitable was surprisingly widespread »

What is surprising about that? The Northcliffe propaganda press and writers such as H.G. Wells had been nurturing the idea of the inevitability of war with Germany for years, so, unless they really sucked at propaganda, at least some "positive effect" would be the expected outcome.

« It's just that the nature and scope of the conflict that caught them by surprise - a land war »

Maybe, in some respect. But they had factored in the armies of France and Russia, hadn't they (in 1904 and 1907 already), so they were certainly expecting some land war scenarios.

The reason they didn't tell their people they were willing to sacrifice them on the order of a couple hundred thousands may have had to do with the lack of popular support for such an honorable prospect.

While "we" as in "most of us" have limited insight into and no influence on the course of things, the leaders and classes who do are by no means "sleepwalking".

Such wording is of course an allusion to Australian author Christopher Clark's 2012 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. The book is very detailed, but still a big lie in the overall narrative, meant to gloss over the fact that a clique in the British establishment had spent at least ten years organizing and preparing this war; yes, with their indispensable associates in France and Russia, but masterminded in London, as explained by Scottish authors Docherty and Macgregor in Hidden History.

« … and it can never influence facts so fundamental like the existence of dinosaurs. »

The real reason for which is of course that … Dinosaurs are Too Big to Fail. :)

Discovery of a couple large aquatic lizards preceded the invention of the dinosaurs by a few decades. Most notably among these, we find mosasaurus, ichthyosaurus, and plesiosaurus, which looks dubious and which Cuvier thought was a hoax.

I read the German Wiki article on mosasaurus, and even though the creature looks straightforward by comparison, and I find no reason to doubt its existence in a configuration roughly similar to what's presented today, the science isn't settled at all in the matter, and there's considerable questioning and shuffling about of the various specimens and the corresponding taxonomy, which is because the evidence is scarce and sketchy, by the very nature of the fossil record.

Far greater and deeper questions arise when we turn to the dinosaurs. Fundamental things like their posture (wrt to their tail) have been "corrected" in the past decades, and it looks like a couple decades from now they'll actually have feathers to be more in line with how they've been inserted into the evolutionary graph as the ancestors of birds. Other things such as the unlikely (and unviable) anatomy of many of the most famous dinosaurs don't look like they can ever be fixed.

With all the bona fide and even sympathy for such phantastic paleontological scenarios, I simply do not understand how this situation can be a base for any kind of "certainty". Curiosity and fascination, okay, I get it – but certainty?

« At most, some bad researchers may try to publish false data, if that can be useful for their careers, but that is usually discovered sooner or later, and it can never influence facts so fundamental like the existence of dinosaurs. »

I asked Chatty for the best book on the history of the discovery (or invention) of the dinosaurs in the first half of the 19th century†, and it came up with The Dawn of Dinosaurs by John R. Horner, published in 2005. The title struck me as odd (I would have preferred Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and it appears the book doesn't exist, Chatty had made it up.

But that turned my attention to Jack Horner, a very important figure in paleontology (at least in the USA), who has discovered various T-rex skeletons and dinosaur eggs and whatnot, and so I watched a couple minutes of a lecture he gave in 2001, which left a peculiar impression (I mean his personality), and then I read his Wiki page and was not disappointed to find my impressions totally confirmed by the article …

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Horner_(paleontologist)

Can't fault him for liking young girls, that's human nature, and he had the money to be a customer of Jeffrey Epstein; but isn't it curious how he didn't allow dyslexia from stopping him to rise to the top of the field? And what does it say about a field (at least in the USA) if such characters somehow manage to rise to the top? Could it be there is a (well-funded) system that facilitates their ascent? Because they have just what it takes to fulfil the role?

That, of course, should not reflect negatively on whatever paleo findings were made on the lands of your grandparents.

† Chatty next suggested The Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury (Terrible Lizard for the US edition), which I found on AA and which seems to do a proper dive into history as is essential to find the truth of the matter.

« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »

Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.

Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?

Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.

In this case I think it was automatic, due to the inclusion of a link to Canadian Research Casting International company's website, which I first posted in 49312918, which at one point was suddenly dead.

Don't know about you specifically, but people here clearly "flag" things they disagree with, which is part of why what could be an interesting discussion often ends up being a dull CJ style chorus between affirmative and know-it-all. As if there was no middle ground between that and a "flamewar".

I've read comments to the effect it would be easy to change to the better by administrative means, but apparently there's no will, so "smug-flagging" seems to be in line with the purpose of the site, and that's it.

I posted a reply doubting the existence of dinosaurs (50073836). When I looked after about one hour, it was dead. Maybe it was killed immediately, like another similar one I had posted in August, possibly killed by a moderator (49312918).

Now I'm wondering whether HN uses some sort of language model to infer semantic similarity and thus kill content automatically. Frankly, whether this is automatic or by consensus of certain users, there's not much of a difference. It is dystopian, especially given the mountains of meaningless one-line comments that abound here (probably “too little substance to be worth killing”).

Once upon a time the Internet was the realm of free thought and free speech. I get it that spam etc needs to be fought and suppressed, but frankly, none of my comments that have been killed (quite a couple of them already) come close to that category. Rather, it seems the ruling HN mindset is about as narrow-minded (if not more so in certain respects) than your typical mainstream forum.

« hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them »

The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?

Could you take a look at 50003450 ? It shows as dead after one hour. I cannot see whether this is because someone disliked and killed it, or whether "software" is out on a run again. We talked about this before (49841897).

At any rate, suppression of such comments is to be expected for CJ style groups but not for open-minded discussions.

Same applies to my dead comments 49953689, 49954141, as well as 49938615 and 49941900, on the subject of Hiroshima. If you cannot even quote top experts and administrators with first-hand knowledge (such as A. de Seversky and general C. Sams) just because they contradict the prevailing narrative, then what kind of discussion is that? And the flavour of "curiosity" involved must be very peculiar.

Frankly, my impression is that some people are using or abusing the "flag" feature and perhaps other features they may have at their disposal to remove opinions and facts they don't like or don't even want to see published.

« to test whether an integer is null or non-null »

Shouldn't this more correctly read zero or non-zero ?

The Nuremberg laws were calqued on US race laws. Can't go wrong by copying the US, can you.

Just as the moniker for the administrative status of occupied Poland, Generalgouvernement, was explicitly copied from British practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor-general

  > auto m2 = m; // implicit too
  Taking a copy requires making an allocation.

C++ makes it “look nice” at the cost of clarity. But not consistently. Overall, despite addition of syntax sugar in various places to make things look smooth, we arguably have “a lot of syntax” (“syntax castles”) in C++, as a result of embracing a lot of complexity. C, OTOH, avoids both sugar and castles.

So my sibling comment posted yesterday did not get killed, unlike 49953689, 49954141, as well as 49938615 and 49941900 before.

« A cover story for what ? » — To cover up dozens of heinous mass-murdering crimes with veneration of “the Bomb” ?

« We have eyewitnesses of Hiroshima. » — Yes, we do. You'll find some in the Palmer book (link in the dead comments). You'll also find some in chapter 19 of the Rhodes book (The Making of the Atomic Bomb), where they're more numerous but less interesting, as the book serves a different purpose: it's not an investigation, but a narrative. About 60 % of the eyewitnesses Rhodes quotes were children, and what we have is their recollection decades later. Let me quote this:

  A five-year-old girl: The whole city … was
  burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we
  could hear the sound of big things exploding.

Big things exploding? Sounds like multiple explosions. But the testimony, as quoted in Rhodes, is too brief to make much of it, and, like many others, not exactly precise, and hence not substantial. And also probably a much later recollection. And she was only five years old.

« We have videos of atomic bomb tests. » — Those are separate incidents.

« Multiple countries … Why ? » — You're rushing to ulterior questions, if not to conclusions. Palmer focuses on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki evidence. And there is more than enough in there already that is “puzzling”, to reuse your expression. So I'd prefer to stay focused.

« Their source was a U.S. intelligence report. » — In other words, blowing smoke around some important government lies.

« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.

At least there's a certain creativity to the concept of overseas waste forests. You could take that further argueing that the vessels importing the pellets only burn^H^H^H dispose of waste minerals, and demand more subsidies. Although “minerals” has a bad ring to it (uuugh, “mining”), so rather call it “waste bio detritus”, which it is according to the theory (“rotten dinosaurs”).

I'd reply but it's pointless, all my comments are now stillborn, dead on arrival. It appears some people on HN, despite all the talk about “curiosity”, don't like seeing their topics of predilection and veneration challenged by views and evidence that could lead people to reconsider whether the establishment view is correct at all.

Thanks. This is a novel explanation to me. So to rephrase, some volume of air (~1,2 kg/m³ at sea level) is “plasmarized” and then eats the X-rays, upon which it expands in a shockwave.

It is usually stated, however, that the X-rays go first, and at the speed of light. Plasmarization, OTOH, would be subject to some inertia, however little, wouldn't it. So there'd be a delay before plasma formation, and the X-rays would already be “over the horizon” (joke – they wouldn't follow Earth's curvature, would they).

« For them it is not geopolitically useful to actually finish a weapon »

Why, they could take their revenge, couldn't they.

This whole thing is stories built upon stories built upon stories. It's stories all the way down till you reach The World Set Free by British propaganda writer H.G. Wells, published in 1913–14 as part of the British war propaganda preparations against Germany. I don't recommend the book, it's psychologically dull and constructed, but that's where Leo Szilárd picked up the idea of an “atomic superbomb” in 1932 when reading the novel, which led to the Einstein letter in 1939. Well, according to the story anyway.

« pyroclastic flows … basically just gas, but really hot and full of rocks »

Rocks fall to the ground (too heavy), but the eruptive cloud is still full of matter heavier/denser than air (e.g. CO2, volcanic dust and gas, forming crystal needles and “stone flakes” when cooling), and all this is thrown up miles high by thermics into a towering mushroom cloud, which eventually collapses, gaining speed on the vertical, and then flowing horizontally on hitting the relief. At least that's my understanding, assembling bits and pieces from documentaries over the years (Pompeii etc), but I have never seriously “studied” it.

These clouds (on the rise) and flows (on the way down) hold together because of density and gravity, and also because the volcano thermics have locality, perhaps not unlike a huge man-made fire (like in Hamburg or Dresden) creates its own local weather, resulting in a firestorm.

« why does the warm air mass ride up on top of the cool air instead of just mixing? » — Well, because it is lighter. Whereas a cold front moves like a wedge into warm air, throwing it up while staying close to the ground (cold = heavy), and thereby sometimes provoking frontal thunderstorms.

« people who just want to change things for the sake of it » — Not for the sake of it, but to “make the world a better place.” The intention is noble (well, mostly, at least let's assume it is). Of course, there is disregard for history and her deplorables (or not so deplorables), comes with being “progressive”. Which is why I like Windows better (not 11 though, will probably have to go back to Linux at some point).

« What is it about these projects » — Maybe that they're “at the forefront.”

« claim … ludicrous » — Without knowing much about physics, I totally agree.

« unlike the Americans they kept their methods unchanged after 9/11 »

That's a good one :) It shows a couple things, like:

• a certain independence from Uncle Sam (like they displayed when they bombed the USS Liberty in 1967)

• that their own population was already sufficiently propagandized into paranoia mode (fear and loathing of “evil muslims”) in order to never make peace and keep the hate up

• and of course that they knew there was nothing to worry about wrt the 9/11 hoax

« Without what the US government did and still does, the prices of memory would have never increased so much and all the world would not have been forced to pay so much »

If that is true (and given the reasons you provide below, and the general quality of your commenting, I assume it is) then the situation is similar (if less militarized) to that of the oil sector, where the cost increase is likely higher by perhaps three orders of magnitude.

If you like the SR-71, the U-2 CIA spy plane is at least as fascinating. All this was retired because of advancements in satellite technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2

« what we must have 'secretly' concocted » — Secrets are often dirty, which is why they're secret. Not for public consumption. Like, what is the secret behind Wikileaks Bradley Manning's “conversion” into “Chelsea” after whistleblowing secret dirty videos showing the world how dirty it really is in there? In that military? Did they castrate him in custody?

Rather than wondering about “secret tech”, boyish fantasies fueled by Pentagon sponsored Hollywood movies glorifying guns and violence and blasting enemies (they always need enemies), ask yourself whether all of the stuff publicly and conspicuously trumpeted about (not only in past decades) did and does actually work and exist. ;)

Did you mean Einstein? But it was only a “thought experiment” …

I had to look this up, and it turns out the British invasion of Palestine started in early 1917, coming from the Sinaï, they lost two battles of Gaza in March and April, and won the third on November 2, 1917, which is the exact date on the letter of the Balfour declaration, published a week later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Gaza

The British took Jerusalem in December, but it does not seem at all that they were occupying Palestine before in the sense that there was no more Ottoman resistance. Rather, large parts continued to be held by the Ottomans, who only surrendered in October 1918.

As for the population being kicked out, that was not in 1917/18 and not the feat of the British, but of the Jews (aided and abetted by the UN: expropriation plan), and in 1948. The British had, however, helped prepare the ethnic cleansing.

Anyway, what I meant by occupation in my previous comment was the current day occupation of Palestine by Jews mostly from Eastern Europe (Ashkenazi), who then “encouraged” Jews from other ME countries to resettle to Palestine, where they were creating a Jewish state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Tribe

No, but the Levantine coast is strategic wrt ME oil reserves and also close to the Suez canal which oil can be shipped through (up to Suezmax), and part of the idea was to have a dependent proxy in the region to protect British interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

The Balfour declaration article is a reference to how the occupation of Palestine came about; yes, there were specifically Jewish interests (only some Jews, by no means all), but there were also strong imperialist interests.