OkayPhysicist

Why does a fitness tracker need continuous development? How on earth is something whose main competition is a $5 notebook and a $1 pen worth $50/yr?

A fitness tracker is exactly the sort of software I would expect to pay once for. It doesn't need some compute-heavy backend. It shouldn't need any backend at all. The entire application is window dressing for a SQLite database.

If you violently bust into someone's home in the United States, you're liable to, and absolutely deserve to, get shot. I do not care if you have a badge. If you want to execute a lawful search warrant, the best time to do it is when nobodies home. The second best time is during the day, when you can clearly state your legal mandate to be there, and allow the homeowner to comply.

The ATF in this instance (and frankly most instances) chose the most violent option available to them, because good people don't join the ATF. Violent thugs who get off on shooting dogs join the ATF. And when they get tired of shooting dogs, they decide to manufacture a scenario where they get to kill a more dangerous game.

In the US, most unions are majority unions, i.e., they unionize an entire workplace by majority vote, and then demand that the company allows them to require all hired employees to belong to the union. Hiring scabs is a breach of contract, with the added weight that unions have extra protections ( for example, you can't just fire anyone who talks about unionizing. That's big illegal).

Besides the legal protections, the primary leverage a union has is the fact that in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., companies start hemorrhaging money if work stops. So a relatively short strike (and thus more easily weathered by the members) can have a massive impact. This worked even before there were legal protections for unions, because the union can strike faster than the company can hire scabs. Of course, prior to the protections, companies could decide that taking the hit was acceptable, and then just hire a bunch of scabs to replace the workers. Or they could threaten the union leaders with violence. Which of course lead to the unions using threats of violence against management and the scabs.

After a couple decades of increasing hostilities, accelerated by the re-introduction of a bunch of combat trained WWI vets back into the workforce, the US established a robust set of worker protections to eliminate the necessity of violence.

Translated: Management ("wasn't represented due to job classification") doesn't like unions. Shocker.

Due to this, back when Hong Kong was under U.K control, a person born in North Ireland to a Hong Kong resident could claim 3 birthright citizenships: U.K., Ireland, and China.

You're making the assumption that the change in absolute terms is entirely driven by deficient additions to the population. It's just as possible that some portion of the population lost their skill by allowing it to atrophy from underuse.

If breaking the law is immoral, what are we celebrating on the 4th of July but a massively immoral action? It was certainly not legal for the the colonies to secede from England.

Sure, but those are averages. I'm 30-ish, and my hearing doesn't cut out until somewhere in the 21kHz range. When I was younger, it was even higher. One of my roommates in college had one of those anti-rodent high-frequency noise generators, we almost came to blows over it.

Defining God as supernatural and unprovable would lead the absurd situation that if God made Themselves self-evidently provable to everyone (say, with the whole trumpets and angels routine), then the alleged faithful would reject Him for not being their God, while He would only be believed by nonbelievers.

Sure, an Angel descending from the heavens would shatter our existing scientific understanding of the world, but that wouldn't make it intrinsically supernatural. It just would reveal a whole branch of knowledge that we didn't previously have any lines of inquiry into.

Yeah, it went from ~$10 / month to ~$30 a month to rent a relatively beefy VPS capable of doing the above (game servers being the most resource demanding of the lot). Still well within hobby money.

We were providing free services decades ago. Hosting a website, or a Minecraft server, or a VOIP server, or IRC, or a forum simply doesn't cost that much. Well within "some guy's hobby budget" type expenses.

Physics is a weird one to bring up, because even compared to other fields, it's one where breakthroughs are frequently the result of relatively singular genius. Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein, their discoveries were generally not incremental progress along existing lines of inquiry like most physics research is, they made pretty radical changes to our understanding of the world writ large.

In comparison, Carmack is grossly overhyped. He's like the Feynman of CS: A significant contributor to relatively young field, and a pretty influential communicator, but their contributions were moreso being the first to make a certain type of incremental progress than a paradigm shift.

If the skies errupted with the sound of trumpets and an angel descended to tell me to do something, my first thought would probably be that I'm having some sort of mental break, but if the person standing next me is seeing it, too, then I'll be the first one carving some commandments or whatever. There's a perfectly achievable standard of proof for you.

The page uses 'font-family: sans-serif'. They've already given up on any control over what the page looks like. They leave it up to the browser, which, IMO, more sites should do.

New Mexico has (pockets of) exceptionally well-educated population. 3 of the top 100 counties for PhDs per capita are in New Mexico (including #1, Los Alamos).

From what I've seen with Waymo, autonomous driving in relatively good conditions (light to medium rain, fog, or sunny) is a solved technical problem, even in small, winding streets. Snow is the next big hurdle, and they're actively working on that in Denver and Detroit.

They're being conservative with their rollout mostly because of civic issues. Most places do not have a legal framework for "what if your autonomous vehicle hits someone?" yet. Even if Waymos never were at fault for a collision with a person, you can always have cases like the one in Georgia back in October where a bicyclist wasn't looking where they were going and rammed into one. The shaky legal ground is a pretty big impediment right now, and that's in the US where we have much laxer laws about corporations killing people.

This guy isn't just the CEO (someone who "works for them"), it's a cofounder with 50% ownership. Personally, I avoid buying anything from the KKK bake sale.

We had a photolithography lab when I was at school. It's not that complicated to make a few npn transistors. The difficult part is doing it well.

They do not go to the same schools. The school system is controlled nigh-exclusively by the states, to rather infamously mixed results. That Northern Californian kid is getting a world-class education. The kid in Georgia is almost certainly not.

Meanwhile, the US is wildly more diverse at the local level than Europe is, which leads to its own significant cultural differences. Up in Northern California, about a quarter of people are of Asian descent, predominantly Indian and Chinese. Another quarter is Latino. Southern California is half Latino. Jump across the country to the Midwest, you've got a lot more people of German descent, in the South you've got Black people making up a significant portion of the population. What the US lacks in local history, it makes up for in cultural admixture: all those diverse backgrounds end up stewing together in unique ways across the country, producing all sorts of unique cultures. Leads to some fantastic fusion foods: Spam wasubi, breakfast burritos, American pizza, soul food, Chinese-American cuisine. Sure we don't our own thousand years of rich fucks inbreeding over funny hats, but the wide spectrum of cultures across across the US draw from the histories of everywhere on the globe.

Compare that with, say, Germany. Germany is 70% ethnically German. Most US states aren't even that 'White', never mind breaking that down by individual countries of origin.

Europeans are very proud of the fact that they're a bunch of different countries, but besides the language thing, Europe is only somewhat more culturally diverse than the US. The differences in philosophy, social norms, and general life outlook between Hawaiians, Northern Californians, and New Yorkers and Georgians is only marginally less wide than the differences between the French, English, Germans, and Italians. In my experience, the former Soviet block countries are pretty significantly different from those on our side of the Iron Curtain, but when an American says Europe they're probably not referring to anything east of Germany anyway.

You're talking about a different group of people. Back then, the only people who were online were relatively technical, which for whatever reason correlates with leaning libertarian (left or right). My theory is that the experience of identifying a solution to a problem, then being told it can't be implemented because someone with authority says "no" shakes one's belief in authority fundamentally.

Regardless, nowadays online, even in tech circles like this one, you have a much broader sample of the general population. In the case of HN, it's split more evenly than you'd expect from the general population between software developers, and tech entrepreneur types (or at least wannabes). The latter group is perfectly happy with oppressive power structures as long as they help them make money, and aspire to be the authority that says "no".

DMCA takedowns, if they were actually followed to the letter of the law, would be much better than the current system. What's supposed to happen is Party A posts a video that Party B thinks infringes on their copyright on Platform C. B sends a DMCA claim to C. C takes down the content, and sends A a copy of the claim. A decides to fight the takedown, sends a counter claim to C. C reinstates the content, and sends the counterclaim to B.

A and B now have each other's information, and are free to sue each other.

The problem with the status quo is that the platforms are taking full advantage of the slack given between receiving notice and taking action for counterclaims, but acting immediately on claims.

The separate account is, in fact, the way to do exactly this. Settings->System->Multiple Users->Add User. Follow the on screen prompts to set it up the second user with Parental Controls. Selecting which user to access the phone as is available on the lock screen.

This gives the identity brokers full insight into what sites you are visiting. Worse yet, it consolidates the information in one, easily leaned-on place: If I provide an ID to 3 non-Australian companies, sure, those companies know who I am, but the government or other companies would need to extract that information from each one. With an OAuth scheme, all that information is in one convenient place for the surveillance freaks.

Left vs. Right largely boils down to "are hierarchies good?". A quintessential far-right belief is the divine right of kings. The modern incarnation of that is that "The 1% earned their power and influence".

Now, there are far right people who want to dethrone the current powers that be. But distinguishing between "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because no one should have that much power over others" (left) versus "I think Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't be given unlimited power because he's a Jew" (right) is a useful distinction. One wants to eliminate the power structure, the other just wants different people in it.

OIDC is only barely more complicated than the minimum viable option for establishing someone's identity based on the word of a trusted third party.

User shows up at your login flow. You assign them a big random number identifying their user session (this is your "state")

User indicates an identity provider they'd like to use. You probably have a short list you trust.

You ask that provider for the configuration data.

You generate a big random number, that identifies this log in attempt as unique. This is your "nonce".

You send the user, along with the state and nonce, to the trusted third party. (at their "authorization endpoint")

The user proves to the trusted third party they are who they say they are. This isn't your problem.

The user comes back to you with a claimed state and a code (a big random number assigned by the trusted third party).

You check that the user's claimed state matches the state that you assigned them. This ensures that you end up authenticating the same user session as the one that started the login.

You then reach out to the third party directly (to their token endpoint), with state and code in hand, and ask them "yo, a user session with this state just claimed you sent them to me with this code. Who are they?".

And then the trusted third party sends back a token attesting "They are so and so".

The one superfluous step is that, according the spec, you're supposed to then verify the signature of that token. It is unclear to me why this is in the spec, since I just made an https request to the trusted third party. The entire security model here has assumed that trusted third party is trusted.

It doesn't need to work forever. You just need to delay your competitors long enough that you can IPO to great fanfare, and then leave retail investors holding the bag. Founders and big investors get to cash out, everyone else gets screwed.

Unions have a negative connotation in the US because the there is a lot of money in giving them one. The US union structure arose because they predate any legal protections. You don't need the law to protect you for a strike to kill a company, it just (mostly) prevents the spiraling violence that often would ensue.

Ah, I missed the difference between union shops and closed shops.

But that alternative of dissenting unions not striking is exactly the loss of leverage that I was talking about.

California has had a ban on noncompetes since the gold rush.