ble

Read a little further down and the description has a different character: the Imperial Japanese Army showed, at best, an indifference to the lives of Japanese and indigenous civilians in Okinawa. Worse than the indifference, they propagandized civilians to believe that the Americans would rape, murder, and torture them and encouraged them to commit suicide or to launch suicide attacks and otherwise tried to maneuver civilians into harm's way.

At the time it probably did look like civilians were being turned into defensive soldiers- in the fullness of time, I think it looks more like a desperate and cruel army brutalizing a civilian population, sometimes pushing them into harm's way. I'd also presume that the treatment of the civilian population was worse for indigenous Okinawans-- maybe even today Okinawans can find themselves treated as 'not real Japanese'.

It's been a while since I read 'Embracing Defeat' but I recall its summary of the state of Japan towards the end of the war and a lecturer saying, in effect, that nobody had to invade Japan to cause the deaths of millions, the supply chain (Asian mainland colonies collapsing) / labor (men at all near military age gone to war and many of them dead or captured) / agricultural situation was so dire that the U.S. could have set a blockade and millions of Japanese would have died with 0 fighting.

The counter-argument to the necessity of the bombs is basically that the U.S. knew Japan could not effectively resist and though the U.S. might not have had a way of guessing, the highest levels of Japanese government were already in the process of discussing when and how to surrender right around the time the bombs were dropped. IIRC about the emperor's message of surrender, the bombs may have made it easier for the emperor to preserve face when surrendering, as such weapons make it easier to justify a surrender as a positive action.

What evidence is there, other than propaganda on both sides, that the Japanese were ready to use old people and children in a military defense?

Thank you for this context! I left the article curious to better understand the author's particular frame.

While the author may draw some questionable or disputable conclusions, I think he is aware that different parts of the city and different parts of NoVA look very different; it seems like it's part of the point of going for a walk to make these observations.

Is there a reason that you think Northwest is a better reflection of "DC proper"? Anacostia and Benning are very much inside the city limits- they can't represent what most of Northwest is like and vice versa Northwest can't stand in for them.

> Yeah it makes the people across the river pretty uncomfortable. They like to have their abstract model of a poor victim they support but that often doesn’t jive with reality. Most of them wouldn’t even dare walk through that neighborhood.

Do you personally know people like this? It sounds like you're making some pretty broad generalizations and imagining (not wholly inaccurately!) how some people act and think.

I appreciate your moderation and I've attempted something reparative: a much more substantive and engaging response.

I hope the piece wasn't a total turn-off for you. "Uptight" is a subjective judgment and a comparative judgment but I think the author is hitting on something real - though different people might perceive or phrase it in different ways.

Do you think Alexandria might feel uptight compared to Anacostia and Benning Road? The author is partly expressing a comparative judgment - that's kind of the point, going for a walk in a much poorer black neighborhood vs strolling past the perimeter of Old Town Alexandria.

One expression of what I might call "uptightness" that you might hear from DC area residents is an overt fear of even driving through certain DC neighborhoods (or maybe even Southeast as a whole!), as if they were active war zones and not just a place where the signs of low social maintenance and low-income lives of black people are unmistakably visible. It makes sense, the crime stats are worse; most people have no reason to visit these neighborhoods and see what they're like; everyone has heard stories about how bad DC was decades ago and these neighborhoods hold the bad reputation.

In my opinion, people being "uptight" in this way is a mix of "common sense" (maybe it doesn't reflect reality, but if people act like it does they really pay no price) and "hysteria" (other people told me I ought to be extremely afraid, so I will be). [scare quotes added to emphasize that these are my subjective judgments and, imo, inescapably subjective.]

You are doing a wonderful job of letting someone be wrong on the internet.

As a native of the DC area familiar with one of these neighborhoods and living right next to the other, the author's descriptions are pleasantly familiar to me.

The author seems eager to fit the neighborhoods into his sociological and political analysis so some parts seem reductive but he's rather overt and honest about it. The author seems impressed with his social analysis and political opinions and I'm glad he has them but not sure how much I agree.

In my positive assessment, it doesn't hurt that I agree with some of his general sentiments: Anacostia is mostly homey and run-down, not brimming with menace; Crystal City is dominated by the offices of corporations and doesn't have much going for it, e.g.

people who are the opposite of uptight are usually okay with unimportant disagreements, like letting other people be wrong in their harmless opinions.

> The world does not turn on elite cultural panic.

Hear hear! I feel it should be said as a bookend: elite media discourse _does_ turn on elite cultural panic.

Thanks for the link, this is a much clearer example of how prototype pollution can be an important vector.

As another commenter noted, if one can directly inject literal JS code that writes to __proto__, you've already got RCE.

The case where prototype pollution happens without arbitrary RCE looks like:

- User input can set arbitrary fields of an object and its properties, allowing the user to add or alter a field on a `__proto__` that references a widely-shared prototype;

- The existence or value of that field non-locally affects other code which assumes that the prototype is not under user control.

The history of 'scientific' human eugenics is absolutely full of controversies and links to controversial things like involuntary sterilization campaigns, genocides, etc.

Oddly, people tend to get touchy when someone starts trying to provide justifications that decide who will live well, poorly, or not at all.

Interesting that ships turning off their AIS transponders can still be picked up from their radio or naval radar signals from orbit.

It seemed a bit extreme that the single satellite RF detection and localization technique referenced in the article would get classified by the U.S. government -- it's presumably a beamformed angle & doppler measurement going into a detection algorithm which is aware of the motion of the satellite platform, which is cute but not groundbreaking -- but at the same time it's probably a very inexpensive technology for space-based surveillance of RF emitters, which has obvious national security ramifications.

smallsat = cheap

cheap = affordable for smaller nation states

RF emitters = many military assets

I suppose you're right, though I'd call it less "fealty" and more "relevance".

In this case, it looks like the discussion in the comments flies to a subject that people feel they have familiarity with (satellite imagery) instead of what is actually contained in the article (satellite RF detection) and thus the conversation on the article strongly suggests that the community is _not_ assimilating any information from the article.

I suppose I should be the "candle" and just talk about RF detection rather than "cursing the darkness".

I see a few comments where people refer exclusively to satellite imagery despite the fact that this story is about RF-detection satellites.

Has Hacker News ever flirted with a "commenter did not read the linked story / page but is pretending they did" vote feature? There's obviously room for abuse even if it were limited to "reputable" users but I would use it on some comments on this item.

It would be a shame if politicians got some Politics in our politics. /s

I can imagine some GOP senators voting for this bill but I feel I have to get pretty imaginative to imagine it passing.

After reading Rampersad's biography of Ellison, I feel like I'll eventually pick the book that this piece reviews. I'm not sold on the idea that Rampersad's biography was being wholly unfair to Ellison, at least on the subject of pointing out the gulfs or differences between him and Black writers who rose to acclaim after him.

The distinction between different kinds of time is really pretty key to having a clear understanding.

Civil time is different from atomic time and different from sidereal time or solar time.

Civil time is how people, businesses, and governments organize and plan their activities.

Atomic time is monotonic, physical, and "more objective" / less dependent on legislatures :)

Sidereal time is about the orientation of Earth relative to stars. It's really important if you're an astronomer.

UTC is a civil time standard based closely on TAI, an atomic time standard, except it gets corrected to be within 1 second of UT1, a sidereal time standard. It is basically _the_ civil time standard and it is a little compromise to make a civil time that advances like atomic time but also does not desync from sidereal time.

Different administrative regions use offsets from UTC to determine their local civil time.

If you're writing an application where people plan future activities and you really want to "get things right / not surprise users", you probably need to store times in the appropriate civil time standard, make it apparent _which_ civil time standard is canonical per activity if people are being coordinated across administrative regions that do not synchronize their standards, and ensure that your application can find out about planned changes to civil time in any of the administrative regions of interest.

"Downlink into AWS" would be a clearer name. This is just about passing your data down from orbit and getting it into AWS.

I'd like to think Shotwell et. al already have a pretty well established convention as to how much Musk is allowed to intervene directly in operation and decision-making.

He can pretend that he knows better than automotive engineers but I think his self-awareness is better calibrated when it comes to rocketry.

SpaceX is not a public company so I don't see how a ban would affect Musk w/ r.t. SpaceX.

also, otoh: think about the good things that could happen to $TSLA when Elon is removed from being a CEO.

Peer review can't fix broken incentives.

Why indeed. The article also stated that Google had twice attempted to broker access to the dataset and twice been turned away.

I'm of the opinion that the complexity of possible human behavior and phenomena is too great to allow for some experiments to be replicated and controlled.

There are some scientific facts about humans that you can establish because you can do a replicated, controlled experiment and there are others that you can't, for ethical (no one should allow this experiment to be done) or material reasons (this experiment is very easy to conduct assuming you have multiple copies of the planet earth).

>There is really no excuse for them not trying to replicate each others studies this whole time

I think that this statement fails to account for the incentives for researchers: what kind of things they get success, praise, and support for doing. Despite their importance to the scientific project of any field, replicating experiments and publishing negative results are not rewarded the way that new studies with positive results are.

Can you substantiate this claim? "Doctors and lawyers who strategically go bankrupt to avoid paying student debt" sound like made up boogeymen... boogeymen who perfectly justify parts of the US' 2005 bankruptcy reform.

The federal government of the United States of America.

I feel like your question is supposed to be making a rhetorical point but it has an extremely literal answer as of a few years ago.

It sounds like you have a hard time putting yourself in this person's shoes.

Why are you using a 6-year old account to (not quite) anonymously request assistance with your personnel concern? I'm not going to try to find out who you are or who your employee is, but you are doing yourself no favors by using a non-throwaway account.