Hacker News Reader

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

According to what _Bentley_ posted it sounds as though there is a moral signal: some states that object to Israel consider it to be beneath their standards to participate in the Eurovision. This implies that those that do participate have no problem with what Israel does. That includes the Australians and the others mentioned earlier by _alphanerd_. Otherwise they too could just not participate.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

In a comment by _alphanerd_ in this subthread he points out that problematic states such as Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Australia are in the Eurovision.

Maybe Israel's neighbors object to that?

Or maybe they can't find bad enough musicians to get an entry together and are afraid of losing?

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

The New York Times does not agree with you:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Exactly. You don't see them blowing up ten year old girls. It's the power of love.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.

Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.

Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.

Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

I cannot see any comment in the immediate sub-thread making a distinction between explosives per se?

Certainly to me I don't see the difference between explosives supplied in a missile produced with US tax-subsidies to arms profiteers or explosives produced by someone else. Except that in the first case US voters have some control over the supply -- not much, but some.

The GP comment is clearly talking about the lack of precision or targeting. Here you may have a point if we consider absolute quantities instead of some relative measurement: a US-taxpayer-supplied-with-profits-to-a-private-company Hellfire missile fired into a refugee camp full of women and children might kill 10 obviously-innocent people for 1 presumed-to-be-a-terrorist-without-any-sort-of-trial person; whereas a pager bomb exploding might blow up the we-dont-know-yet-anything-but-he-was-in-Hezbollah and his ten-year old daughter.

If I were a moral simpleton I might argue that the Hellfire missile murders were worse than the pager murders.

But what do I know? After all hundreds of years of protocols and treaties and norms about this sort of thing are probably just old and in need of being re-envisioned by some clever code jockey.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

That's a good summary of the dangers of normalizing the actions that previously were the domain of only terrorists. The world works because most countries and people rejected amoral results-based reasoning and considered such actions in the light of another dimension: morality. It's difficult to define, but there was some sort of consensus. How long those agreements, formal and simply normative, will last remains to be seen. I do not look forward to their further erosion.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

I'd go further than that: the truth may be completely outside of the poles established by the stories concocted by involved parties.

frabbiton Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.

frabbiton Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with Americas

For context: In addition to supporting the idea of contact between America and Easter Island this is being presented as a rebuttal of the idea advanced in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" that there was a population crash.

frabbiton XMPP vs. Matrix

Also: what do we know about the people and institutions developing and promoting these standards and implementations?

We've seen the appointment of people with biographies suggesting affinity with US interests, for example Katherine Maher to the Signal Foundation (and the departure of the Moxie Marlinspike.)

I see a members list for the board overseeing the spec for Matrix, but does anyone know who they are[1]? And the spec is one thing, but who controls the development of the actually used clients and implementations?

Please note I am not imputing anything w.r.t. Matrix/Element etc, but if we're bothered to put effort into E2EE then it is probably worth thinking about this aspect in addition to whether the technical basis is sound. The historical record is clear on government attempts to influence things from that end.

I have the same sort of worries about GnuPG (and the SPoF that is the hard-working maintainer.)

Maybe E2EE is not of concern to the OP, in which case disregard the above.

1. https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board-elections/

frabbiton Michael Phelps is 14 feet tall

Not just LLMs. Search engines like Google based on spying for money.

frabbiton If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

Yes, you are articulating perfectly why the pampered, irrational and entitled Western middle-class are and will fail to meet any of the real world challenges we now face.

Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.

frabbiton If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

> Disabled ppl in us are living worse

> than disabled ppl in nl again due to

> car oriented infra.

Car-centered road and sidewalk design is hostile to wheelchair users, people with sight impairments, children, old people on so many fronts:

- noise from vehicular traffic

- the right to progess impeded at every block by having to wait until someone drives their horseless carriage

- the danger of crossing because the licensing process for the self-propelled horseless buggies does not select only for the reasonable and sane

Motonormativity is a loss for everyone except car manufacturers and oil companies.

Even the suckers driving them are cheating themselves out of exercise and experiencing the world.

frabbiton If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

We also raised a child without a car -- in North America. It is much more possible than most people claim.

I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical.

The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future.

Get a bike losers -- and use it.

frabbiton In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

To be more precise: this simplified history suggests a shared "lineage" back to the original UNIXes of all of BSDs (and hence Darwin and OSX) and of the GNU/Linux and other OSes https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/3202

So, "zero shared lineage" seems like a very strong statement.

frabbiton In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

Your statement seems very strong. Is Mac OS X not based on Darwin? Are you defining "lineage" in some way to only mean licensing and exclude the shared ideas (a kernel manipulating files)? Thanks for the "carcinisation" link.

frabbiton DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

What would you use instead of ACI?

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

Again, I'm not going to go searching the internet.

Yet you imply that others should do exactly that in order to take seriously your insinuation that actual bodily harm was incurred. If you have proof that someone was physically damaged by the blowing of the truck horns then it will a simple thing for you supply this information of which you have implied you are the possessor.

If you do not have it and have never had it then you could also help by just stating that, so that no one wastes their time.

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

That's not what I asked. I am asking whether there is even any serious claim (as opposed to your simple assertion) that someone's hearing was damaged.

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

Did the protests achieve anything besides re-affirming your perception that you live in a democracy?

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

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

Recently we've seen a functional alliance of those on the bottom half of the diagram.

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

They also used their horns in a densely populated area, which an ENT doctor confirmed exposed the citizens of Downtown Ottawa to volumes that can damage the inner ear.

Are there any actual examples of people making claims about going deaf due to the protests?

Doctors == generally low information value unless they have training in science or mathematics.

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

It was not tricky at all. CSIS (Canadian FBI equivalent) made it clear to concerned parties in government that there was no armed\violent threat[1], despite the official\reputable news media[2] claiming this repeatedly.

As regards your world of difference argument. Most of the important protests that have changed anything have involved not simple, passive attemtps to "draw awareness to a cause", but actually causing a good deal of deliberate loss of income, convenience, security and comfort. (see the suffragettes, the stonewall riots, the montgomery alabama lunch counter boycotts, chartists in 1848 etc).

The truckers, whether you agreed with them or not, were peaceful and intent on using that peaceful protest to force a change in their society. They were met with co-ordinated media defamation, the invocation of a power which should only be used in war time and the seizing of their supporters funds. Pretty much standard behavior for a Western democracy getting squeezed and needing to ditch the facade of democracy and revert to good old fashioned authoritarianism. It's never far from the surface.

1. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/csis-told-government-... 2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-rcmp-convoy-violence-1...

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

The Windsor bridge obviously had to be opened at any cost. US businesses and their representatives made it clear to the Canadian raw-resource suppliers that they needed to stop their silly little democratic protest.

frabbiton Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance

Doesn't HTTPS offer E2E _interception_?

A slip of keyboard I assume?

frabbiton Why You Want to Blur Your Home in Google Maps Street View and How to Do It

Sure, someone could simply walk or drive by your home and scope out where you live, but Google Maps lets them do it easily -- from their couch. Anyone with a phone or computer can do it.

So someone(s) is already interested enough in you that they are going to be thwarted by "oh noes, it`s not on google"?

Seems like a weak invitation to the weak-minded to destroy a useful visual aid to a navigation tool.

frabbiton I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton

Tell me this, do you ever open a book at all?

frabbiton The Basics of Legibility: A Short Guide for Non-Typographers

Fraktur typefaces were phased out (starting with an edict by the Nazis, of all things)

The popular association between Fraktur (and similar blackletter scripts) and rightwing-associated bands is ironic given the NAZI attempt to outlaw them as of Jewish origin: https://blog.waldenfont.com/2019/06/26/the-history-of-the-ol...

frabbiton BirdLingo: A birdsong learning game

Fantastic! Well done. As someone that is not a twitcher but is interested in knowing what I hear around me on a walk this was easy to use with a low effort entry point.