mcbits

You speak as if "HN" is some dude with multiple personality disorder.

Active illumination isn't always safe. Russians in Ukraine have (or at least at one point had) a conundrum where if they turn on the radar to detect incoming HIMARS missiles then the radar gets targeted by HARM missiles.

In a domestic authoritarian context, an herbal extract salesman could detect when illumination is shone on the house in preparation for a heist.

At a minimum, passive radar could be useful to augment more conventional types of cameras in a home security system, especially for someone with acres of land with a lot of trees, etc.

I think the best rule of thumb for UI animations is to keep speeding them up until users stop praising the beautiful/elegant animations. They shouldn't notice the animations.

> Is there context missing?

Yes. The missing part is that when every customer is technically violating one or more policies, they can pick and choose who to target without further justification. Like discretionary traffic enforcement, they're not going to "fine" everyone who sells a Snoop Dogg CD, but they can keep the option in their back pocket as a pretext.

As long as you and your neighbors all had the same understanding (in writing) before buying the property, that's fine.

It's not something that should be foisted on people after they own their property, since "you're free to move your whole life and family somewhere that allows parking on the lawn (or hanging laundry, etc) if you don't like my new rule" is rarely practical or reasonable.

If someone has a lung tumor and the immune system is coaxed into killing/eating the cancerous cells, what happens after that? Is the lung able to fill in the gap with new healthy cells, or can the patient end up with a big hole in their lung?

That's what they get for using cupric oxide. At this point they should rebuild it from scratch in ferric oxide.

It's not as if corner stores are banned, but zoning restrictions have that effect in many places.

Maybe stars are the Dyson spheres, and their emissions are the waste energy that wasn't worth harvesting.

> People murder to get cocaine. When’s the last time anyone murdered for Starbucks?

If people could buy cocaine at Starbucks (or get cheap stuff at a dollar store), would supply be such a problem for users that they resort to crime?

If caffeine were banned tomorrow and prices rose a thousand-fold, to what lengths would millions of addicts go to postpone the dreaded headache, constipation and lethargy for another day?

> Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it.

In other words, a small self-hosted email server will be considered a spammer until it starts sending out large amounts of email? Maybe that can be automated...

No need to burn it down. Just buy a bunch of gift cards for the bar and hand them out to people recently released from jail for drunk & disorderly conduct. If the bar is trying to optimize for maximum traffic at the expense of all other quality metrics, surely they won't mind.

You're carving out a definition to fit intuitive inferences gleaned by observing instances of "sandwich" and "not-sanwich" labeled by influential people in your life who had no objective reasons for constructing and perpetuating those categories in the first place.

If the reproduction rate is kept low enough for an extended time, the virus eventually extinguishes itself. With vaccination, "self-vaccination" among the uncooperative, sanitation, testing, contact tracing, and some fraction of the population continuing to take personal measures, the combination can bring the rate down low enough.

It can and will be eradicated, and eventually the flu along with it (which was already a high research priority before Covid). Just not soon.

It already coexisted with a host: bats. If we're going to anthropromorphize the virus, maybe it's searching for a way to kill off one of the biggest predators of its preferred host.

If true, that would be an embarrassing oversight in the study as well as possibly #1 in one of those "Top 10 accidental scientific discoveries that changed everything" articles.

Where Covid vaccination could work (remains to be seen) is if, combined with other mitigation measures, it brings the effective reproduction rate down low enough and for long enough to eradicate the virus. Problem is, the long tail can last for years, and every time the goal has been within grasp, people would see the falling numbers and assume that meant it was already over. Vaccination makes that less of a problem.

Polio and MMR vaccines aren't 99.9999% effective, either. More like 80-99%. A breakthrough is extremely unlikely because you're not likely to be exposed to those viruses at all anymore. But it took decades to reach this point.

> what do I do when there’s a hurricane and no power for weeks

If I ever (can afford to) buy an electric car, this is actually the strongest selling point for me. It's enough of a reservoir to keep my most important electronics powered up for weeks.

Maybe more benign or more malignant among them, or maybe more benign or more malignant among us, yes. Or they may reach literal herd immunity before any significant mutations get established.

> when police jam cameras at protests they just use bright visible strobes

Ironically then the story just goes from "here police are brutalizing the people protesting brutality" to "and also being childish with their flashlights." Bright lights aren't nearly as blinding to large-sensor cameras with good lenses as they are to cheap cell phone cameras.

VAERS shows more than 15,000 cases of COVID-19 reported after vaccination. Are we to conclude that they got COVID-19 "from" the vaccine?

Hypothesis: The accompanying text in people's posts sharing the link got flagged, but Facebook's system doesn't differentiate between that and flagging the link itself. It just sees the link being repeatedly flagged and failing whatever fact-checking procedure they have.

They've archived past weekly reports going back to 1999-2000 (not sure if that's when the weekly report started or just when the archive starts), although the formatting and specific information has changed over the years. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/pastreports.htm

Put two iron pellets on a very thin, flexible fabric. Underneath the fabric, put a magnet so each pellet is stuck to one pole of the magnet through the fabric. Tug the magnet "down" in the third dimension, which will fold the fabric and move the pellets so that from their perspective (stuck to the 2D surface of the fabric) they're moving far away from each other. They also maintain a constant and very short distance in the third dimension, but they can't take advantage of it because I forgot to mention the fabric is impervious to them.

This is why I think AGPL is a reasonable default for personal projects where the dev doesn't want to fuss over licenses or sue anyone, but would be uncomfortable with $BigCorp exploiting their work. Even though it doesn't explicity prohibit them from using it, it tends (or tended) to have that effect.

Nobody ever argued that molecules of air and ink have some duty to participate in enforcing laws prohibiting various types of speech and the press, I guess because it was never possible. Bits and bytes are rapidly supplanting ink and air for many types of communication, and they do make it possible to censor those communications at a deeper level than ever before.

So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?

I'm not sure how to track the history of US code, but it looks like that law didn't exist until 2012.

Open source isn't just a label. If the label is a lie and the product is not actually open source, that's a separate issue.

Assuming the product is actually open source, the important question to answer is the same as if it's closed: How do you plan to make money? As to why it's open/closed source, any answer just leads back to "and how will you make money?" Neither licensing model is inherently going to make money.

But I have to agree, an answer like "because 'open source' attracts investors" is a red flag. Investors are the means to an end, not the end itself.