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sjducb

1,162 karma · joined July 17, 2021

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sjducb··on Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays
Lots of countries in the EU care more about civilian deaths than the US. However the US cares a lot more than Russia.
sjducb··on Why Do the Police Exist? (2020)
Agreed that sounds like wasteful spending. When that SWAT team finally gets a callout they’re going to go hard and use excessive force.

The US spends 135 billion on its police force so some wasteful spending is going to happen.

Defund the police people would spend that money on something unrelated to law enforcement.

I would spend it on something useful and law enforcement related like more training for officers.

sjducb··on Why Do the Police Exist? (2020)
I could see them operating from my home office window. There is a corner where two roads and a footpath cross. It’s a walkable neighbourhood so there is a lot of foot traffic. A daycare center is about 50 meters away.

Every afternoon one of the men would be standing at the corner selling drugs. People would walk up to the man to buy the drugs. They worked a rotation but there were about 4 regular dealers at my crossroads.

The first few times I walked past by myself they tried to sell me drugs. Then they knew I was not a customer and ignored me or greeted me politely.

One of them was very chatty and I had to explain to my daughter that we don’t trust him even though he is friendly because he makes bad choices. County lines gangs are involved in human trafficking as well as drug dealing.

Every dealer I saw on that corner was from an ethnic minority background. Usually county lines drug dealers live in London and commute out to where they sell their drugs. This is why the ethnicity of the gang does not match the local population.

I sincerely hope that you never experience anything like this.

sjducb··on Why Do the Police Exist? (2020)
I know they’re drug dealers because they tried to sell me drugs.

The English countryside is over 95% white. It’s obvious when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over and start selling drugs.

The police put a stop to it and we are all very grateful.

sjducb··on Why Do the Police Exist? (2020)
There used to be county lines drug dealing outside my house.

County lines drug dealing is where organised gangs in London send people out to deal drugs in small towns outside London. It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.

2 years ago the police did a massive crackdown and the county lines drug dealers disappeared. County lines drug dealers haven’t come back and now there is no obvious public drug dealing in my neighbourhood.

The police do a difficult job and they are fantastic at it.

https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/over-1-800-arrested-wit...

sjducb··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
MS Co-Pilot was so close.

If it’s a drive‑through wash where the car must be inside the machine, then of course you’ll need to drive it over. If it’s a hand wash or a place where you leave the car with staff, walking is the clear winner.

It still blows my mind that this technology can write code despite unable to pass simple logic tests.

sjducb··on Ring owners are returning their cameras
What did the ad say? I didn’t watch the Superbowl.
sjducb··on Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
This could be a useful tool for putting self hosted Bitcoin in a will.

If you self host then die no one can access your coins. Lawyers don’t want to be trusted with copies of secret phrases because of liability if the bitcoin gets stolen. If you encrypt the bitcoin recovery info across several files you can give part to the lawyer and part to different beneficiaries.

sjducb··on Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments
The first week of my PHD was accurately copying DNA sequences from an old paper into a computer file. 10 pages in total. I used OCR to make an initial version then text to speech to check it

76 pages is a couple of months of work

sjducb··on How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.

However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/tre.372?msoc...

sjducb··on How to carry more than your own bodyweight (2025)
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
sjducb··on Doubting U.S. resolve, Europe looks to bolster its own nuclear arsenal
The UK has nukes and sucks up to trump. I think it’s the personality of the leader that matters.
sjducb··on Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?
People forget that a billion rows isn’t big data anymore.
sjducb··on Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?
Cutting people off because you disagree politically is new. I remember having friends in different political parties when I was younger. (20 years ago)
sjducb··on Parental controls aren't for parents
From the original comment

> lied and deceived extensively to gain access to devices, and repeatedly sacrificed relationships and trust for more screen time

It’s not about truth, it’s about lying to gain access to devices. Lying to gain access is a type of theft therefore stealing.

sjducb··on Parental controls aren't for parents
The problem is that most parents are not competent to assess the risk. The environment is different to the one we grew up in.
sjducb··on Parental controls aren't for parents
They are lying and stealing from their parents to “scroll instagram”
sjducb··on Parental controls aren't for parents
I’ve set up a gaming raspberry pi for mine too. I suspect it only works for little kids. Someday they’ll realise that supertux isn’t cool
sjducb··on Python numbers every programmer should know
The main reason why is to keep a handle on complexity.

When you’re in a project with a few million lines of code and 10 years of history it can get confusing.

Your data will have been handled by many different functions before it gets to you. If you do this with raw lists then the code gets very confusing. In one data structure customer name might be [4] and another structure might have it in [9]. Worse someone adds a new field in [5] then when two lists get concatenated name moves to [10] in downstream code which consumes the concatenated lists.

sjducb··on Python numbers every programmer should know
It’s missing the time taken to instantiate a class.

I remember refactoring some code to improve readability, then observing something that was previously a few microseconds take tens of seconds.

The original code created a large list of lists. Each child list had 4 fields each field was a different thing, some were ints and one was a string.

I created a new class with the names of each field and helper methods to process the data. The new code created a list of instances of my class. Downstream consumers of the list could look at the class to see what data they were getting. Modern Python developers would use a data class for this.

The new code was very slow. I’d love it if the author measured the time taken to instantiate a class.

sjducb··on Sabotaging Bitcoin
There is an advantage because occasionally you find the second block while the first block is still secret, then you release the two blocks in quick succession. That’s the edge.
sjducb··on Staying ahead of censors in 2025
On day one the UKs porn ban was used to censor political speech.

Discussion and images of the protests around migrant hotels were age restricted because they contained adult content (racist content, fighting and burning things).

This age restriction meant that only logged in, age verified, users could see the content. Loads of adults are not age verified.

This is censorship of the news and political speech.

sjducb··on The Deviancy Signal: Having "Nothing to Hide" Is a Threat to Us All
When people say they have nothing to hide I like to remind them about fraud and criminals.

All law abiding citizens have data that they want to hide from fraudsters.

Fraudsters often get their hands on government data through breeches and bribery.

Also fraudsters pretend to be government agents to get data from big tech companies. So any channel that governments use to get data from tech companies is abused by fraudsters to commit crime.

Fraud is a very big deal. The UK economy loses 219 billion per year to fraud. Our national deficit payment is 93 billion per year and we spend 188 billion on the NHS.

If we improved privacy of all of our citizens then the savings from fraud reduction would cover our entire government deficit

sjducb··on Twins reared apart do not exist
It seems surprising that IQ would not be heritable. Literally everything else is heritable.

Height, skin colour, sporting ability, body weight, eye colour, cancer risk, most disease risk, beauty.

Why would IQ be mostly random when other things are very heritable?

Occums razor says pick the simplest hypothesis that explains the data. The onus is on the blank slate crew to find some good data to demonstrate that IQ is not mostly heritable.

sjducb··on Doxers posing as cops are tricking big tech firms into sharing people's data
I think we need a law that government agencies must support out of band identity proofing.

The root of the problem is that government agencies can request personal details and if the tech company fails to comply then the tech company is sanctioned. However the government agency forces the tech company to provide details in an insecure way often over email. If the tech company tries to demand reasonable security then the law enforcement agency views this as non-compliance and starts the sanctions.

sjducb··on How does a "you interview for US company, we do the work" scam work?
I think they will create fake candidate identities. So you’re just the person who passes the interview for them. You might find that you spend most of the time interviewing and fill many positions per year. Providing lots of work for Indian developers.

Obviously it’s fraud so don’t do it.

sjducb··on Jury trials scrapped for crimes with sentences of less than three years
Keir and Lammy want to jail Palestine action and extinction rebellion protestors. Juries keep acquitting peaceful protesters.

Juries are a great safety measure for bad law. This is why they have been vital for the last 600 or so years.

sjducb··on Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable
Synonyms rarely have identical meanings for example:

Happy: Joyful, cheerful, merry, delighted

Or

Beautiful: Lovely, pretty, attractive

The only truly identical synonym I can think of is flammable and inflammable

sjducb··on Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.

The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.

Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.

sjducb··on Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders
Yes many contracts contain unenforceable or unactionable clauses that are superseded by common law. This is an example of that.

For example a tennant can sign a lease that says they have no notice period before eviction. If they’re in a state with a 30 day minimum notice period then the notice period is 30 days. It doesn’t matter what the contract says.

Google would comply with the US court order and ignore the contract it signed with Israel.

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