ythn

> One should be allowed to alter one's own consciousness any way one sees fit.

And to what degree is one accountable for the things they do in pursuit of and under the influence of altered consciousness?

Yeah but if a neighborhood kid with a lockpick breaks into your house, installs cryptomining sw on your computers, laughs at how weak your lock is, admonishes you to spend more money in better security, what will you do? Take his advice and buy a better lock?

Couldn't you theoretically escape a planet's gravity without going into orbit? I mean, gravity weakens by the square of distance, so it wouldn't be long before Earth didn't have much influence on you

> Possession of information of any kind should not be illegal, as information is in and of itself not harmful;

And how does one come to possess information without creating or receiving (distributing) it?

You'd still need to know that the number is a base 256 encoded string, and the chances you run across such a number in an innocent context (i.e. math publication) seems infinitesimal.

Someone who knowingly hosts a base-256 encoded secret should be held as accountable as if they had hosted the same information in picture form, morse code form, or plaintext.

Large numbers can mean anything depending on how you interpret them. If you provide the means (metadata) to interpret a given large number as illegal information (state secret, crypto key, etc.), why shouldn't that be illegal?

> If from a completely different domain, someone who has no relationship whatsoever to the maintainer of that first site creates a page explaining how DVD players contain AES keys and then links

The link is the illegal metadata. It's fine to explain that DVD players use cryptographic keys. It's fine to explain how said keys work. It's fine to have a list of prime numbers on your website for fun. It's not okay to link the two together. The link itself is exactly the type of illegal metadata I'm talking about.

Any type of pointing, eyebrow wiggling, coughing, etc. providing people with metadata on why certain numbers have cryptographic significance for a particular product is not okay (in my opinion).

> That description can be embedded in the number. If you use ASCII it’ll be pretty obvious.

In that case, the knowledge that information is encoded in that specific number and the drawing attention to that fact is the illegal metadata. In other words, numbers are just numbers - until you draw attention to specific numbers with metadata, that's when you cross the line.

If you make a website with a prominently displayed huge prime number with flashing lights and arrows, you've added illegal metadata that says "try decoding me" or "I am probably a cryptographic key to something"

In my opinion, I don't think it's the number itself that's illegal, but the metadata that you attach to it.

"11234349387298245791029384857" may or may not be an illegal number. Nobody cares and mathematicians can use it to their heart's content. That is, until I attach the metadata to it: "This number is the AES key embedded in every YthnVideo Disc Player". Now it's illegal. Number = legal. Number + metadata = illegal.

At least, that's how it should be.

Seems like you could still "downgrade" via an upgrade:

1. Disable firmware digital signature verification (not sure if this is at the hardware level or not)

2. Modify the older firmware such that its reported version is newer than your current version

3. "upgrade" to the older firmware version

> The reason they prevent downgrades are to reduce support costs, to ensure broad compatibility, and because of security flaws in older versions

That's a reason, not the reason. I'm sure you can think of many other reasons a company would want to prevent downgrades that they won't tell you because it's "user hostile".

For example, say an exploit is found in the Nintendo Switch that allows arbitrary code execution. People use that to load emulators, homebrew games, pirated games, you name it into their Switch console. Nintendo does not like this, so they force an upgrade on everyone, lock it from being downgraded, and now anyone who upgraded can no longer do that. They'll chalk it up to security of course, because what company will flat out say they don't want their users to have the ability to run unsigned code on "their" device?

Maybe women and people of color just perceived SO as a more hostile place because they imagined the person on the other side of the keyboard as a white male (true or not) and took it as an attack on their gender/race, forgetting that they are anonymous.

Yeah I'm talking more from a company incident perspective. Say you have a reformed felon who committed rape. In an on-site position, they may relapse and rape an attractive coworker. However, in the remote case, you can't rape female employees if you don't know where they live.

Seems like places that have remote employees would be perfect for hiring reformed felons. If I ever made a company as successful as GitLab I would have no qualms hiring this guy for remote work. Nothing wrong with hiring them for non-remote work, just saying the liability is even lower.

The problem is that proponents of mass immigration frame it as "either you are for mass immigration, or you are for the slaughtering/suffering/starvation/etc. of refugees in war torn areas"

There are alternate front-ends that use HN's backend you can use. Such as:

https://vue-hn.now.sh/item/16893581

Reminds me of an anecdote Richard Feynman had in his book on the Brazilian education system [1]. Basically, the students could memorize crap from books but didn't really comprehend what they were learning, such that when Feynman would ask a question such as "if I hold a glass of water in front of this picture, what will it look like?" they couldn't answer. But if he asked "What is the refractive index of water?" they would answer instantly.

[1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Is it even possible to be completely unbiased?

I wonder though if you could do "regenerative braking" in electric planes, i.e. spin up a flywheel anytime you descend, and then tap that energy next time you want to ascend. Doesn't really make sense for planes that cruise at altitude, but could make sense for hobby craft.

> The planes are zero emission aircraft running on lithium ion batteries

How heavy is that battery pack??

I generally agree that we as a society need to be more forgiving of people's pasts. The #MeToo fad is more about bringing justice to offenders that escaped justice in the past, but this guy didn't get off scot-free for years like Weinstein, Spacey, etc. This case seemed like a one off thing where he made some poor choices and was punished by the legal system for it.

You're right, the analogy is not good. I was more thinking about making an app for fun that solves some problem, makes you and your users a little money on the side, mostly intended for teenagers/college students, etc., but then the masses move into to squeeze every last cent out of it and I get demonized and accused of exploiting workers, etc, when it was never meant to be a life-sustaining employment opportunity to begin with.

I.e. "biting the hand that feeds you" syndrome. Can't we just make cool things that don't require you to give 401k matching to everyone who touches your cool thing?

Again, maybe this doesn't apply to Uber and they totally could be giving full benefits to all drivers, etc., but I'm just saying in general

> AKA have no rights or security as an employee ever anywhere.

I get what you are saying, but somehow this attitude also rubs me the wrong way sometimes.

It's like "Hey, I'll pay anyone a nickle per piece of trash they pick up in the local forests"

Soon: "NiceNature is the worst company ever! They exploit their workers to pick up garbage without proper protection, the employees have no rights or securities and are forced to pee on trees because no bathrooms are provided! Worst of all, they aren't even paid a living wage! /u/ythn is the worst CEO ever, he gluts himself off of the labors of the socioeconomicly desperate!"

Like, all I really wanted was to fix a problem I saw with our local forests, not become a human trafficker...

I wish it said that kind of thing in the changelogs more often (in general). I would be much more eager to download updates if I knew the app was getting slimmer, and not fatter.

On a side note, I'm annoyed Skype now forcibly updates itself on app launch. I have no idea how big that app is getting but I just assume it's slowly getting bigger and bigger.

I'm not saying all regulation is bad. But some regulation is has a major stifling effect on innovation and startups simply because the cost of compliance is too high for new players (but manageable for established big boys).

But they are the champions of security and safety

To me it seems like Yet Another Barrier To Entry For Tech Startups (TM). I remember the good old days (re: 10 years ago) when you could make all sorts of cool things without being bogged down by regulations. I guess that era is over (at least for certain categories of tech like search engines).

Also, your right to be forgotten seems to be infringing on my right to remember.

Well, the alternative to PGMs is a lot more collateral damage. Want to take out that bridge? Carpet bomb or dive bomb and hope too many civilians/pilots don't die. Want to take out that factory? Carpet bomb or dive bomb and hope too many civilians/pilots don't die.

With PGMs you can take out a bridge with pinpoint accuracy in the middle of the night and nobody dies at all (directly, at least).

"tragedy of the commons"

I as a freelance developer sometimes make releases whose sole purpose is to refactor/slim down/increase performance with no new features. Yeah, some of my users are disappointed I didn't prioritize X feature they wanted, but it helps mitigate tragedy of the commons a little.

Individually the users are well-meaning with their feature wants/needs, but collectively all the different feature requests can turn your app into a bloated monstrosity if you aren't careful.

So you're saying something like UBI could turn America into social media/streaming entertainment zombies...

But wouldn't that make the entertainment industry explode?