Hacker News Reader

cmpbon Police can’t demand you reveal your phone passcode then tell a jury you refused

In the US that would be a (search?) warrant which also comes from the judge during a police investigation and authorizes the police to get your phone's passcode under threat of prison time.

This particular case is different because the police did not get a warrant and instead just asked the guy to disclose (without a warrant), which he refused to do, then they tried to use that against the guy in court, which is a violation of the US constitution.

cmpbon U.S. declares more than 20 species extinct after exhaustive searches

>we Homo sapiens outcompeted them and made the world better (in someone’s point of view) for Homo sapiens

I think what's coming into focus for a lot of people nowadays (i.e. the last 50ish years w.r.t eco conservation) is the idea that we are actually making the world worse (for humans) - that actually making the world better for ourselves necessarily includes limiting or reversing our out-competition of other life. While it may not be noticeable to humans that a single species has been driven out (even just out of a region and not necessarily to full extinction) over the course of 10 or 50 or 500 years due to human activity, that does still represent a change to the established biodiversity, which (many people believe) is likely to be net-negative for humans.

Reasons for these beliefs likely vary according to people's experience and interaction with the physical world. Personally, I find great joy experiencing wildness and nature, and I worry that my daughter will not have that. Others might be concerned that the loss of species incurs the loss of some aspects of nature from which we might be able to learn - that there was an opportunity to better ourselves that is now gone forever.

cmpbon Asynchronous Programming in C#

>Prefer async/await over directly returning Task

This one seems questionable to me. I've never been bitten by any of the cons mentioned[1], and it's even noted that doing it this way does incur performance costs. I've learned over the years that if the code path is very prolific, it pays to avoid the async state machine.

I'm curious if others could expand on this one.

[1] https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/b...

cmpbon Username ending with MIME type format is not allowed

I'm going to have to find a way to work "naked domain" into my lexicon today, thanks!

cmpbon How did the plain green lawn become the central landscaping feature in America?

>it's the trees that are dangerous

This reads like a lawncare shill quote

cmpbon Hurricane Ida could be close to Cat 4, dump up to 20“ of rain in S.E. Louisiana

Yeah it is potentially a really bad situation right now in Louisiana. We have been getting our vax numbers up recently and the hospitalizations have started to come down in the past week or so, but not by much.

With catastrophic hurricanes, though, what I've noticed is that we have lots of refugees (and deaths, in the case of Katrina) compared to hospitalizations. New Orleans can also turn the large arena areas (e.g. Superdome, Zephyr Field) into mass casualty and refugee areas immediately following the storm, which should help with keeping the hospitals from getting overrun.

cmpbon FDA Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine

It's also possible that its approval will result in more people getting the vaccine due to those people now having an out from their initial reaction that it was rushed (but still sticking to their convictions up to now in order to avoid embarrassment).

cmpbon U.S. opens probe into Tesla’s Autopilot over emergency vehicle crashes

I disagree. One feature my car has is to pull me back into the lane when I veer out of it (Subaru's lane keep assist). That is still incremental improvement towards "full self driving". I agree, however, that Tesla's Autopilot is not functional enough, and any tool designed to allow humans to remove their hands from the wheel should not require their immediate attention in any way.

cmpbon Galois Groups and the Symmetries of Polynomials

Reaching Galois groups (and field extensions, rings, and other related tools) in class was the point in my math undergrad that I realized that math had become too subtle for my brain to easily comprehend. I quickly realized that I'd either have to start studying outside of class to learn the motivations and connections or accept that I would not be pursuing math as a career.

And that's when I got a job in software.

cmpbon Calculus Made Easy (1910)

I was a math tutor in college, and many of the tutees would come into the tutor lab completely downtrodden, dreading their homework. I found the most helpful thing I could do with them was to focus more on getting them to understand the motivation behind what they had gone over in class that day, and in particular saying things like "now why would we do this" as soon as I could see in their face that it was clicking. Getting them to understand the why (and getting them to feel like they understood the why) was incredibly effective for helping them feel less insecure when going to class.

cmpbon South Africa issues world’s first patent listing AI as inventor

We're a long way off from Star Trek's Data / "Measure of a Man" scenario, when the AI can fight for itself.

cmpbon Rainfall flooding is becoming an issue

>Houston is trying to adapt. ... developers are now required to practice a kind of “leave no trace” policy when it comes to rainfall—once ... as a result, alongside Houston’s ubiquitous parking lots, many new projects feature grassy flood pits.

There's a strong case to be made here for more community parks & woodland trails. They serve as extremely good water containment areas

cmpbon BirdNet – Identify Birds by Sound

Any comparison of PlantNet to iNaturalist[0] (regarding quality of the product / size of the community)? I use iNat frequently for identifying native plants and animals around the yard and it's been extremely helpful and active (I typically get at least one verification on each item I post, oftentimes two or three).

[0] https://www.inaturalist.org/

cmpbon Hubble telescope has new lease on life after computer swap appears to fix glitch

I see your point, but you could also argue that worst case scenario for atomic bomb malfunction is much more awful than worst case for JWST

cmpbon GitHub’s AI Copilot Might Get You Sued If You Use It

And yet they'll get shoehorned into our legal systems regardless. It seems like legal systems need a more adequate revising process, something to help refactor after all the shit we've shoved in over the decades

cmpbon GitHub’s AI Copilot Might Get You Sued If You Use It

Has that been proven? It's possible it's only doing that due to a small training set

cmpbon NDA expired, let’s spill the beans on a weird startup

Google turned up very little, please elaborate

cmpbon US-Canada heatwave 'virtually impossible' without warming

One thing you can still do is plant native plants. Almost all urban areas are virtually devoid of biodiversity and are breeding grounds for many invasive species which then spread out into other areas and choke out biodiversity elsewhere. If we want to prevent extinction, that's at least one avenue (out of many, undoubtedly) that should be taken.

cmpbon Garden Hermit

I imagine today's hermit would spend most of their time on their phone/tablet.

cmpbon Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350

Mayday, mayd 'THIS FRIDAY ON "AIR FIRE WATER MOUNTAIN RESCUE: ALASKA": "It sort of just fell from the sky!" - TUNE IN THIS FRIDAY AT 7 EASTERN'

cmpbon Hoover Dam reservoir hits record low, in sign of extreme western U.S. drought

Xeriscaping is fortunately starting to grow in popularity, but the majority of people I discuss it with are still surprised (and often insulted) at the idea of not having and maintaining the traditional grass monoculture.

cmpbon 'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77%

> How safe is this technology?

> It’s extremely safe. The EPA has done its due diligence and tested many of the potential side effects of this technology. The real question here is: What are the existing control mechanisms that are in place? This mosquito has been controlled using many different broad-spectrum insecticides in Florida, including pyrethroids that also kill honeybees, ladybugs, dragonflies and other insects. Pictures show aerial spraying of insecticides from airplanes over neighborhoods in Florida during the Zika virus outbreak in 2016. By comparison, Oxitec’s technology is extremely safe. It’s only going to target A. aegypti, and you’re using the mosquito to control the mosquito.

Wow, hell of a deflection. I am genuinely curious about the biotech company's perspective on the potential risks of what they're doing, and all they can say is that other methods have risks as well?

cmpbon Global Cactus Traffickers Are Cleaning Out the Deserts

There is a similar problem with native orchids in some states in the US. Many people who come across one in the wild will attempt to collect it, which prohibits the plant from reproducing in its natural range. And due to the rarity of these plants, it doesn't take many members of the species to be removed before the species begins to experience pressure. There are some attempts being made to reintroduce some of the more pressured species, e.g. https://www.centrallouisianaorchidsociety.org/cypripedium-st...

cmpbon MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

We’ve been with Azure for two years. This scale of an issue is definitely abnormal, but other minor outages (typically geo-specific) are more frequent, which is why we do have some things using their “paired regions” geo-redundancy mechanisms.

cmpbon Azure was having DNS issues

Which was also down until just a few moments ago. Seems like poor planning, but maybe it was just overloaded with requests

cmpbon One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin

I have similar memories of building shanties and lean-tos and things with my brother behind our house in the woods. I had always assumed it was my grandfather's land, but I only discovered recently that the logging company owns it. Not that they would care - they can't use it because it's protected due to the riparian habitat.

It sounds like our productions were a lot less involved than your "log cabin" though. Mostly just switches and young hollies tied together with briar vines to form a roof, occasionally with walls (built of the same materials).

cmpbon Great Man-Made River

To Lafitte wetland trace with the Louisiana Native Plant Society

cmpbon Great Man-Made River

I don't mean to be a wet-blanket with my comment, just to point out the potential negative impacts of human engineering, when such engineering is not well-thought-out.

We (in gulf south US) have had similar engineering projects with the Mississippi River (et al) over the course of the last couple of centuries. Largely the goal has been to keep the rivers from flooding their banks, which they are keen to do in various places, mostly yearly. The impetus for this is of course to aid in the development of major cities and keep farmlands productive.

What is happening as a result, however, is now known to be truly disastrous for my home state of Louisiana, where the adage is "Louisiana is losing a football field an hour"[0] due (in large part) to the levees preventing the sediment from the rivers from depositing along the coast and helping to keep the coastal marshes in place. There are other (secondary) ill effects as well, that are perhaps more subtle. I was on a native plant society field trip last week to study one of our more southerly "bottomlands" (mixed swamp/marsh/upland habitat). What we found is that many of the freshwater-wetland-specific trees are becoming severely unhealthy and/or dying due to the influx of brackish water (mixed salt/fresh) from the gulf/lakes in the area. This is largely due to the loss of sediment that normally would be deposited from the Mississippi river - that sediment helps to reform the uplands surrounding the bottomlands, and without it, other water sources are able to carve a path in. Some of this, of course, is natural, and part of how Louisiana's wetlands normally change over time, but they do seem to be changing more rapidly.

Fortunately, there is a large amount of interest among Louisianians to fix these problems. There are some more large engineering projects designed to undo some of this damage, specifically with projects to reroute the sediment to where its needed (aka diversions)[1]. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to stop and maybe reverse the damage being done

[0] https://www.nola.com/news/environment/article_3128024a-cc03-... [1] https://coastal.la.gov/midbarataria/

cmpbon Tasks, microtasks, queues and schedules (2015)

I didn't realize why my browsers (Firefox, iOS Safari) were correctly handling the tests, despite the article indicating they were not compliant. Then I realized the article is from 2015.

The content is still really useful, though. A good understanding of JS tasks & microtasks and HTML jobs is really useful for diagnosing the inevitable front-end weirdness encountered during development when using any of the major frontend frameworks (which contain a lot of abstraction that separates the developer from these lower-level facets).

cmpbon Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit

>Source code is a red herring here

If there were a way to ensure that the test suite applied to these forensic labs was all-encompassing w.r.t. the genetic variables at play, then maybe. But that sounds impossible. What if there's a coding error that causes the software to operate differently/incorrectly only for people with a certain (rare) genetic abnormality?

For what it's worth, I'm totally unversed in genetics, though I have a great deal of experience writing software tests (and seeing them come up short in adequately modelling real-world data).