Hacker News Reader

dbsmith83on Appeals court rules White House likely overstepped 1st Amendment on social media

Deciding what constitutes "misinformation" is highly subjective and can lead to censorship of diverse opinions. A government empowered to regulate speech based on content risks suppressing valid dissenting voices. While misinformation can be dangerous, attempting to police speech can lead to unintended consequences and threaten democratic principles. Instead, a better approach is to provide accurate information, promote critical thinking, and foster open debate. Maintaining individual freedom for everyone across the country is more important than the lives of a few people who choose to follow misinformation.

dbsmith83on AOL pretends to be the internet

Ahh good memories. This is how me and a friend got into programming. We would constantly feud though because he used VB, but I used delphi. Clearly, I was using the superior language :)

dbsmith83on ‘I've got nothing to hide’ and other misunderstandings of privacy (2007)

> He added: “As I say, who gives a f***.” (sic)

I don't understand your point. You both said the exact same thing: "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey", except you also said the guy added "Who gives a fuck?" which basically means "who cares?". Does adding a "who cares?" make the originally phrase much different?

dbsmith83on The inescapable rise of moral superiority

I've been noticing this a lot too. When I was younger in the earlier days of the internet, it always seemed like it was the religious ones who were judging everyone and demanding they accommodate their beliefs and moral outrages. Nowadays, there is a new crowd that doesn't even go to church but is somehow worse. It's the new religion

dbsmith83on When did people stop being drunk all the time?

I'll just leave this here before you continue spouting more nonsense

Harmful effects of nicotine

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/

I'm sure even a cursory search for caffeine will reveal some harmful side effects as well. Especially for people with certain conditions

dbsmith83on Time to bring back asylums?

Talk to any E.M.T. in a major city in the U.S.

dbsmith83on Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

Thinking out loud here and this might be a terrible idea, and maybe at the risk of snubbing journalism majors, but what if the dependency was inverted? As in, what if, instead of having journalists who take a few classes here and there in various subjects, we instead had people who majored in subjects who also took some journalism classes, so they could write on subjects within the field?

What I mean is, instead of having a journalist who took an intro chem series writing about chem topics, we had people who majored in chemistry with a few journalism classes writing the articles instead?

You might say "well people who majored in their science field probably want to work in that field", but I'd say look no further than at the amount of science degree people doing dev work. Something something, a trained ai chatgpt-like tool might also help bridge the gap to journalism? Perhaps a pay gap would also need to be addressed.

dbsmith83on Inconvenient Truths about TypeScript

His point remains. If someone is so uncomfortable in all other languages that they have to pick a bad tool for the job, then they are probably not a good developer. Obviously, we can't always pick or even know the absolute 'best' tool, but good grief there are a lot of better choices than typescript for cli tools.

dbsmith83on Show HN: Tweak your chord progressions for practice or composition

"There was an error generating the chord progression." Every time I click "Generate"

Looks like a 403 - Site disabled on the call

  OPTIONS https://chord-alt-api.azurewebsites.net/api/reharmonize?progression=[G, Em, C, D]

dbsmith83on HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

Sure, of a law is on the books, then hold people responsible. But we are talking about 3rd party printer ink here. Why is criminality and jail even being mentioned at all?

dbsmith83on HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

Because "make decisions that harm people" is vague, and criminal codes should be explicit and clear? Who the fuck would want to do business if someone can arbitrarily claim they broke some vague law that most surely would not get applied fairly and equally? It's a terrible idea.

dbsmith83on Engineers develop water filtration that removes “forever chemicals”

> In the meantime, it may be effective to remove these chemicals from your body through regular blood and plasma donation[0]

slight distinction: remove these chemicals from your blood

I only mention that because there are most likely places in the body where doing this will not do anything to help remove them from that organ

As far as removing it from the blood, I wonder about the efficiency of blood donation. It seems to me that simply stopping the intake of new PFAs by drinking purified water from your pitcher should help considerably, because water consumed goes into the bloodstream regularly. Additionally, red blood cells are constantly being cycled in the body as well, with their byproducts excreted.

dbsmith83on Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs

Using the word 'entirely' helps to remember the ending to avoid since it ends with it

dbsmith83on New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

The parent is talking about having no vent hood.

dbsmith83on New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

> 90% of places would be grand-fathered in. A landlord won't spend money on fixing the heat...

But we are talking about new construction here like the title says, no?

dbsmith83on New York to ban natural gas, including stoves, in new buildings

Your logic makes no sense. Make laws requiring landlords to properly vent gas stoves, not ban them altogether.

dbsmith83on FlipperZero: 1 Month Battery Life with Firmware Update

You can add one of these to increase the capabilities:

https://www.tindie.com/products/eried/mayhem-for-flipper-zer...

and you can also swap out the firmware as well: https://github.com/DarkFlippers/unleashed-firmware

dbsmith83on A vegan leather made of dormant fungi can repair itself

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_s...

Some disturbing historical precedent

dbsmith83on Who Is Running Stanford?

> If your comms are unprofessional ...

By unprofessional, I think you mean laughably absurd... let's be honest here. I agree with your point that it wasn't an official university opinion. But it is troubling how no one in a department had the common sense and courage to call this out before it was released.

dbsmith83on Brave launches self-serve ads program

Or a browser which forces you to update whether you want to or not

dbsmith83on Scientists developed simple way to cook rice that cut calories absorbed by half

Important to note, the presentation showed a reduction of 10-12%, not half. The half is just a prediction if a more ideal rice candidate were found.

https://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2015/04/...

dbsmith83on GPT-4 performs significantly worse on coding problems not in its training data

Goldfish are likely more intelligent than you give them credit for

https://petkeen.com/can-goldfish-be-trained/

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1072095219/goldfish-driving-c...

dbsmith83on Book publishers won't stop until libraries are dead

> Even now it's a cinch, in 20 years it'll be so easy that if any text or video has any public exposure it'll be copied by consumers as a matter of course—copyright holders bedamed. (Think Google Glass—like tech that captures everything a human sees in high definition. If a human sees it then it will be copied automatically. Right, copyright is on the wall without major reform.)

That is, until your phone apps start scanning works automatically to detect copyrighted material before allowing you to store it on their cloud-storage

dbsmith83on Gang members hold positions at ‘highest levels’ of LA Sheriff’s department

I'm not denying that the media may be talking about crime more, but, at least in my city, crime rates are actually up. In fact, 2021 and 2022 are higher than they've been in 15 years.

Saying people are not outraged about crime, but are outraged about outrage of crime is a little silly. The other side of that coin would just be that people hear more about it and are more informed. So attributing outrage to a media coverage conspiracy is not really meaningful (not to mention difficult to prove) because people are allowed to be outraged at what they want. One could even say the news covers what people are interested in, which is a classic chicken vs. the egg case in this context.

The actual data is more important, and for many cities, it is trending up recently.

dbsmith83on Gang members hold positions at ‘highest levels’ of LA Sheriff’s department

Because the original point about crime had nothing to do with large swaths of history, thus the point about large swaths of history is irrelevant. See below:

> You can see this playing out right now in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, etc., where mayors have been defeated or come into power because people are outraged by the increase in crime.

We are talking about people voting because they are outraged due to recent crime

dbsmith83on DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

I think the point is that it should only be used to summarize wikipedia information, and thus harder to use for other ethically murky purposes? But that remains to be seen; I haven't tried it yet.

dbsmith83on Gang members hold positions at ‘highest levels’ of LA Sheriff’s department

That article is 7 years old, and doesn't really apply to the rise in crime people are talking about of the early 2020's. Sure, maybe taking a look at large swaths of history you could say crime is down. But no one gives a shit about that. People who are alive today remember crime 5 or 10 or 20+ years ago because that is relevant to their lives. Saying 'crime is down if you take a long look at history' is little consolation to someone who is noticing a rise in crime in their neighborhood over the last few years

dbsmith83on Gang members hold positions at ‘highest levels’ of LA Sheriff’s department

At least s/he has data, where's yours?

edit: I misspoke, there is no data, but at least there is a claim with numbers that can or cannot be refuted for specific things. Your claim is really vague. How do you define "time in history"? How do you define safety?

dbsmith83on Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination

The idea of Indian workers in tech getting more representation sounds a little silly. I don't know the breakdown of percentages per caste, but it would be interesting to see if they are still each massively over-represented vs. other groups. The only way it would make any sense would be at the expense of other castes (which I also don't really agree with either, since in a way it is just reinforcing the caste system by relying on it as a criterion/metric), while also reducing Indian representation as a whole

dbsmith83on Mysterious leak of Booking.com reservation data is being used to scam customers

> OTA's are fine for price discovery but you often get a better deal (and better service) from the hotel/brand directly. The front desk knows you booked via an OTA instead of the hotel directly.

That used to be more true in the past, but recently OTA's are beginning to offer better rewards programs, as well as making your trip more 'interconnected' (having one place to get flight, hotel, cars, events, activities, etc.), so now I'd say "it depends". Lately though, the bigger hotel chains themselves are also starting to introduce their own rewards, so we'll see what happens