helterskelter

Some people speculate that the USA gained control of Oregon country in large part because Canadians/Brits trading in beaver furs had to send all their pelts back to the UK before they could go out to the rest of the world. America just sailed from Boston to the PNW, traded for pelts and went directly to, say, China. Much faster, and cheaper too.

I like the idea of a shorter character limit as it nudges users to a specific mode of interaction: short thoughts/updates and not long-winded soliloquies. It's signalling that interaction with this platform doesn't demand much of your time or attention. I don't know what the about page has to do with it, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

That said, I'm not a social media user besides HN I guess.

2036 crime prevention, detecting this behaviour and automatically forwarding it to the police to be referenced later for probable cause.

I've managed to run Linux just about exclusively since probably just before I was a teen in the early 2000's. I think I bought Red Hat 8 or 9 or something like that at CompUSA on a whim and proceeded to call customer support to get help doing basic tasks on the desktop which they very kindly helped me with. Man I was feeling like a seriously 1337 h4x0r.

The greatest rec of all was seeing the NSA crying about tor in the Snowden docs. Doesn't get any better than that.

A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to block ads altogether.

This is a silly distinction anyway. Blocking ads is an obvious first step to improving browser security.

There are two books people ITT may be interested in: How to Read a Book (a classic that everyone should read), and Make It Stick. The latter goes over the current state of learning research and it's helped me out, but both of them complement each other pretty well. As far as our current understanding of learning goes, the following is about the most effective way to approach it:

- Engage with what you're reading. Ask yourself what the key ideas are, which ideas are new to you, how you would define them, and how they relate to other ideas you already understand.

- Test yourself. Do the excercises at the end of a textbook chapter. Create your own questions and answer them. Quiz yourself at least once a week (on both new and old material). Check your answers and correct yourself (if you were wrong, how, and why?). Use flashcards with a spaced repetition regime (like Anki)

- Focus on your retrieval. Avoid looking things up unless you really have to. Each time you recall something you've learned, you reinforce it.

- Your first encounter with new information may need a small interval of just a few minutes or hours, but you should gradually increase the interval periods between quizzes/flashcards on something. The longer you go between recalling something the more it gets reinforced because you have to work harder for it. Build up gradually.

- Use what you got wrong in quizzes or flashcards to identify what needs work.

- Focus on the material you get wrong, but don't totally neglect things you feel comfortable with.

- Basically, use Anki/spaced repetition.

- Take some time between study sessions and quizzing. (I think of studying like kneading dough, you need to let your brain relax some before you work it some more).

- When studying a subject, interleave different but related topics.

- Topics should be complementary and reinforce one another so that insights from one lead to insights in the other. Examples: calculus and rocketry. Spherical trig and astronomy or celestial navigation. German idealism and eastern philosophy. Etc.

- Once you have a rudimentary grasp of a new type of problem, move onto something new, but make sure to return to this type of problem periodically. (Basically, add this type of problem to your flashcard deck). Don't worry about mastering one type of problem so you can do it your sleep before moving to the next thing.

Some other key things:

- Elaboration: Relate material to what you already know. Explain it in your own words. Visualize it. Imagine it in different contexts (if you're learning calculus, imagine your speed and acceleration while biking in hilly terrain in terms of derivatives, etc).

- Generation: Attempt to answer a problem before you know the solution. This excercises your creativity and gets you looking for similarities to other types of problems you already understand. Before reading new material, make a quick summary of what you expect to learn and how it will relate to your prior knowledge.

- Reflection: take a few minutes to reflect on what you've learned that day. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experience does this remind you of? What do you need to work on? Etc.

- Calibration: you need an objective measure of what you do and do not understand. Humans are pretty bad at gauging this for themselves without some sort of external measure. This gets back to flashcards.

- Consider using some mnemonic devices. They can be very effective.

- When reading a textbook, don't bother with crazy highlighter schemes. Research shows it doesn't really help. Neither does reading textbook material more than maybe twice unless you have a particular point you're confused about. What does help is spaced repetition and summarizing the material in your own words.

This all sounds like a lot of effort, but one of the key things to remember is that learning is effort. Struggle is basically necessary for your brain to optimize and form new connections, or even to reinforce old ones, and if you aren't struggling you're probably just doing what your brain is already optimized for, which means you probably aren't learning much.

NetBSD is the only nix I've ever been able to use for novel (for me) tasks without consulting the internet for help; the design is so clean and the documentation complete that I never felt the need for outside help. I love the package management system. Definitely my desert island OS.

Go through the SE comments on this recipe. The amount of fish sauce makes the broth smell like asshole. I recall several Vietnamese scratching their heads over it. I love fish sauce, but Kenji went nose blind to it or something.

Oh man the the amount of fish sauce he wants you put in this will ruin it. Add a teaspoon or a tablespoon or something, but not 1/4 cup. The first time I made it I nearly threw it out.

Great way to tank a brand. Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it, but having your car force ads on you is something people wouldn't even expect from a Kia Soul leased off a used lot.

Huh, yeah you're right. I swear I remember hearing about this on an NPR radio piece about how police really don't need to do anything to protect you.

Taxpayers will just foot the bill. These cops need their personal funds taken, and before they blow it all on legal bills defending themselves from criminal charges.

Come to think of it, this is America dammit. Cops should be licensed, bonded and insured, and if their training or records aren't up to standards they don't get covered. We have higher standards for plumbers and pest control than we do police.

IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to concerns for their own safety, even when the asailant only had a knife.

I certainly don't believe everything should be based on essentials, but when very little growth is from honest to god innovation which produces more or better of something, and isn't valued based solely on its anticipated future returns, or isn't based on innovation which only extracts more from the consumer while providing the same or less in return, I'm a little pessimistic. One day somebody who does innovate will eat your lunch. When too much of your economy is based on services or luxury goods, you're sitting on a house of cards.

Perhaps by some measure, but what I'm referring to is how everything is becoming a fly by night scam-adjacent "product" that isn't much better than Alibaba drop shipping.

Ie, a junk economy. None of this produces value, if anything it's parasitic.

I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.

Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.

The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.

Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue every single one of them, especially if every city commits to dragging out the process for as long as possible by creating as many legal hurdles as they can, all of which Flock would have to have a court rule on.

Kind of like how practically every Scientologist filed suit against the IRS over CoS having their tax exempt status revoked, to which the IRS eventually relented.

Forgot to add, there was one customs officer in $SMALLCOUNTRY who used to take bribes from somebody I knew, but was transferred to the taxation department. The person I knew died, but I found out through one of his coworkers that the former customs officer resolved a SNAFU with some tax paperwork that was about to turn into a very expensive disaster. He didn't even expect payment, he just wanted to do right by the person who had seriously bolstered his income for years, he was even asking about the guy's family how they were doing after his passing.

Once you get outside the first world brides seem to be the norm -- every person I know who does international work has a story about having to bride somebody, especially if you need to get something through customs quickly, or at all. It's funny, you just make a bare effort to make it seem official and they'll get you right through.

One guy would keep cash in a hidden pocket in his suitcase and if customs gave him trouble he'd politely inform them about the pocket they didn't check and everything would get resolved.

Another guy would be bringing in parts for his company and when things got held up he'd talk to the person of the appropriate rank and offer to pay the "expedited" fee to get things through, as these were very important pieces of equipment. There was no expedited fee.

Somebody else would literally just sneak them cash as they shook the custom officer's hand, but they had a working relationship and knew each other on a first name basis.

One person got pissed off and refused to pay a bride and literally just waited until they changed shifts and his stuff was released.

I read about it here originally:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243666

I haven't read into it much but I believe the circular breathing excercises strengthen some of the muscles that tend to relax during sleep so they keep your airway open.

"What is this, a didgeridoo for ants?

But seriously, yeah pretty much, usually with some beeswax on one end.

Yeah I was expecting somebody to build a gif by hand from the spec using ed.

For sleep apnea you may look into playing the didgeridoo for 30 minutes a day. The circular breathing every day really improve people's symptoms, and I've heard you see results after a few weeks or months. I'm in the middle of trying this but unfortunately I just haven't been doing it every day.

I've also heard just practicing circular breathing by blowing through a straw into a cup of water can produce the same effect but playing a didge is just so much cooler.

HN rules are slightly bendy and not blindly applied. Things are generally okay if it's within the realm of good taste and judgement.

For instance, I've seen plenty of submissions which were retitled, like a news story which had a vague headline written for "normal people" which ends up being an article about a specific tech issue relevant to this community.

Franklin also invented the lightning rod, something which we take for granted these days.

Do you believe closed-source software is entitled to people's usage and good opinion?

Who wants to use a privacy-focused browser which isn't FOSS in this day and age, especially given the mature alternatives?

Still not enough.

Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.