346 karma · joined July 22, 2015
I submitted this because of the new "Live Folders" feature. For a long time, RSS has felt relegated to third-party extensions or separate reader apps. Zen's update integrates RSS feeds and GitHub Issues/PRs directly into the sidebar tab hierarchy.
This is simply not true. At least in my country, poor people generally have interest and the skills to repair their devices (or to pay someone to do so, as it's cheaper than buying a new one)
> If the book is available in the district libraries, that means it was approved by a media specialist and can be made available to students again. But any book not currently held in the district libraries must be individually evaluated and approved by a librarian.
Ok... Totally unbiased statement. /s
> Fungi are central to every terrestrial and many aquatic ecosystems, but the mechanisms underlying fungal tolerance to mercury, a global pollutant, remain unknown. Here, we show that the plant symbiotic fungus Metarhizium robertsii degrades methylmercury and reduces divalent mercury, decreasing mercury accumulation in plants and greatly increasing their growth in contaminated soils. M. robertsii does this by demethylating methylmercury via a methylmercury demethylase (MMD) and using a mercury ion reductase (MIR) to reduce divalent mercury to volatile elemental mercury. M. robertsii can also remove methylmercury and divalent mercury from fresh and sea water even in the absence of added nutrients. Overexpression of MMD and MIR significantly improved the ability of M. robertsii to bioremediate soil and water contaminated with methylmercury and divalent mercury. MIR homologs, and thereby divalent mercury tolerance, are widespread in fungi. In contrast, MMD homologs were patchily distributed among the few plant associates and soil fungi that were also able to demethylate methylmercury. Phylogenetic analysis suggests that fungi could have acquired methylmercury demethylase genes from bacteria via two independent horizontal gene transfer events. Heterologous expression of MMD in fungi that lack MMD homologs enabled them to demethylate methylmercury. Our work reveals the mechanisms underlying mercury tolerance in fungi, and may provide a cheap and environmentally friendly means of cleaning up mercury pollution.
> "We research and publish tools and academic papers to expose fishy IT security that just isn’t secure. We also develop and publish tools to help the IT Security movement."[1]
> "[...] The company cited environmental concerns for removing chargers with every purchase of the device and claimed that the decision will save 861,000 tons of copper, zinc and tin. The Brazilian Ministry of Justice remained unmoved by that reasoning, telling Apple that it could help the environment in other ways, such as giving its devices USB-C support."
Yeah, unfortunately that's exactly what they are trying to do today in Brazil.
Some quotes from the book:
"A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work...."
"Aristotle's dream is our reality. Our machines, with breath of fire, with limbs of unwearying steel, with fruitfulness, wonderful inexhaustible, accomplish by themselves with docility their sacred labor. And nevertheless the genius of the great philosophers of capitalism remains dominated by the prejudice of the wage system, worst of slaveries. They do not yet understand that the machine is the saviour of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty. The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. And so it was in this era that men like Aristotle, Phidias, Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; it was the time when a handful of heroes at Marathon crushed the hordes of Asia, soon to be subdued by Alexander. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods: O Melibae Deus nobis haec otia fecit."
> "A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"
[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...
[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...
The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."
- Emma Goldman, "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for" (1917);
- HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25989698
- A great article about the project: https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2020/12/07/a-data-ecosystem-...
> In December 2019, Google and Facebook proudly announced a major milestone, which was echoed in news media all around the world: it is now possible to copy a picture from Facebook to Google Photos. This news came in mere months after we celebrated the 50th anniversary of another technological feat: the moon landing of 20 July 1969, when millions of households witnessed Neil Armstrong take a giant leap for mankind.
> So let me get this straight: two of the largest tech companies in history make headlines because in 2019, they move a single photo over the whopping distance of 11 km it takes from the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park to the Googleplex in Mountain View, whereas in 1969, we sent live video signals from 380,000 km away on the actual moon?
> If those two companies, both widely hailed as pinnacles of technology, genuinely consider this to be innovation they are proud of, the only logical conclusion is that data-driven innovation today is fundamentally broken.
> The problem is widespread and not limited to technology or social media. Any sector that requires personal data to deliver services, from retail over insurance to health, suffers from the damaging effects of siloization. Companies increasingly need more access to data, but they won’t get there if they keep on collecting that data themselves.[...]
0. https://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2020/12/07/a-data-ecosystem-...
> For example, rather than ranking and selecting top notes by a simple majority vote, Birdwatch can consider how diverse a note’s set of ratings is and determine whether additional inputs are needed before a consensus is reached. Additionally, Birdwatch can proactively seek ratings from contributors who are likely to provide a different perspective based on their previous ratings.
> Further, we plan for Birdwatch to have a reputation system in which one earns reputation for contributions that people from a wide range of perspectives find helpful.