lifeonlars

Obviously you don't have to "start experimenting on children". One can survey parents on whether or not they used microwaves, plastic containers, or not, look at the health of the children concerned in later years, and then work from that data.

I think this is actually evidence of what the poster above is referring to - the long-term effects of Oppenheimer being unfairly discredited. Fermi has streets, schools and subway stations named after him all over Italy. Oppenheimer doesn't (at least not to anywhere near the same extent), even in the US, because during the period when this might most likely have happened, towards the end of his life and shortly after his death, he was still widely regarded as being a traitor.

I don't think you studied either Klaus Fuchs or the Rosenbergs in much detail then. Whatever the merits of their actions or the cases against them, they were certainly dedicated Communists who did their best for a cause they believed in fervently.

Your evidence is a movie whose raison d'etre is to elucidate the viewpoints of an American citizen and military leader who is heavily implicated in this decision and in other American war crimes, and even that document does not support your point (McNamara openly admits that US bombing of Japanese population centers was a war crime.)

I'm not sure I would class that as 'heavily under dispute'.

Hard to argue that Einstein is not overrated when he is literally the archetype of 'genius scientist' for most people in the world. But in his annus mirabilis Einstein literally made world-tier steps forward in 3 huge areas of physics simultaneously. Any of these in isolation would have ensured his immortality. This is either the single most important short productive period of scientific work of anyone, ever, or holds that accolade in tie with Newton's plague year.

Of course, his later years did not live up to this stellar record - he both made mistakes and was less productive. But how could they?

Joseph Heller was challenged by a journalist in later years that "he hadn't written anything as good as Catch-22 recently". He replied "No. But who has?"

There are (in that era) no other geniuses 'like' Einstein or von Neumann.

Einstein was probably the most visionary scientist of the whole century at making huge steps forward in several key areas. John von Neumann made landmark achievements across pure maths, physics, engineering, computer science and economics.

To say that a basketball player is not comparable to Larry Bird or to Michael Jordan is no disparagement.

You obviously don't know much about Evernote.

Yes, BT was divided into two business units to enable this process. They unlawfully colluded with each other in order to stop any reseller from being able to charge less than the BT retail offering. Result: terrible infrastructure investment and no competition.

There were quite a few small energy co-operatives in the UK, mainly set up by municipalities.

When wholesale energy prices spiked last year, followed by a cap being applied to the prices that they could charge, they weren't hedged and several ended up going bankrupt.

The 'funding for public unions' is 7% of the economy?

Actually, the very widely replicated experience of most challenger utilities is that the entrenched utility will stop you, sometimes in collusion with the government or municipalities. Try getting permits to dig up the road to put your competing pipes alongside the current monopolists.

In Britain, British Telecom spent around 20 years making it impossible for other players to supply an internet service to consumers. They used various anti-competitive practices and had very good capture of the largely toothless regulator OfCom. This is all documented.

A "loss" here is just a politicized framing of the fact that government pays Amtrak to do something of use to society.

You might as well say that the US military makes a $1 trillion loss per year. No, they supply something which is required by the govt and which has a cost.

How the web works has changed quite a lot since the early 1990s though.

You're contradicting yourself. Taking notes is a feature for many, but a product for people whose working style involves taking lots and lots of notes.

Call them "process cyclists" if you want, there is a bimodal distribution for how much people use notes apps, and the people near the high mode are prepared to pay monthly for something good, and tend to be extremely loyal.

I paid for a subscription because I really liked what it did and I used it a lot. The Android app became so unresponsive that it was basically unusable. I stopped paying when I found myself making notes in email again to avoid opening the treacly app.

It has since got better but I haven't gone back to paying for it, despite using it a lot, and now I'll probably slowly migrate away as they progressively break and disable the free version.

Perhaps your hindsight is selective. After HTTP/HTML and related technologies such as JavaScript have become hugely successful following this principle, it's easy to look back and say "the technology stack which beat all others and became ubiquitous is now hard to develop against because it's too permissive".

Almost any web server can be configured to provide a generic response to a specific request, for example by ignoring some or all of the url path, and in practice I would bet that a majority of actual instances do this for at least some sets of requests. (To confirm my theory in 20 seconds I checked if https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nonexistent_user_1620 returns a 404 or a 200 - it's the latter.)

It's silly to pretend that the use of a 404 in this type of circumstance is either clearcut in the standards or ubiquitous in practice.

Well, the web has been very successful in the last few decades. Arguably at least part of this success has been due to Postel's law since, for example, browsers interpreting HTML on a best effort basis has allowed for both diversity and innovation. Comparing the rapid adoption of the web to the failures of numerous closed and strongly specified protocols provides some empirical basis for this.

No it's not. Dealing with it on the server side means that all tools and servers in the world have to go along with this decision. Posting on a blog saying that people 'SHOULD' do something and actually making it so that this is a reasonable expectation are two very different things.

A vulnerability scanner having to implement hairy heuristics to decide what's a vuln and what's a common false positive is literally its whole job.

Obviously if there was a business choice that you should be able to do this the supposed technical obstacles could be worked around.

..or the vuln detection could be less stupid and try to decide whether the content it has retrieved is a bash history or not?

This breaks the principle of being liberal in what you accept.

Technically Elon Musk is a CEO, and he is at the helm of Twitter, so Twitter does have an impulsive weirdo CEO at the helm, even if that impulsive weirdo CEO isn't the CEO of Twitter.

Someone who reads the title and posts flamebait based on it without reading the article or knowing what the more interesting aspects of it might be.

It's not the Spotify model that is responsible for this, but the scammy way which record companies have approached the Spotify model.

They offer artists a similar 'royalty' on Spotify revenue as they did on record sales. In other words, where they used to give artists 10-20% of a CD sticker price, with much of the rest going to retailer markup, manufacturing costs, etc. they now keep 80-90% of the Spotify money, when they have zero per-unit costs and are simply passing the money through to the artist.

Artists who are working with Spotify outside of this system are able to make money from streaming, just as YouTubers who own their own content are able to make money while musicians typically see tiny amounts from YT.

However, the record company are essentially a bank who fund firstly recording and development costs, and second (both important and very expensive) marketing costs. So to be able to license directly with Spotify you have to already have a bunch of funds.

"Hacker News"

There are about 2^67 different Enigma machine initial settings. The inverse probability of the appearance of a real seven letter German word (LUEBECK) twice in a random string of similar length to this message is a number that's pretty close to 2^67. So if you decrypted one ciphertext message with all the different incorrect settings you might expect to see one purported plaintext which isn't correct but which has two appearances of LUEBECK, or a similarly misleading occurence. Since there's also one correct plaintext, seeing LUEBECK twice already puts you at roughly 50/50 that it's the real message versus the most convincing wrong plaintext (if you had no prior knowledge of what the settings might be). The additional presence of even a few of the other recognizable German words (or common abbreviations such as triple letters and the shortened names for the numbers) makes it overwhelmingly likely that this is the correct plaintext. LUEBECK + LUEBECK + STUETZPUNKT in one message make the chance that it's not the real message of the order of winning a jackpot in state lottery two weeks running, even if the rest of the message was gibberish. In practice, much shorter pieces of plaintext than the double LUEBECK (like the presence of a single triple U, one spelled-out number, or highly abbreviated weather info) were used to validate guessed settings with a high degree of confidence.

It will deter other people from criticizing them though.

Statistically, what are the odds that you're someone who actually understands enough about teaching and learning to be able to identify why education is 'broken' and successfully 'disrupt' it, as opposed to someone who just thinks they understand it but actually is suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome?

If a guy in a dirty denim jacket comes to you outside the bus station and tells you he's Jesus, he absolutely might be Jesus. However assuming that he's not is a perfectly good heuristic.

The rule of thumb with mathematics books is that either you skip the first 2 chapters and read the whole thing, or you only read those 2.