Hacker News Reader

slipframeon CDC Reports 51% Increase in Suicide Attempts Among Teenage Girls

This still doesn't sound like an overly broad definition of suicide-attempt to me. Somebody saying they want to die and giving themselves minor cuts seems like a pretty serious situation. Unless the supposition is that boys don't get hospitalized when they do the same sort of thing, number of hospitalizations sounds like a robust metric.

slipframeon Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

I think that ubiquitous global communication is the "Great Filter" that prevents intelligent civilizations from colonizing the universe. Before any intelligent species can hope to tackle a problem like that, they invent something like the internet. And once they've invented an internet, they become addicted to low latency communication and will never stray far from it, at least not in significant numbers. Even one year of latency becomes utterly intolerable once an intelligent species has been using an internet for a few generations.

slipframeon CDC Reports 51% Increase in Suicide Attempts Among Teenage Girls

My guess is lockdowns and school closures probably drive substantially more suicides than masks and testing. I doubt the latter two move the needle much.

slipframeon CDC Reports 51% Increase in Suicide Attempts Among Teenage Girls

How do you come to that conclusion? The CDC data is tracking the number of hospitalizations. If the suicide attempt results in a hospitalization, that sounds pretty serious to me.

slipframeon MyBook Users Urged to Unplug Devices from Internet

Experimenting on the general public is unethical, particularly when your experiment is framed as a consumer-ready product.

slipframeon MyBook Users Urged to Unplug Devices from Internet

Programmers want the social respect and salaries of real engineers, without any of the professional responsibility and accountability. We [loosely speaking] want to have our cake and eat it too. I think if society continues to let us get away with it, nothing will change. Self-regulation clearly is not going to happen at this rate, we need legislatures to wake up and put our collective feet to the fire.

slipframeon Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

> A current tactic of the Christian-right is to enter into alliances with people they would otherwise despise (radical feminists, "scienceologists" like Dawkins) on certain shared causes which are even more important to them

Maybe this is just a story you've concocted to explain away evidence that contradicts your predetermined conclusions about who believes what?

slipframeon Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_phobia

> Specific phobia is an anxiety disorder, characterized by an extreme, unreasonable, and irrational fear associated with a specific object or situation.[1][2] Specific phobia can lead to avoidance of the object or situation, persistence of the fear, and significant distress or problems functioning associated with the fear. A phobia can be the fear of anything.

Whatever the term originally meant to the greeks, it does seem to be knit with the concept of fear today.

slipframeon Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

Hydrophobic dogs do fear water though.

(Hydrophobia is another name for rabies. Rabies often induces a fear of water.)

slipframeon The Miami condo collapse is a reminder of America's artificial land problem

I hope Tyler Ley does a video about it. He's a professor at Oklahoma State University who's all about concrete. He did a video about the I35 bridge collapse a few years ago that was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57pi53hBByA

His video production quality is a little rough, but nonetheless his videos are quite interesting. I never knew concrete was so fascinating before coming across his channel.

slipframeon Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

Well, most people aren't alcoholics, so I presume most people are able to reason that out and control themselves. But for those who do become alcoholics, I suspect it's because the question "what am I doing with this can of beer?" has an answer along the lines of "because being sober hurts more." That is to say, they are self-medicating for problems that seem even worse.

slipframeon Sorry, we replaced that old technology, “see-through glass”

From one of the tweets:

> Turns out that Monster energy drinks are found in the "no content" door.

So how did he find it? Obviously he went down the line of doors opening each one until he found it. If the doors were glass, he could have looked through each door instead of opening each.

slipframeon Sorry, we replaced that old technology, “see-through glass”

Energy losses will be through the roof! To see what's actually behind half those doors, you have to open each one up instead of keeping the door closed and looking through it. Even when it's in "display the products" mode, are you really going to trust that it has the correct inventory configured when you're looking for your favorite beverage and can't find it? No, you're going to go down the aisle opening every single door to check for yourself.

slipframeon The Miami condo collapse is a reminder of America's artificial land problem

You're correct and should not be downvoted:

> Land reclamation, usually known as reclamation, and also known as land fill (not to be confused with a waste landfill)

slipframeon WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

Is this your experience with Apple as a user or as a security researcher?

slipframeon The Miami condo collapse is a reminder of America's artificial land problem

I'm no engineer either, but it seems logical to me that a building would not even notice mild to moderate uniform sinking, but that differential sinking could split the building in half.

Also, I guess that differential sinking can be detected before catastrophic failure if the sink rate were measured on two or more points on the building. If the south side is sinking at 2mm/year while the north side is sinking at 0.2mm/year, that sounds like a recipe for disaster that you don't need xray eyes to see.

slipframeon WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

I don't think it's a "computers are hard" problem. I think it's a "corporation sold a defective product" problem. Well charted territory.

slipframeon WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

I think we need to lean into the environmental angle to have a chance of addressing this in a better way. Frame this legislation as anti e-waste. Any computer device with an expiration date shorter than 10 years gets a 500% tax, or something like that. I'm just spitballing here but it seems like a surmountable problem to me.

slipframeon WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

How many My Book customers would even understand the meaning of your [correct] advice? When companies fuck people over with a defective product, we should resist the urge to tell the victims to be more tech savvy and not use those sort of products. Particularly when those products are intended for the general public.

slipframeon WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

From conversations on this website about Apple's responsiveness/attitude to security researchers hunting bounties, I have gotten a contrary impression about Apple.

slipframeon NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

Hubble was botched initially, they had to send astronauts up to fix it before they could get usable images out of it. I wonder what the success rate for those spy satellites was. Maybe some of them were replacements for others, replaced instead of repaired?

slipframeon NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope

Fascinating buried lead:

> A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

Hubble was derived from these spy satellites.

slipframeon Stop using your work laptop or phone for personal stuff, because I know you are

What's the point of having phones thinner than razor blades, if not to facilitate carrying two of them? I think I could stack 5 or more phones and they'd still easily fit in my pocket.

slipframeon U.S. government prepares to issue landmark report on UFOs

> Not our military, not foreign country, and not aliens. That leaves…

A prototype jet owned by Lockheed and flown by a civilian test pilot. That could be called "not our military" without lying. A weather balloon launched by some civilian agency could also be "not our military."

slipframeon U.S. government prepares to issue landmark report on UFOs

Since all of this material was published together and is coming from the same sources, I think even just a few of the videos being debunked damns the rest of it. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. I am confident they are lying about those two videos, and that gives me good reason to doubt everything else they've published even if I can't find the tell-tale flaws in the other material.

The way I see it, the pilots are lying, probably as part of a special 'retirement plan' of getting book deals pandering to kooks. The US Navy on the other hand is being cagey, making statements that might technically be true but deeply misleading[0], and aren't directly contradicting the pilots. My guess is the USN decided these pilots' lies serve the Navy's interests as well.

[0] Navy claims the GoFast video is: "Subject Area: UAV, Balloons and other UAS" ... well it's a balloon, so they're 'not lying'...

slipframeon Canada: Hundreds of unmarked graves found at residential school

> Interment [euphemism for] concentration camp

"Concentration camp" is a euphemism when you're actually talking about death/extermination camps.

The difference between an "internment camp" and a "concentration camp" isn't entirely clear to me, but the terms were originally meant to mean what they say at face value: camps where people are concentrated or interned. The interment camps for Japanese Americans were concentration camps in the literal face-value meaning of the at term. They took a group of people that was spread out over the whole west coast and concentrated them down into a few small camps.

A camp that is purpose built to exterminate people, not merely concentrate them, should be called an extermination camp. In casual conversation extermination camps are often called 'concentration camps', but that is clearly euphemistic. (This is somewhat complicated by the fact that many nazi extermination camps were also concentration camps. "Auschwitz" was a cluster of several camps, some of them extermination camps, some of them concentration camps. Treblinka on the other hand was an extermination camp but not also a concentration camp.)

slipframeon Google turned me into a serial killer

Technology Connections had a great observation about this in his video about touch lamps: the problem with Google's knowledge graph is that it takes everything it reads on the internet at face value.

https://youtu.be/TbHBHhZOglw?t=58 (0:58 through 4:20)

slipframeon Facebook keeps recommending political groups

This was a fine enough message until corporations got us to forget that it was meant to be applied in that order. Reduction of consumption is paramount, but bad for corporate profit, so corporations promoted the idea of recycling being just as good if not better than reduction.

slipframeon Facebook keeps recommending political groups

Aren't they 'virtue signaling' by pushing a 'virtuous' agenda? These don't seem mutually exclusive to me.

slipframeon Facebook keeps recommending political groups

> “Progressive Democrats of Nevada,” “Michigan Republicans”, “Bernie Sanders for President 2020,” “Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz,” “Philly for Elizabeth Warren”

For classifying things like this as political, a typical bayesian 'spam' filter would perform very well.