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ywain

It’s probably less about the sunglasses specifically and more about seeing the person’s eyes. Many neurotypical people think it’s rude to not maintain eye contact during conversations.
Re:Fastmail offers EU data region on Sunday August 09, 2026 @02:59AM (#49229073)
> look at the Rwanda: It is absolutely possible to have a genocide made by democracies,

Rwanda has never been a democracy. Habyarimana was "elected" with 99% of the votes ffs.

> and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships

It is trivially easy to verify that this is not true.

The detailed terms of the bet include this:

> A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.

I assume this would cover the HTTP->HTTPS redirect scenario.

Re:Fastmail offers EU data region on Saturday August 08, 2026 @10:16PM (#49227782)
What's your point? You'd rather have a democratically elected but corrupt leader than an appointed but honest one?
Normal rules do not apply because these companies are worth billions and powerful people don’t want them to fail. It’s neither specific to AI nor a new phenomenon.
Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.

I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.

Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.
Re:Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid on Thursday May 14, 2026 @06:07PM (#48141917)
Mostly by looking at packets TTL. It gets decreased by 1 by the hotspot’s NAT so if the value is something like 63 or 127 (instead of 64 or 128 which are the defaults for most platforms) then it’s almost certain the packet originated from a device behind the phone and not from the phone itself.
Re:Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @11:33PM (#45988986)
Is that what really happens though? EU countries usually don't immediately punish violations unless they're particularly egregious. You're more likely to get a warning and a grace period to meet the requirements. So the rational approach would be to not bother with consent banners, GDPR and whatnot until you attract the attention of the regulators, at which point you should definitely hire a legal team that can tell you what exactly you need to do to comply.
Re:Founder Mode on Sunday September 01, 2024 @03:25PM (#41419586)
Urban Dictionary might be a better place for recent internet slang: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
Re:Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment? on Monday June 03, 2024 @03:18AM (#40560146)
I'm not the person you're replying to, but here's my take: even though the two look conceptually similar, Unix programs are just a lot simpler. All programs run on the same machine, they read their input, execute, produce output which is piped to the next program, and terminate. Want to change something? Change one of the programs (or your command line), run the command again, that's it.

Microservices are a lot more complicated. You'll need to manage images for each of the services, a fleet of servers on which the services will be deployed, an API for services to communicate together, etc. In many (most?) cases, a monolith architecture will be a lot simpler and work just fine. Once you reach the scale at which you'd actually benefit from a microservice architecture (most companies won't ever reach this scale), you can start hiring devops and other specialists to deal with the additional complexity.

What actually gets hate, I think, is not microservices themselves, but the fact that microservices are often used in contexts where they are completely unnecessary, purely because of big tech cargo culting.

Re:Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?' on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @01:46AM (#40282746)
This was a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing.
Re:Show HN: Rotary Phone Project on Saturday March 23, 2024 @02:44PM (#39802182)
Very cool and fun project! Thanks for sharing.
Re:Unicomp's "New" Model M Keyboard on Monday February 12, 2024 @08:04PM (#39352977)
The Q5 Pro is a 96% layout, but Keychron also has quite a few 100% layouts: https://www.keychron.com/collections/all-keyboards?sort_by=m...
Re:What it was like working for Gitlab on Sunday February 11, 2024 @04:19AM (#39333692)
Stripe does use Ruby, but not Rails.
Re:The Apple Vision Pro on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @04:36PM (#39281002)
Apple's ad business is fairly limited in scope (I think they only sell ads in the App Store and the News app) so user data is not as valuable for them as it is for Google and Facebook.

They definitely do make some money off Apple Pay transactions via interchange, but it's probably something like 0.1 to 0.3%.

Re:Fairphone 5 scores a perfect 10 from iFixit for repairability on Thursday December 07, 2023 @07:03PM (#38563592)
There are definitely some parkings where you can only pay with a smartphone. The worst is when they force you to download a shitty app. Super fun when the parking does not have good reception and you have to download an unnecessarily large app over 3G.

I've also been to random parking lots in the middle of nowhere with a cardboard sign saying "Venmo $5/hour at X".

I'm not sure I understand how your analogy is relevant to the discussion, but you should know that the current consensus is that the pyramids were build by paid laborers, not slaves. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt#Great...
But HAL didn't act "on a whim"! The reason it killed the crew is not because it went rogue, but rather because it was following its instructions to keep the true purpose of the mission secret. If the crew is dead, it can't find out the truth.

In light of the current debate around AI safety, I think "unintended consequences" is a much more plausible risk then "spontaneously develops free will and decides humans are unnecessary".

Re:Rails 7.1 Released on Friday October 06, 2023 @12:57AM (#37787235)
I'm working on a fairly recent Rails 7 code base. We initially started using Stimulus, but are now considering switching to React for a few reasons:

- if you're looking to hire frontend engineers, the candidate pool for React is a few orders or magnitude bigger

- it's getting harder and harder to find vanilla JS packages that you can wrap in Stimulus controllers for common tasks, compared to finding React packages

- Stimulus doesn't really offer a way to write unit tests for your controllers. With React, you can use jest and react-test-renderer like normal.

Additionally, the recent Turbo TypeScript debacle did not instill confidence in the long term stewardship of the Hotwire ecosystem.

We're still on the fence about it. Stimulus does feel like a very Railsy way to write frontend code, which is definitely a plus for small teams of people who're already familiar with Rails.

Re:Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows after 28 years on Saturday September 02, 2023 @09:49PM (#37367037)
The binary for Microsoft Paint is called mspaint.exe, and there is no "paint" alias AFAICT -- typing "paint" in the run prompt results in "Windows cannot find 'paint'".

You could create a paint.bat file in C:\Windows\System32 (usually the first dir in %PATH%) that calls Paint.net instead. Something like this should work:

    "C:\Program Files\paint.net\paintdotnet.exe" %*
I strongly doubt airlines can change flight plans after everyone has boarded.
Re:Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List on Friday August 25, 2023 @03:07PM (#37265874)
Out of curiosity I tried a few of the services on this list. They all follow the same textbook dark pattern, with fake progress bars, making the process of looking up someone artificially take several minutes, then only at the end do they ask for your email and payment information.
Re:'Screen Apnea' on Thursday August 24, 2023 @12:39PM (#37251043)
I recently replaced Powertoys Run with ueli: https://ueli.app/

Basically the same thing, but Powertoys Run was always slowish while ueli is very snappy. It also integrates with Everything.

> The universe is the same in 3D.

This would mean the universe has positive curvature. Experimental evidence points towards the universe being flat (zero curvature), though there is some margin for error that could go either way (positive or negative curvature).

Re:Ask HN: Problems for the Next Decade on Sunday July 09, 2023 @02:36AM (#36652171)
By that line of reasoning, we may as well eliminate tax brackets entirely. Or any sort of arbitrary limit, really. What makes an 18 year old mature enough to vote, but not a 17 year and 364 days old?
Probably, but I doubt it's as intentional as you suspect, if only because that would require a level of competence I don't think they have (Hanlon's razor and all).
I don't understand how he was not pushed out after he was caught abusing his admin privileges to edit user comments a few years back. Any employee caught doing that would have been let go immediately, yet this guy was allowed to remain as CEO.
Very cool game! Are all seeds solvable?

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