k310

404. You've got about 25 minutes to fix it. :-O

Fired police offices just get a job in the next town. It's all a charade.

Wars are not declared wars since WWII. They are instruments of international or domestic political projection. Lately, a distraction from damning evidence of the largest illicit sex, blackmail and money-laundering operation in recorded history.

"Weapons of Mass Destruction" a lie. "Weapons of Mass Distraction" a cover-up, and a mistake about to grow bigger than Putin's "walk in the park" in Ukraine.

A war based on politics and not national survival is unwinnable.

Ask Putin, Trump, Mussolini and others.

https://archive.is/20260719133921/https://www.bloomberg.com/...

Farhan Zaidi proved to SF Giants fans, that short of one "miracle" 107 win year (2021), analytics and now AI (?) are no substitute for raw talent, smart team play and focus (i.e. waiting for your pitch and not swinging wildly)

Oh, and having a real closer. Coffee's for closers.

Or a statistical anomaly with many players having record seasons.

That was before the AI craze.

There it is, click on "new". I don't because it's too small on the phone for my fat fingers.

I use a bookmark instead.

I wonder if and how many backdoors were planted in government computers.

Use Hacker News. Unlike most sites, it's moderated.

When you open up to other people's experiences in life, you will see different ways of thinking. One might consider eastern philosophy, which views things quite differently from western linear and hierarchical thought.

Differences are not just superficial. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of fellow employees, customers and even neighbors can enrich a product or service a lot.

In my career, I worked with a crazy quilt of fellow employees and customers. Each encounter gave me something new to think about, and made me better for it. Specifically, I administered a computer network with about 300 users, a lot for the time, of the most varied people you can imagine, faculty, staff and grad students. I learned more than they did. And I took that experience with me to a sales engineer position where our customer base was all of Northern California, with great success.

It all starts with putting yourself in the other person's shoes, and the golden rule, but you first have to open up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Sorry, newest.

Too late to edit. The secret is to triple check before posting (note to self)

Speak for yourself!!

I am (redacted large number) years old and I play classical piano (well, I try), take superb photographs everywhere I can, and (OMG) scan Hacker News for exciting real developments that can actually help people.

I give absolutely none of my brain away to anyone or anything else. There is a purpose to my life other than soaking up elevator, lounge or couch opiates.

I do prefer quality literary, music, opera, and even comedic works because they keep me sharp and satisfied. Some music is absolutely divine (Thank you, Mozart et. al.) and I am in a heavenly state while still alive, as opposed to being a zombie living dead.

Saint Peter don't you take me because I can't go.

I'm listening to the Marriage of Figaro.

You do, too.

P.S. If you want to go to Heaven, learn to love Mozart, because his music is played there.

Wilhoit's Law

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Bodies are buried in New Mexico.

DOJ is now a protection racket.

https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/

Because this kook, with ties to Musk and Thiel, is very likely the next president,within months, and his lies become political "reality"

In the post-truth age.

Let's ask Emmanuel Goldstein. [0]

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

[0] https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practic...

I'm an infovore and go to /latest

I visually scan extremely quickly, because my browser has an autopager that works on HN/latest, and I go one day back.

I copy the day's worth, open up SeaMonkey, get a new composer page and paste the html into it.

No slight on Algolia, this lets me search locally.

In those visual scans, since there are only so many hours in the day, I grab a few flying by and once in a while, go to /best to see which elephants I missed.

I never look at the front page, since it's so brief, I don't know the algo going on, and TBH, I rarely find something that interests me. A lot of my interest is in optical thingys and open source goodies that never make the front page, nor best.

Not exactly unleash. More like dog tags?

Starting today, he’s advising Innovation Labs, an organization trying to create the open architecture for AI agents to identify themselves.

Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, which sees domain-name infrastructure as a practical way to hold AI agents accountable and position itself for a future where more online interaction happens between agents than people. Cerf joins a handful of other internet luminaries lending their names to the effort.

Related question: What do Apple stores do with outdated items?

There is plenty on earth if wealth is not concentrated in the hands of very few. It takes a lot of energy to suck the entropy out of the system.

While I and others like Kevin Kelley and Ted Nelson of "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (1974) see technology as liberative, distributive and empowering, others see it as a tool to concentrate power and wealth.

It's a choice, powered by the now universal philosophy of "Creative Destruction" though many will deny that. The wealthy get Creative, and the rest of us get some goodies (with strings attached) and live with the destruction.

The full title is "Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage"

The "Why" makes a difference.

To me, the key is here.

   Empathy is a cognitive tool we use to forgive human error. But a machine’s error is different, like it’s the product of a bad corporate decision or poor coding. Often, there isn’t one person to blame or forgive; we are stuck with an opaque version of fate that is hard to accept. Forgiveness needs an agent that perhaps could have done something differently and can be held responsible. When a person makes a serious mistake, we have somewhere to place the blame and, eventually, someone to absolve.


    People tend to lose confidence in a machine more quickly than in a human when the two make identical mistakes. We prefer a worse human over a better algorithm if the latter has made an error. Behavioral scientists call it algorithm aversion. With no trusted party to explain what happened, visible mistakes dominate people’s judgments of a better system.

"Whataboutism" as an excuse to attack.

I get the feeling that the point is to make machines more like humans in the sense that we empathize with humans, whereas machines are opaque.

And I expect that if that's fone, it will be a sleazy con job.

Having done some programming, I tend to look past the opacity to the designers and coders. And direct my "comments" and feeling of powerlessness [0] to those anonymous people.

While open source can give me a real human to gripe at, I would rather use the open source mechanism to make suggestions, and feel empowered.

Does that put the "humanity" into machines for you? I presume that HAL was closed-source.

[0]Yes, I feel powerless dealing with the home computer when things go off the rails, and while I could write scripts, apps, and flying hot patches, the vendor changes things constantly. And nags me daily, on every damn device when I don't go along.

To a lesser extent this happens with open source, but at least I can see what changed, or as noted above, be part of the whole process.

If my suggestion or code isn't accepted, I can be told why, up to and including "Well, that's because you're an idiot", which has happened in the past, so I can discount the comment, or just try changes on my own.

The chances of any of this actually happening are minuscule, but, getting back on point, it's possible, unlike those black boxes created by anonymous people.

Apple held phone prices while jacking up computer and ipad costs, obviously to protect market share of the flagship.

The entry level imac went from $1150 on sale at several stores that week, (was 1300), to $1500.

Apply that percentage increase (1500/1300 or 15%) to a phone and watch sales drop.

Maybe we need an urban planning revival

Those failures are visible everywhere: Have you ever wondered why so many residential streets wind around in aimless, circuitous patterns, disconnected from the town around them? Or why you are forced to endure a nightmare commute to drive just 10 miles?

When I first moved to California in 1980, Silicon Valley's famous orchards were giving way to homes and businesses. Now, I see farmland outside Fresno being turned into giant home developments. And why not? Homes in the Central Valley are half the median cost of the rest of the state, some $430,000 (YMMV)

And it's so well planned. (not)

Months of highway work on Hwy 41 only seemed to add drainage alongside. Same old two lanes. And where your one lane used to fan out into two headed into Fresno, the right lane was dedicated to right turns only, causing mile-long "stop and stop" backups that didn't exist before, and many a short-stop (don't ask me how I know)

It's ALL unplanned, from an average Joe's perspective. Only making affordable (and WAY too large) homes from available farmland, with zero upgrades to roads, and no public transit except for existing city busses.

I see improvement only on the margin (and the current margin is noted above) leaving the overall situation about as tractable as unscrambling spaghetti, my cable collection or most aptly, tangled fishing line.

I am planning to reply to the post on how suburbs aren't so bad. But I guess that will have to wait, because I need to shop and all the useful stores are some 50 miles from my boondock (it was affordable!) home. Beautiful as all heck, like Jackson Hole on the cheap (make an offer) but nada else. People here actually say it's a great place to die. I have no such plans.

Suburbs, even the "unplanned" ones, do offer a little space to gather friends. My Buddhist group meets in peoples' homes. And Trader Joe's isn't a 50 mile drive. Since the affordability is basically in the Central Valley, with temps in the 100's lately, and insane electric rates ... I might just rent in the bay area. I have always lived in suburbs, except for the past 11 years in the woods.

I grew roses and a few veggies in suburbs. Here, the deer eat everything not made of stainless steel, or so it seems. Lovely wildflowers make their brief appearance only because deer can't stomach them. And for a fair number of years, BART'ed to work. Those were the days, my friend.

Seniors always get the wrong end of the stick. I'll make do.

A similar building, the San Francisco Centre, formerly Westfield Mall, flopped and was sold to developers recently.

But SF is not Tokyo.

https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/04/san-francisco-centre-mall-...

Apple's decision to sit out the data center spending spree and instead pay Google for access to its frontier AI models is being increasingly seen by traders as an asset rather than a liability.

Apple pays Google. Google pays Apple. Reminds me of the early days of the internet when one company bought $1M of ads on another site, which bought $1M of ads on it.

Huge revenue claimed, when there was none.

Too bad for me that contractors and PG&E don't accept funny money.

Zuck apologized, in effect, FOR BEING CAUGHT.

I wonder about backdoors, if any, created when they had root access.

The evil that men do lives after them" ... Marc Antony

xcancel cancelled me.

Don't smartphone RAW images bypass internal processing? Mine doesn't create them. They do on digital cameras (though I am pleased with Nikon's jpegs, and save but rarely process the RAW images.)

I used a Coolpix P510 (and still do) with equivalent focal length of 24-1000 mm for many years. It did basically everything I needed (less the extreme wide-angle, which got me into a new mirrorless camera in recent years) and is fairly compact.

Really small (fit in your pocket, about the size of a phone but fatter) cameras have a zoom of 8X or so, which is OK. I have taken them on trips. The equivalent focal lengths are roughly 24-180 on full-frame. Small cameras do often have very small sensors, to achieve long effective focal lengths in small cases.

The Coolpix sensor is 1/6 of full frame. Interestingly, that model is so old that it doesn't kick out RAW images, but the rendered jpegs have almost always been very pleasing and "true" (you can adjust rendition in the menu tree).

My father was an artist, and was completely clueless about what I was doing, but was very supportive. He was not an outgoing person, but later got into local politics, and that experience taught me a lot about people (and ethics). No matter what I was doing, or you will be doing, really basic psychology is at work, as in communication and persuasion. He also got me started in music, which has been a wonderful hobby all my life. For all I know, specific career advice might be rare. He wanted me to be a dentist. I found science and tech more appealing!

And things change! My Dad grew up in a world of newspapers (He was a commercial artist) and telephones pre-dating rotary dials, vacuum tubes and no transistors and such. Things really change, even over a short period, as you note.

My own college education was in physics, which essentially prepares you for every job other than physics. And since service intervened, I hopped on the aerospace job train, in optics, electronic engineering and eventually, computing, around the time when you could actually build and own your own.

I never had any mentor, so to speak, and I understand your desire for one. I hope you do find one, because a mentor can share experience and wisdom that you would otherwise learn the hard way. I sure did.

But ask what is enduring in all this change. I tell young people to become electricians, because power generation and distribution are essential. In your case, electrical engineering. and since computers run everything, your interest in computing will be important. I needn't remind anyone how vulnerable power control systems are when sloppily programmed.

And if it all falls apart, people in remote communities will always need electricity from solar or whatever, and cost-effective, reliable systems.

Here in California, communities who didn't long ago set up their own power companies, negotiating with suppliers directly, are paying a terrible price for the monopoly or duopoly which burned entire communities with outdated equipment and forged safety records. We are paying for the renewed infrastructure whose budget went to shareholders and executives instead. Unfortunately, switchover takes time, and it's just too late for many. Nearby Fresno has the highest total electrical costs in the U.S. [0]

Well, just my two cents. To be honest, I was (and still am) a Jack of all trades, adapting to various job opportunities, from aerospace, to education, finance, sales engineering, and whatnot.

Seek good advice, and build your basic competence (as I did with physics) and confidence. We are all problem-solvers, and the ability to bring in ideas from outside a specialty can pay handsomely.

And avoid forums other than Hacker News. They are overrun by bots.

[0] https://gvwire.com/2025/05/09/fresno-pays-the-most-for-elect...

So Google is the gatekeeper of the internet. So much worse, because Google has turned into an advertising site rather than an information site, and now, an AI chatbot.

How those two get along must be an interesting technical problem, like reconciling relativity and quantum theory.

Of course, I get paid for neither problem, but can say assuredly that I rely mostly on HackerNews for information, and when looking for a paper, I will search with DDG to find a completely free paper (say, at arxiv) rather than the customary paywall put up by publishers (who probably pay Google to attract people who post here and who don't take the few seconds needed to find the free paper.)

Remember, "When all vetted information is paywalled, then most people will see only CT's, propaganda and falsehoods, which will always be free." The "Digital Divide" is real and it's spectacular(ly destructive).

And with bots and AI, politicians are able to rewrite history, as George Orwell detailed.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein

https://genius.com/Emmanuel-goldstein-the-theory-and-practic...

This internet is garbage, and I commend HN for being a good source, along with Wikipedia and arxiv. Those here who make an honest living on the internet should work to prevent its (further) destruction.

The unredacted Epstein files.

Not being glib. Without them, a whole lot of incriminating facts and allegations are being whitewashed from the world's knowledge base. I believe that the distinction between the two is made in the documents released so far.

This seems to the referenced paper, paywalled at Nature

Analysis of Tidal Perturbations Due to Asymmetric Response of LARES 2 and LAGEOS (revised 10 Mar 2026) [0]

   Earth tidal perturbations affecting laser-ranged satellites are critical for refining satellite orbital dynamics modeling, and their accurate computation represents a prerequisite for high-precision fundamental physical effects and geodetic investigations based on satellite orbit analysis. This study focuses on the tidal perturbations induced by the asymmetric responses of LARES 2 and LAGEOS on their orbital nodes and inclinations. Perturbations induced by a total of 402 (392 2nd and 10 3rd-order) earth tide constituents on the two satellites were calculated, based on Kaula's orbital perturbation theory and Lagrange's planetary equations for satellites, considering the frequency dependence of Love numbers. The asymmetric characteristics of tidal perturbations between the two satellites were quantitatively analyzed. The minimum resolutions of orbital inclinations and nodes, used as screening thresholds for significant constituents, were derived from the RMS of overlapping orbit differences using orbital geometry and error propagation law. With these thresholds, 83 significant constituents were identified from the 402. The cumulative effect of the 319 minor constituents was further evaluated, and it was found that their total impact, from coherent superposition, noticeably exceeds the thresholds, thus becoming non-negligible. The results of this study provide accurate tidal perturbation parameters for LARES 2 and LAGEOS, and offer methodological references for the screening of Earth tide constituents in high-precision satellite orbital dynamics research, laying a foundation for subsequent studies on inverting geophysical parameters from satellite orbits and verifying fundamental physical effects, particularly the relativistic Lense-Thirring effect. 

Related:

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Reinvigorates America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry [0]

Just a sample:

  Directs the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council to designate coal as a “mineral” under Executive Order 14241, entitling coal to all of the benefits of that prior Order.

  Directs relevant agencies to identify coal resources on Federal lands, lift barriers to coal mining, and prioritize coal leasing on those lands.

  Directs the Secretary of the Interior to acknowledge the end of the Jewell Moratorium, which paused coal leasing on Federal lands.

  Requires agencies to rescind any agency policies that seek to transition the Nation away from coal production or otherwise establish preferences against coal as a generation resource.

  Directs CEQ to assist agencies in adopting coal-related categorical exclusions under NEPA.

  Seeks to promote coal and coal technology exports, facilitate international offtake agreements for U.S. coal, and accelerate development of coal technologies.

  Calls for the Secretary of Energy to determine whether coal used in the production of steel meets the definition of a “critical material” and “critical mineral” under the Energy Act of 2020, and if so, add it to the relevant lists.

  Pushes for using coal to power new artificial intelligence (AI) data.

Trump announces $700 million investment in coal plants and California export terminal [1]

The U.S. is stepping up its investment in coal as President Trump doubles down on his commitment to bolster the fossil fuel industry.

During an event on Thursday, Mr. Trump announced that his administration would commit $700 million in funding for coal plants and a new export terminal.

[0]https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-coal-industry-funding-boo...