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Find small communities.

In my experience, everything you said is 100% true -- once groups get big enough. But each of those points is, equally, 100% false for small groups.

For example, the Raku community is fairly small, so the r/rakulang subreddit is friendly. For that matter, even the [raku] StackOverflow tag is friendly! Last I checked, the same was true of the corresponding Rust tags, though I know they've grown a lot since I was a regular there.


> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.

If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning.

(Here, Levine is making a specific claim about the remedies that the Delaware chancellory court typically employs, not about the authority of US courts)


This is an appeal to authority that is not valid: there are plainly a lot of lawyers out there who's legal opinion leaves a lot of daylight against the actual law. Rudy Giuliani took a long time to get disbarred.


> This is an appeal to authority that is not valid

I'm open to that criticism; I'm typically pretty skeptical of appeals to authority myself.

But to be clear: the appeal to authority I'm making isn't "legal opinion of a lawyer" (I agree that's very weak) but rather "opinion on corporate law by a Wachtell attorney who practiced corporate law" (Wachtell is probably the best corporate law firm in the world, and clearly in the top handful)


And in the example the parent comment gave: RUDY Guiliani was a US Attorney and the Associate Attorney General (third highest position in the DoJ).


> The other thing that comes to mind would be quantum systems that can only be measured once. Unfortunately I think that practically you would need a system that is "only twice" so that it can be compared, but I have this sense that anything that can be measured twice can be measured 3 times.

Just spitballing, but you could do it with a "once only" system if you could generate it reliabilly/deterministically enough that you don't need to measure it post-generation


This thought crossed my mind, but I couldn't figure out quite how to get it to work. I think the fundamental flaw with using a deterministic process to create the state is that an adversary can immediately reproduce a matching system if they make the measurement, and then we are back to needing a deterministic process that takes longer to occur than transit time.

After a bit of tangentially related thinking (see below), here is one possible way, and why I don't think it works. One could deterministically create a metastable state in a quantum system, e.g. by pumping a certain specific amount of energy into it. Then to figure out how much energy there was present, any additional amount of energy from by the measurement would cause the state to collapse. Unfortunately having the measured value in hand an adversary could now reproduce that state because the original process is deterministic.

For example, a classic "easy to produce hard(er) to measure" is creating aqueous solutions, where a bunch of different solutes are mixed together (I always think of ACSF, artificial cerebrospinal fluid, because I used to have to make it all the time). The creation of these can be entirely deterministic.

Unfortunately all you need is a good analytical chemist to get an approximation. Even if you used specific ratios of different isotopically pure salts they could probably reproduce it, and you would want something that would cause an irreversible change on physical tampering, such as an oxidation, cleaving, or isomerization so that you couldn't just dump the contents and put them back. All of these are tactics that delay an adversary by presenting them with a measurement and combinatorial problem, but doesn't provide the "measure once" property we need.


> From banking law about 10 years back now, I would expect that the bank would be on the hook for Deborah's transfers in the first story. … I would have taken that case if I were a plaintiff's lawyer.

I disagree, for two reasons. First, an outside-view argument: lawyers who currently practice in that field apparently disagree:

> Deborah reached out to more than thirty attorneys. Only one called her back. Deborah’s eldest brother consulted another, who called her situation “a terminal case.” “There’s no life here,” he said. Her claim was dying, if not already dead.

Second, on the merits: most of the fraud protections have requirements that the defrauded customer notify the bank promptly (either after the fraudulent transfer or after the next bank statement). See, e.g. [0]. It looks like that didn't happen here.

[0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rules-policy/regulations/100...


The fact that shadyurl.com is only available over HTTP is perfect icing on the cake. Attention to detail like that really sells the joke


ShadyURL (2010) launched years before Let's Encrypt (2014) so it might have just been too expensive to get a cert?


That was 12 years ago. Do you have 12 year old websites that have never been maintained ever?


In case you're looking for an alternative: consider using Perma.cc links, which both serve as a URL shortener and an archive of the current page.

(Plus they're expressly intended to last "forever" and are maintained by one of the few organizations with the multi-century history to credibly make that claim (Havard Law School))

https://perma.cc/about


Strange they'd lean on a country code TLD since those can go sideways for political reasons.


That's a good point. For .cc in particular, it's the TLD for an Australian territory and is managed by Verisign so I'd expect the risks to be lower than with some TLDs. Still, though, a lot can happen in "forever" and you're right that it adds an (unnecessary?) risk


It doesn't matter who is 'managing' it, since the owner can choose to give that management to someone else.


[flagged]


That's odd, the US usually has Secretaries and Departments instead of Ministers and Ministries. Is it a cabinet level position? I'm having trouble finding it's web page.

But I would have used `.net` personally, rather than a country-specific domain.


It's an allusion to the Ministry of Truth in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...


I'm sure the commenter is well aware of that, they're replying to a low-quality, vague comment with a sardonic version of the Socratic method.


I believe they are referring to Department of Homeland Security's new Disinformation board: https://www.hstoday.us/federal-pages/dhs/dhs-standing-up-dis...


.io is one such domain (Indian Ocean) and I won't use that domain for anything serious because of that.


True. I imagine Harvard has the necessary staff on hand to run a TLD themselves. Might make a good use for it.


They stopped giving out the monthly allowance of 10 links to free accounts in 2019.[1] New accounts now can archive 10 links, and that's it.

You might have access through a registered institution (e.g., libraries and universities get it for free). Otherwise, the rates for individuals are hidden on their blog.[2]

If you really want to archive and shorten a link at once, https://archive.today (often seen on HN for bypassing paywalls) is another option, but its unknown ownership makes its long-term existence slightly questionable. For general web archival, the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org) looks like it'll be around for a little longer. But since its crawler and server have their own quirks, I'd still submit links to multiple services for good measure.

[1] https://blogs.harvard.edu/perma/2019/01/07/introducing-indiv...

[2] https://blogs.harvard.edu/perma/2021/09/15/usage-plans-updat...

-----

Speaking of web archive reliability, it looks like WebCite might have recently died for good, after a decade of funding issues and intermittent downtime[3][4]—the first major web archive to fall?

[3] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/WebCite

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AWebCite#2021-10-27


I would love to know if the source code or an alternative to perma.cc is - otherwise, I want to build it myself!

edit: https://github.com/harvard-lil/perma


I’ve never heard of perma.cc before, but had a similar idea (likely more naive than however they are doing it) to save the content of a given url as an image and apply OCR, and keep both the image and the text saved. Got that working (somewhat well) and then dropped the project heh.


For the curious, this is powered by DuckDuckGo's favicon service, which takes significant steps to preserve request privacy. Details at https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/fa...


Running `feh` in an ssh session (or other terminal session without a graphical display) will print

    "Can't open X display. It *is* running, yeah?"
That's not quite an insult, but seems to be the in the same spirit


> Honestly I’m surprised they admitted this.

I think it's because they're lawyers.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about the legal profession, but most lawyers (especially the "establishment" types most likely to be involved in the CA bar) are *very* unlikely to make deliberately false statements (or to fail to correct a past statement, one they learn it was false).

In defiance of thousands of lawyer jokes, in my experience lawyers lie the *least* of any large group of humans I've encountered – at least if "lying" refers only to the specific denotation of the words, since lawyers also love to split hairs to say something that's technically true. But the distinction between a "hack" and a "database error" is _exactly_ the sort of hair that lawyers love to split!

Source: I'm a lawyer-turned-programmer


Previous "Superblocks" discussion on HN:

Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars[0] (2016) - 236 comments

What New York Can Learn from Barcelona’s ‘Superblocks’[1] (2016) - 133 comments

Superblocks: Barcelona’s plan to take back streets from cars[2] (2019) - 31 comments

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237966

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200760

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12633414


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