I wouldn't regard those downvotes as valid. There is a large and vocal group on this thread with no apparent regard for HN's culture. They appear to be from "out of town".
CodeMonkeyZ on Twitter is biased, but links to interesting material nonetheless, such as excerpts from Dominion software manuals describing such oddities as vote tallies stored as floating point rather than integer values (seriously?).
Many of the comments on both sides - although hopefully not most of the worst ones - are from long term contributors.
Many of us try to be reasonable even when we go against the grain here:
Personally I never liked or voted Trump and I trust the American public and American judges more than HN or YouTube.
As an outside observer with contacts on both sides I can see how maddening this must be, so here I am on HN, trying to explain how this feels like for Trump supporters.
Meanwhile I see messages waiting for me on Telegram and I think Instagram from some of those people and I will again tryvto explain them that even if they haven't seen a single Biden supporter for miles it just means they haven't looked in the right places.
But, historically I think being a reasonable person when American elections are discussed on HN is a losing proposition :-)
these are minor problems and more importantly they don't have any proof that they would have changed the outcome. For example, 9500 people were dead. What was the breakdown of Trump/Biden in those votes? I don't understand how we can fix that. Do you have a crystal ball we can all look into to find out if we will die between the day we mail in our ballot and the day of the election?
That is not what YouTube said. They will not take down a video where you say that some people died between the time that they mailed in their vote and the time that the votes were counted, so those votes shouldn't and didn't count.
They will take down a video that says that foreign countries stole the election for Biden, because all of the evidence points to that not being true at all.
>"In March 2012, Professor Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University, an expert on Iraqi archaeology, returning from the first archaeological expedition in Iraq after 20 years, stated that she does not know a single archaeologist who believed that these were batteries."
Shantaram is incredible, I can only think of the original Dune novels by Frank Herbert as comparable in depth, scope and revelation of what it is to be human.
Shantaram's author claims use of artistic license in names, character descriptions and details, in order to protect those described from repercussions. Reading the extraordinary story and arc, and subsequently learning of the fact that later in real life the author later went on to marry into Czech royalty, it's easy to believe it as a fundamentally true account.
In principle it leaks information, so is always worse practice than not leaking. For example, one could imagine an edge-case where given a set of average-colour password images collected over time, for a password field that has a dynamic in its presentation that is exposed in the averaging, useful information could be discerned and used to supplement other attack vectors.
Say for example, the password field had one of those password strength colour indicators that subtly changed the background or font colour to indicate password strength, and the images were captured and obfuscated at that point. Information useful to an attacker would now be embedded in the colour average.
Maybe the commenter simply believes that it might not be crazy to exhibit concern for something that's known to be dangerous enough weaponise, is invisible, silent and being deployed in concentration all over the world including throughout your own neighbourhood and living complex.
Sure, similar things could be said for electricity, and many other beneficial things - even water. But the same can also be said for things that were said to be safe - by the same sources; industry and media - and yet ended up causing great harm.
How bizarre, I'd been led to believe wireless energy was completely harmless; safe to use in the home, upon ones person daily and even distribute randomly in concentrated areas en masse without coordination.
And further, I thought I was in the right that anyone claiming otherwise was paranoid and misinformed.
Oh, look, this information is even coming from the same news services that previously told me it was completely safe.
It's almost like the X-ray thing all over again. Or smoking. Or DDT. Or...
Yes, and do you know the difference between science and conjecture? Practice and theory?
Done any research into people who are medically hyper-sensitive, sometimes at the milliwatt level, to RF energy?
Is it possible that the cumulative effects of compounded milliwatts could potentially have harmful effects, that have yet to be sufficiently studied or understood?
Maybe.
I'm not at all suggesting there is a massive conspiracy to do whatever to everyone by deploying 5G or Wifi or whatever else. But I am saying that "move fast and break things" is an irresponsible modus operandi when the things might be us.
The race for faster and make more money does NOT have a good history of safety for us, nor the planet. Proceed with caution, and value those who doubt. What have you got to lose? Your Netflix buffering 2 seconds faster?
The fact that the "new name" (IEI) seems to ignore/discredit the primary claims of the sufferers at the outset, and that a multi-billion (trillion?) dollar industry would somewhat prefer these people don't exist, I remain skeptical of recent studies. (A view no doubt also biased by personal experience.)
That older studies show the effect, and newer ones don't isn't a smoking gun, but it is a cause for skepticism.
At least, one thing almost all studies agree on is "more research is required".
Your link does not support that - whilst it admits the possibility that the effects "must be very weak or affect only few individuals" it does not suggest that "more research is required", and suggests that other environmental factors or the nocebo effect is to blame. I read the last sentence of the conclusion as suggesting that researchers stop wasting their time with false reports due to poor experimental setup.
You have the need for scepticism round the wrong way. Scepticism is needed when dealing with claims that some humans can detect radio frequencies, despite no single human that has been tested being able to demonstrate such a skill, and no proposed mechanism for how this should be possible.
But set that aside that for a moment. Consider that it's well-established that EMF can and does affect human tissue, and it's also well-established that some humans are extraordinarily sensitive and susceptible to harm from tiny doses of just about anything you can name (versus "normal" people who aren't).
Therefore, I have no idea why ordinarily intelligent people will readily believe EMF/RF hypersensitivity to be completely impossible.
My mother claimed to be sensitive to WiFi and feel sick when it’s on. She would often power it off and claim she felt better. My sister lived with her at the time and when I visited, complained she could not use the Internet most of the time. So I hid the station ID but left it on. Told mom the WiFi is off on the router.
Guess what? She stopped complaining about feeling it or feeling sick from it. I don’t know if she eventually found out it was on the whole time (from my sister), but she now uses WiFi herself and has even asked me to help fix it when it was down.
Perhaps some people are just sensitive to SSID broadcasting? ;)
> Is it possible that the cumulative effects of compounded milliwatts could potentially have harmful effects, that have yet to be sufficiently studied or understood?
Yes. It's possible but isn't the general understanding that it's extremely unlikely?
Many, many things are possible but some criteria has to be applied to decide which ones we can spend time on investigating. Werewolf research is currently massively underfunded for good reason.
Yes, I would generally agree. But I think it's fine, and justified to investigate the (many) claims of EMF sensitivity. People having a seizure because they walked past someone eating peanuts may have seemed insane when it first came about, and while I have no idea of the history, it's easy to imagine that nut may have been cracked only finally by someone crazy enough to hypothesize such a thing. I have a friend who will die if their partner kisses them after drinking a glass of milk - the human body can at times decide to do extremely counterproductive things based on things ordinarily considered "safe".
(I love the werewolf research line, definitely stealing that for when I'm on the other side of this argument.)
I agree, most people dismiss claims of harm because they themselves are not personally affected by it ( example perfumes, allergies). Or do not see the immediate effects of it. ( eg. DDT ). Greed,ignorance and mostly stupidity plays a role here. Further they turn the tables and ask for proof of harm of the technology in question, instead of having to prove proof of harmlessness (which can be done but they do not do it).
>It's almost like the X-ray thing all over again. Or smoking. Or DDT
"Maybe we shouldn't want" is a strange statement. It simultaneously appears to acknowledge widespread desire for something, along with an apparent minority view that wanting that thing is bad. In the context of a democracy, the argument ends before it begins.
Maybe we shouldn't want to write "maybe we shouldn't want"?
