skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you're not going to see what people did on a site, what's the point?

Because you are not a unique and special snowflake. If you regularly go to /r/The_Donald, it says something specific about your politics (probably). Same for /r/LateStageCapitalism or /r/trees. It might not say much, but it adds up to a profile of who you are and what you think about.

If you are emailing certain people, or tweeting them or whatever, GCHQ can build a social graph of people you know, who they know, etc. If you are the friend (or friend of a friend) of a person of interest, you're more likely to be of interest yourself. There are not many criminals like the una-bomber working entirely on their own - most of us need encouragement and/or provocation, and nowadays much of that happens online.

If your search phrases include things like "how to make a bomb", you're probably going to be on a database somewhere. There have been numerous serious court cases (e.g. murder trials) where the prosecution have presented evidence that the accused's search history included phrases like "how to dispose of a body" or "how to poison someone". In other cases, jurors have been dismissed for using Google to research the background to the case they are serving on. I wonder where the information about these searches came from?

Metadata is important for identifying "interesting" people. When you have found them, you "zoom in" and start hoovering up all the information you can find, not just the metadata. It's the greatest spying tool ever, and a way to implement highly repressive government too - just start monitoring people with different lifestyles or "way out" opinions.

http://ghanadailies.com/2016/11/22/uk-government-plans-porn-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/23/niche-...
Opt Out is scammy.

Command line tools do not usually do this at all, particularly FOSS command line tools. This is a very worrying development and reduces my trust in FOSS.

--edit-- to whoever downvoted me, can you explain why?

I love FOSS but I also lovemy privacy. I have come to generally have a default level of trust for popular FOSS projects. Things like this make me question that trust. Why is this wrong?
I'm not talking about his point, I'm talking about the kind of tone calling a stranger an idiot.
> So, in practice, what you do is you remove outliers (e.g. cap the data at +-3sigma) then use squared error.

But if you are say fitting a function to the data, you can't tell beforehand which data-points are the outliers. So in that case perhaps you need an iterative approach of removing them (?)
Show HN: MediaPickerInstagram – A photo picker (Instagram-like) for Android
They use .NET and build their tools and services using it. .NET gets better so does their associated services built using it.
In 2015, Finnish electricity production was as follows [1]:

- 33.7% nuclear
- 16.6% fossil fuels
- 44.9% renewables
- 4.4% peat

Wikipedia says that all the fossil fuels are imported (except peat) but does not cite a source. With a fifth nuclear reactor under construction (Olkiluoto 3), the import of fossil fuels would probably diminish at some point anyway.

The renewable electricity production mostly comprises hydropower (25.1%) and wood-based energy (about 15%). Solar power is not an option--during winter, every Friday is black Friday here. Wind power would hardly be profitable without the feed-in tariff [2].

Given the ecological issues with hydropower, the limited nature of wood-based power and how inapplicable solar and wind power are here, I personally consider nuclear power to be the most environmentally friendly option if we're to produce more electricity.

[1] http://pxnet2.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__ene__s...

[2] https://www.energiavirasto.fi/web/energy-authority/feed-in-t...
Ah, didn't read closely enough. Thank You.
Debian's popularity contest package gets it right. You're asked once during installation, with the default being to decline. If you keep choosing "next" without reading or thinking you get a working installation with your privacy intact, and it never bothers you again.
How about choosing no default, and instead ask the user on first run? `Do you want to send usage data to the developer? (yes/no)`
This seems to ignore the main objection. It's not that Chinese companies are investing in European economies, it's that these companies are run by the Chinese state, and that China is not providing reciprocal access to its own market to Western companies. This is not natural free-market activity, it is a state-sponsored effort to take technology and expertise from European companies and feed it into state-owned Chinese ones.

For all the fears raised recently about rising Western nationalism and protectionism, the Chinese regime is blatantly and unashamedly nationalist and protectionist as a matter of course. The state decides who wins and who loses, and they will simply not allow foreign companies to gain a dominant market position in any significant sector. All market activity, including foreign investment, is tolerated only so long as it is subservient to the nationalist goal of Chinese hegemony.

For years, Western politicians and businesses have turned a blind eye to China's flagrant disregard for the basic rules of free global trade. Partly out of greed for Chinese money and market access, and partly due to an entirely wishful assumption that this is only a phase, and that China will eventually start playing by the rules and acting like a "normal" free market economy.

This delusion demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how autocratic regimes like China operate. Just as they cannot, and will not, tolerate any significant internal competition to their own authority, they will, in the long term, not tolerate any external competition either, either political, military or economic. The Chinese state will never be satisfied being one powerful economic actor amongst others, all playing by the rules of a global market. They will never accept being checked by laws of trade or other country's interests, any more than they will tolerate being checked by democratic accountability or rule of law.
This kind of nannying can be really expensive to do correctly when trying to build high performance systems -- to the point where it doesn't make sense to punish everyone just because someone who didn't read the manual MIGHT misuse the product. It's not at all unreasonable to mix transactions with different guarantees if they never touch the same data, and tracking that accurately enough without pissing off your customers with performance needs seems like a fool's errand.
Repeal the New Surveillance Laws (Investigatory Powers Act)
"help them secure access to the growing Chinese market" is a very euphemistic way of referring to China's refusal to let non-Chinese-owned businesses operate there. China, you see, does not actually believe in free trade and is really rather keen on protectionism when they're the ones doing it..
On the contrary, I think there is a real question over whether AlphaGo would be able to beat a group of 3-5 tier-1 Go players (e.g. ~top 10 rankings players) who were allowed to write things down on paper, discuss, use whiteboards, use separate game boards to play variations, etc, even with same time controls.
You can disable it by setting the ENV variable HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS.

https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/Library/Homebre...
> * Byte strings and character strings are different things so now I have to care about stuff.

The vast majority of Python programmers who don't live in a mostly-ASCII world just breathed a sigh of relief. Python 3 makes Unicode awareness mandatory instead of optional; that's the right move for a web-facing, human-facing language.
There is one other relevant complexity. ECHR membership is a condition of being a member of the EU. Brexit has to happen for the UK to depart from the ECHR.

So voting for Remain was also a vote to keep the UK locked in to the ECHR. Voting for Leave was also a vote to release that lock.
Your belief may not match the real world. You can only know that by actually asking them.

Look at the outcry when Microsoft put this stuff in Win 10.

At the very least you should present a question on install. Hiding a notice amongst licenses and other information, as often happens, is underhanded and scammy.
Germany has a proper constitution which makes it easy to judge if something is unlawful. In the UK, the constitution is just a collection of ways of doing things. That makes it harder to throw a law like this out.
This illustrates how slippery the distinction between communications data and metadata really is. The examples in the first paragraph would all just record that you had been to www.reddit.com.
Why didn't they just use the same algorithms as typical implementations of C++'s STL?
The problem is that if you can verify your vote you can be coerced into voting in a certain way. There would need to be some sort of plausible deniability built in.
You can go and use Genode right now. There's no installer (to my knowledge) -- you'll have to build the OS by hand. If the area of secure OSes or capability-based OSes are interesting to you, Genode is the best playground for that. The DROPS/Dresden folks have been working in this area for a long time.

Genode is largely kernel agnostic, being an "Operating System Framework" -- you can run it on Linux, variants of L4, seL4, Muen, and more.
Show HN: Online version of the Codenames boardgame
Then it's their social contract in their democracy.
How is your opsec - i.e. do you vary your purchasing pattern, using random numbers to pick intervals between purchases and a variety of vendors?

I only ask, because routing everything over a VPN provides the illusion of privacy while flipping contracts every month provides some element of real privacy. It is easy enough to check on the activity of people pretending to hide their activity (assuming GCHQ has access to the same access that the NSA do), but real resources have to be spent tracking down people who actually hide their activity.

I have no idea how they allocate their budget for tracking potential threats, but somebody flipping prepaid sims would warrant a closer look if I was analysing the logs.
This BBC article also quotes people arguing that this recognition might just be a tendency for a judge/jury to find someone guilty.

Again, that can't explain how you can reach 89.5% hit frequency?! Even in China, there needs to be some evidence... right?

To me, that argument sounds like "double think", because of fears of a 1984 society -- where people are characterized from their faces. (That is stupid, if this can really be refined and made to work, then active criminals would just do cosmetic operations.)

If those results goes against your ideology, just note that it isn't peer reviewed yet. :-)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38092196
I've emailed numerous MPs about this. None of them give a shit.
Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 18 with WebRTC
This used to be true. Nowadays, some corporations have more power than states and have more money in the bank than the whole GDP of multiple countries. Corporations can steal income and can indeed kill people, they are just not powerful enough to do it in the western world yet. Corporations do regulate industrial practices a lot through massive lobbyism, the examples are countless.
Doesn't that social graph require them to know what you're doing on a given site?

I suppose they already have that power, otherwise we wouldn't have what you describe.

But the article says they're only gathering connection metadata, this law anyway. I guess they're already doing even more intrusive things, at least as a way to know who to get "legit" evidence on.
In (somehow) related news, Morocco is enlisting the help of China for building a new City.

http://qz.com/841803/morocco-wants-to-build-a-new-city-from-...

They just finished building a Huge bridge near the city of Rabat.

http://www.thearabweekly.com/Economy/5954/Rabat%E2%80%99s-ca...
How long before they extend this to VPN users?
Has anything really changed in China in the past 3 millenia, from the point of view of political dynamics?

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

China has had a central government for a long time. Before Roman civilization was more than a bunch of farmers.

"people will start calling for more representation"

No, people seldom have started calling for more representation. Rather, a portion of the intelligentsia has yearned for a system with more representation, based either on ideals originating in philosophy (europe) or out of spite of colonial masters (americas).

Now, the question is - based on what philosophical framework would the intelligentsia base their request?

I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm just pointing out that a european or american view of history will skew the political intuition around a framework that can lack a basis once one leaves these spheres of influence.
What exactly does "greatest civilization" mean?

You mean the next super-power?
China just made probably one of its biggest mistakes
http://bit.ly/2dmfR9K
For a basic setup like Piwik (open source analytics) on a VPS it shouldn't be more than $5 - $30 / month.
I hope so. But China is going to be a much larger thing to chew and swallow. Also Japan depended (and does) on "the West" for military protection. And military might ultimately sets the bounds for what you can get away with in trade.
They already do: https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
Indeed. Most apartment buildings and some houses in cities use municipal central heating. Otherwise it's common to have electrical heating (though older houses sometimes use oil), and people tend to heat with wood stoves in addition.
Ledger Blue: an enterprise grade security device
List of common misconceptions (wikipedia)
The point here is that, like that Ubuntu search we all hated, this is not behaviour we expect from well behaved FOSS application, notice or otherwise.

Google collect obscene amounts of info on everything from government interactions to software preferences. So far it's largely been confined to the web and could be blocked by using an ad or tracker blocker.

Now that software may or may not do this stuff too... it ups the game and the threat.

This will make me less likely to use Brew. Likely no great loss to the team I'm sure.
How to Be a More Mindful Leader (10-Day Email Course)
Is this possible with TLS? How would they know anything more than the host you're connecting to?

Still, though, disgusting.
Ported all my code base to Lua. Python can die now.
Or I suspect some bent copper will be caught selling celebs data to the tabloids again.
I know it from this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU2Rhq5eWa4
Hello HN! I've not found any PhotoPicker component suitable for my needs for Android so I made this one. :)

It's a Photo picker component that aims to replicate the experience provided by Instagram.

The features I plan to add are :
Photo taking functionality
Video taking functionality
Photo editing with filters and stuff

Hope this helps!
Some help is much appreciated, there is much work that could be done. :)
pkg.src is available for Mac OS X and might be a good alternative (disclaimer: I have never seriously used it, certainly not on OS X).

https://www.pkgsrc.org/
http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
Its pretty obvious that it should be bdhd, the gLTD however needs some thought as .ly, .io, and .co are too nerdy and frankly past their due dates.
That was a great watch, recommended.
Rock on anon' -- we feel the same way!

Once you get above a few boxes though, you might need some pricey geeks for a month or two to rig up cobbler, ceph, openstack, proxmox, or whatever-takes-ya simply because it's quicker than getting up on all that yourself right away -- but really there is no magic involved here and it's just so you can have it totally manageable as you grow.

The tooling is much more friendly these days; and to be totally honest -- provisioning probably isn't the problem you're trying to solve anyway (more likely packaging/deployment/ci is the pain after you got a bit of breathing space on perf). I've seen loads of folks coming back on prem spend months rigging up crazy vm provisioning things when their estate is basically static because they didn't realise they were solving the wrong problem.

If your ops time is spent building machines, then sort that out. Probably and more likely it's spent on getting apps running and dealing with moving traffic about and deployments and such; so that's the real thing to work on.

I think the 'complexity' argument seem so loud on HN as the opsy people are the minority here and it's not exactly a sexy/exciting/fun thing to pick up, and when it goes wrong it's brutal, especially when you can be nailing features instead.

All I'd say is -- regardless of what you're doing, getting into containers at this point makes your life quite a lot easier; you get a standard deployable unit of code you can throw into aws, or on prem depending on your workload, and it removes a lot of the anti-patters of config mgt.
Being open source they should just make their analytics data public.
IMO, the intent was good... but yeah, the implementation is a grand demonstration of what you get when legislators don't understand the technology they're regulating. It would be far better if they'd required browsers, not websites, to show the notifications - much like they already do when a site wants to access your webcam/mic/location/etc[0]. That would mean much less implementation work (once per browser instead of per site), no way for underhanded sites to use cookies without the user being notified or despite the user declining them, consistent UI across all sites...

Such a thing could provide significantly more useful information, too - I envisage a notification with "This site wants to use a cookie on your computer" at the top, "allow/deny, now/always" buttons and a "What are cookies?" link at the bottom, and a user-friendly breakdown of this particular case in between, things like:

• "only visible to this site" vs "visible to ad.doubleclick.net" etc - maybe including, say, the Organization Name from the cookie domain's SSL cert, at least in the case of cookies set to "Secure" (maybe only if the cert's EV)

• "until you close your browser" vs "for a week" etc - perhaps with a way for the user to force session-only if desired

• possibly some kind of warning about snooping risk if the cookie's not marked secure, or not HTTP-only & 3rd-party scripts are on the page, etc

• for the case of 3rd-party cookies, it'd be possible to list which other sites have used the same cookie in the past

And so forth. The most importantant point being that you could actually trust this information - your browser has no motivation to lie to you about it, but any random site might.

[0] eg, https://i.imgur.com/NcxWz8zh.jpg
No, I want every program I ever use not to leak data about me all over the internet.

I'm amazed we're even having this discussion
Indeed, that's a good point and I'm aware of that. They can absolutely track me given enough effort; they probably do it anyway since I'm a developer, I just try to make it a bit costlier for them I guess. For now, I don't bother much rotating vendors but it should be something I do indeed!
Know About Our Onyx Pomsky Puppy
Let's not forget the China has acquired this position by providing the world with goods for 30 years, for a price that meant misery for their workers. It's not entierly undeserved that they are now able to execute whatever grand evil plan they imagined. We're free to prevent them from accessing our markets, as long as we reimport manufacturing into free-market countries, which would mean paying a bit more than $7 for a toy, clothes and electronics, or accepting a minimum wage under $10/day for our Western workers. Serious question. is our independence worth the effort?
Fuck, Marry or Kill? Upsetting New App Launched
i wasn't angry actually, maybe the angry "joseph" was another one ;) this troll session helped me to think about flood control, etc.
Shakepay Instant: Create No-ID Bitcoin Debit Cards in a Browser Extension
Do you have a link for IBM's mishandling of the NDIS? Interested, but can't find a link.
If there's a language that you know best and highly prefer, then use that; but if you have no preference then Python is very suitable at the moment, as it's both easy to get started in it and also easily extending to powerful numeric computation and machine learning frameworks.
Yes. You can talk in this chat with JS : ws.send(...).
> The Chinese state will never be satisfied being one powerful economic actor amongst others, all playing by the rules of a global market. They will never accept being checked by laws of trade or other country's interests, any more than they will tolerate being checked by democratic accountability or rule of law.

The same could be said about the US i guess. It's the EU that looks like a naive child on the World Stage...
That DJ EZ mix is excellent. Reminds me of everything I love about the London electronic music scene.
Excellent points! It is not a question of capitalism playing out, its state directed (and funded) economic expansion to further the national interest of China (more specifically, Communist Party). You can see this in the "investments" made by China in Africa, and the Chinese string of pearls in the Indian Ocean, among others.
Jedit - the most underrated editor, its extremely customizable and has great set of plugins
I'm thankful to both.
>My problem is that I believe that 90% of the users of my app won't care one way or the other if I record these stats. If I default opt-out these people, then I lose all that useful data and in the process, I believe, make my app worse for everyone.

If those people wouldn't volunteer to opt-in, it's just as likely that the reason they are not opting-out is because they missed the notification that someone is collecting data about them.

It's a UX anti-pattern to default behavior to something the users may not want. If you're worried they'll accept whatever default there is, just explicitly ask them if they want to relay usage stats and you'll be surprised how much of the 90% you claim don't care will start caring.

Look at the comments on this thread, there are multiple accounts of people surprised by this. The very fact that this article is on the front page is proof that Brew tricked users.

>Especially when the data is anonymised and doesn't contain any private/identifying information.

You've either made massive breakthroughs in the field of information security or this is a bogus statement. If the user's computer even connects to an analytics service, they've already got an IP address, frequency of connections from that IP, etc and all of the correlation that comes with enabled by their other data sets. Just because it's anonymized by the time it comes out of Google in Brew usage reports doesn't mean it hasn't given Google additional information to profile people.
I did, yeah, sorry.
Banks and investment funds control our currency, governments are at best a serious player. many governments are smaller than and often forced to do the bidding of corporations. Companies like wallmart and macdonalds control more what people eat than the us government or those people themselves. If you think companies don't have a lot of power you are deluding get yourselves - the only way to have choice for consumers is when they (through government) control and check the market. If government doesn't monopolies and other anti competitive behaviour nullify any of the free market benefits very quickly.
You can assign values of different types to the same property in those languages, no?