skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out (though, these days, probably not creeped out enough to do anything about it). I expect that another example of this would be the ability of their facial recognition system and the breadth of the database behind it.

Users are Facebook's product, and they should expect to be treated as such. The Facebook site and associated services are just infrastructure designed to a) collect information on users and b) give advertisers optimal access to those users.

edit: also, obviously, Facebook is not the only company engaged in this sort of thing. It's all around us.
If restaurant service was like SaaS email marketing
Do you have a contact detail? I am not looking at the moment but I may want to move to Japan in the future since my wife is Japanese.
> match your customer with data about them from countless other sources

With so many data sources, it should be easy to find proxies for protected classes (race, sex, etc). Indirect discrimination was (and still is[2]) used to enforce racial segregation ("redlining"[1]). Facebook was recently caught[3] enabling direct discrimination. I wonder if your roommate cares that his company is probably doing the same thing indirectly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[2] https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas...

[3] https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...
My point was not "Romanians can't get remote jobs," but rather "It's not so easy to get remote jobs that all Romanians can simply get a remote job."
This is the correct way to make a "proportionate" response!
They ought to encourage the use of prepared statements to defend against SQL injections. It's the only way to handle that threat, yet the report does not mention it:

"5. Input Validation - Input validation is a method of sanitizing untrusted user input provided by users of a web application, and may prevent many types of web application security flaws, such as SQLi, XSS, and command injection."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_statement
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SQL_Injection_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet
I don't think it is safe to assume at all. They laid this at Russia's feet almost immediately and before any investigation was conducted.
Sort of related, have people noticed or have they officially announced that they are tagging photos on the alt html field with a description of the actual photo? It's pretty accurate with texts like "two people smiling, with baby".
I think the sky is red but I tell you today it is teal -- I am lying about something I misunderstand
That doesn't contradict what I said: The U.S. imports large amounts of food. The charts on a related page show tens of billions of dollars of imports per year:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-trade/...

Net imports is a different question.
When things like this are used as a pretext to sanction other countries, I will assume nothing and expect data. The bogus weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was enough to convince me that "just trust us" isn't sufficient data.
s/shouldn't discuss them over email./shouldn't.
Cheney literally made up an intelligence agency to tell him what he wanted, after the CIA said there was no evidence of WMD. If you blame the CIA for that, you very mistaken.
8,000 U.S. jobs? Trump takes credit for Sprint, startup decisions
What? I would re-read the OP comment.
A family member of mine left a biotechnology job for similar reasons: death-march management, disrespect for scientists, and the obvious fact that the only purpose of the company was to pile IP into a closet, never to ship a product.

It was a straight-up exploitative scam, but for people with PhDs.
Oh goodness gracious, I misremembered it as "Slavery is freedom" from when I read the book 10 years ago. My, oh my, how careless of me.

I'm skeptical you can actually engage with any of my more substantials """stinkers""" and that's why you resorted to nitpicking. In any case, that line can be replaced with the general idea of the party's newspeak and doublethink in the book. In particular, the line "war is peace" from the slogan fits the bill. Instead of saying the party wants to maximize freedom, let's say it wanted to maximize peace. The party loves peace, in fact! There. I clarified the minor point you snagged on.

And for the more substantial points I described in the post, the most accessible scholarly source I've read is Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown [1]. Unfortunately, it's impossible reduce any lengthy political analysis to the point where it can be fit inside of an Internet comment.

[1] http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BROW_UND.html
Note that the cyber warfare programs mentioned in the article seem to be military programs, so a better comparison would be comparing skill levels of people working in comparable elite branches of the military.

The existence of highly trained and highly skilled special forces units in various forms (e.g. GRU Spetsnaz[1]) in various countries implies that with enough political willpower and funding the skill levels of at least a small subset of people working for these organizations should be somewhat formidable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spetsnaz_GRU
Are you aware of https://firejail.wordpress.com/ ? Sounds like it's what you are looking for (or is there a reason it does not satisfy your requirements?)
Kudos to the author for compiling these.
One note: Maxima can do fast Fourier transform, too (with fft and inverse_fft).
I agree with you... science is really all about fixing mistakes. What I meant was exactly what you say, to minimize their emotional impact, not their rational effects.
The biggest cost gains have probably been realized, especially given the reduction in long term obligations (pension, healthcare, weakened union position). I could see another round or two of automation, but at some point it's not worth investing in.
RefCell does use run-time checks; that's it's entire reason for existing. They're "implicit" in the sense that they're inside of the functions, but that's the job of calling the function, so.

Question mark is roughly six lines of code, it's a match statement on Result, which has two cases.
That is conspicuous consumption, and digital goods can perform this function just as well. As an extreme example, the "I Am Rich" app. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
I have 2 comments saying just the opposite that good/bad papers require more time to read than bad/good papers.

So a bit of clarification to my comment. If I spend months reading papers about the same topic, the first papers will take me a lot of time but the last papers will take me less time because I have a lot of background and I don't have to check references, review concepts, understand maths proof or whatever. Probably those papers are very related and share a lot of information.

Good papers (for whatever you think it is good) require time to read because you really want to understand it completely. Bad papers (for whatever you think a bad paper is) require time to read because you cannot be sure if that paper is relevant for you unless you understand it completely. Although at the end you have a ton of papers to read and you check the abstract and decided whether spend time on the paper or not.
The Chinese Fighter plane probably was a bigger deal on the merits. I don't know how seriously our national security apparatus takes that versus this attack.

As an attack, though, it didn't rise to a major domestic political issue because there just isn't anything up for debate. It happened, it's clearly bad — where was our response lacking? Maybe it was lacking, but apparently our two parties don't disagree enough to make it an issue.

And that's the issue here. If both parties agreed that it's wrong for foreign governments to hack the DNC's e-mail and air their dirty laundry, there wouldn't be much public debate. But the President elect claims it didn't even happen, and that's making the stakes far larger than the issue itself.

It's like Elian Gonzales: how much does the event itself matter? Not that much. How much do the conflicting political forces arrayed around the event matter? A whole lot.
If you can make more than $17k/month from straight consulting, I would like to subscribe to your newsletter please.
Agreed - this is meant to present the evidence or at least the public part of.

If this is all there is; then the skepticism coming from the incoming administration is warranted.
Charlike – Small, fast, simple and streaming project scaffolder
The way the industry is moving, it seems that:

(1) Web apps are increasingly being split into a separation between presentation-only frontends + multiple "purely API-oriented" backends;

(2) There is a trend towards static typing in webapps.

We're currently using Go (plus some legacy Ruby apps we haven't rewritten yet) to implement microservice backends that serve APIs, and the frontend is all client-side JavaScript using React. (We also use Node.js to do server-side rendering of static HTML for Googlebot, but for a typical visitor, all the magic happens in the browser.)

For us, Go works well, and the compilation and static typing is a much-appreciated safety net compared to the everything-goes world of Ruby, not to mention much better performance and memory usage (one app is went from being multiple Unicorn processes consuming 2GB RAM in total, down to a single process using ~60MB and a fraction of the CPU usage).

But this isn't "systems programming" at all, and yet for me, Rust is very much on the table as a possible next language. I'm not sure if its complexity is large enough of a hindrance yet. Go is already a challenge for junior programmers who are used to dynamically typed languages, Rust much more so. I'd love to be able hire all seniors, but all the hot startups are taking them. (Though in that sense, Rust may even serve as a good carrot.)

As for static typing on the web side, TypeScript — which is essentially static typing for JS — is also most definitively in our future. The last year or so, Microsoft has made it easier to work with a mix of legacy JS and TS, so you no longer have to convert the entire codebase to migrate, which is great.

I don't think every company is going to move away from their classical Rails or PHP stack, of course, but there's definitely a trend, and I can imagine Rust becoming a popular alternative to the other statically-typed languages, including Scala and Java.
Here's the scene...
https://youtu.be/-rdG7ug_icw?t=1m18s

eXistenZ is paused!
This. I've found a few minor glitches and would've already submitted them while reading if there was a faster way to do it.
Last time I checked, the race detector could only find a certain percentage of data races – those easier to detect .

The crux with such systems is you tend to rely on them...
Yes we can, we can try to send a message to the creatures in higher levels of reality.
U.S. Sanctions Russia Over Election Hacking; Russia Threatens to Retaliate
How much for a decent high-speed Internet connection?
I'll need some time to check out EDN, so will message you with any comments later, since this thread might expire. Thanks again for letting me know about it.
> Me too, but we do have to remember that that's probably because we were raised in societies that don't value these perks over cash. In societies where that is not the case, non-monetary perks can be many many times more valuable than abstract cash.

Societies don't value things: they force people to pretend to value things. "Society values X" is only a valuable figure of speech as long as it actually approximates, "People in society freely value X for their own publicly understood reasons."
>Second, the Bush White House saw the intelligence they wanted to see.

And the Obama administration is not doing the exact same thing here? I'm sorry but a py2exe agent dropped from phishing, some random IP addresses, and some publicly known persistence techniques do not an APT make. This is horse shit
As the article says, every country's security services need to deal with IT security and need skilled professionals to do it, so everyone recruits. They all recruit naval engineers too.

The Russian gov't reputedly recruiting criminals is a story, but only a small part of this one. The Russian government's aggressive recruiting tactics are somewhat of a story, but probably not specific to this segment of the labor market.
Agree. I don't want these things cluttering up my view of the sky.
Costco is your friend. Also, you can put Solo cups in the dishwasher to extend their use a few times.

http://www.costco.com/Solo-Party-Plastic-Cold-Drink-Cups-16o...
I recommend relatively obscure game Magic & Mayhem. Although not 100% strategy, it has controllable units and isometric view and that feel.

Also Majesty and Dungeon Keeper.
What's the market rate for a guy in spetznaz? I don't think he has one.
There was barely any coverage when the Office of Personnel Management was hacked and the personal data of millions of people holding security clearances was taken. The hue and cry about the social engineering hack of the email of a political party campaign manager seems far in excess of the response for that...
Have you had much problems with bugs using Wire? I've been using it intensely for over a year or so and I can say that I've never used a buggier app to this day.

Calls connect 75% of the time (at best) and the app is still filled to the brim with UI bugs. Example: often, when I open a notification I'm transported to the right conversation, but at the beginning of the conversation history. This is a year back, and when I begin scrolling down the app hangs. I need to force stop the app and open it again to see the actual message.

It seems they're obsessed with adding new features (like robot voice fx for audio messages), but don't know to fix the important things.

Still, strangely enough, I continue to use it. It works, but has a ton of quirks. I use stock unrooted Android on a 5X and the other 7 or so people that I know uses Wire have all experienced the same problems.
when compiler doesn't let you write race conditions or unintended variable mutation - it's a huge thing, not just "decreasing unsafetyness".
Although I hope Rust will also get rid of arrays bounds errors.
What about people who don't live in the US?

Not aware of many European multinationals with a big footprint in Japan who are keen to ship over staff.
Only one (the DNC) was compromised, yes, but the phrasing about which organizations/politicians were targeted by the emails is ambiguous, so one might think that they also targeted Republicans.
Which Python library did you use for EDN (if any)? I had quickly googled for that, and saw a few, including one by Swaroop C H. Got any preferences? And same question for C.
And if someone wasn't aware emails are DKIM verified for authenticity.
I think what we are missing in some discussions of the "plight of [the] poor" is some measure of sovereignty and opportunity. Class mobility statistics don't capture all of this idea.

Sure, the US poor may have cheap giant TVs from Walmart, but they may or may not have any reliable means of becoming something other than poor, and they may or may not have much control over their own lives.

Earlier in my life I spent a little bit of time in a very poor community in inland California as a volunteer, and nothing I saw convinced me that society is working for those people, and especially their children. The expectations were low, opportunities almost nonexistent.

The message I'd like us to take away from these discussions isn't, "Let's ignore all the improvements that have been made," but rather, "Let's not stop now, there's much more to be done."
What I don't understand is why you created yet another root level comment to point this out again.
Do you mean the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans ?
What will replace Moore's law as the engine of exponential growth? The progress in the last 30 years in computing will not be replicated in the next 30 years for the simple reason that we are hitting hard physical limits of atomic scale and thermodynamics.
I haven't used Rust, but generally speaking wouldn't you say that safety in some sense includes the other nice features? For instance, if it were safe but not fast (like, say, a GC language) it wouldn't be useful. So it has to be safe and fast (which it sounds to me like it is). Okay, so what if it were safe, fast, but a real hassle to use? Well that's not very useful either. So it has to be safe, fast, and usable. Just like Moxie's approach to security: focus on usability, so people actually use the damn thing. And it sounds like all the other nice features make Rust more usable.
Great. Password expiration.

Cue everyone recycling a set of 10 unique passwords among devices and/or writing passwords on Post-It notes on work computers at the office.

Only bit of truth in here was the phishing campaign. That could be anyone, however. This is barely more advanced than the Nigerian bank scam e-mails.

Yet the POTUS says it's a sign of the highest levels of Russian government.

We've already been fed lies about e-mails being altered (DKIM signatures disprove this) and now this PDF ignores the insider element in the DNC/Wasserman-Schultz leaks.

What a joke. NIST, NSA, FBI, CIA et alia should be discredited almost entirely at this point.
> it's still a government job and I can't imagine the govt to be able to attract the best of the best.

In your country it may be different, but in Russia it could very well be that connections with the intelligence services are more valuable than money and the best possible resume material.
They are not attracted hackers. Hackers hate Russian govt. But Russian govt can make sky to look like # for any of their citizen, so hackers have no choice.
In Praise of Cheap Labor (1997)
Plot twist: there was no attack, the RNC and DNC invented it as a way to teach America's political blowhards what spear-phishing is and how to avoid it.
Using a measurable quantity N as proxy for singularity progress and or status is valid, Vinge himself did it in a long now talk (power generation per person iirc). So in some sense asset accumulation per entity or organization could be a similar measure. Not saying this author does a particularly good job of it, or that it's a good measure however.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singula...
17k a month is only 204k a year which is awesome don't get me wrong but I'm not sure that supports 6 employees.
Seems fitting. Just a bunch of chest beating. Very sophomoric for people who should know better on both sides .
Have you done much skydiving? I used to go three days a week, for a couple years, between 4-10 jumps a day at a place that had world class experts. My experience is that only beginning skydivers are constantly preaching safety. They go around (vocally) judging everything they see, and I think they do it because it alleviates their own fear. Instructors would teach safety, but really only to their own students.

I think the safety aspect of Rust appeals to a lot of beginning programmers. They can feel safer looking down their nose at us dangerous C or C++ programmers.

> Rust is a parachute that always opens at exactly the right altitude

This isn't a good metaphor. Frequently it's safer to pull higher, and on some occasions, you're safer opening lower than you had planned... I think a canopy that always opened at the prescribed height would cause many unnecessary deaths. That doesn't say anything about Rust, one way or the other.
Using the power of RxJS and Angular components to
This is an interesting internal play for US politicians as well -- it strikes me it's probably harder to remove sanctions and reinstate booted intelligence personnel than it is to choose not to act. I'm curious how the Trump presidency will approach this.

Also in the news today is more strident messaging from Kerry about Israeli settlers -- I wonder if we'll have other moves from the Obama administration before end of term.
White House to shut down alleged Russian spy base in Maryland
I just gave you backup; I grepped my whole .cargo cache dir (both the one used by servo and my global one). You have also made your claim without backup -- you have repeatedly claimed that this is an endemic problem in Rust, with only individual crates (most of them obscure ones) to back it up, and I only usually make my claim in response to claims like yours -- the burden of proof is on you. Anyway, I do provide some more concrete data below, so this isn't something we should argue about.

Marices fall under the abstraction umbrella IMO. This is precisely what unsafe code is for. However, I totally agree that we should be fixing this in the optimizer, with some caveats. Am surprised it doesn't get optimized already, for stack-allocated matrices. I'm wary of adding overly specific optimizations, because an optimization is as unsafe as an unsafe block anyway, it just exists at a different point of the pipeline. If there's a general optimization that can make it work I'm all for it (for known-size matrices there should be I think), but if you have a specific optimization for the use case imo it's just better to use unsafe code.

The raw pointers thing is a problem, but bad crates exist. They don't get used.

I recently did start going auditing my cargo cache dir to look for bad usages of unsafe, especially looking for unchecked indexing, since your recent comments -- I wanted to be sure. This is what I have so far: https://gist.github.com/Manishearth/6a9367a7d8772e095629e821...

That's a list of only the crates containing unsafe code in my global cargo cache (this contains most, but not all, of the crates used by servo -- my servo builds use a separate cargo cache for obsolete reasons, but most of those deps make it into the global cache too whenever I work on a servo dep out of tree)

I've removed dupe crates from the list. I have around 600 total crates in my cache dir, these are just the ones containing unsafe code.

Around a 70 of these crates use unsafe for FFI. Around 30 are abstractions like crossbeam and rayon and graphs.

I was surprised at the number of crates using unchecked indexing and unchecked utf8. I suspected it would be less than 10, but it's more like 20. Still, not too bad. It's usually one or two instances of this per crate. That's quite manageable IMO. Though you may want to be stricter about this and consider those numbers to be problematic, which I understand.

I bet you're right that many of these crates can have the unchecked indexing or other unsafe code removed (or, the perf penalty is not important anyway). I probably should look into this at some point. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
You said "Agreed" then said the exact opposite of what the parent said.
These side gigs and businesses can scale to something larger than just one consultant is what I think the point is
Exactly. Obama just created a National Anti-Propaganda Center to keep watch over American news organizations.

An elaborate surveillance/police state combined with a propaganda system is scary indeed, no matter which president or political party controls it.
Not only many of these comments, but a few commenters jumping on the thread within minutes trying to repeatedly question or throw shade on Russia's role in this.
I think he's complaining about the suspicious timing of the sanctions. In which case it would be 100% political.