skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It's not ethical to correlate a user's sessions using etags when they have cleared cookies and caches (or set DNT header). You are expressly behaving against the user's wishes, and there really is no difference in exploiting the browser in other ways to reveal other personal information.

You don't see a difference between analyzing the data a browser gives back during normal operation and exploiting security bugs to force browsers to give up information that is supposed to be private? They're tracking your session based on the data that your browser normally sends. They're not crossing any boundaries or stealing any secrets.

The difference between using ETags and exploiting a bug to get secret information is that ETags were never meant to be secret or private. No one thinks they're "personal information". They're normal information that happens to be useful for uniquely identifying a user, as are Flash cookies.

The customer can ask politely not to be identified, but there is no reason that companies have to automatically consider that an ethical obligation just because customers wish it was that way. Customers also wish everything was free.

If you feel browsers should support completely untraceable sessions, that's a feature request. It's not an ethical violation on the part of others that they're not imagining this feature already exists.

>Did you even read my original comment? Privacy sensitive people and people that don't like ads are not the same set of people. Stop using ad blockers as a justification for unethical privacy violations.

We're not talking about specific people, we're talking about general principles. If ad blockers are not unethical in principle, then neither is server-side session tracking, because both stay 100% within the technical bounds without coercing any information from or disrupting the ordinary operation of the other party.

It seems that your conception of ethics really does boil down to "the customer wants it", so it's going to be hard to continue this conversation.
It should be pretty clear that privacy against government agencies is protected by the Constitution. Of course our government ignores that and tramples all over the spirit of the Bill of Rights, if not the letter.

As far as corporations? Not unconstitutional, but I don't think passing laws in the interest of the People's privacy against corporations would be unconstitutional either, so if our government had our best interests in mind, then they'd pass those laws instead of repealing them.
Steve Mnuchin: Losing Human Jobs to AI “Not Even on Our Radar Screen
What would you say the ratio of for-profit vs. non-profit applications is?
30 years experience web dev here, probably much more successful than the author and everyone else in this thread.

Fully agree with the author here. 10/10
IBM Quantum Experience
The current startup ecosystem and culture promote move fast and break things, and while doing so you won't be able to see the big picture and you most likely required to burn more than few millions to have an understanding of the market and the opportunity.
Is there a significant difference between paying for healthcare with insurance premiums & deductibles vs. paying with taxes? (I realize this is a big question, just looking for a starting point because it's not clear to me.)
My default action with these popovers is to Cmd+Opt+C to trigger DevTools Select Element feature, click on the modal background div and just delete it from DOM. Most of the times quicker than hunting for the small X button somewhere.
Yeap. It's quite a common linguistic phenomenan, when a term like JIT stops being a fringe thing and enters mainstream discourse among an audience, what used to just be "normal" now gets a name.

"Imperative programming" might be another one. IRL, think about how "cisgender" has entered into mainstream vocabulary in the past few years, or "heterosexual" many years before that.
If we want to be really specific:

By FedEx i mean "Rangel Expresso SA" (www.rangel.pt or www.fedex.com/pt) which is their representation (Global Service Participant (GSP)) here in Portugal.

By customs i mean airport customs (the ones i contacted), not the portuguese state customs. I don't know how they evaluated the package, they probably didn't even knew about it (due to lack of staff or other stuff...).
I don't think the problem here is what the human mind can comprehend because identifying where these methods break down is actually pretty easy from a math perspective, and the breakdown doesn't change as you go up and down with the number of dimensions. What has always surprised me about ML and DL is how far we can stretch simple regression techniques and how useful it is on such a variety of problems.

I agree that it has turned into an NP problem in a lot of cases now but the concepts behind the problem of N-dimensional optimization are pretty well understood.
So is this like the sort of stuff in newfangled cars, where you hear about automatic breaks, and they say "There's 4 computers and at least 3 of them have to agree on the sensor data before they slam the breaks"... kind of thing?
Someone has to start doing it, otherwise you'll get the catch 22. So "others aren't doing it" is not an excuse.
Absolutely. The "big tent" the Republicans assembled started to come apart when the Tea Party insurgency began. They're now experiencing the consequences.
In a den of lions when saying this, but companies that do that have too many engineers.

There's a "right" size for any project and going over it's hard to avoid over-thought, over-complicated, user-confusing, pedantic, semantic things.

This isn't the trite "too many cooks" argument. It's that the right kind of quick-and-dirty shortcutters who value leaving things alone produce better products; they use simpler paradigms and abstractions, have better combinable primitives, communicate purpose more effectively, and produce overall better tools.

The corollary is the stupid thing you can hack to do what you want is often better than the smart thing that is very carefully designed to do what you don't - because one of them you can technically use and the other you can't.

This is why earlier versions are frequently better than later ones and earlier products seem to do more, better, and faster. It's why smaller companies seem to produce better things, and counter-intuitively, products that take less time to finish (say a few days) seem to do better and gain more traction then the 6-month effort.

Some things really are profoundly complex, like databases and operating systems. Most things however, despite much we'd like to pretend, are not in that class of software.

And yes, these claims are cultural bomb-throwing. But the evidence for it is solid.
Android Messages is apparently [1] the renamed "Messenger", the Google one (the internal android APK names are the same), which was probably confused with "Messenger" the Facebook one, likely to Google's detriment and Facebook's gain. Renaming it probably salvages some of that confusion.

Also, Hangouts "the original" (aka. the Hangouts App, Chrome Extension, Chrome App, Gmail Widget, and the standalone website) -- most of which will probably live on. The extra irony is that the same time Hangouts App users are being warned to move to a different app for mobile text messages, GTalk users are being told to switch to Hangouts, while Google Voice users are being assured that their Google Voice texts (and presumably calls) will keep working within the Hangouts App, even though a new Google Voice App was recently released that mysteriously added chat.

Then there's Allo, Duo...

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/24/14721602/android-messages-...
The article doesn't make this clear, but this is an excellent example of an area where "pure research" and practical technology overlap. Free electron lasers are essentially particle accelerators (of the same sort used in, e.g., the LHC) with special configurations of magnets stuck on the end. They are large, expensive to build, and expensive to operate for essentially all the same reasons that research accelerators are. So advances in physics which lead to advances in accelerator technology, which allow further advances in pure physics, also directly impact the practicality of using FEL X-ray sources for imaging microchips (among other things).
The correct way to solve this problem is through raising awareness of privacy issues and supporting efforts to create competitive and attractive open source communication protocols, not legislation enforced by a prison/military industrial complex. What you're suggesting is to hand the State further control over our choice in communications platforms and trust them to never abuse it.
A googler already summarized their strategy succinctly up-thread [1] as:

Google is a feudally organized collection of fiefdoms and this shows in their product strategy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13951918
Some do, like Portugal.
I won't be surprised if AT&T revives its "Internet Preferences" targeted ads program[1]. Most customers apparently didn't care and were willing to put up with it for a $29/mo discount. AT&T never indicated why they canceled it, but my money is that it was due to the FCC regulations that were put in place.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/att-t...
I was terrified when I first read this, I thought it was "Google Voice" but then I realized it wasn't... and couldn't for the life of me picture what Google Talk was since... we have Google Hangouts and couldn't tell you the last time I even saw "Google Talk" anywhere.
As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment

Currently, as I understand they are not. But, there is legislation [1] which proposes extending Fourth Amendment protection to e-mails and communication stored on your behalf on third party servers. I've already written to my Congressperson in support of that bill.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/387/
No true, LG sells its 2016 curved 55" UHD OLED TV for $2000.

But 8K/UHD-2 might take a while, since the marginal gain from such a resolution is probably not going to be huge for your typical TV viewing experience, and it would cause problems at many levels.
Ok, how do I install it on an OrangePi PC Plus? What about on a Roseapple Pi or CubieBoard6? Wait, I can't, there is no eMMC support for the OrangePi H3 boards in FreeBSD, and S500 based boards literally have no BSD support at all. It goes on like this for most of the boards out there, unless you stick to a BeagleBoneBlack or are willing to live with a gimped system.
>I'm having a hard time imagining a compelling case that the lobbyists could present though.

If I were them:

Look how much money Google and Facebook make doing this. Doesn't make sense to prevent AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from doing the same.
I recently purchased a 2016 Macbook. Reasoning is, they last longer.

My sony vaio stopped turning on after 2 years and my dell xps didn't even last 1.5 years. My 2009 Macbook still runs today, but it's no longer powerful enough.
I believe that one area where TS could stand some improvement are multi-package projects. https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/3469
>> Life is not a zero-sum game.

That might have been true in the past, but with 7.5 billion people on the planet we are aproaching the point when life becomes zero-sum.

What I mean is that in pre-historic era the caveman that didn't get along with his tribe could just leave them, go find some uncharted territory and make a living from what he could hunt and build with his own hands.

Even in Middle Ages, discovery of America was a game changer: suddenly the people that would otherwise had to live in poverty were given an opportunity to go to the New World and become rich with nothing but hard work.

Nowadays, we are using so much resources that we have to compete for them. You cannot easily increase yearly supply of oil, or gas, or food, at least not on global scale. Also, in developed economies unemployment does not really exist so to find employees for your startup you need to take them out from other companies. That's makes the life more and more competitive.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/modal-remover/affk...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stoppity-poppity/a...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...

I personally only install highly trusted Chrome Extension, I will review those at some point.
Hit the Bullseye Every Time on This Self-Adjusting Dartboard
This. As someone who's worked on the insurance side of the equation for a while, it always amazes me when people don't realize the majority of health insurance policy is a zero sum game.

If insurance companies aren't solvent and profitable, products won't be offered. And that's exactly what happens when you force unfunded / unbalanced mandates on them. Congress can easily legislate the country into a market where no one wants to offer insurance because there's no way to do so sustainably.

That said, one of the best things that ACA did was finally target some of the inefficiency in as conservative of a business as insurance. The provision capping administrative costs did a lot to jolt companies into streamlining their operations and investing in modern, more efficient technologies.
The fastest-growing apps in America
I got good mileage with the mail server on cloudron. Also, mail-tester.com is awesome to check spammyness.
I have been helping out a charity that uses a small web hosting company for email.

Any emails they send to Gmail automatically go into the spam folder.

Why? I reckon it is because there is no SPF configured, no DKIM configured, etc.

We could try to get that small web hosting company to configure all that.

Instead, the plan is to move to G Suite for Nonprofits.
I know that consensus is probably the cleanest way to guarantee very strict correctness, but I'm kind of not convinced that synchronous replication is the ideal solution for HA. I have yet to see clear evidence that teams at less-than-Google scale aren't mostly getting by with semisynchronous replication, or even just asynchronous replication.

Always running an ensemble of three or five nodes for each shard seems to be pretty overkill (and expensive, both in terms of money and latency), especially if it's mostly just a way to do automated failovers. I sometimes wonder if there's a good-enough cheaper semisync alternative.
C++ Refactoring Tip: Primitive Obsession
Talk didn't have its own client outside of the Gmail panel when it launched. It would have been much harder for Google to bootstrap at the time, if they hadn't been able to just point people to existing clients that supported XMPP. Third party clients made Talk useful faster (thus popularizing it). Sure, several of the third party clients were pretty good at reverse engineering weird protocols while also supporting open ones, but there's no guarantee they would have bothered with Talk, especially if Talk existed only in a web browser.
Founder Stories: Blake Scholl of Boom (YC W16)
Nah. Everyone already knew.
How necessary is the not keeping logs thing(unless of course they too sell the data)? Sure if someone is hunting you down and the VPN keeps logs, then they can easily figure it out. But if you're just trying to avoid your ISP selling your browsing data, do you need to be concerned about what the VPN provider knows? Would the ISPs go to the lengths of trying to get that info from the VPN?
Those are two separate issues. A certificate in a smartcard is not the same as a CA certificate used in devices to authenticate sites.
Silent to you. Their lobby speaks volumes when they pay these pricks to take away more and more privacy.
This sensory wearable is designed for flirting
Something similar happened in the Democratic party with the Sanders insurgency.

America is too diverse to be represented by just two parties.
Server Density with David Mytton
In Zurich right now and just want to say: quietest big city i ever been to. Only clocks are ticking!
'Windows 10 destroyed our data' Microsoft taken to US court
Because their old one was an open standard, and they were effectively the only one open one (and the last open one standing). So I find it totally reasonable that they stopped caring about it (and probably would again if another major player did).
Looks cool. Here's a blog post from 2015 with a similar intent: http://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/
Give it up for Octograd
The Republicans' only position on this - one which has become religious dogma at this point, is "repeal."

They didn't prepare for a replacement because they never intended to actually replace the ACA with anything comprehensive, as comprehensive healthcare reform is philosophically anathema to them, and any language to the contrary was just lip-service to keep moderates and Democrats quiet. The Republicans probably never even expected the public backlash they got over this, but to simply strike it down and then be greeted in the streets as liberators.
I think this article does touch on something that's always bothered me regarding healthcare. Specifically on the problem that insurance is tied to healthcare. To me insurance is about covering risks that are liable to occur no matter how much one may minimize them. In contrast, healthcare is about routine and extraordinary care of human beings. It's not something I believe follows properly with insurance business models which is why often they cut corners to make it profitable. Otherwise, I suspect many health insurance companies today would be bankrupt if they didn't attempt their corner cutting. Rather than leaving healthcare to insurance business models we need to finally admit that maybe it's no different than roads or other infrastructure and have it handled by the US federal government for better or worse.
Do you have a source for this? Not arguing. Just looking for data.
Invitation for quantum computing at IBM
Incidentally, this is one of the most interesting aspects of the "crank" operating system Temple OS, every program in the language is written in a variant of C that's compiled on the fly, and the shell itself is just a C REPL. I've never used it but found this article very interesting:

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
There is the Google Voice app.
We simplify the tracks as much as possible (and convert to a geometry rather than store as raw data) but once you are in the terminal area there is a lot of value in retaining the full data set - especially when you start analyzing things like RNAV/PBN procedures or mapping noise contours.
I'm thinking about porting my GV number away from Google, if that is even possible. Voice used to be the best thing ever, but now it has a shadow of it's original functionality.
I worked in a call center for a couple of years when I was still in school.

I hated it so very much. We had to do credit checks and stuff, so they wouldn't let us have anything to do when it was slow. Towards the end of my time there they changed something and we started getting more call volume, that sucked. It became just hours and hours of talking about the same thing again and again.

> Aside from the fact that I've never met anyone who makes 'good money' doing this type of work, I personally don't blame anyone who does this long enough to eventually fake a disability or something. In fact, I'll happily keep paying high taxes if it supports that kind of 'disability'. No human should be forced to do that kind of stuff in this day and age, least of all in a developed nation.

So apparently the call center in the bigger city a few hundred miles away had a union. Doubt it made the work better but they were getting several dollars an hour more than us. We got 10+bonus, they were getting 15 or something.
Amazon Prime Air drone completes its first US public delivery
A lot of useful analogies for N-dimensional space can be abstracted from the simple transition from 2 to 3 dimensions.
3 IAM public sector trends to watch
How about anti-dumping laws? How is that applied in the US?

Isn't "burning money until you kill competition" inherently illegal?

I assume Uber has the same issue.
My point is that companies forced to do this would create abstruse formats, and then even misimplement them, to thwart those trying to interoperate.
There's no actual Smalltalk code in there. It's just a Github display bug.

https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/search?l=smalltalk
It's my favourite plugin, and it often causes hilarious situations to occur when I forget it's on.
I agree about regions, but `#if` et al are preprocessor directives, not regions. They actually influence how your code is compiled.
You can choose not to use any particular site or service. However, there's little to no effective market for ISPs in many localities, so if the one or two ISPs in your area don't provide effective privacy, then you're screwed.

In a market where everyone has a wide variety of ISPs available and people can start one without massive infrastructure work (for instance, with widely available fiber infrastructure and a choice of who to light it), then we don't need as many restrictions on ISPs can do; people can handle that by selecting an ISP that meets their requirements.

But until we can make ISPs less of a monopoly, and make it possible for others to easily enter the market, then it's reasonable to restrict what those monopolies can do.
Medicaid cap.
Sometimes I wonder if it would make sense to have a healthplan that covers cancer and absolutely nothing else. I honestly have zero concern about any other ailment and figure I could make due, but I know enough about cancer to realize it is a completely different story.
Yes, insurance premiums and deductibles also funds a vast bureaucracy and profits for the insurance industry...
It's a corpse at that point.
It doesn't really make sense to invest so much time into promoting the bill if this was the plan, though. He claimed to be personally calling hundreds of representatives, threatened those planning to vote against it, had Spicer guarantee its passage, etc. I don't know if Trump thought it would pass, but he certainly gave lots of signals that he wanted it to and was taking responsibility for it.
What if you held a cold civil war and nobody came?
I mostly agree, but there is one thing that end-users are dying for. Truly federated chat services and open standards. Its the only thing that anybody could do differently to really stand out above the rest.
> The PM's get paid to do the mock interview.

This violates the anti-moonlighting clause that most companies have.

> Will a Google PM be ok in doing this mock considering that it may be considered unethical?

There is no incentive for top companies to permit their employees coach applicants with questions from their interview process. It would amount to being able to pay money to get an edge in their hiring process and the top companies wouldn't even be getting any of the fee.

The employees at the top companies are making enough money that they would have no interest in it anyway.
I have insurance through the Washington State Health Benefit Exchange (i.e. Obamacare), and a pre-existing condition. My insurance is kind of 'meh,' but it means that I will not be bankrupted if something serious happens to me.

Had this morning's version of Trumpcare been made law, the odds of me being able to afford useful insurance would've been slim to none. So, I am ecstatic about this news.
HTMLAI-RNN: Train a RNN to generate valid HTML and CSS templates for websites!
Does anyone have a timeline of Google messaging app changes?
As I mentioned the monitor is already too tall, and not wide enough. I don't need a bigger monitor I need a squarer one.

In fact my old monitor was smaller (22") and I liked it better except for the lower resolution. Why? Because I could tile two windows side by side in portait. Docs and code, no fiddling, very little scrolling, and very productive.

I guess I could ignore the top few inches of my monitor but that is somewhat of a pain because of what happens on window maximization.