skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The short sightedness and naivety of this comment is disgusting.

The poor and the rich have had "real" identification that has worked well - the electoral ID for example. Forcing aadhar down everyone's throat with no practical complaint redressal is the issue here. (Good luck getting UIDAI to take responsibility)

Aadhar is not progress. Forcing biometric identification that relies on brittle infra is not progress. It is a sign of short sighted faith in solving people problems with technology.

India can solve its problems by its own when it recognizes that beyond money, there are people who are willing to support its technology movement. Competant tech people have time and again come out against the architecture of the solution - the last to suffer for it was Kiran Jonnalgadda (jackerhack on twitter).

This was a solution designed to give absolute oversight of people, as an exclusionary mechanism.

Clarifying more.

1. Aadhar verification failures are a lot more than its advocates proposes. I have seen logs of verification failure with rates upwards of 30%. (No, I am not willing to disclose where, except that it was available publicly on the website of an organisation associated with the government). Citizens will still go starving with that kind of failure rates. Remember that Aadhar Card is a piece of paper with your Aadhar number on it and no storage whatsoever. This is different from countries like Malaysia where they have a national ID card with biometrics stored on chip.

If the verification fails and it does fail all the time, good luck to the poor people who wants UIDAI (not even under legal obligation to do it by the way) to redress the complaint.

2. Privacy.

I like it how everyone conviniently ignores this :

"Even worse, the government of India is selling access to this database to private companies to use and combine with other datasets as they wish. This would allow companies to have access to some of your most intimate details and create detailed profiles of you, in ways you can’t necessarily see or control. The government can also share user data “in the interest of national security,” a term that remains dangerously undefined. There are little to no protections on how Aadhaar data is used, and certainly no meaningful user consent. Individual privacy and security cannot be adequately protected and users cannot have trust in systems when they do not have transparency or a choice in how their private information will be used."

I mean WTF man. Really ? That is what a Government is supposed to do ? Sell your citizen's data ? Because that is exactly what is happening here.

Good job Mozilla. You prove you stand for people.
Tumblr Suspends Violent Extremism Researcher's Account
I used the private investigator here as a middleman, a third party. Just like law enforcement or a data broker would be. My concern (in this argument) is less that of the ethics of each single act, but rather the consequences of setting up such a service. You don't know what you are enabling.
Perhaps related to our calling people "engineers" who aren't anything of the sort...
What pin smart card? Could you provide sources?
> Perhaps it's a reflection of Christianity.

It's a reflection of Puritanism, not Christianity as a whole.
Better than Free (2008)
> I'm not sure why doctors would need to wait for more doctors to be available before collectively putting their foot down and refusing to work these incredibly insane hours.

Many get paid by the hour.
OMG Mozilla. No wonder open internet is in such a bad shape when we have you leading it.

1) Aadhaar is not fundamentally different than a National ID which every other country in this world has. India not only lacked it, out birth registrations certificates weren't reliable at all.

2) Yes they do collection Biometrics(BM). But BM are never shared with any other agency/company. And it's strictly codified in law. BM are only used for deduplication(1b+ population), and authentication.

3) For KYC(Know your Customer) or E-Payments BM based authentication is much more secure than what's being used currently - signatures, and self attested xerox which anyone can forge/photoshop.

4) You can also ask Aadhaar server to dispatch an SMS to your mobile number every time an authentication happens. Now compare that your signature/xerox which anyone can forge/photoshop and you would have no idea about it.

5) In this changing world who would you want to control identity? A private company like Apple which can block you or some developer anytime and there would be no recourse? Or a govt agency - backed by a law of Parliament - that you can drag to court.

6) Want to build a marketplace for house-maids? Or for farmers? Don't want it bogged down by scamsters which in the end depressing adaption?

Easy add Aadhaar based autnetication to your app. http://bridge.aadhaarconnect.com/

7) For financial products like bank accounts, mutual funds etc Aadhaar brings down compliance cost. So for a MF while in the old system it wouldn't be viable to take an investment of less than 50k Rs because the compliance cost itself would be 1k Rs or something, now you can do it under 10 Rs.

Are we making a better world or not, in which the poor have access to Mutual funds, Insurance etc or Mozilla thinks it's not?

Please watch this https://youtu.be/LJCEyqcKN3Q?t=5m50s and tell me which other country in this world can match this. Getting a loan in under 8 minutes. Or opening a bank account in under 10 min.

This is a technological revolution - but not happening in Copenhagen or Zurich, but dusty villages of India.

I have had enough of these Aadhaar critics - and now Mozilla - who have colonised their minds with some western ideas, and are unable to see what's happening in India.

Bottom line, there's no better example of how technology can drastically change lives for the poor and the needy than Aadhaar.

Those who are unable to see it, are usually just biased because need clicks for their publications, or need to build their reputation as security analyst or something by bashing something. Look into this thread itself, and you'll find them linking to each other's twitter profile etc. Sickening really.
Why Google Is Suddenly Obsessed with Your Photos
By using IT outsourcing in India (Tata?), Poland, BA and its parent is revealing some important information: They are cutting corners to the point of risking airline operations. The question is, where else are they unnecessarily cutting corners? Are they cutting unnecessary corners on airplane maintenance?

Other quality airlines have outsourced IT or part of their IT operations, but they are careful about choosing their IT vendors.

For example, Israel's national carrier, El Al, which also has extremely good security against hijacking, outsources at least its ticketing as a cost savings move, but this it does to Lufthansa the German national carrier, which uses the Amadeus Ticketing platform. El Al is saving money over running their own operations, but still using a reliable vendor.

Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one.

Contrasting with Israeli and Australian flag carriers El Al and Quantas, BA the British flag carrier made some extremely unwise choices trying choose a "cheapest" solution, instead of a money saving cheaper solution.

Compared with El Al and Quantas, BA management has shown us that quality of operations is not their top priority. The question is, where else in their operations is this a problem?

BA management is revealing to customer and shareholder alike that customer service and shareholder value is not their highest priority. They are signaling to shareholders that it is time for a change before they further harm the BA brand and before some serious accident happens.
Why should applying to a university require an Aadhar card? Getting a phone number? Getting gas to my house? They're shoving it down our throats.

I'm not entirely opposed to a UID system in India, but the way its been legislated and implemented in the last few years is absolutely disgusting.

India has absolutely 0 laws when it comes to privacy. Who is accountable when your data is leaked? Its literally upto the Aadhar committee whether they prosecute any leak of data.
Cars have been faster than people for ages, but marathons and sprints are still popular sports.
I'm not Indian, I'm a white middle class American.
Where exactly have you seen the 30℅ number ?

Did you just made up?

All proganda against Aadhar has not been exactly proven.

None of the Aadhar bashing article have been able to exactly point by point prove any of claims made against Aadhar.
Probably not, as long as they distribute correctly under the terms of the license. Android didn't follow the license correctly (although they've since fixed that), which is why they ran into trouble.
> There's not much the police could have done. Erdogan's bodyguards had guns and there were more of them...

I have heard this argument from multiple sources regarding this event but it seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how things like this work, so I strongly disagree. I've been trained on similar situations, and I know the escalation of force procedures in general (DC police are weird sometimes), and the second they saw Turkish nationals punching and kicking old men and women on the ground is the second they should have been escalating force. No, lightly tapping a dude sucker punching a woman on the ground with a baton on the back is not good enough. Sorry, but it simply isn't. I've been beaten worse in fucking training scenarios as the protestor.

Again, the real issue here to me is the lackidasical way in which the DCPD responded. IF they were afraid to enforce the law outside of the embassy there is a much bigger problem here than people are talking about. The same thing works for Americans in embassies abroud. They have a close relationship with and work with the host countries police and other forces... but they are notoriously well trained to not engage beyond embassy perimiter unless absolutely necessary. The fact that you think we should be afraid to enforce the law on Turkish nationals outside but close to their embassy says to me that if you are right, that embassy needs to be shut down, but in general I think you are wrong.

Now, I'm not a cop. I used to be a knuckle-dragging door-kicker, not a fat mall cop like most of the pd in the video look like. I don't know exactly what the pd's should have done, but I do know what they did wasn't it.

To put it another way. If American DSS (Diplomatic Security Service) showed up in England escorting Trump near the new US embassy, and the DSS rushed British protestors and just start fucking them up, I would fully support and expect the Brits to have arrested every single one, wait for diplomatic immunity to be verified (or not), and then proceed accordingly (persona-non-grata for those with, arrest and charge for those without). What I would not expect is to just let DSS walk back to their embassy as if they hadn't broken a dozen laws.
I enjoy the analogy of the small town gas stations. But I think it falls short in describing the problem of price segmentation, where a company offers different prices to different customers. Some countries have gone far in regulating sales as a response to this, as firms would set prices extremely high and offer a perpetual sale (furniture and cosmetics are really bad with this).

What worried me is when marketing signals are used to raise prices for me above what they should be. Airlines do this when you are searching for flights, based on browser, OS, and other signals.

However, if we ban price segmentation altogether, then we risk preventing businesses from offering sales, which serve some business and social utility (to borrow the term from the speech). But it's worth spending time thinking about what is ok and what isn't. Chances are that some businesses are already doing what isn't ok.
Nah they aren't.

HN have superior signal to noise ratio in the comments and even better; enlightened discussions mostly.

Let's not pretend this is a faculty club, this still is the Internet.
Privacy...

I think the problem here is ultimately that people aren't doing proper threat modeling, and failing to include the government itself as a potential threat.

The most terrifying consulting contract I've ever been offered was a project to entirely replace cash in a country with a "blockchain" currency scheme. In addition to the requirements that both buyer and seller be 100% identified (likely by biometrics), there was also a requirement that every receipt be uploaded to a government run server, allowing exactly what was being bought to be tracked in detail in real-time. And of course, there was the requirement that it be possible to freeze accounts on demand.

I asked the client what country the project was ultimately going to be for, and they didn't really want to tell me (citing NDA's and what not). But I did get them to finally admit it wasn't a democracy, it was a dictatorship.

Pretty obvious that dictatorship wanted even more control over their citizens. Needless to say, I turned the contract down as being involved would be incredibly unethical.

But how much more ethical is it really to do the same type of project in a country that's supposed to be a democracy? I'm not so sure there's a clear difference, given how quickly privacy protections can be removed. Look at how census data was used to round up the Japanese in the USA during WWII for instance.
MacOS Keychain Cracker
Are you talking about style, grammar or ethics? Hyperbolic tweets and biased content marketing can be written well, communicating exactly what the author intended.
I don't see the problem with

val b = a
b: Int = 1

After all, if you wanted to turn it in a function, you can use `() => a` syntax which everyone is already familiar with.
I have been using hacker news comments to improve my writing and I get instant feedback. After awhile I had ideas that were big enough to write blog posts. From my experience in writing poetry is you must keep writing to really get good . Another thing is that about 10% or less of what you write is going to be any good. And 1% is going to be acceptable. Life isn't like college where your performance is judged on each piece of writing. Your job is to maximize that 1% so you just have to keep writing so you have enough exceptional pieces of writing and then you will be a better writer .
What is meant by "a grammar"?

Is it the way we concatenate functions to create what's essentially a sentence of what we want the plot to be?
> which means that layout performance affects what looks like script time

Chrome's profiler actually shows synchronous layouts and style recals forced from JS as layout/style so it's not misleading in that way. The traces I've looked at (admittedly, not something I do terribly often) showed those to be typically ~20% or less of the time spent while content is loading.

> And, due to ads, a lot of the performance cost is cross-domain iframes, which have no reason to run on the main thread (process isolation is too heavyweight to scale this far, which is why Chrome-style Site Isolation isn't a solution).

I suppose the proof will be in the pudding, but I think process isolation could actually be a solution here. You don't have to have a separate process for every cross origin iframe. This is something desirable to do anyway for the security benefits so you might as well leverage it for performance as well. IMHO, this is the biggest problem with web perf and I don't see Servo as directly addressing it.

> If layout were fast, we wouldn't see people implementing layouts in JS

Are people re-implementing layout/paint because it's slow? Or because we didn't bake in the little detail they want into the platform through a multiyear standardisation process? I think it's naive to think developers will just stop writing JS if the browser gets x% faster.

> If the main thread weren't so bogged down all the time, then people wouldn't see the need to move a random subset of the Web platform to the compositor thread.

I disagree. Developers will always find something to fill it with. IMHO, the real goal - and the reason for the compositor thread - is to separate rendering from input and make it difficult for a page to tie the two together (or rather, easy to keep them separate). A user wont notice if the page takes an extra few hundred ms to render. She will notice if her scroll is delayed by 200ms.

I don't see Houdini as the main thrust here, there's lower hanging fruit. Practically speaking, non-blocking event handlers have had a bigger impact on user experience than anything I've seen in the last few years. I expect IntersectionObserver to have a big impact too. I think chasing the long tail of UX antipatterns, while not as sexy, is far more productive.

In any case, I'd be happy to be proven wrong here - Servo is doing some really cool stuff and no one would be sad to see things get faster; I just don't see it as the silver bullet it's often promoted to be. I think this is a great example of how having multiple rendering engines is healthy for the web. Lets all innovate independently and let the results speak for themselves :).
Subtle :-)
I'm happy with algo too, easy to setup and works great.
> Non profit and closed source seems like a formula for doom and destruction.

Which is not the situation here.
I don't really know, but I would be suprised if that is the intent of the project because:

1. The maintainer of llgo is a Google employee (and a very talented LLVM engineer).

2. I don't imagine there would be tremendous differences in the strategies used to generate LLVM IR between the tools. ISTM, if there are deficiencies in llgo, then it would be better to fix them rather than creating a whole new tool.
Yes, but the old lady in the village will have a problem with it when it is used to marginalize and discriminate against her.

The riots in 1984 and in 2001 showed us how voter lists can, and will, be misused by people in power to their own benefit.
We changed the title from "Ask HN: We should all be better at writing" to the question in the text above.
I don't understand the problem.

Why can't residents just check in with a therapist each week to ensure that they're mentally healthy?
To play Devil's Advocate, Mark Zuckerberg has at least had a more direct contribution to the business that made him wealthy than has Trump, who merely licenses his name to products and properties he otherwise has no involvement in.

If I had to vote for a businessman, I would rather vote for the one who actually made something innovative. And Zuckerberg speaks Chinese, and even if he isn't fluent and would probably never be allowed to speak with Chinese officials without a translator for protocol's sake, having a bilingual President would be a breath of fresh air compared to one who barely speaks English.

Although this may just be a case of me preferring a competent evil to an incompetent one.
>So of course, the "logical" thing to try was to write a .bat and save it with a different extension and see what happened.

Ha ha, same here. Also the next thing I did was to open exe files with notepad and conclude that this is what real code looked like and that the programmers that wrote the programs had written it that way.

When a little bit later I learned that programs were written in languages like C++, I got a book about C++ while on vacation and I read a bit in that book and I wrote down the Hello World program on paper and wrote variations of it and a couple of programs that would ask questions and say something. When I got back from vacation I sat down in front of my computer, typed in hello world and used a compiler called Bloodshed C++ which the book had recommended and compiled the program and double-clicked the exe file, only to have it open a window and immediately close. I had failed to understand that I needed to run the program via cmd.exe because of course Hello World exits immediately when it's printed the text.

This discouraged me a bit so I stayed away from programming languages for several years after that but at least I kept learning HTML and a bit about reverse engineering and a couple of other things and eventually I got back to programming when I started high school and we were using Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus calculators and we were given a couple of programs written in TI-BASIC which we were told to store on our calculators. Once I'd written some programs of my own in TI-BASIC I then read a book about PHP and wrote some PHP.

Such was the beginning of my experience with programming.
The best writers actually enjoy writing. pg told me that to him an unwritten essay is like an uneaten piece of cake. I realized that that feeling is foreign to me. I'd probably be a better writer if I liked it more.
What do you find problematic with SBT ? I'm from the C++ camp and I just love SBT, simple and powerful, so I never really understood what the issue was with SBT (i've seen other people complain about it too)
I don't quite see how your comment relates to mine.

I just offered you a scenario where you can exercise compassion and make a lot of money at the same time. But you would have to shoulder responsibility. Would you do it?
Exactly. Taking away someone's liberty is a substantial punishment, and the imposition of longer sentences for more serious crimes should slake the natural desire for vengeance to some degree.

But the victim is not the only stakeholder in the justice system. There are also the accused (prisoner's rights), and society at large (lower recidivism). The interests of all need to be balanced.
I'm guessing it's because `example.com` comes before `example.exe` when you sort alphabetically? So when it goes looking for `example`, it gets the list of files and takes the first matching one it sees.
here's another "only plane allowed to fly" story http://abcnews.go.com/US/September_11/saving-kareena-sept-11...
500 Motivational and Self-Improvement Books
You mean the Cincinnati riots of 2001 I can clearly see why USA should not have voter lists /s

The riots happened in 2002 and NOT 2001 (at least get the year right), and unless you are arguing abolishing voter lists, or have a specific argument that involves Aadhar. I don't see how this is in anyway relevant to this discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_riots_of_2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots
OpenStreetMap has this. I don't see a use for it, but if someone sees a use for it, they're free to add it to the dataset. Seems you and others find it useful, and it's in there :)
We did ban that account, as I said.
Far from every intersection has a traffic light?
Propaganda? Your 30 minute old account sounds like propaganda too.

We all know we could reduce crime by putting cameras in people's homes. But we don't do that, because there are risks to those kinds of invasive measures.

Aadhar is infrastructure that allows for centralized control of the population. Sometimes that control will be used for good things, like stamping out bribery. But that control can just as easily be used for evil too. And history has shown time and time again that's exactly what happens. I live in Canada, a country filled with refugees of authoritarian regimes. Among my friends I personally know lots of people who have fled those kinds of regimes; I know very few people who have fled countries because of bribery. The latter is annoying and unproductive, but the former is deadly.

That's why you're seeing so much opposition to Aadhar: because it's incredibly dangerous.

edit: better wording
These scenarios are not analogous.
Ok, but since appear to have such a strong opinion on the subject, perhaps you could also address the questions I've asked ?
My new elite software application that I coded by myself
Does that data go open source or are you paid for it?
Nice deflection! Are you disagreeing that voter lists were used in 2001 to discriminate against muslims? Do we have any laws preventing that from happening with aadhar data?
Yeah, that's why I'm scared of it now... any clue how I could test it?