skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These databases are there essentially to punish you. If you don't pay your utility bill, they report that to the credit agency, and reduces your chances of getting credit elsewhere.

These credit information don't give much benefit to Americans, it gives benefits to businesses[1]. It's essentially just a global black list where business can communicate who not to do business with.

This business is there for other businesses and we are the product there. This is why people generally have very shitty experience when they have to interact with them, and this is why Equifax thinks the problem is solved when they provide free one year credit monitoring service.

[1] note how Equifax thought it was important notice that the core database - the one storing your credit records was not affected. None of Americans care about this, but if the core database storing record was compromised Equifax would disappear overnight without any help of the government, because none of the businesses would want to use it.
And Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft - they're in the article too.

Anyway, how would you write this without talking a lot about the trend-setters?
The fictional world in Wall-e explores that premise; sort of. It's kind of strange seeing the CEO of a company as the president of everything...
That's a good conclusion to take away. But reflection and dynamic bytecode manipulation is used in Java all over the place. Class loaders are a core Java feature, and reflection is used in almost all modern annotation-based packages for DB access, object serialization, remoting, dependency injection, etc.

Heck, any JITing language requires process images allowed to execute code in dynamic memory segments, such that basic NoExecute hardware features can't be used. Combine this with Java server-side apps being run in a single process/address space, and I hope you can see that, if nothing else, from a security PoV Java is a dead end.
I have two sources and one line of reasoning.

1) Reading newspapers and watching the news gives me the impression that there are large numbers of people who are not happy with the current social contract.

2) Speaking to people in and outside of my community informs me that there are many people who are not happy with the current social contract.

The line of reasoning I have is that there are simple ways that could readjust the flow of revenue and capital to enable the removal of many of the perceived injustices that other people cite when I speak with them or read of their experiences.
The Hacking of the American Mind with Dr. Robert Lustig
There are legitimate use cases where collecting and storing (in some manner at least) is necessary. You cannot just stop companies from collecting information, and furthermore stop them from storing any of it. Thats just naive.
That doesn't sound that weird to me. Two things:

I expect most people aren't shy about buying several weeks worth of meat and freezing it. Quality doesn't drop off that much. Quality differences are more noticeable with frozen vegetables, but I suspect a lot of people are fine with those too. Then there are frozen microwave/oven dinners and things like that, as well as non-perishable/shelf-stable items.

A household that exclusively cooks all their meals might make 7-10 grocery trips per month, but I expect that most people don't do that, and even those who cook all their meals probably don't rely on fresh meat & veggies for every single meal. And note that they don't cover people who go out to eat at restaurants at all in that list, so they're not accounted for anywhere.

On a side note, regarding your surprise at the purchases being large: most Americans, especially those who live in rural or suburban areas, don't do the kind of daily or near-daily stops at small convenience stores to pick up a few quick things that you see in dense cities. They drive to the grocery store, load up as much as they can fit in their cart, fill up their car, and go back home.
Instead of heavily regulating I say we should make this service obsolete by passing similar to European laws where people can request what information given company holds about them, request removal and not allowing data collection without permission.

Neither of those companies provides anything valuable to ordinary citizens and the data collection they do comes with great price to us as it shown with recent Equifax fiasco.
There is a signifiant value prop for this type of clean interface when considering users that use accessibility tools to browse the web. I had the pleasure of working with an engineer whose vision was impaired. Truly inspired with all the self-engineered tools and software that he created to sanitize sites of all the bloat for his consumption with a screen reader. This type of site will make his life a little easier.
I would prefer writing Scala/Kotlin over Java. I still don't think that merits calling Java "trash". I am perfectly happy writing Java. Boilerplate & a few null-checks are very far from the truly horrible things about bad software - they are minor annoyances.

This hyperbole about language is really not helpful. On the scale of things that make code good or not, separation of concerns & modularity, documentation etc. are 10-100 times more important than language.
Major news failing to explain that Hurricane Harvey was fueled by climate change
Contributor Spotlight: Thompson Crowley – The Blogging Musician
I still think the best way is to dig deep and pad it densely with filler material. The point is, for the future civilization to be able to reach the material, it would need to develop to the level of middle-XX-century technology, at which point they'd most likely be able to handle the waste.
I never realised till now that American's SSNs were supposed to be kept secret. That's absolutely ridiculous. The idea of trying to keep the UK equivalent (National Insurance Number) secret is laughable. How can anything function when an important id number is also supposed to be known by very few people?
Closing the Open Door of Java Object Serialization (2015)
Two things:

1. Legal weed is not almost here because of the 68' treaty that strictly prohibits it. That's the reason we see all of these "decriminalized" and "tolerated" scenarios. No one has yet to decide to just ignore the (very tiny) part of the full text that covers cannabis and no one is willing to step away from the rest of the text.
Canada is showing signs they might do it, which will trigger a landslide, but at the moment that's only speculation.
My country would have passed legalization months ago if not for this treaty :/. So the USA screwed everybody in 68' and they are still doing it.

2. The twilight zone is good for exactly one group of people: illegal dealers and growers. Imagine: the police don't prosecute you as aggressively anymore (or at all), the populous treats it as a legal substance, that's still incredibly popular (funny, it's culturally accepted, but still an act of defiance against the authority) ... and you have no taxes because you still can't buy it legally. I've personally seen dealers agents masquerading as pro-canabis campaigners derail political alliances that would have made realistic progress towards legalization.
Also sex, sex is inherent to society. As is friendship, as are stable child rearing agreements (spartan or catholic - I'm not dictating, but you do need something to get babies to productivity).

Let's not minimize those, or poetry or theatre.

Your moral equivalence is not mine, perhaps other like you are a majority or even a significant minority, but perhaps not. In any case I think that for a functional society my equivalence has a higher utility.
Apps to download during Irma
Thanks, both of you :).
Most grains can be stored for years under the right conditions. Sure the quality will decline over that time, but given we are feeding a large amount of grain to livestock this decline is manageable.

Even having a single years buffer would be very worthwhile. As I mentioned in the OP if we have a catastrophic event in the northern summer the poor are in serious trouble.
Cleaning and cooking builds character and allows time for reflection, in my opinion.

Paying someone else to do my cleaning and cooking and other day to day drudgery work buys me time, and allows me the choice of when and how I want to "build character" and do some reflecting.
Curse of the ancient tombs of X...
> then this license is dangerous.

...if Facebook has any patents. Which, in this case, it seems very likely they do not.
Top 10: Books for Women in Tech
The problem I see with this is that if the illusion is ever shattered (because you make a jump you know you shouldn’t have or vice versa), then not only is the effect lost, but likely the player will distrust the game and the satisfaction of accomplishment in the game is gone forever.

I like some games (eg Dark Souls) because I know that I can overcome challenges through my own perseverence and skill. If I ever feel that it wasn’t my doing, then the game suddenly becomes completely worthless to me. The first time I battled the final boss in Dark Souls 3 DLC 2, I was playing on NG+2 and it took about a week of after work play to finally take him down. It was exillerating because I knew that I was a better player (at that fight, at least) at the end of the week than I was at the beginning. For example, I was able to dodge attacks with ease that at first I felt like they were un-dodgeable. What do you think will happen if I ever found out that the game became subtly easier over time and let me win, instead of my own skill improving? I’d feel cheated...
You open the account in person, by showing them your ID card. The bank has access to the central national database of IDs, so they can compare if the ID card shown by the person matches the information coming from the central db, matching the person showing it on the picture. Hence you have strong in-person proofing, that is now the basis for the 2FA.

Thats how it should be done, except in the US there is no way to check against a national database of IDs, not even on the state level with DMVs. You literally trust the plastic card the person shows you and thats where the problems start. Online its even worse.
The airline industry is on the whole a zero sum industry, but there's a huge difference in profits/losses between the many airlines worldwide. So some do make huge profits while most struggle constantly.
Fired Google Engineer James Damore interview [video]
Mastodon supports photos and videos.
I see what you mean now, but on initially reading your comment I was under the impression that the man involved was convicted of a criminal offense. Just to clarify for anyone else reading, this didn't happen.
The first paragraph of the articles says "The top left corner encodes my initials, JRH, in ASCII. The bottom right corner is my date of birth."
Every child deserves start up money.
I don't know what your definition of infinite is but that doesn't sound right at all, and further your argument applies equally to all existential risks, so it doesn't really tell you that you shouldn't work on this particular one.
The Twin Cities (AKA Minneapolis) perhaps doesn't scale well on the "raw growth" charts, but the region has a strong track record for being a very good place for corporate headquarters. By metropolitan area, it ranks first among the 30 largest metropolitan areas in the number of Fortune 500 companies per capita. It's also a major knowledge hub for shipping logistics, which is why Amazon opened an office there related to that work.

I'm not really jazzed about the idea of Amazon moving in, but don't discount the Twin Cities here, it's a very strong contender.
This is the solution if we have a decade long event, but we need time to implement this - you can't just set up millions of acres of indoor growing space overnight.

Ideally, we need a couple of years food in storage together with detailed plans for how to grow food indoors (if needed).
it calls the method drawImage on the context object.

ignore, in OCaml, allows to "cast the expression to void"
“I don't miss anything. I'm home where I am”: The Voyages of Henk De Velde
They do benefit from using the network infrastructure, but I sort of agree with you that this is just money grabbing to make up for ever increasing government expenditures. If they do it to the tech giants they'll do it to everyone else. This is an experiment, just like Cyprus was with taking sums in excess of 100k euros out of people's accounts.
also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064
On the other note, you missed the last character of the URL, so that's not terribly surprising.
The negative health affects are definitely there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yewlM8CtbQU

But that does not mean that we should not legalize it. I would even argue they are THE reason why we should legalize. A legal market is a regulated market, which lets you minimize the negative health effects by controlling what is actually being sold.
It's good for massive companies positioning themselves to monopolize the legal market when it emerges, bad for everyone else.
The same holds for bank account numbers which seems just as ridiculous to us Europeans.
It should be simple:

When applying for new accounts, or logging in from new devices, you should be receiving an email and/or sms on the endpoints of your choice. And then able to stop those things from happening.
Avoidance, you mean. I think there are more distorting effects in the market at the moment than tax avoidance, such as extremely low interest rates and quantitative easing (outside of the US).
Goa: A Lesson in Life Receives Its First Amazon 5 Star Review
The 'start learning' page tells the user to try `print("hello world")` but doesn't tell the user _where_ to put it. The page has even gone so far as to tell the user that it is _not_ to be put into an IDE or CLI prompt.

You might want to help the user install and open Jupyter before telling him what to type into it.
Could.
With a better choice you can get a better chance:
1. Take an organization working for your cause,
2. identify a subset of org members you assume to be zealous enough for your taste
3. give all of them some money

Now: Your vote can be bought once
Then: Your vote can be bought arbitrarily often with diminishing returns.
Part of reading comprehension is understanding the source of what you are reading. In this case, we have police officers who indisputably have bias against legal marijuana and who lack empathy towards those who see little benefit in paying an essentially criminal amount of taxes and adhering to overbearing regulation (not all of it is overbearing -- it's important to look after mother nature), framing the conversation in a way that serves their agenda. I don't see many actual numbers being thrown around in the article. It's largely speculation on behalf of the police officers.

If you wish to convince me, you will need a less subjective source, for example actual well-executed studies on the negative impacts of pot farmers in California, as well as literature proving the necessity of such high taxes and regulation by the government.
Mastodon impliments a very very confusing username system, due to the design of domain-name based federation.

alice@mastadon.social
alice@mastadon.network

Twitter suffers from impersonator accounts on its own network, imagine the confusion of an unfamiliar user having to find a real account on mastadon.
Ah, the good ol' days, when CNN didn't have CIA minders moderating its releases and directing its reporting policies, because of, y'know .. "the war on the TERROR" .. before The Patriot Act came and ruined America.

Yeah, I remember those days too. While I'm glad that CNN has become more accessible with this text interface, I'm still not going to read it. It is, without a doubt, highly unreliable a news source, and not something one should be using to base ones world view on ..
I see, so if you temporarily steal a card from a person who looks like you, you can open acccounts in their name?
Ok, LOL :)

For the record, I very much like Discord, and I want to use it for a large group of volunteers looking for a coordination and discussion tool. We currently use Telegram. This is why I'm asking this weird questions ;)
I am having the same issue. Once I log in to Slack nothing happens in the main window. My team is very small. I submitted a bug report as advised. Thanks for the nice work!
No he just had his life ruined instead.

We have spent centuries learning why due process is critical and somehow we throw it all out because someone in government sends a "Dear Collegue" letter.
I lived in the USA for long enough to get a SSN and a credit rating, but I left some time ago.

I've now discovered that my details are in this leak.

Does anyone have any advice for how a non-US citizen, not currently living in the USA, can secure their data and ensure that its not being used nefariously? I.e. is there a way to permanently retire a SSN and credit rating, remotely (which doesn't involve dying, lol)?
I am currently very close to finishing my studies, so I cannot.
You're right, I screwed that up.

But the resulting script has this lovely gem:

curl -L -o $TARGET ...
chmod +x $TARGET

No error management, no download integrity checking... Let's just run a fie from the web! Which can be incomplete despite the `set -e` at the start of the file.
> Or use 2FA like in any internet banking?

That's the funny part - there's no 2fa available for most internet banking in Canada or the US. In Denmark we get the NemID card mailed to us, but in Canada it's just your card number+password+sometimes they ask a security question like "what high school did you go to?"
Well yes. The empty program is 100% bug-free. I don't think any other language can guarantee that your code will be 100% bug-free.
Haven't we been through this with the likes of identi.ca / statusnet?
You hear this a lot, but I don't really get this... Everyone is using email and I have never heard anyone complain "email implements a very very confusing username system" because alice@gmail.com and alice@hotmail.com are not the same people.

Maybe it would help to make it more explicit that Mastodon works more like email than Twitter in that respect, but to be fair joinmastodon.org and also the new user onboarding tutorial do try hard to make that very clear.
Cannabis was banned throughout the world, because American corporations wanted it banned, and after the US put it on the Schedule I list, efforts were made far and wide for the rest of the world to follow suit.

And yes, cannabis was banned because of who was using it - as well as how USEFUL it was in disrupting other industries (such as paper) - not because of its effects. There are countless documentaries which discuss this - a simple Youtube search will yield results.
@EGreg below me - no, the national database has biometric information including finger and retina prints as well (definitely fingerprints, not sure of retina prints). The bank is able to check that too.
The most romantic music ever played
Having a unique identifier is separate from being able to use it to identify as the holder of that identifier. Yes, having it may simplify tracking, but tracking is a hell of a lot lesser problem compared to identity theft.
Yes - agree, sorry sloppy language. I agree that both of the other distortions are important and difficult too - but I think imposed on authorities by circumstance.

Also having other things in play doesn't mean that this thing shouldn't be fixed...
Storing seed for 2FA on your phone (google authenticator) leaves you vulnerable to anyone who compromises your phone. If someone compromised your phone, your likely would not know they are generating the same 2FA codes as you do. To tackle this problem you could store your 2FA secrets on secure device (e.g. Yubikey NEO) and use phone as display.

Lastpass is cloud service and they had some issues in the past, I consider more offline/app approach for password manager as bit more secure alternative.
Charlie Rose discusses the state of the markets and the rise of corporatism
The second reason was the predominant reason. We already had a lot of options for search results with search engines like Altavista/aggregate sites. It's the simplicity of Google that made Google.

PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
What we need is a system like a base key and derivatives keys that can be revoked / issued via some central government system. If someone's SSN gets compromised, revoke the base key and all keys are invalidated. If a individual organization's use of your key get's compromised, revoke and reissue. Most likely this all will have to happen transparently without the user really knowing what's happening under the hood. Perhaps on the blockchain?!
I believe that all EU has a similar approach, it is just the US that misuse the SSN.

The way it is done in Italy (it is called "Codice Fiscale") it is composed through a public algorithm from name, surname, place and date of birth with a final "control" character (derived by the preceding characters) so - with the exception of the very few cases of total homonimy - it can be recreated "on the spot".

Nowadays it is however printed on an electronic card, with both a magnetic stripe and a chip and it is the actual card (together with an ID document[1]) that "authenticates" your identity (in person) while on some government sites you can use the card (with a smart card reader) to authenticate.

[1] actually the main thing is the ID document, passport, ID card or - in some cases - driving license, with that you can declare your Codice Fiscale even if you don't have the actual card with you.
Agreed that the US govt (read companies) put pressure on the govts. of other countries to get it banned.
Google AMP is Winning
It has no benefit on the client itself, but in this (server-rendered) case, you can think of it as improved PHP/Ruby/....
> you defend your patents by suing Facebook, you lose the right to use React.

No you don't. You lose the right to use any patents Facebook might (or much more likely, doesn't) have on React.
Too much of it is wrong. Even Ambrosia, as the saying goes.
Can be reasonably sure Pharma companies have done research over it. After all, it's in their interest if it appears bad. But they also use some of its contents. THC for instance. Seems good business.
Nishino kana
There have indeed been issues of identity theft here in Sweden where the thieves ordered a new login to the 2fa app and then managed to get hold of it from postal offices with bad verification processes.

So now the practice is to fetch the credentials from the nearest bank office or something like that.
I remember my car having an option to increase hp by 20. It's still the same engine but it's less fuel efficient according to their datasheet.
Yes, agree, but I just think in many cases the resources and effort it requires for tax authorities to win these cases often makes it not worth it.

A full tax case can easily run for 5 to 10 years, and the upside will be relatively limited. A lot has already been done in recent years and for a lot of EU companies the actual tax rate they pay has gone up with a few percentage points. But now most of the low hanging fruit is gone.
The incredible growth of python
If I call my bank, the bank personnel can (and do) request a challenge to the 2fa app. Same with connections over the Internet.

The 2fa app is driven by a separate company that only does identification service.