skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If someone offered me this case, I would probably decline it on grounds that I didn't see a reasonable prospect of winning.

Equifax still hasn't revealed any data about how it was hacked, without that information it's hard to prove they were negligent.

Negligence requires three things: duty, breach and damages.

As to duty:

Does Equifax really owe a duty to every single person whose data it keeps. That would be a tough argument to make. They didn't sign any contract or make any agreement with the people whose data they collect. So where does the duty come from?

Even if the plaintiffs were able to overcome that hurdle, they would then have to prove breach. Was Equifax careless in they way they handled information security? I don't see evidence of that, the mere fact that they were hacked doesn't necessarily mean they were careless. All Equifax would have to show to win on this count is that they had some sort of basic security system in place comparable to what other businesses it's size have in place. My guess is that they do have a security system and that this probably wouldn't be hard for that to show.

Being hacked would be considered under law to be an intervening criminal action. It is established that people are not responsible when damage is caused by someone else's criminal action. So long as Equifax took basic, prudent steps to protect data, they can't be held responsible for intervening criminal action.

As to damages

It's hard to see how anything of monetary value was lost by the plaintiffs in this case. There was a loss of privacy, but I haven't heard of courts giving out awards for that sort of loss.

I'm sure people more familiar with information security could point to flaws in they way Equifax protected info. And certainly the way they reacted to the hack was negative. But bad or imperfect behaviour doesn't in and of itself give rise to a claim for monetary damages in court. This case doesn't seem winnable to me.

There is some argument that if you use Equifax's identity theft protection you may be able to sue, which I think is what this class action is about. But that still doesn't give rise to damages because none of the plaintiffs can prove that their identity was actually stolen. And you still don't have breach (no proof that the hack was the result of Equifax's carelessness).
I think the area around Reston / Dulles would make a great pick. The Silver Line will be finished soon, and there is plenty of room to build it up in the style of Arlington's Orange Line or Old Town's Blue. Dulles being 10 minutes away would be a huge advantage, especially compared to Denver where the airport is a long ways from both the tech corridor and the Boulder area.

Traffic is still a nightmare and housing costs are pretty bad compared to most cities, but there is a lot of tech talent here and wages seem lower than NY, Seattle, and the Bay Area.

NOVA is liberal, but Virginia is business friendly, unlike DC and MD. There is already the big NE Virginia AWS here, and I'm pretty sure most of the governments and intel communities AWS infrastructure is also housed close by.
There's a pretty large market for inanimate blocks of silicone shaped like various body parts already.
Is there a reason you guys are doing UA sniffing instead of a Modernizr-esque strategy? Would it have too much of a runtime cost? Or is it just about syntax and serving a transpiled blob would make it bigger? Genuinely curious
I just discovered messenger lite after uninstalling the main bloated battery sucking messenger app and I'm sad they chose not to release it in my country. It's fantastic! Also messenger.com really needs a lite browser app version for phones and to improve their browser version of Facebook. They're really out of the loop in my opinion. Since removing all Facebook apps, including instagram and going to browser app only I've increased my battery life significantly.
In Sweden your SSN is public information. I posted the same comment on another Equifax thread and got some pretty interesting replies relevant to this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15208223
Food spoils so a stockpile like that isn't quite feasible. Sure we'll be able to get some foods that store well and can last for years but that's a small subset of food and even that food not all of it lasts for more than two years.

It's just not realistic. Sure we can significantly enlarge our buffer but two or more years? I can't see that happening in any practical sense.
Why not just use RSS? This is time and effort wasted.

Given RSS is old, text only and has XML its very lightweight, has good support and fast readers.

No heavy javascript needed as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins
Some dirt they can fabricate to threaten Trump, and then get him to go to more wars so that the military industry can keep profiting?
Show HN: Fd – a fast and user-friendly alternative to find (written in Rust)
Yes... that is the point of reviews, that's why they exist, to establish what a game is not what it was meant to be. If marketing materials were accurate there wouldn't need to be any reviews in the first place, if you pre-order you are pre-ordering aspirations not guarantee's, all anyone had to do to avoid disappointment was not buy the game until it was released.

As I said, that fanbase hyped themselves up to a degree which is ridiculous, they took every word out of the devs mouth from years of interviews as gospel, it really was an unholy shitstorm where everyone from the developer, the publisher and the customers made things worse than it needed to be.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please stop.
I really want to embrace this - but I'm still not able to make up my mind whether I object more to Twitter the company or to the whole concept that Mastodon is implementing.

(edit: not that Twitter themselves have done much to offend me - "Twitter the company" above is more of a stand-in for commercial social networking companies at large)

2nd edit because I've not had my coffee yet and didn't explain myself properly: the "whole concept" that I'm talking about is, I guess, what people used to call 'microblogging' - a service of which Twitter is the holotype; as far as I can see, the real utility of it is in its constant presence via a phone app, but I am not sure if I want to do that. I definitely don't want to have that in my life by joining Twitter, but I can't make up my mind whether my dislike is more about the companies providing the service, or more about the generic service itself.

Does that make better sense? :)
No special reason. I found it on this aggregator and though about sharing it.
What happens is that a French person on vacation in the USA pays US taxes, for example the state tax on what s/he buys. S/he starts paying French taxes again when going back home. It looks fair.

But if that US business goes to France and sells to French customers there, then it should pay French taxes in France on the profits made from French customers. All loopholes should be removed.

What happens is that corporate taxes ultimately come from the pockets of customers. Either those companies will raise prices or lower their profits. Either way this will help local companies that currently can't exploits loopholes to pay no taxes and are at an unfair disadvantage. Somebody could see it as protectionism, I think the existence of those loopholes is a bug that has to be fixed.
Yes we actually worked a lot with kids and programming / computers, mostly kids from very poor backgrounds high up in the himalayas. Also I've worked with young programmers for almost 20 years. This project, which you see the very beginning of, is something that is coming to fruition as a result of that experience.

The primary target audience is kids, and the secondary non-programmers who want to get in to data science. The goal is to really make it "for all ages". A previous iteration was tested on target audience and had an encouraging reception, which was the motivation to put more time in to this.
why did i get downvoted? seems that hn is populated by a bunch of ufo believers/bitcoin investors like types that would rather believe than fact check https://youtu.be/GL82cKwG8Ik?t=1m9s
Why You Should Be Using Vesta
The direct flight requirement is odd. Adding flights is trivial, and it will happen if Amazon is buying the tickets. Airlines like to make money.
What value do facebook developers create directly? They have crafted a network of complementary services for which I don't deny their craftsmanship, but would you argue the developers are the core business instead of the interaction between users and their product?
> Long term, it's all about being able to have enough indoor hydroponic/aeroponic space to grow enough food for ~7.5 billion people, which sounds really difficult and impractical.

I can't find the research I read a few years ago but from what I understand growing indoors is crazy practical. Plants need less sun light, essentially zero pesticides, can grow much faster and if you build your structures vertically you'll be able to farm the same amount of food on orders of magnitude less space.

I don't know if we're at the point where it can be practical today, especially with so much subsidy in farming, but I'm very optimistic about it moving to automated systems within buildings that wouldn't even need the sun.
For them to struggle at something that (per your own comparison) you seem to think of as possible to do in a way so that it is worthy of praise (because you've compared them to ones who could do it in a praise-worthy way) shouldn't really be something that you have no sympathy towards, if you want everyone to do it the best way..? [Unless you mean that they are
intentionally 'cheating', so to speak, and capable but self-centered]
Coming from another country I really have difficulties understanding why e.g., utilities would want to have your SSN. What do they get that they otherwise won’t get? Isn’t a validated address and a credit card number enough for them? What is the scenario that they try to protect against? That someone misses his 30 USD utility payment and has a CC that is not covered? That seems like a rather weak argument
Thanks, this seems exactly what I was looking for! One question though, all demos I looked at had 'run' disabled. Is there some 'catch' to this?
There's some weird misunderstandings going on with NHS use of technology.

Some organisations still use fax. This is because the failure modes are well understood. It's pretty hard for a sender to think a fax has been sent, but for the receiver to not get it. At least, that's the case with traditional fax machines. But when you add modern computers as gateways, with people sending from their desktops through some not-understood conversion process, you lose that tiny advantage, and you have the disadvantages of an ancient technology.

But they keep it because fax is what's "needed".

There's a bunch of stuff about reliability, or privacy, or auditing, that really could be done electronically.
Their problem set can be found here: http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of-problems/
What do you object to about the concept of what Mastodon is implementing?
Bluemix container service offers free cluster with 16GB memory and 2 CPU

https://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/container_index....
Top 20 MCQ Questions on Strings and Vectors in Java – InfoTechSite
Fantastic conspiracy theory, A+ job.
I really really agree with you. I also think that the fast.ai courses are amazing.

It is a question of motivation. If you're reasonably proficient at programming and want to hit the ground running on a specific application (especially in a domain that has well-established methods) fast.ai is probably what you're looking for.

If you're new to programming and mathematics, or want to work on the state of the art of these methods, you need to first truly understand more fundamental ideas. For those who fall into this camp, I am collecting resources (work in progress) and trying to organise them into a learning pathway: https://github.com/hnarayanan/deep-learning

You or anyone else who's interested is free to offer suggestions on learning material.
Very cool! The first cell of your first notebook
"reminds" me that we should have one part which just talks about using Jupyter in an effective way (tab completions / shortcuts / etc).
Was this in response to the update? Or the original terms?
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8951283.
I think we're mixing two different purposes here.

Authentication through knowledge of a SSN is an absurd practice, and is a non problem in countries which have a national ID card scheme. Introducing ID cards would be my obvious response to this leak. Not re-issuing SSN until the next major leak.

Having a universal unique identifier for every individual across systems is a different matter and I am not convinced this is even desirable. In a world where no organisation is able to protect its data (or even willing since most organisations now are looking for ways to monetize it), this is making it too easy to link an identity across breaches. I don't think your utility companies have any need to know your SSN.
We do this both for polyfills and for different compiled code in some cases. Since we need this on the first request (and care about perf on that first request), it's less practical to use JS to decide. User-Agent works well in practice.
Not many of today's archealogical sites come from civilizations that used nuclear power.
> The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one.

Like working in high-finance? A sector that's been overtaken by algorithms pretty much the earliest among all the industries.
Imho "the machines" have already "won", humans are mostly mere cogs in a whole collection of systems which see planet Earth as a gigantic perpetual "economic engine" in need of constant acceleration, or else it might come crashing down all around us.
A lot of people ARE "conspiring" to get Trump out of office. Do you realize that a "conspiracy theory" does not necessarily imply that it is wrong? Deep State has been trying to get rid of Trump for a long time and some of them have admitted their intent publicly.
> or to the whole concept that Mastodon is implementing.

Huh?

You can have a user on any Mastadon or GNUSocial server, and communicate with any other user on any other Mastadon/GNUSocial server.

So, no get tied in there.

That's the main complaint I see with people and social networks... So can you expand?
How can I get it to remember my exceptions to the Shield?
The train conductor that has been driving trains for twenty years is very unlikely to pick up the latest AI framework and become a software engineer.
I don't mind the company, but I don't like that a product of a single company has become the defacto communication channel for tech people.

In many gatherings speakers identify themselves by twitter handles instead of email. Do you think that is sound?
Are there any plans for polishing the backend experience?

The progress for front end looks very promising, however as someone that likes the look of Reason but isn't interested in front end I found getting into Reason with the native toolchain was no easier than OCaml.
True.

But in some ways current situation with Safari is worse. With IE you could at least say "download a proper browser if you want proper experience" (if you had the luxury of not being in servitude to your visitors). With Safari it's more like "get a proper phone", which is far from costless.

On the bright side, Apple is also hurting themselves with this approach. Missing a good browser will only speed up the decline of iOS.
The first instance was caused by cobalt-60 which was medical grade. 3 people total died. Cobalt-60 has a half live of roughly 5 years. So in 100 years, it will have gone through about 20 half-lives and be about a million times less radioactive. In a thousand years, it will have gone through about 200 half-lives and pretty much safe to eat every day.

Even in both the cases mentioned, less than 10 total people died. Even without any signs, people living near it will most likely quickly develop taboos about the site.
I would argue that the benefits or difficulties of avoiding taxation are dependent on the rule of law in the states where business is actually done. If the USA or EU took a political decision not to permit such structures then they would disappear.

The USA and EU don't because the benefits to their political class have so far outweighed the problems caused by a lack of revenue, and these structures have developed and proliferated rather rapidly. Additionally the political structures required to create collaborative responses have been developed in response to different issues (the necessity of supporting development in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the wall), and the alignments necessary to operate a larger system in Europe are not yet in place.

I do believe that Brexit will facilitate this, but I think that the process will have to go further to include Macron's ideas on a single budget - a greatly expanded take and disperse for the EU. This will require a huge reform of the Commission. I invite everyone to try and engage with the commission in some process or other and then judge what kind of capability you are engaging with.

I hope that the EU will devolve the distribution of central budget items to locally accountable forums, possibly at the sub national level - perhaps six for a country like France, one for somewhere like Greece. Currently I fear that the favour networks that operate in the EU institutions would greatly distort and corrupt any large fiscal rebalancing.

The big issue is that it seems that several of the national level structures in the EU would creak in the face of this kind of new set-up. Spain and Belgium in particular, but even Italy could be pulled apart by the creation of subnational entities with revenue lines independent of the national entity. Also, what would the mechanism of accountability be ? I think that this should vary according to the tradition of the region, but what are the acceptable limits or bounds on this?

Without Brexit this is simply a non-starter, I think that the UK would have been much more compromised than any other EU state by the emergence of this kind of structure, and I think that the English part of the UK would have been a real problem in terms of subnational accountability - the sovereignty of the commons would have gone and I don't see that as politically possible in England (note the other nations are less touchy about that for some reason!)
Our agreement is based on the fact that there will always be someone more interested in your wallet than your life. It is dangerous to suggest that after x dollars it is acceptable to take money from someone. Excluding taxes, which are a different subject.
BenoitEssiambre, what are your thoughts on http://woobull.com/bitcoin-volatility-will-match-major-fiat-...?
I agree with a well funded government. I don't always agree with how government spends the money, but that is kind of the point. Governments should guarantee a minimum standard and equal starting conditions for everyone, capitalism raise the roof. Both are vital.
> Alcohol is only addictive to alcoholics, and precisely what makes an alcoholic is a subject of ongoing research.

Could you elaborate on that? From what I know the whole term 'alcoholic' is generally avoided in research precisely because 1) we don't actually know whether 'alcoholics' exist, and 2) we do know quite a bit about the mechanics of addiction, and based on what we know it seems like anyone can be addicted to pretty much anything under the sun.

Based on this, at most one could argue that alcohol is only addictive to those who are susceptible to addiction to alcohol (whether through circumstance or genetic factors). But that would be a tautology.
I wish feedly.com (my RSS reader) had a light interface. It feels so bloated and slow.
> Marijuana didn't exactly become illegal in the United States because of its effects. It became illegal because of who was using it.

Is it really the case? I know it comes up in every discussion about cannabis but I'm wondering if it is really the case. Cannabis (and most psychoactive drugs with the exception of alcohol) are banned in most countries in the world and it has nothing to do with harassing minorities.
I guess that's the problem edn [0] was trying to solve, but it doesn't have wide enough adoption.

[0] https://github.com/edn-format/edn
And it still hijacks the back button, and therefore shouldn't be read.
Sure, that is the point of moral relativism, because morality is shaped by culture. For instance, capital punishment is variously moral/immoral in different parts of the world.
Agree, can someone explain me what does `ignore @@ context##drawImage sprite.img sx sy sw sh dx dy dw dh` mean? I coulnd't find `ignore` in Reason docs

from
https://github.com/reasonml-community/Mareo/blob/master/src/...
Edited my post. More coffee needed, evidently.
See 2nd edit above :)
You might want to try Typescript.
The cost of empire!

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175627/tomgram%3A_david_vine... might be an article on it.
> as readers of RSS are often native apps or browser plugins

That's probably why.

Most people can barely drive their web browser, and many tech people are reluctant to install new extensions, because of trust issues.

A web page, in a nice pure form like this, is fast, responsive, and easy to use.
So what is the limit of what is acceptable to pass down to a child? Who decides?
I am surprised no one mentioned the Dutch sandwich yet. Look it up: the EU is a taxation joke.
For the purposes of fraud, it's fairly easy to link accounts across datasets even without a unique key like SSN. You can just guess based on name and address or something and if you're only right 90% of the time that's still a pretty big win.
Maybe it was trying to be helpful - detected you were pasting XML and tried to pretty-print / colorize it.
> Software's free and hardware is cheap.

Imho that hardware part really depends on scale.
As nice as the thought might be, I doubt there are enough resources on Earth for a future where 8 billion people live a leisurely first world lifestyle in their smart homes with IT gadgets all around them, while robots take care of all the manual labor that needs to be done.

All that hardware requires resources and those resources are finite, at least on that little piece of rock we like to call Earth. As of right now that's pretty much the current ceiling for humanities progress and it ain't a very high one.
perhaps allowing tokens/passwords to be established for existing SSNs would be an alternative to national IDs. You could even create a separate token each time you needed to supply the SSN, so that if it's ever leaked, the source of the leak could be investigated.
Huh? We already have a wall. It covers about 1/4th of the US-Mexico border.

Trump would just be expanding it. Likely to around a half of the total border (Much of the border is close to impassable, due to mountains, desert, ect).
Or, maybe this is just another attempt from NASA to prevent budget cuts. And in a cunning way. Pump fear, look cool, create a long term very expensive very difficult project, keep money coming. IMO, moving money from war machine to risky projects is hardly justified. Both should be gone.
I'd rather consume some plastic or birdshit than continue destroying mountains for a substance we literally have oceans of. I think many people feel the same way
In many gatherings speakers identify themselves
by twitter handles instead of email. Do you think
that is sound?

No, I very much dislike that. Part of it is that I am (by choice, for sure), not able to use that information, but part of it is, as you say, an objection to a single commercial offering having that position.