skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Huffington Post article is written by an anti-corporate former heroin addict who, yes, clearly holds animus against those who profited off of opiates.

> By convincing doctors that OxyContin was “safer,” offering financial support and special perks to family physicians who were willing to push the drug, and investing millions in a marketing campaign that claimed OxyContin was not only harmless but beneficial, Purdue Pharma cornered the pain pill market. By 2003, Purdue was selling $1.6 billion of the pill annually.

The crux of his condemnation is the incentivization of doctors to prescribe -- which one could call bribery. Also, the misrepresentation of known addictive and deleterious long term health effects, which I believe could likely be demonstrated through internal company documents.

Wealth allows the purchase of goodwill at a discount price -- the ultimate destination of Mr. Sackler hinges on both the wilfulness and premeditation of his capitalist technique and the breadth and compassion of his philanthropy.

Collecting and displaying Oriental artwork appears to be at the center of his humanism -- the other side of which is biomedical research. I have not scrutinized the publications emerging from the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv, but for the sake of his soul and millions of prescription opiate addicts, I hope the papers reveal cures proportionate to his profits.
This was a weirdly subdued review by Gruber, it even brings up areas where competitors have been doing something for a while without going through the normal Gruberian mental gymnastics to justify it. He even brings up Apple's inexplicable need to have a 16 GB base model until this year without trying to justify it. Gruber often gets himself in trouble by omission as much as by the circus-show of what he writes. But there's very little of that here.

This reads like an honest review.

My tl;dr of it is "It's a solid year over year update from the 7."

note Not to worry, his previous articles will send the critically thinking reader down the road to infuration just like one might expect...I was afraid Gruber was losing his edge.
I thank you for bringing Hartmann up, as I hadn't looked into his work and this is a reminder to do so.

But anyway, I wouldn't include him for the same reason I wouldn't include Pierce, James, and some other american pragmatists, or more enigmatic figures such as Cioran and Bataille--namely because while my personal perspective on their thought is that it's excellent and deserves serious consideration, and they are some of my favorite philosophers to read, their work hasn't had as great a historical impact on the world stage as these other major figures.
The author is acting like this wasn't an intended phenomenon. I don't understand the mental gymnastics required to NOT see this.

Bezos decided, "we need to grow, and to grow we need equipment and real estate, so I'm going to spend the profits on those assets, since we will get more bang for our buck than just holding onto after-tax cash."

A corporation doesn't just accidentally conduct business that way lol, for better or worse.
Get used to it. The tech backlash is just beginning.

There are two forces. One is the series of gaffs by Google, FB, and Amazon and the resultant public awareness of their power. The second is Trump's election. When he set up his initial meetings with business leaders at the beginning of his administration, the tech giants were notably not invited. He sent the signal that they were not part of the real economy.

Say what you want about Trump's morals or ineffectiveness, but things like that send signals across a society whether we like it or not. "Greed is good" came from Reagan's election in the 80s. Tech is losing its shine in our culture.
zxcvbn [1], the best simple password strength estimator I'm aware of, gives "correct horse battery staple" around 62 bits, and "Tr0ub4dour&3" around 30 bits (cracked in a day). ("ILoveTacoAndBurgersWhatever1984", suggested below, 53 bits).

> Yes. Knowing the password rules limits the space that'd need to be bruteforced.

Yes, but not that much, really:

1. Giving away the length of your password doesn't help the attacker much. For realistic scenarios, testing all passwords with length < N takes less than 2% of the time of testing all passwords with length N.

(The proportion of passwords with length < N to passwords with length N is approximately 1/M, where M is the number of distinct symbols (here about 60). Exactly it's (q-q^N)/(1-q), I think, where q=1/M.) So, even if you use only numbers, telling the attacker the length of the password gives them only a 10% edge.

2. Knowing that a 10 letter password contains at least one number excludes about 1/6 of passwords ((50/60)^10). So, that's less than one bit. Similarly with special characters etc.

TL;DR: Telling an adversary the length of your password doesn't really help them. Telling them password rules (contains a number, etc.) helps them more, but adding just one more character to your password increases the difficulty more than knowing the password rules decreases it.

[1] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2012/04/zxcvbn-realistic-pass...

https://www.bennish.net/password-strength-checker/
I see the big 4 as robber barons[1]. They see opportunity in millions and billions of dollars. The company doesn't care about the individual.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
When it comes to messaging I prefer XMPP with Omemo these days. There is Gajim for PC, Conversations for Android and ChatSecure for Apple.

Of course, many people don't want to change their habits and I think there is no need to push too hard. However, I convinced a friend of mine to try Gajim on PC and to my surprise he sticked with it and installed the Conversations App a few months later on his smartphone.

Of course, the network effect of FB is very real. So overall this anecdote doesn't really change anything. But I think it is import to remind ourselves every once in a while that there are people out there who are willing to change their habits. And some of these people, in turn, influence other people. It's unlikely that you start a trend but I think we should keep trying.
JavaScript Array cardio
I understand that. But if you're so fearful that you think a code inspector is there to harm you, you probably shouldn't be allowed to own a gun. Instead you should seek medical care.
> One almond takes about 4 liters of water to produce

How long does it take for that water to re-enter the ecosystem in a usable way? Water isn't just destroyed, yeah?

Water planning is definitely worthwhile, but seems there are a few other variables in play.
It had the opposite effect for me -- now that everything gives me a notification, half the time I see the red dot on the corner I assune it's something stupid.
Ugh, I noticed the same thing a few weeks ago reading reviews of battery life.

Apparently "good" battery life these days means "in more sedate conditions it's easily going to get you home to a charger."

When did people's expectations get so low?
No VPN button in Control Center? Do Apple employees use public wi-fi?
Depends on your definition of "friend", for sure!
It's hard to imagine a tax that would be sensitive to this difference unless it was a tax on market cap, which would be very odd because shareholders are the owners. So it would be a tax on one entity for the value of assets owned by another.
This reminds me about the banana industry, I read about governments being changed by US but I can't find anything now on google since there are tons of articles about the "banana wars" where poor countries are exploited by big corporation that are aided by US gov(because politician get lot of donations from banana industry.
My point is that even non-corrupt countries could be fed by companies.
one settings I'd like to have is "unmute for the next 15 minutes" to be able to hear a funny vid without forgetting to reset it back to muted
You're reading too much into it. It was never presented as a "bonus", rather an honest accounting of why one material may be better than another. Both are "tacky" feeling, but only one didn't show wear and tear just one week into use.
It's the Internet that enables communication. Families and friends would be able to communicate once the Internet became possible whether Facebook exists or not. People would be able to use and get value from the Internet whether Google exists or not.

These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful.

What they have been able to do is inject themselves into communication pathways, provide a network effect in the case of facebook to leverage social curiosity about others which in the larger scheme of things is not important, and now sit on tons of data which has zero value to users and thus does not enhance communication in any way, but helps advertisers.
I haven't had a Facebook account for five years. I get by just fine by emailing or texting a friend when I want to get a hold of them.
That is incorrect. You are talking about a design chouce in WhatsApp which is explicitly not a problem in Signal.
> to let a single company own my OS (and update whenever, without really auditing it) and my "end to end encrypted" apps -- way too easy to slip in any kind of backdoor there if they want.

Strange. We have opposite conclusions from the same data. I figure I need to minimize the amount of people that "have root" so to speak. If I can't trust Apple, it doesn't matter if I trust Signal. Apple controls what actually gets downloaded to my phone.

I use signal for a different reason: mark certain conversations as "phone only" so notifications don't come up at inopportune times like when I'm at thanksgiving dinner with my extended family.
IP header has flexible size, up to 60 bytes: https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6855/...
I think that what you're suggesting (based on a vague understanding of the UK tax system) is abolishing corporate taxes and taxing dividends as income?

I'd be curious to hear someone who knows more accounting's view on this.

I've always thought that the answer was to have wealth taxes, easier to avoid but surely what we should actually aim for.
Unfortunately, Apple being Apple - doesn't expose those new sensors in any APIs.
> How come solar panels are ubiquitous elsewhere? Is it that e.g. Germany is risking the lives of line workers? Is Florida doing the right thing, or the wrong thing?

1. Florida does not provide any subsidies for solar installs (only the Federal 30% tax credit)

2. Florida utilities continue to lobby directly against solar, while sinking money into non-renewable generation technologies (this is changing, as some Florida utilities have thrown in the towel and have begun to plan to install utility scale solar and battery storage)

3. Unlike other states, utility power in Florida is already very inexpensive (~6 cents/kwh) generated from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, so there's less incentive than in other states to move to rooftop solar.

Source: Florida resident
why not gamify it. add points.
Getting off facebook will not suit everyone, mostly because a lot of users will use messenger or need facebook to beventa in the loop of some social events.

There is way to empty one's Facebook feed and remove all notifications that are not related to messenger. The solution is to unfollow everyone, until the facebook feed displays "no more posts to show". One can then enjoy the messaging features of facebook without the bad. One can also view some profiles or groups occasionally but this prevents the passive consumption of feeds.
Are the 4 liters of water being shot out to space?
Size matters when it comes to extinction risk
"No way. The high-quality wooden hand-crafted toys at good mom & pop toy stores are not available on Amazon. "

If they have any kind of success and are visible - the chinese will have copies flooding the market within weeks. Small shops play a game to sell - but don't become too big.
FWIW, Flow allows you to put the annotations in comments, but the syntax for the type annotations is generally more pleasant to work with.

I have found the types to be useful in a large (for JS) codebase with more than a handful of developers. The types help catch bugs, especially when refactoring, even with a decent test suite and linting. Plus, using React and GraphQL, we get static types all the way from data coming from the server through to the UI.
>Knowledge progresses. You can choose to come along or be left behind.

Dynamic weakly typed languages have been in use on the internet for more than 10 years and i've listed them above, so we're not talking about new stuff or new paradigms.

If you, with your overtly smug comment above, want to imply that you are not "left behind" in terms of "knowledge" of the state of the art in programming, you shouldn't be clinging to javascript transpilers but using truly modern tools like Haskell, Clojure/Clojurescript, Racket, Julia and Lisp/Parenscript.

Because knowledge progresses, and you shouldn't be left behind.
Did development engineering in the air force. Worked with xbox360 drivers as a PoC for bomb defusal bots.
The troops loved the ergonomics, and the product was cheap.
iirc i think irobot does use these for our bomb bots
My defense, however imperfect, against having to deal w/ having to update subscriptions is to have a card I only use for subscriptions, so there's a low chance it gets skimmed. I use Mr. Swipey swipe all day long without need to (excessively) worry that someone illicitly cloning Mr. Swipey will affect my relationship with Mr. Subscribey.
Pure functions, and why I like them
what's the difference between "There is a similar technique using markov chain. The author don't seem to be aware." AND "There is a similar technique using markov chain! :) "
So, you making this comment has been inevitable?
Why adding abstraction layers makes programming easier?

Because allow the programmer to not think (and even know) about some things and leaving them to the layer/libraries.

But every layer adds also a level of obscurity. The interaction between multiply layers is even more undefined and random.

It is OK while everything goes as expected. But when there are problems, the obscurity can make the debugging a hell.

In addition, the behavior of the bugs hidden deep in the layers (or in the way the layers interacts in between and with the application) can be really weird.

That is why, IMHO, the programmer should keep the abstraction layers to the minimal count that allows solving programming tasks with minimal effort, counting not only the coding time, but debugging and supporting time as well.

In my practice, I decided that using FASM with Fresh IDE and set of assembly libraries gives me the needed quality of the code.
Currying is something the programmer has to do when defining a function - well before partial application happens at all! More precisely, the programmer has to choose between:

fun foo (x, y) = ...

And

fun foo x y = ...

The language won't make the choice for them.
It takes 5 minutes and a few clicks on a web site now a days. I'm all for more security too but like OP it isn't really my responsibility nor my liability so I have little care.
> How on Earth do you figure that?

We were discussing Web Components at the time the Angular was getting popular and before React was even released.

> for non-browser developers to ... have those components work just like native elements

Honest question, how do Web Components help native developers in any way? Because from UI devs perspective, Web Components are useful only in a single edge case - when you must make sure than it's impossible for Cascading Style Sheets to cascade to your component.

For a developer, Web components are solving problems that almost no one has or that were solved better by React and Vue.
Real-time analytics startup Incorta raises $15M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins
The EFF wasn't pushing for "don't standardize EME". It was pushing for "add a clause to the EME standard that prevents it being abused in certain specific user-hostile ways". In particular, it would prevent it being abused to prevent actions by users that are perfectly legal under existing copyright law.

This is a complex topic with a lot of nuance to discuss, but I don't see how misrepresenting the EFF's position helps the discussion in any way.
Sorry to hear that! What browser are you using? Do you get an error on your console?
> Water is a scarce resource.

Water is not scarce! We got plenty. The model of water being a limited resource we have to save does not represent an economic reality.

We have an entire planet worth of water and we are not shooting it out to space. We know how to use it, how to clean it, etc. We will never run out of water. We might run out of
'free' water, but thats the whole point of using a resource, consuming it.
You may be interested to know that the 1975 Alaska Supreme Court ruling which legalized cannabis in that state used more or less your exact reasoning. The court found that as long as cannabis use was not a public health issue, the State had no right to infringe the privacy of one's home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravin_v._State
> They catch the simplest of newbie bugs that are rare in modular, linted, unit-tested codebases.

They catch 15% of the bugs in Javascript projects on GitHub.

Why do people insist on restricting their static code analysis into heuristic rules when there are so many perfectly good complete rules to be checked with a type system?
Are we talking about friends or acquaintances?

Because if ones friends forget to invite them to events because they are not on FB, then it’s time to find new friends.
Trump administration eases throttle on visas for techies
Fishing nets don't stretch, so I assume the fact that clothing does adds a lot of complexity, especially since seams won't stretch the same way? Also, different sizes have the same number of seams, but won't have the same overall drape/stretch.
> Pistachios and walnuts use similar amounts of water, so do other things we eat like broccoli.

What does this really mean though? In New England we have Walnut trees growing everywhere, and no one is watering them. If anything they're locking water into the soil that would otherwise just evaporate.
Ha ha, cool :)
You would have to ask everyone for their SSN.
And many youth will already be trained on the controller.

I've seen this subject come up before. It makes sense. I believe it was even considered for UAV controls.
Hopefully because its a gross title. It should be more like "Local government sells to coca-cola most of its water forcing residents to buy water"
TypeScript and Flow are both designed to work with the way people write JavaScript. The DefinitelyTyped project adds TypeScript types for existing JavaScript code without touching the existing code.

You don't rewrite your code to use these systems. You add annotations, which should not be introducing bugs.
1. So that's what you tell your parents? Every snap thread I've ever seen is soliciting nudes found on snap or soliciting usernames to solicit nudes.

3. I don't think we're talking about the same Saudi Arabia. Just talking about sex will earn you 5 years and 1000 lashes.
> Modern Scheme has:

> * Lazy, immutable, mutable subsets

> * Hygenic and unhygenic macros

> * Fast and simple error handling

> * Fast and simple compiling and evaluation

> * Tail call elimination

> * Procedures, closures, currying

> * Safe eval, and generative environments

> * Multi-threading and asynchronous callbacks

> What is left for you to consider modern?

Scheme had all of these 30 years ago, and most of them 40. What kind of an argument are they that it's "modern"?

> There are several ways of error handling, because error-handling lazy, immutable, mutable and object-oriented things can't be done in the same way

> You're looking for the Exception stuff. [...] In fact, most other error systems are only there for backwards compatibility with previous versions of the Scheme standard.

So which one is it? The second point seems to agree with lispm anyway; they complained about multiple redundant ways to do something in a "modern" language, and your explanation is that most of those ways are historical cruft.
And thank god for that. The face recognition data goes in the secure enclave and stays there.

The last thing I need is Snapchat to say "We need access to the facial scan for new video filters!" and then using it to measure microexpressions in response to ad displays.
Code maintainability and readability depends only on the programmers knowledge of the language/framework/libraries used.

For example, I don't know Lisp, so for me it is much harder to read/maintain Lisp project than assembly language project.
One problem here is that Javascript eats a lot of type errors silently.

$ node
> 1+[]
'1'
> 1-[]
1
> 1*null
0
> 1*undefined
NaN
> x = {}
{}
> 1+x.a
NaN

This is not something that other dynamically typed languages necessarily do.
They demo'd Snapchat with improved face tracking, though?
As someone whose background is mostly in statically typed languages, who has been using Ruby and Rails for the past year, the biggest issue for me is when refactoring/making big changes to central parts of the app, the many repercussions of these changes often take a long time to track down, and subtle bugs are often introduced. By comparison, similar changes in a statically typed language are are usually much less scary, and less prone to having subtle breakage going unnoticed. A big test suite helps, but it's not a replacement for all the help a static type system will give you.
The people installing these skimmers aren't the ones writing firmware for them. They have been mass produced in China and sold around the world. There might be a v2 in the works that works better or is more difficult to detect but people will still be buying the original version because it does the job and works well enough to get at least some cards before being found. It is similar to the OBDII reader chip, ELM327. Elm made a decent v1.0 release for their PIC-based ELM327 and forgot to lock down the firmware. Everyone then proceeded to make pirate clones of the reader. It is much easier to just keep producing the exact same chip/firmware combo than it would be to actually go back and decompile/write new code to add some stealth features that aren't going to make your new v2.0 sell any better over the cheaper than dirt v1.0.
I do worry about the tragedy of the commons with FOSS. Massive amounts of social benefits accrue when there are high quality libre tools out there. Outside universities and some rare corporate positions, it's hard to find instances where engineers can work full time on the highest value, but lowest compensated projects.

Selfishly, I looks at things like a basic income as a means of getting to spend a year earning ramen money on valueable but non-economic projects.
Neither in the case of Coca-Cola. Somebody is going to pee that back to the earth.
Although you might not be affected directly, it's cost of doing business that affects all consumers.
It's not at all clear cut, it's just the best starting point (in my eyes, the most moral starting point), and it is the starting point we have gone from.

The fact it is not clear cut is why we have courts and history of law to draw from. Things like what you say, or such as building something on your property that destroys another person's view, were once taken to court, and the rulings established precedent.

My point is that it's important to remember this is what we have been trying for all along, because sometimes that point gets missed.