skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe it's listening based on an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence reported all over the Internet. (Where there's smoke, there's fire.) Including by intelligent, scientifically-minded people.

At the same time, it wouldn't take much at all for me to believe otherwise: a simple blinded test where some people leave their phones in a room, researchers come and talk about some subject (absent the owners), then leave without ever interacting with the owners of the phone.

There are two ways to do the next part: The owners of the phone 1 week later could be asked if they've seen any facebook ads on (topic). A control group would have to be compared (where researchers didn't speak on the topic.)

Alternatively, the subjects of the study could be given 5 random topics when commencing the study and asked to record any ads they've seen on any of the 5 topics. The researchers could then speak on 1 of the 5 topics (differing from person to person) and a statistical analysis could be performed.

A "proof" is a statistically valid correlation between what the researchers talked about out and what the blinded subjects reported seeing ads about.

A refutation is a lack of such a correlation. Easy, and it would convince me personally.

By the way based on the anecdotal evidence I strongly expect this study to conclude "facebook is listening."

-

Note: there are a few loose ends to take care of. The researchers who are tasked with speaking on a subject are more likely to google it on their own phones. (Having been exposed to the topic), and those are in geographic vicinity. There are other similar possible mechanisms.

Perhaps the best approach is if subjects' phones are in a sound-proof vault and the researchers' speech is either fed into it via speaker/microphone, or not done so, but the researchers do not know for any specific phone whether it is able to hear them. (Making the study "double-blind", as neither the subjects nor the researchers know whether the subjects' phones have heard anything on a subject.).
Repealing ISP rules = good. Making new rules for tech companies = bad. Doing something = hard.

Inaction.

We've had laws, OLD laws, regulating things that are far more subjective than bandwidth (which is quantifiable), or even "free speech", yet civilization continues to hobble along...
And on the flip-side, we have MathML which the Chromium team decided to drop, fighting against an incredibly useful and performant (in comparison to other Javascript-based implementations) feature supported by Firefox and Safari which made mathematics a first-class citizen on the web.
That doesn't make any sense. To violate network neutrality you basically have to be either turning away peers or sticking them up for money. A mesh network wouldn't be doing either. If Fox News wants to plug a local node into the mesh network so their viewers have lower latency, you just let them. Why wouldn't you?
Very few things in law are truly reducible to some hard, bright-line rule. There are conflicting interests all worthy of consideration and that therefore defy a single objective rule. So even in the presence of extensive precedent, there is usually a grey area requiring case-by-case judgment based on intuitions of fairness and equity.

Say you own an apartment building with a view of the ocean and I own the plot directly between it and the ocean. I threaten to build a wall that blocks your building's view of the ocean unless you buy my plot for 10x more than its market worth. Should that be legal? Say you succumb to my demand. Should you be able to then sue me and recover the excessive payment? I think many would have the intuition that my threat should not be legal and any resulting contract not valid, since it was extracted by duress.

But how about Firefox selling its search bar to Google for billions of dollars, carrying the implicit threat to use a different default provider should Google not pay. That seems more fair than the previous example, but why?

And how do you formulate that difference into a hard rule, without relying on human beings' (i.e. judge and jury) intuitions of fairness and equity?

Here is what the Restatement of Contracts has to say:

(1) A threat is improper if
(a) what is threatened is a crime or a tort, or the
threat itself would be a crime or a tort if it
resulted in obtaining property,
(b) what is threatened is a criminal prosecution,
(c) what is threatened is the use of civil process
and the threat is made in bad faith, or
(d) the threat is a breach of the duty of good faith
and fair dealing under a contract with the
recipient.
(2) A threat is improper if the resulting exchange is
not on fair terms, and
(a) the threatened act would harm the recipient and
would not significantly benefit the party making
the threat,
(b) the effectiveness of the threat in inducing the
manifestation of assent is significantly
increased by prior unfair dealing by the party
making the threat, or
(c) what is threatened is otherwise a use of power
for illegitimate ends.

Look at all of the subjective terminology: "bad faith", "good faith", "fair dealing", "fair terms", "significantly".

And look at (2)(c), "otherwise a use of power for illegitimate ends". What does that even mean? It's basically a surrender, acknowledging that it is impossible to formulate a rule ex ante that totally captures our notions of fairness as they should be applied in every possible situation.
The author is a self identified communist. What do you expect?
If they'd just follow Remembear's example and appended a penultimate "a" after the penultimate "e", instead of just removing the penultimate "e", it would have been "Foundear", a much better name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15777340
I'd phrase that as "they're watching" not listening. More like having a private eye tail you. They can't hear exactly what you say (well maybe) but they sure do see everything you do.
tl;dr: furry sjws are mad at furry neo-nazis on internets
These things happen regularly.

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

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1445_web.pd...

http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Fairewinds_...
These notions are actually becoming more and more intermixed. You could say today that interactive theorem proving (what is done in a proof assistant) is an extension of automated theorem proving, as for example the Isabelle proof assistant has very strong support for proving intermediate theorems automatically.
How I hacked 40 websites in 7 minutes
Reply All, an entertaining podcast from Gimlet Media, tackled this topic a few weeks ago [0]. They explained the myth, explained how Facebook's advertising an be explained without surreptitious listening. In the last part they called believers in the myth and tried to convince them otherwise.

[0] https://gimletmedia.com/episode/109-facebook-spying/
My point is that I do not believe constantly listening would significantly improve their profit. I don't think they'd gain much information. And I'm sure they've discussed it.
This is the correct link https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-...
The security advice I give the non-tech people in my life is to get either an iPhone or a Pixel (or older phone made by Google). Is there any reason this isn't good enough? I vaguely recall that recent iPhones have a few useful crypto features that the Pixel still doesn't, but I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes. Certainly, I view the update situation as the primary reason not to use third-party Android phones, and the Pixel doesn't have that problem.
is there any evidence cameras are used? I've recently been engaged in two activities in front of my phone and got scarily relevant ads that I've never seen before, and are can not be part of my graph. I am not on social networks and none of my browsing or search would be vaguely relevant.
given the below examples i'll contest that it'd be "trivial" to debunk on the iOS platform and also add that even if it were debunked on the iOS platform, that doesn't debunk the other platforms. why would they leave data on the table if they could scoop it up instead?
I forgot my pimping king with thor hammer was riding in a car so 19/20 for me. I wonder when Miller's law is gamed with this narrative technique how information design is tailored to this long tail of users. Story as the new UI.
I'm of two minds on this.

With the futures market being a place that individuals can trade non-public information for a profit, and the history of Bitcoin being tied to criminal activity (drugs, ransom ware, etc.), I see a potential for market manipulation. The value of Bitcoin is still extremely volatile; due to the inherent anonymity and media presence surrounding the asset, the ability to trigger a price swing and make a killing in options is a reality.

On the other hand, estimated illicit transactions have decreased substantially due to the evolving ability for law enforcement to track down individuals from Bitcoin transactions (worth noting that I couldn't find solid numbers on this). If this realized reduction of anonymity thwarts most attempts at market manipulation, I'm thinking that these futures can help Bitcoin more quickly find stability in the world market.
Hard to disagree with that...even though I want to :)

That's very succinct.
Perhaps they're trying to find a technical co-founder to build out the platform?

(That's not entirely snark!)
> I'd say it still appears to be better than fully-impertive "manual" process.

I really don’t know. It may largely depend on what you want to do, and I believe Coq also has powerful proof automation, albeit one that works differently. Both take quite a bit of practice to write. The main thing I can say is that TLA+ proofs are easy to read. In any event, formal proofs in any style are far from a walk in the park (which is why when using TLA+ in practice we try to avoid them altogether and just use the model-checker).

Also, TLA+ is a much gentler introduction to formal methods, as it's so, so, so much easier to learn, and the availability of a model checker means that, when learning, you can concentrate on writing specifications, a much more important skill than writing proofs (if you're interested in software, that is).

> I wonder if the TLA+ system also uses a "database of propositions" behind the scenes to help with faster inference, e.g., something equivalent to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (but in a coded form), or like metamath.

It automatically uses the axioms of the core logic (essentially ZFC set theory with a Hilbert's choice operator, some simple theorems on the built-in sets, like the natural numbers [0] plus TLA, which is a simple yet very powerful temporal logic for computational reasoning). Other than that, it is a core principle of the system that you manually list which theorems are to be used for each step of the proof. It doesn't only help the provers -- it also helps the human reader. But, to save you typing, you can write "USE lemma1, lemma2", and have them automatically added to all following steps.

The proof language (like the entire specification language) was designed mostly by Leslie Lamport, based on his "structured proof" style detailed here [1]. The appendix of the paper lists some formal calculus proofs, checked with TLAPS, if you want to get a sense of what those proofs look like.

[0]: For example, here's the proof for the natDiff lemma from the post:

LEMMA natDiff ≜ ∀ n1, n2 ∈ Nat : ∃ n3 ∈ Nat : n1 = n2 + n3 ∨ n2 = n1 + n3
PROOF OBVIOUS (* this is automatically verified using just built-in axioms/theorems *)

So, actually, it doesn't even need to be stated.

[1]: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf
> they need to deliver Fox News and Netflix at the same bandwidth and latency with which they deliver locally available curated content.

Why would the speeds be different? If it's because longer links are more saturated/throttled, and nothing else, that's valid in the presence of net neutrality. Is there any other reason that should be protected?
Because a good propagandist does two things:

1. Ground the argument in some vestige of reality (the reliance on statistics is very strong).
2. Point out the opposing denial of reality (magical thinking, social constructionism, blank slate lunacy) in order to push the radically opposite perspective without nuance.

This is inherently isolating but also makes the adherents feel very powerful. Think pieces like this do not oppose but rather support the cause they purport to be against, since the ideological leanings of the writer are plainly obvious and their own denials of reality stick out like a sore thumb.

As long as the political left is dominated by social constructionism and other lunacy, the alt-right will never be exterminated. The task ahead of us is not trivial.
I think this is really something even more nefarious than background listening.

Facebook and Google are using machine learning and massive data sets about the mental worlds we inhabit when we think nobody is looking.

And these algorithms are optimizing for clicks in so many vectors of psychological need and vulnerability that it’s already become incomprehensible for how they can know the things we haven’t yet understood we will think about.

They know about our conversations because they know the searches of the people we talk to, and what they’re thinking about. What will be on the top of their mind.

There’s nothing to go looking for or debunk. It’s just the next step in the data collection experiment.

I’m guessing they’ll need to tone down the effectiveness of ad targeting, if they haven’t already.
Humans made the Banana perfect but it would be gone soon
The link out in the story to the Therac 25 that over irradiated and killed several people with a software bug seems to strengthen your point.

https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-ther...

I'd heard of it before, but hadn't heard it was controlled by a PDP-11. Apparently running some bare metal ASM, not multics or unix (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Therac_25/Side_bar_...)
The argument "We've lost net neutrality because some people refuse hosting / claim domains" misses the definition of net-neutrality.
Specifically, net-neutrality is about treating all traffic the same.

It would be horrible if ISPs refused, on their own initiative, to serve certain traffic. However, this is a case of people refusing to host.
Now maybe hosting at `web-scale' is only possible with such a small set of providers as to be an issue, but that is not relevant to the net-neutrality discussion.
I find also C-a to be a terrible choice. At work, we have screen instead of tmux. I have configured screen to use C-b like tmux default.
Yes yes, let big legacy companies do whatever they want! And stifle the little guys! It'll help innovation!

Anyone see any problems with that argument?
If we're really nerding out about browser security, it's important to understand that while Firefox's sandboxing is not as sophisticated as Chrome's, it's not a lack of sandboxing that puts Firefox behind Chrome (and probably Edge), but also all the other stuff that goes into browser security, most notably runtime hardening and ancillary vulnerability research.

People tend to look for a simple explanation for these kinds of differences, like, "iPhones are more secure because they have a Secure Enclave", or "Chrome is more secure because it has better sandboxing". But the real answers are rarely that simple. There's a lot more that goes into both iPhone and Chrome security than those simple things.
I don't think creating a government monopoly is the solution to the problem. I think there needs to be more competition rather than less.

I think a good first step would be to remove the current barriers to local municipalities setting up their own internet services. There are a lot of small rural communities that have really crappy internet service, because the giant companies are unwilling to invest in the infrastructure required, but they do everything in their power to prevent the local governments from setting up internet service for their communities.

Chattanooga is an excellent example of what can be accomplished by local government, including gigabit fiber internet at reasonable rates.
Yes, there are reasons that's not good enough. It's not simply that you have to be careful what phone you pick, but also that you have to do things differently on Android phones, including Google's phones.

At-risk nonspecialists should avoid all Android phones, and standardize on iPhones.
The Galaxy X – Samsungs first foldable phone that will actually be released
As c256 surmised, I use kill to send signals other than SIGKILL. I don't think I've ever even known about the C-\ or C-y bindings for SIGQUIT. I also hardly ever use shell job control, to the extent that I have an alias fg that does something unrelated, so I would need to say \fg to get the shell foreground command.

But if for some reason I wanted to do that, I would use C-\ : send-prefix. That sends the prefix character to the process running in tmux, in this case the shell. It's also super useful if you ever find yourself running a nested tmux (i.e. in an ssh session) with the same prefix character. You can just send-prefix d to disconnect the remote shell from the remote tmux session, then open a new local shell outside of your local tmux session, log in and reconnect to the remote tmux.
No, i'm going to build it myself. The conversion rate is substantially lower if I put "coming soon."

Minor annoyance, but I'm not trying to scam anyone.
It's incredibly aggravating how aggressively Nazis are attempting to corrupt internet culture to espouse their hateful ideals. The original mindset that developed on the internet was about how nobody's identity IRL mattered, and what you said/did was what proved your worth. Now, a bunch of basement-dwelling Nazis are trying to turn that meritocracy into their own whites-only club? Fuck that, that's not what internet culture is about.

I strongly believe that anyone who cares about the internet and its culture of free ideas will recognize it as a place where people can be judged based on their skills and the quality of their ideas rather than their race or gender, and will harshly judge anyone who attempts to exclude others based purely on such superficial metrics.
I actually agree with this, I like the advice.

Feel free to email me at stanfordhays@gmail.com

Or provide your email. I'll contact you.
Few question the feasibility of building a mechanism. The question is whether they’d try to hide any such mechanism in plain sight.

Native apps on a phone are not comparable to government spying on networks outside of your control. The attack vector in this case is entirely within the device in possession: the code, and interactions with the OS and hardware.

Entertaining the opposing view: If fb did build this, how is there no hard evidence of it? On iOS, their code is distributed via Apple, so they couldn’t doctor versions for specific users, and any attempt to build self modifying or self deleting mechanisms would be detected sooner or later for similar reasons.
Alabama vs. Auburn Live Stream
> Alt-right

> Intellectuals

A+ joke!
I almost always use that anyways, because then I can clearly see start and end (and nest them easily).
IQ has scientific value but it falls quite short of the kinds of policy and ideology that spring up around it. It's a fair guess that if someone brings up IQ in a political context as justification for their position, it's pseudoscience.
I'm glad that that fad is... mostly(?) over.
As far as I can tell, this is only an effort to create new parts, not find volunteer service people. If there are zero available parts, it is better to have parts than to not have them. No replacement parts = guaranteed death at some point. So, the way to bet here is to support the creation of replacement parts.
Typical ad hominem.

Copies parts from the text..

Yet refuses to comment on it, attacking the author.
Is the demand really all that high? As a scala dev myself, when I look around it always seems like the trend is heading in the wrong direction in terms of the job market.
Does autossh help?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/1password-x/aeblfd...

1Pass X seems to be available on just Chrome? I'm actually quite interested to learn how it works - from my knowledge it's the only standalone PM extension right now.
> the alt-right will never be exterminated

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilting_at_windmills
>an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence reported all over the Internet

This is exactly why I believe pizzagate, am a 9/11 truther, etc.
But all of the supposed goals of net neutrality, competition, everyone having a voice, etc. seem to be impinged at the hosting / domain layer. So if the justification for net neutrality is that we might lose those things... and people feel like they already don't have those things, why would they care about net neutrality?
That’s not what’s happening. There’s no hard evidence and it’s not really a fair comparison between detecting government snooping on networks out of your control, versus a spyware mechanism hidden in plain sight, entirely in your pocket.

Nobody seems to be doubting the feasibility of building such spyware but rather are asking where’s the hard evidence and how could they get away with it (not legally necessarily but in terms of detection)?
1-year-old attacks big sister so he can sing solo
There were white supremacists pushing holocaust denial on usenet. What actually happened is that the social places on the Internet suddenly stopped moderating themselves which let white supremacists congregate, organize and normalize.
for those of us who are digital natives, even if we spend great effort in covering our tracks, they likely know more about us than we know about ourselves.

they use this information to employ a system of psychological levers which results in us willingly handing their proxies our money.

is it a good business practice. certainly. is it simple theft? my instinct is to say no, and instead ask:

is this new mastery of knowledge about peoples behaviors and the ability to affect other behaviors on a mass scale the most terrifying form of feudalism that mankind has known?
Not a fan of changing style.

People would be pretty pissed if someone did that to a book wouldn't they?

But at least they aimed for accuracy. Not too much American culture and memes. And actual respect for the product and creators! Unheard of in some contemporary videogame localization circles.
Are you sure they are substantially immunocompromised? they're opening and closing their mouths and breathing through their noses on a regular basis while exposed to room air. There is no bacteria filtration like there would be with a properly configured positive pressure ventilator's circuit. The mucous membranes in the airway and nasal passages actually provide a significant amount of filtration themselves, and some circuit configurations are non-invasive which enables these natural filters to function.

There is potential for barotrauma in improperly configured devices, especially with volume-controlled ventilation, but it's possible to configure the device to ventilate safely, otherwise we wouldn't use them. Modern devices do have safety features like high pressure cutoffs and direct pressure controls which can prevent barotrauma. Some of these have to be configured correctly by the clinician for each patient.

Regarding the link to positive pressure HVAC, I'm not sure what that has to do with medical ventilation. HVAC provides a constant flow into a room, but medical ventilation cycles to an inspiratory pressure or inspiratory tidal volume repeatedly either on a patient trigger or on a set timing schedule.

I'm still really curious if there are any Respiratory Therapists or Physicians who can speak to this?
Kind of related, I actually use tmux-modality to add vim style modality to tmux. For this reason, I don't often use the prefix. I switch to "command mode" to do certain operations (resize panes, change windows, etc).
Why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years