skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Would you agree Dapps are bad for programmer's biz value?
Hi,

In the world of centralised apps, programmers hold power. So many of the tech startups are founded by developers. Some of these turned into tech giants.

We as programmers hold power to the systems we make, investing our time and effort. It is the essence of meritocratic nature of programming.

If we bring a world where apps are decentralised, stored and ran on blockchain, developers will not be in power anymore.

We are basically killing our own market.

If Dapps become ever more popular, you will not be able to compete with it. Because it will be very cheap to run.

Please change my mind.
GDPR checklist
GDPR expressly forbids default checked boxes or "silent acceptance", setups which require opt-out to prevent tracking/data collection.

Data collection is OK, but it must be opt-in only.

You're only looking at it from a "more data = better" perspective, instead of a privacy perspective, which is a lot more important.
I'm not sure, but I _think_ you're asserting that the information content of a 35mm Kodachrome slide taken in the 1970's is 140 Mpix. It isn't. Not remotely close. A present-day DSLR (e.g. 5Ds) with a present-day lens is going to greatly exceed that slide's information content.
Speaking with an expert on this recently, she is under the impression that individual opt-in boxes for every distinct type of data will be necessary. So a single box will be insufficient.
I am completely committed to removing biases and discrimination that stand in the way of competent people, but I find the idea of equality of outcome for its own sake to be deeply troubling. It moves the discussion away from systemic biases, and to an artificial metric that has little relation.

A simple example of why equality of outcome might be undesirable is this: people don't like doing jobs they find unfulfilling.

Even though I admire the nursing profession, I have absolutely no desire to become a nurse. If nursing were the highest paid profession, it still wouldn't interest me -- because I get my kicks out of playing with ideas and building things.

In my case, it has nothing to do with ability, or IQ, or emotional intelligence.

Should nursing training and culture be manipulated to be more appealing to people like me? I would only want that if it were beneficial for the nursing profession itself.

It doesn't matter that people with my temperamental make-up are under-represented, because there are plenty of other people who are drawn to nursing.

Where there are systemic problems that hinder women / minorities who want to excel in tech, focus on those, instead of an artificial number.
uBitx (http://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/ubitx/) is I think $110 for a kit of the guts. People seem to be really enjoying building them.

QRP Labs has a bunch of cool projects (https://qrp-labs.com/qcx.html). CW is something I haven't learned yet, but is pretty attractive for what it can do, how far it can reach on low power.
>AV1 is better than HEVC, is not patented,

Being royalty free does not mean it is not patented.
Oh, and it is most definitely opt in. Ubuntu will not get away with that.
This is incorrect information. Bed bugs tend to bite center mass, neck, arms, and hands. You can confirm this with a google search.
Fair enough. In theory Nano's design can handle something like O(2^n) transactions per second where n is the number of nodes, while mined blockchains can handle O(n) transactions per second where n is roughly the block rate multiplied by block size. In practice who knows. The former has a fighting chance, at least.
> private data (e.g. file names/paths or usernames)

Can you give an example of a path, file or user name that would cause problems to you (or anyone else) if Ubuntu engineers see it when fixing bugs?
The document is a late 1980's document, but as such, in trying to say what a NVN structure might look like, they do much to describe existing VN architecture. And it is very telling that not much has changed since then for hardware or software.
I mean, he explicitly references anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as his source at multiple points. That alone is enough to completely undermine his credibility, leaving aside the myriad other problems with his memo.
I'm surprised they didn't do this already. This is crucial data for them to actually improve the product.

Only thing I'm a bit concerned about is automatically sending crash reports. This highly depends on the programming language the crashing program was written in. It is very much possible for a program to include sensitive or personally identifying information in the stack traces right?
Title is editorialized and should be changed. They are not saying they will do it, they would like to do it and they are asking for feedback.
Do you not think this could be because immigrants are looking for economic prosperity and have fewer connections?

For example, a British woman that graduates from a British university with a history degree and wants to work in the UK probably met a couple people during the course of her degree (or at any other point) that can help her move forward with a career. Because let's face it, you're not going to get a high-paying job with high marks in your History BA and nothing else. As such, her prospects will be better in her field of study or in a reasonably related field (or any field where having contacts strongly helps and where she has made such contacts).

Meanwhile, an immigrant will be much, much less likely to have such local connections/contacts. Presumably then, immigrants will gravitate towards fields where getting into them / your pay grade is more closely based on competency and not "who you know". In other words, fields like STEM or (in your case) anything which requires a PhD.

Could that not be an explanation for your experience?
I was with you until you wrote:

> But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers.

Uh. What?

As far as I can tell, it has _everything_ to do with that. These two things are so closely related i cannot fathom how you can make such a statement...

Also... You make the same point twice. To paraphrase you:

a) "academic CS is less intellectually rigorous and less hard to succeed in than chem/etc -- but there are less women in it"

b) "work as google is simply not that hard, just wiring form fields to databases -- but there are less women in it"

For both a) and b) you then point out that they are problematic and that we cannot explain them (and, for the record, I agree with you on both counts) - but they are still unrelated?

EDIT: To reiterate: I think you are right in that the gender imbalance is a problem and is hard to explain. It's just this disconnect that i don't get here...
HTTPS or bust: Chrome’s plan to label sites as “Not Secure”
That's why you rent an apartment out and rub your hands like a good schemer. /s
I think you mean popcon? Short for popularity contest[1]. It's been part of Debian forever, not sure when it first showed up but it was part of Woody at least. With Debian you could configure it to use PGP and encrypt the reports you send in. I generally disabled it on work computers but left it on at home. That probably didn't help them as much but I just couldn't see leaving this type of feature on for servers and computers that weren't mine.

[1]https://popcon.debian.org/
With 1 MM+ per year past earnings do you technically have to work at all? Can you take a sabbatical to recharge?
Fierce Warrior Ants Are the First Insects Ever Observed to Treat Their Wounded
I think it is not a bad idea, imagine the mining is taking place only when the page is active and (max) 5 - 10$ on your electricity bill split among all the publisher, a much better alternative to ads if you ask me.
Cool article, thanks for posting :)
> The unwritten rule is to drive 10km/hour faster, according to the speedometer...

Absolutely. Traffic light timing even takes that into account. Kind of unrelated, sometimes I'm puzzled about how many drivers are eager to be first at the next red light and wait the longest.
Low but constant [1] and it is the constant volume that matters, not the volume on itself.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...
Why does it seem to me like lucid dreaming comes up in waves as a trend every now and then?
Yeah, and after all those words about how even in advanced gender equality countries differences persist they offer the following qualitative reason for it:

> The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science.

Right, so because as a woman she intrinsically like people more, my friend is now doing a postdoc about moths?
Currently browsers assign less CPU time to tabs that are open but not in focus, so any mining would probably be affected as well.

In e.g. Chrome timer events in such a tab are fired only once per second.
Hopefully they took the opportunity to put some sensors in the space suit also. I'm not sure what data they could provide without there being a real person[0] in there, but surely something.

[0] Sorry Starman.
Hi dang. This is incredible feedback. Thank you so much!

Great point about us "burying the lead" and needing to hook the user in the first 2 seconds.

After our current sprint I'll take a couple of days to see if I can rework it a little. Really appreciate your guidance on this. Will ping you an email when I have something.
I think the evidence is that it is the other way around. Running Dapps is very expensive.

For instance, if I want to run a program on a normal computer I can run it one computer. If I wanted something as reliable as the space shuttle I might use 5 computers.

If I want to run that on Ethereum it runs on thousands of computers and you have to pay all the miners. Not cheap!
A big barrier to VR is the fact that it doesn’t work out of the box and needs configuration. My VR headset is collecting dust since I don’t have time to reconfigure it. If you make a device that works as fast as a Nintendo switch (put it on head, turn on and it opens the game) you will have a Really compelling device .
True, but you are not going to be able to use 2m/70cm/1.25 to talk to people over vast distances.

While EchoLink doesn't have the same visceral feel that a radio has in your hands, it can be interesting. By connecting those repeaters to EchoLink I can directly broadcast on them. Which is pretty fun.

The other day when it was snowing like hell in Chicago I had a nice chat with a mobile ham using a 2m repeater on the big island of Hawaii.
They don't collect any personal data. The GDPR defines "personal data" with

"‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;"

Nothing in the collected data is "relating to an identified or identifiable natural person", so the checkbox is not even necessary.
There's an AR kit for IOS which would make development super easy if you already know the basics behind IOS app development and are a game developer (which I imagine is a sizable population).
>When I pay in cash (digital or otherwise), I know what I give out in terms of value for goods or services. This concept of renting out your computer time on the other hand is vague.

When you watch ads and get data-mined do your really now how much value you pay? I don't think so, it's safe to safe that all of us have no clue about the price we indirectly pay for services we on internet, most of it is just free in appearance.

>How much 'currency' will be mined? Will it be proportional to the goods/services I get to use in exchange? How long will the process take? What if my system fails midway during 'payment'?

The norms are not established yet since it's a totally new way to monetize content on internet however how much you will pay will probably be determined in hashes.
Here an example with a new blockchain (Nimiq) of a micropayment you could do: http://coinmiq.com/mine/eyJ3YWxsZXQiOiJOUTI3IFJDNUIgOUU1QSBT...

>This just smacks of convenience for the implementers and as for the user, it exchanges a straightforward system for a murky deal.

I disagree, in my opinion it opens an entire new way to do micropayments on the web.
That's still tracking by default.

A safe bet in this case would be a "double opt-in" approach, in which they have a checkmark during the installer, and then send an interactive notification asking you to verify your decision after the installation. In such a case, tracking would need to be enabled only after the user has clicked "yes" on a notification.

The idea here is that the user has to do something explicitly to enable tracking. Clicking "next" on an installer isn't an explicit user action.
Independently of the arguments of the other person who has graciously responded to you ... please read this story: https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
Songs with Past Lovers, Which Were Only “Our” Songs Because I Listened to Them
> Are you sure it's not the culture that's stayed the same and you who drifted right?

As a leftist, yes. I understand to be on the left means to strive for equality of power among people, economic and social. To be on the right means, at best, not to care about power inequalities between people.

I cringe every time when other people think that feminists and SJWs (I would prefer to call them by different terms but I don't know any) are leftist. They are only in a certain very narrow sense, which makes them often to be on the right, paradoxically. They often do not care about oppressed white males. But if you do not care about some oppressed group, then you don't stand for equality.

Feminism became to be included in the left, because in the past, all women were oppressed. It's no longer the case, and some feminists do not actually care about equality of other groups.

Some biologist put it nicely in a discussion: The left (as a broad political movement) might suffer from a predatory problem - being joined by someone who is oppressed, but doesn't actually want equality, only power. But that's the nature of the game.

And this conflict is nothing new, either. Noam Chomsky, a giant of the left, has been affected by it in the 70s, when he defended free speech of a Holocaust denier.
Sorry I should have been more clear. I want the raw result data he used to draw the graphs from.

I wanted to use high-charts to make it interactive, eg hide dbs to compare more easily.

I don't want to run my own tests, but I did have a look at the github repo and dataset.
It has been mentioned already above.

We are talking here about anonymized diagnostic data, not private indentifiable information.
If you buy a current Android phone, it will have privacy controls for 90% (guesstimate) of apps in the Play Store.
The data collected is probably not fit to be classified as personal data. GDPR does not automatically forbid collection of anything involved with a user otherwise things like page popularity ranking would not be possible. There was a court ruling stating that IP addresses could be considered personal data because an ISP would have a log that associated the IP with a person. As long as the are only collecting things like "what packages are installed", "how powerful is the system", "when did it last update", and anonymize the last section of the IP they should be fine.
This is an essay that knocks down two extrinsic causes for gender disparity in STEM and then suggests, using Finland as an example, that the cause of disparity is probably intrinsic.

It may be the case that some intrinsic difference between men an women keeps the field of chemical engineering at 40-60 women/men, or mathematics at 35-65.

But those fields are cognitively more demanding than commercial software development or, for that matter, undergraduate computer science. No cognitive ability or innate affinity explains the degree of disparity in computer science as practiced in industry. If it did, you'd see it in related STEM fields.

The term for an argument gerrymandered around the data to the degree "CS participation disparity is innate" is is special pleading.
I literally have tabs open for months at a time. If any more than 0 of them tries to mine without me explicitly opting in I'd be furious.

There are services such as flattr and patreon that tries to fix this. It is not perfect and the horrendous javascript-infested pages today and click-bait focus doesn't exactly encourage donation.
My personal opinion about Request and similar projects.

I have been using bitcoin for a while, I have payed for real goods and online services with it and I've following the crypto ecosystem for a few years. I really can't see the reason for more than just a handful of competing cryptocurrencies becoming mediums of exchange.

Request's goal is noble, but I think that they'd be better off working on implementing payment gateways for existing cryptos. The first mover advantage seems to be huge in this space, and I really can't see how Request, or any other crypto can scale fast enough to dethrone bitcoin or the rest of the big competitors.
Same as KozmoNau7 reply, you should opt-in to send data rather than opt-out, which is the same case as the Windows and .NET telemetry in which people took a very strong stance against it, now, if Canonical wants to do the same we should at least view them with the same eyes we see Microsoft's movements.
The one with Steven Pinker is also good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUDAdOdF6Zg
Debian's installer requires explicit opt-in consent to install popcon. It's not enabled by default.
Outdoor Rock Speaker
Just to jump in, this is really great information (not just for posting on HN, but for writing articles / sharing lessons learned, in general) - many thanks for taking the time.
I think this would be a fantastic usecase for Scratch, since it is so much more accessible to kids and a good gateway to all-text stuff.
Not good enough, not by a long shot. Even with that feature and all browser windows are completely minimized they still take a significant amount of CPU without any mining going on.
Except it doesn't really play well together with battery-powered devices.
The article actually asks for input of the collection of diagnostic data.

The title by Santosh83 says instead "Ubuntu will collect data about your system by default, starting with 18.04".
Your point about consultants is an important one, and demonstrates a moral hazard of outsourcing intelligence work.

CrowdStrike is especially guilty of this. It seems whenever there's a cyber attack, CrowdStrike is there to attribute it to whichever bogeyman is most convenient today.
What Happens to a Startup When Venture Capitalists Replace the Founder
what ?? why
Quite an interesting counterexample. The trick is in the self-reference where the fact that you believe the premise actually affects the conclusion which most of the time is not the case.

I might consider this an edge case and include it in my worldview as an exception ;)
True. However, it's hard to argue diagnostics data for Ubuntu would be performance of contract (art 6.1: b). It could be argued legitimate interest (arg 6.1: f), but then the right to object comes into play.
Color depth was never the problem, 3dfx used dithering comparable to ~22bit depth (according to company itself).

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=36548

Texture memory capacity, texture size limit (256x256!) and lack of s3tc/DXT1 compression were the real culprit. TNT shipped with 16MB, in TNT2 32MB came standard. Texture quality played the biggest role in perceived visual difference. Not to mention TNT performance went 1/2 down in 32bit mode, TNT2 fared only slightly better.

Quality is great, until you learn both Nvidia and ATI repeatedly cheated in benchmarks and games dropping quality below old 3dfx limits. ATI Quake 3 was quite dramatic: https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-...
> Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. ... Proponents of these theories and their activist followers believe that some significant proportion of the sex differences in STEM fields – but curiously only those in which men outnumber women ...

Completely leaving aside the rest of content, the only obsessed people here are those who are obsessed with not understanding what the issue is about perceiving it to be an obsession. We are not obsessed with the number of women in STEM for its own sake (it's an important but a secondary concern) but obsessed with the inequality of power. As women happen to be underrepresented precisely in those areas that confer power -- including some STEM fields -- that is what we care about. If women were underrepresented in software engineering but commensurately overrepresented in, say, politics, banking or high management, this would have been a matter of less concern. As women happen to be underrepresented in all of these, we're attacking each of these individually.

Of course, those of us who are in STEM also feel that women underrepresentation (aside from the much more important issue of power equality) is a huge loss of talent for our field.
about 20% are replaced; noncompete laws help/hinder recruitment; it's overall beneficial; startups perform better when the founder leaves the company; raising external funding raises the probability that the founder will be replaced.
> Some of the most successful software projects in the world are written in C and occupy the same niche as failing C++ competitors.

You can also find examples for the other way around, too: Web browsers are all written in (mostly) C++ for example.

Games are another example. John Carmack also admitted that switching from C to C++ was the right thing to do for Doom 3:

"Today, I do firmly believe that C++ is the right language for large, multi-developer projects with critical performance requirements, and Tech 5 is a lot better off for the Doom 3 experience." http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/interviews.php

> Top 4 kernels are written in C: NT, Mach, Linux, BSD.

Parts of NT are written in C++ btw.
The NY Times Fires Tech Writer Quinn Norton, and It’s Complicated
For "paying with electricity" to be a reasonable description, it had better be the case that most of the cost of the electricity ends up with the site owner. That's not going to work with mining schemes where aging personal computers are the worst at it.
https://medium.com/@fubukilabs/ethical-use-of-browser-based-...
Crash reports can contain any data that happens to be in memory, including private identifiable information.

Additionally, "anonymized" data frequently turns out to be identifiable when enough of it is collected.
What about crash reports that will be send automatically to Canonical? I hope they would take precautions to scrub personal information from the data before sending them.
People also just get flat lucky, all the time!
I don't use WhatsApp myself but I was surprised to find that members of my extended family (mostly in their 50s) had started using it to stay in touch rather than Facebook.

They're still using Facebook, just one of its other shapes.
Thanks, this is the kind of insight I was hoping for. You answered lots of questions I wouldn't think to ask.