skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it time to switch your acquaintances to Riot.im?
With the recent Facebook scandal, many people are thinking of closing their account and looking for alternative services. The problem in switching a social service is that you can do it only if most of your contacts switch at the same time; but a time like this opens a window of opportunity for a competitor to gain a foothold, and make a significant dent in the share of clients for IM and "social sharing".

Since e-mail and news groups, there has never been a decentralized and open source communication protocol popular with the general public (IRC came close, but its interface is too arcane for most people).

Riot.im is a decentralized open source IM client which is mature enough, flexible enough, user-friendly enough and available at enough platforms to be a viable replacement for basic social interactions between non-technical people.

Is it a good idea to promote its use among my contacts right now, maybe setting a local Matrix server for my close group? I don't want to burn my bridges; if this doesn't pay off now, I won't be able to convince them in the future.
I agree with /u/na85. If you're worried about law enforcement or corporations sniffing keys out of your devices RAM, you have other things to worry about besides "what app should I use for communication"?

If you're seriously worried about communicating without trusting your phone, then you either need to find communication devices you do trust, or else look into verifiable TRNGs [0], dumb serial printers that can be directly attached to RNGs [1], and either manual encryption/decryption algorithms [2] or one-time pads.

[0]: https://archive.is/CGQkR

[1]: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=2146

[2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/339.pdf
I have very worried feelings about anyone who can answer "yes" to a question like "will you treat the word of X as always true?", regardless of the value of X.

The bare minimum I'd need would be "yes, so long as they're not contradicted by less inherently unreliable evidence than that which relies on human memory".
It's like SuperPAC coordination. Every election cycle there are countless obvious violations of SuperPAC coordination at all levels and parties but these are hardly ever investigated much less prosecuted.
The major sports books had him as a 4:1 underdog on the afternoon of election day.

It's easy to say in hindsight but nobody gave the guy much of a chance until it was too late.
They make a good point about workers not able to stay at a job longer than a few years. I'm sure this impacts productivity quite a bit.

This article assumes that productivity is accurately being measured (GDP/worker hours) and doesn't address this issue. It would be interesting to see a breakdown per industry to see where the ups and downs are. I mean, you've got companies like google that generate a lot of money per worker, and they could do even more if they didn't invest in the future and only worked on stuff they had a monopoly for (search).

Jobs have become increasingly specialized, I wonder if this affects the measurement of productivity.
One thing I don't understand, at one hand you are supposed to keep digital data for X amount of years ( I think 7), and on the other hand the company cannot make use of it, why would it be sitting on servers, might as well make use of it.
Maybe it's chaotic good.
WhatsApp requires your phone (and it must be a phone) to be on and connected to WiFi, using battery, to use their desktop "app". This is terrible usability.

I can understand it'd be very annoying when you're affected -- eg having to work in an area with ethernet, but without wifi/3G, or when you need a fallback when the phone is out of battery. For the most part, it's a non-issue for me.

Signal uses the same basic protocol and doesn't require the phone to be online all the time.

Chances are the WhatsApp implementation chose a trade off that minimized confusion for less sophisticated users (within the constraints of maintaining confidentiality). That tends to be a good idea when you've got a billion users.

If I sign in to a new device on Telegram ..., I can instantly have my entire message history available

Including "secret chats"?
Signal is awesome. If know several people who work for a very large company that has their own chat/message system that actually use Signal instead — specifically for security reasons.
Yeah, the problem with offline/paper seeds is that, if you want to spend them, you're going to become more vulnerable than with a hardware wallet, and they're single-use.

Not to mention that they're hard to generate securely.
same address here. Unlikely someone tampered it.
Yeah, because they were funded by the governments they ran under. "News" is a polite word for "propaganda," always was, always will be.
Yes, that's precisely why you should never, ever, ever talk to the cops:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
I love that video. That first speaker really spells everything out in a concise and easily comprehensible way of how you can and will be fucked (if you are the prime suspect) if you open your mouth, innocent or not.
+1 for Wire from me, have been using it for about a year and a half now.

I only wish it had a better desktop client, the current one is a little laggy especially when scrolling up chat history.
Agenda to come.

Later: oh, sorry, I forgot.
Neutrons from the various fission products?

https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/ChipIR.aspx
Not yet, but we may in the future. Please keep us in mind and check for open positions on our website.
UK is out of EU. And what is the point of moving to UK, when you want to the market of EU?
It’s because the person who wanted the call doesn’t actually write anything down from the call. Nothing gets documented, referenced, rechecked. Emails can at least be reviewed later.

No such luck with calls. Everybody wants to have calls and calls bypass documentation...so they want to have more.

I’ve always wanted a BPM system that hooks to my company calendar and automatically requests meeting notes to post from the person who called the meeting...and blocks them from requesting more meetings until those notes have been posted.

Think of it as spam filter for meetings.
Correction: California Democrats dropped her in favor of a liberal candidate, Kevin de León.
Not with the stable version, but Firefox nightly (61.0a1) seems to work very well (with optirun to run it with NVidia card, see parent comment). Better than Chrome actually.
The key in the article is a TLS key, not the keys that actually guarded the email contents. Lavabit shutdown after disclosing the TLS key.

They couldn’t give up the actual storage keys because they weren’t stored. The courts wanted Lavabit to implement a mechanism to capture the keys during use, which they didn’t do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624814
Actually you are a bit mistaken.

The larger the provider is the more they are able to negotiate a lower rate from transit providers. The larger a provider is the more peering they get which reduces the total amount of bandwidth they pay for in general.

Then when you consider the cost of the equipment vs the cost of the throughput you will see that as a network becomes larger, network equipment isn't the main cost driving factor, nor are network engineers.

Simply put Amazon is over charging customers by 10x on bandwidth fees.

If we are able to sell bandwidth to customers at $0.01 cents per GB profitably, which accounts for paying for transit, network equipment, and network engineers, turning a profit for reinvestment, then AWS should be offering you a price that is 10x less than $0.01 per GB because their bandwidth cost should be significantly better than ours.

Instead they are charging you a 10x higher price.
> They really have no choice but to provide it...the dashcam evidence suspiciously often goes missing or broken
One problem with literate programming: a large portion of the industry hates to document, and thinks that comments are EEEEVIL. Not me, but many.

I would love to see something like literate programming become more mainstream, though. Even little things like having to repeat parameter names in a block above a function/routine, rather than simply next to each parameter, seems like it’s harder than it ought to be.
Just say "yes, provided that they aren't contradicted by more reliable evidence". The only thing you left out is that your definition of "more reliable evidence" is very broad.
This is an over-generalization. I worked one job in Canada, where we'd waste an hour on a 'standup' scrum meeting, every day, and another job in the US, where we'd spend 30 minutes once a week on a sync-up meeting.
This was 6 years ago, and we wonder they would be no where 6 years down the line ?
It is an ambiguous construction. And abuse can include doctor shopping to get multiple concurrent prescriptions.
Cambridge Analytica CEO claims influence on election, Facebook faces questions
>It's looking like they were just doing the same thing with Facebook's data too

Crafting lies into propaganda? No, I don't see them doing the same thing at all.
The people that make bail have a financial incentive to “be good”, and not forfeit their bail. That part of the system works fine.... if they offend while out on bail, Uncle Sam gets paid. It’s a broken fix for a broken system.

Harsh(er) punishments are an effective deterrent, and if they don’t deter they should be harsh enough to wipe out offenders through attrition. Eg, shoplifting with 2 hands is easy, with 1 hand is difficult, and with 0 hands is nearly impossible.
Doesn't this entire issue corroborate the idea that this ISN'T just about a social media company trying to sell us shit?

Two of the issues you mentioned, state run gulags and anthropogenic climate change, are issues really only solvable at the federal level. Facebook's and Cambridge Analytica's ability to influence an election can have a profound effect on those kinds of issues. I mean, we now have a climate change denier in the White House who is dismantling the EPA. If propaganda spreading through Facebook created that, could that not also be partly responsible for our inability to do something about climate change?

That's just one example, but I think you're being just as hyperbolic by saying this wouldn't crack the top 100.
It is not so much that something is wrong, but that everything is working as it should. The system is the problem.

Case in point, Cambridge Analytica used ill-gotten data from 50 million people to craft extremely effective political ads. And since user engagement with those ads was very high… Facebook's algorithm made it cheaper for them to buy even more ads.
You also realize that democrats secretly promoted Trump because they figured he would muck up the Republican primaries and become an unelectable candidate.

Not to mention how incredibly ignorant you have to be to not notice how out-of-stock (out of touch but maybe they lack a stock of common sense) coastal liberals are to the real problems and realities of the "silent majority". Blaming Russia is like blaming a soldier for giving a enemy a bayonet stab. Of course after this enemy has suffered grievous wounds from his own side.
Cars kill people in accidents[1]. Guns are used for this on purpose. By your logic, we should also ban food because it feeds the people using the cars and the guns.
Guns can still be used in the military, nobody ever argued that (vis-a-vis to you comment about Hitler & the russians). And btw, about those russians, they found new ways (tools invented by the americans) to screw with the world, didn't they? How are guns defending us now?

[1] in recent years, terrorists have been using cars to kill people too, but not the same extent.
> To be honest, he’s probably too white to win a Democratic primary too.

Yeah, because Hillary Clinton is black, right?
> I've been to at least 10 different county jails and to Florida State Prison twice

How exactly did you manage that?
Troublemakers Get Things Done
> Xu Guangyu, chairman of Beijing Kaiwen and a choral singer in college...

> Westminster’s odd couple may not be such a mismatch, given Xu’s background as a choral singer at Peking University. In the early 1980s, his high-school music teacher in Beijing took students to performances of operas “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” and the ballet “Swan Lake,” he said.

At the very least the buyer does appreciate the art involved.
>To me, this is not a philosophical argument.

Why? Determining what is and isn't life is based on human reasoning, judgement, and morality. Have you found an alternate approach that was somehow missed by everyone else? :)

>If you call it murder to end a pregnancy at any stage, as the GP does, then women are hostages of a life not yet able to survive on its own.

Perhaps you missed the stem cell therapy treatment context that was being discussed. We're only talking about embryos, not pregnancy.
Fair enough. I suppose people mostly felt the same way about Trump winning a GOP primary as I do about Zuck winning a Democratic primary, too.
As a lifelong fan of the Buffalo Bills, 4:1 underdog chances sounds pretty good.
Fair enough. Okay to edit out the crust?
Facebook's customers aren't the ones whose data Facebook has been misusing.

As a rule, a company's customers are revenue sources.
It's saving lives in a different way. Without my eyesight, everything would be difficult. I probably could no longer code, or at least in the same capacity. I love visual art.

I don't have much eyesight left, but a retinal detachment surgery helped make sure I did have some.

It's a worthy endeavor, trust me.
You're assuming, incorrectly, that management (especially upper management) is worried about producing quality products. They sort of are, but for any of the people who mange to survive in those positions, that's a secondary (or even tertiary) concern - their primary concern is survival. The only way to survive has little to do with creating a great product and everything to do with making sure the blame never falls on you.
Yeah imagine some mfgs saying enough is enough and Samsung and LG teaming up on a transition to WebOS across budget and flagship phones. They'd have enough power to gain meaningful presence in some countries. I think you'd probably need an Android sandbox to bootstrap any worldwide competitor.
I can see that this seems to be US based for the foreseeable future.

While this is clearly the best 'bang for buck' in addressing an issue (USA: 22% of the world's prisoners), I wonder how this model, if successful, can be rolled out to other nations.

Fanciful thinking to apply this to China or NK work camps of course, but for AUS, EU etc., perhaps this can be used as a proof of concept, monitored and discussed in the relevant houses of parliament.

--

On a different note, this is a potential slippery slope in terms of freedoms. When cost to apply this technology falls, there is the danger of tracking device sentences to become longer and longer - 2 terms (of a far right government for example) could quickly legislate to the point at which people are tracked for much of their lives.
Works fine on 59.0 here. Modern-ish integrated Intel GFX.
US aside, is there any word on how Ireland et al. are reacting to the EU trying to cut off their cash cow?
The aforementioned video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ
>He got lucky in life, there is not much at how he became what he is by having any special character or much of experience.

Sounds like the current POTUS.
I hardly think that journalism and news are outdated and unnecessary. Where else would people get long-form updates on what's happening in the world? We can do better than corporate/government propaganda, but it's unclear exactly how to avoid biases generated by your funding. Funding news and paying journalists (even for unpopular and unprofitable articles) is the real problem we need to consider.
The Only Privacy Policy That Matters
In my experience yes, they are.
True, although it was from 1982-1994.
There were a few nearly identical parallelizations of Prolog. Besides KL1, there were Concurrent Prolog, GHC, Paralog, Strand, and Aldwych. The structure of Prolog-like concurrent systems is like the Actor model, based on message passing, and shares the problem of indeterminacy in the ordering of messages. These systems had to drop backtracking, because that requires access to a global stack.

In the end, it proved difficult to implement clause invocation in these languages as efficiently as procedure invocation in object-oriented programming languages. The combination of efficient inheritance-based procedure invocation together with class libraries and browsers was better than the slower pattern-directed clause invocation of the FGCS programming languages, so concurrent object-oriented message-passing languages like Java and C# became the mainstream.

I would suggest that the relational database approach is simpler and about as powerful as the rule-based approach to knowledge processing. From a practical point of view, any row of a Relatonal DataBase System table can be considered as a rule, provided that at least one attribute has been selected as an output.
For those interested, here is a relevant link: http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

Personally, I tend to focus on GNU coreutils on the gnu/linux side.(https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html)

I can't find my list of non-gnu linux kernel utilities at the moment. I think it's in the older kernel documentation.
Truly before we get usurped and wonder wtf hit us.
Toys'R'Us
"Westminster is at least the fourth college site bought by Chinese interests since 2015."

Pretty much one per year. Let's keep looking at it, but probably nowhere as near as foreign companies investing in China's education system.
Because you want achieve positive things in your life's work, not pass time.
Because I find in AI's candid responses to the questions we ask a fascinating opportunity to understand humanity better. When we try to conform those answers to our desired biases we learn less from it. But now I understand that such aspects are a subset of the greater problem of getting our models to answer in a specific context.

Ultimately the Model would need to detect & learn the contexts by itself.

And more to the point; I see you are publishing data sets after correcting them for fairness. I think the unfair results can sometimes be more useful. I once prototyped a short-story tagging & recommendation system based on word2vec and I would not be surprised if raw vectors gave better results. People's taste in litterature (especially romantic) are very dependant on gender stereotypes.
You’re right, I’m sure demographics have absolutely nothing to do with it. And this isn’t a trend that’s going to continue. And it’s not one that many progressives, including white progressives, are actively advocating for.
Alphabet's 'Outline' Software Lets Anyone Run a Homebrew VPN
build trust. if you don't take a stand you can lose people's trust. if you end up doing the opposite of what you say it's even worse and you are clearly a liar. perceptions of trust and honesty are built through words and actions.
I simply want real privacy, not an illusion of one. It's pointless to use any half-baked privacy approach when your device is compromised by design; who knows if the current mainstream becomes dissent in 20 years and people will be hanged because of their old communication logs? Thanks but no thanks.
I'm profoundly shocked. I find it unacceptable that a government outsource something this ethically, legally and economically sensitive to a private business. I refrain from an ethical comment on the founders---even though the fact that this is an effort to monetize incarceration leads me to reflections on them not that hard to guess given my stance---but the business itself is ethically foul, and regardless of the quality of it's practical application in this instance, fundamentally dangerous. Even if this particular company is benevolent, this leads the way for other enterprise to try their chance in this area, and it's not hard to see this whole 'industry' becoming a post-modern diluted and prettily-marketed0 Slavery 2.0.
A profit motive can lead to perverse and unforeseen incentives, even despite the best intentions of the founders, who someday will not be running the company.

The private prison industry routinely lobbies for higher fines & longer sentences because it is to their benefit to have more people go to prison. Promise appears to have a similar incentive.
> Democracy does not mean moral

Yes it does. Democracy (the concept) is moral because it gives self-determination and liberty to people. Of course, everything, including democracy, is very imperfect in execution.

> the Russian election. And though they're obviously rigged, the US one isn't some glorious opportunity for the will of the people to be heard either.

Again, there is no comparison. It's like saying Hitler and the U.S. both used internment camps in WWII, therefore they are morally equal.
There's no report. Why did you editorialize the title? It's just an opinion column.
That's ok, can we re-schedule, by which I mean leave it open ended so that you spend the day with a gentle dread in your heart, eyeing the phone with anxiety throughout, and second guessing bathroom/lunch breaks?

tks.
> That seems pedantic. Technology allows users to become "less and less power users" by giving them the tools to solve problems they were not advanced enough to solve before, or that were too time-consuming or difficult to solve before.

Exactly, today a regular user can do what a power user could do years ago.

Create a full website with good design, structure, functionality? You had to be a power user, but not anymore.

Drive a car? You had to know how to use a clutch, shift gears, etc. Not anymore.

Access the internet? You had to buy a modem, configure it, connect, etc. Not anymore.

And so on.

Technology removes burdens, and allows regular users to do what only power users could before.

People don't want to be power users. People don't even want to be users. People want to listen to music, move, read.
Castels are nowhere close to the most interesting things to see in France.

"Le puy du fou" (https://www.puydufou.com/fr), "le palais idéal du factor cheval" (http://www.facteurcheval.com/histoire/palais.html), "le gouffre de padirac" (https://www.vallee-dordogne.com/grottes-et-gouffres/le-gouff...), la via ferrata de peille (http://peille.free.fr/index.php) or "la cité des sciences" (http://www.cite-sciences.fr/fr/accueil/) are exemples of much more exotic, fun, interesting and unique things to do in France.

Stop doing the things they tell you to do on TV.

Cheese and wine will only take you so far.
Unfortunately Signal doesn't have a desktop client (and no, Chrome apps don't count. They will be retired and unsupported too in the near future)
That could lead to discrimination if someone see's a person has a service dog.

The whole point of the ADA is to not treat people with disabilities as if they are second class citizens.
Isn't that exactly what the article says? That's why the EU is trying to fix it.
Store UTF-8 in Playing Card Permutations
Not that I necessarily agree with OP's "call to action," but as software people we have more potential for impact on software-related issues...
This surprises me. Would love to see a breakdown of where HN community are based.
If you're wondering how California deals with this...poorly.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-sheriff-brady-list-201712...

"California is among 22 states that keep officer discipline from the public, but it is the only one that blocks prosecutors from seeing entire police personnel files."
Here is one example that looks like it died in the house: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/gop-s-h-r-620-will-gut...
Signal does have a desktop client. It might not in the future, but it does now.