skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very true. When I was in grad school I made a group to teach data vis to grad students. The distribution of learning, in retrospect, was super lopsided: almost everyone who did our activities wasted their time; a handful became obsessed and are now professionals who use those skills and many others constantly.
I reject your notion that all ideas deserve equal treatment.

If I come to you and say “a woman’s place is the kitchen” and you unfriend me, it would be super dumb for me to claim that you are being intolerant for not taking me seriously by entertaining my opinion. On the contrary, it is me who is being intolerant, and I cannot fault you for not tolerating my intolerance.
Why? It is blindingly obvious to the EFF and anyone else who has dealt with politics.

This is literally just to wrap it up for the rubes and to find a packaging that could pass.

Craigslist, Patreon, Reddit, Youtube, etc. have all started self-censorship programs in response. Patreon did it last year when this looked like it wouldn't die.

Pretending it was an unforeseen consequence when it began before the law even passed and was literally called out by multiple parties as the cause after it passed for the final holdouts? That is literally burying your head in the sand.

I'm sorry but this is up there with denying the Earth is round when it comes to anyone who has dealt with these groups before.

https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/sesta-anti-sex-trafficking-bi...

It is literally cutting the lifelines that help sex workers avoid being abused.
The End of the Cloud Is Not Coming
I don't think there has ever been a human society in which people took "personal responsibility" in the sense you are using the phrase. I don't think it's humanly possible for even the smartest person to keep track of their personal data given the quantity of it, the multiplicity of tracking mechanisms, and the uncertainty about how it all works. Not to mention, even if we all read all the agreements we click through, that doesn't mean they are all accurate, sufficient, legal, or adhered to by the authors.

As I wrote in another thread, I have used LinkedIn for a long time, and I have never wanted it to spam my contacts, so I have always had it foremost in my mind to click "No" whenever it asks to import them. Yet at some point, it did it anyway, because it asks me if I want to connect with people who are only email contacts and not on LinkedIn.

Now if you had complete logs of everything I did with my phone and computer, you might well be able to prove in court that I inadvertently gave permission at some point - perhaps I didn't read all of the legalese on something, or perhaps my finger slipped and I forgot.

I can't imagine I would find anyone at LinkedIn who cared about figuring out what happened, regardless.

There is something perverse, in my view, in appealing to "personal responsibility" of individuals dealing with corporations, as it seems to me that the entire concept of a corporation is a way for people to work together as an entity without taking personal responsibility. The reason we have corporations is because it's impractical for people to be held liable for their screwups.
> If Craigslist is really telling us that they can’t run a page on their website without knowingly facilitating sex trafficking, that would certainly be a damning admission

That's a really disingenuous statement, though I'd expect nothing less from a person who has everything to gain from making Craigslist look shady.

The law very intentionally uses the word "knowingly", which has a lower legal bar than other considerations, like "intentionally". In this case, that means that even if Craigslist took active measures to prevent people from using Craigslist for sex work, they would still be liable for anybody who successfully circumvented their methods.

Secondly, sex trafficking is not the same as sex work. The bill purports to target sex trafficking, but it really applies to sex work - that is, to consensual sexual activity in which money changes hands.

Blumenthal, I should point out, has a long history of targeting Craigslist specifically, going back all the way to his days as AG. He failed to secure the case he wanted against them as AG, so he's going for a scorched earth approach now that he's in the Senate. For him, the Craigslist shutdown is a personal victory, and sticking it to Craigslist was honestly probably one of his motivations for cosponsoring the bill in the first place.
Probably until about 6 months before your knees finally give out. Have you considered eating cake on the beach instead? It will probably only shorten your life by around the same amount of time that you spend running.
Sure, it could have an emotional effect - same as loudspeakers, only more intimate. But proposing that someone would "mistake the experience for some sort of divine intervention or a deteriorating mental condition" is a statement about a person's view of the factual reality you live in, which tends to remain intact even in stressful situations.

My issue is not with the funding of this project or with its use in counterinsurgency operations; it's with journalism that paints (mostly Muslim) terrorists as superstitious primitives, when in fact they are thoroughly products of modern society.
I think permission to read the contact, is different than the permission to store it in your own server.
I'm confident that you would not consider it so easy if you had ever meaningfully engaged with this problem. The simple fact is no one has cracked the nut yet, and not for lack of trying. Either it it is hard, or everyone who has worked on mobile device capability systems is evil or incompetent. I think the former is more likely.
> Why would you question Obama’s own campaign director? As if it were a secret that Facebook is left leaning and wanted to help Obama.

Precisely because everyone knows/thinks Facebook was sympathetic towards Obama, I believe it's not unthinkable that someone used that fact as an explanation when they were asked and did not actually know the specific reason.
Like everyone knows, it's not that they can't, it's just no longer economical for them to do so. I dislike this linear thinking from our politicians and surprisingly it's often not for show or the media. Some of them truly believe that, but it's mostly in the House not the Senate.

They've been trying to pass something like this for years and I remember reading about this back in the day and actually feeling neutral with the bill if they were able to do it the right way. Given the power of the internet giants I assumed that that would happen, but I guess not. This was awful implementation.

There is a bright side. Now within the new law, this gives a small business a good opportunity to create something similar while testing the legal grounds. If you try hard to prevent all sex trafficking/illegal activity, will the law bend and allow some leeway? Now that many sites are exiting the personals market, it's a good time to try. The advantages these sites had were not due to UI or tech features, but due to wide adaptability so this means it could be a free for all and one business could create a vastly greater user experience because those sites had no reason to innovate.

Do I have the guts to do it? No way. The penalties are too scary and any prosecuter trying to make a name for themselves could destroy anyone's reputation and life.
The emoji keyboard on Windows is one of my favorite improvements. Windows key + : (semicolon) or win +.(period) then start typing the name of the emoji you want.

I initially dismissed it as a gimmick but now use it often when writing emails (colored check? Behind schedule? )

Of course, adding the emojis to this post doesn't work as HN strips them.
Being unable to openly express affection upon pain of death seems like a pretty obvious case of censorship.
I never manage the address book in my email app, and when some services want your Gmail or Yahoo Mail credentials so it can import contacts, having an empty address book makes that useless. So yeah, the "clever" importers trawled through your mailboxes for the adresses. I'm guessing they thought they needed to do the same for phone contacts - which doesn't make sense because people actually manage that, although I've met one person who doesn't do that - she doesn't seem to need to know who is calling/writing her.
Seeing tools like this pop up periodically and get so many upvotes it seems a lot of people aren't aware of great tools. It would be interesting to see a gallery of Unix classic/modern tools presented in a structured course. Is anyone aware of one?

Something like images (imagemagick), video (ffmpeg/vlc), audio (sox), phone (asterisk/etc.), SMS (pdus/various), linguistics (various), classification (NNs), version control, snapshots, clustering (PXE/corosync/pacemaker), security (kernel toolkits), transaction systems and databases (sqlite/RDBMS/noSQL/time series), networking (filtering/firewall rules, intermittent connectivity, local multidrop protocols, tcpdump/wireshark), kernel security toolkits, CI/CD, etc.

Scope would be essentially everything except tools lying within the popular web stacks.

The goal would be that a student with interest could work their way through the syllabus and emerge a capable multi-domain unix hacker, rather than needing to encounter these problem domains over decades of career, rediscovering well worn approaches.
When the plastic bags reach the ocean, they resemble jelly fish, so they look like food. Whales have been found dead with dozens of plastic bags clogging their digestive system. [1]

So coastal areas in particular are a priority to reduce the use of plastic bags. I'm disappointed California hasn't forced grocers to use biodegradable bags in the produce departments as well.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-whale-idUSKBN15I2E...
Because four years later, Facebook would let Cambridge Analytica do something similar without having a reason to particularly like them.

Ruling out money as a reason seems a bit presumptuous.
Regardless, the permissions were there for years.

read your text messages (SMS or MMS)
read call log

Was nobody able to make the inference that facebook might be uploading this stuff to their servers? Remember this was during the whole "facebook is surreptitiously listening to our conversations" fiasco.
If you want to make an adblocker and charge money from both the advertiser and the user of your product than you have to explain to customers that you are in fact a classic middle man and not an engineer. That's​ the law. Well it should be anyway. One can dream, right ?
I think your comment underlines the fact that we are on the slippery slope. You think it is OK for you tube to supress free speech, presumably because you don't like that speech either. So what is next to go? Well it looks life the personal kmeetips, mixed connections is got it the door. What next? What else don't you like that you think it will be fine for them to ban.
While the internet is a big place, this like SESTA will definitely put a cool on things.
Is there any way to view the email without going to businessinsider?
I’ve used a blank no-audio video in Windows Media Player to achieve the same.
The problem is that apps need certain permissions to perform their function. Such as a music app that needs access to the phone module, so it can pause the music when a phone call arrives. This has the effect of users not paying attention the the specific permissions, since in many cases the need for them isn't obvious.
Your standard of “personal responsibility” includes the ability to audit code. I assume that you’re just irresponsible if a carmaker sells you a dangerous vehicle, because you don’t know how to detect the flaw? Doctors can just talk to you without consideration for your ignorance, because your failure to attend medical school represents your irresponsibility? If you can’t parse all of changing EULA’s in your life, you’re just irresponsible?

What’s obvious to you in your very limited field of expertise is not obvious to everyone. You shouldn’t insult everyone who isn’t a programmer by equating that narrow expertise with personal responsibility. I wouldn’t assume that your inability to understand a conversation between two surgeons meant that it was acceptable to harvest your organs.
Is it really so strange to factor political beliefs into your decisions about who to spend time and invest in relationships with? A lot of friendships are based on compatibility in things like hobbies, musical taste, or sense of humor. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and some political issues are (I would argue) more fundamental and important than what sports teams I follow or what types of movies I enjoy.
The danger for a resonable small business now are civil lawsuits, not state or federal prosecution. That litigation can be absolutely frivolous, but costly.
Owncloud does not yet have contacts and calendar built in. And it can be sketchy depending upon which clients you use with the add-ons and Caldav. May be worth trying Nextcloud instead. (Not a fan of how Nextcloud started but they've got calendar and contacts included.)
No, "it's too complicated" also recoils on consumers. I don't think your proposal would change behaviors.

Mass market customers don't read contracts and readily give out SSNs, credit card info, and other personal identifiers.

As a law prof. at NYU said,

>“For the most part [having read the contract] doesn’t matter,” she said. “Things don’t usually go wrong — except when they do. And then it matters.”[0]

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/your-money/novel-length-c...
This is a huge problem that has bugged me for a long time, and is a problem on the iPhone too. It needs to be fixed.
When it comes to using super new research models or methods in deep learning, implementing it yourself instead of looking for other implementations is almost a requirement. In my experience the majority of online "implementations" of research deep learning models or methods have subtle bugs, flaws, or outright implemented something different than the paper they reference. This isn't limited to random github code: for example, I wouldn't trust anything in tensorflow.contrib unless I read the source.
Not everything that's permitted is compulsory. I mean, suppose you frequent a store with a penny tray and you decide, since it's ok to take one penny, why not take all of them? And if you get away with that, why not start cleaning out tip jars? Maybe you will get arrested, but maybe not. I feel like computers are training people that everything you are technically permitted to do is worth trying. I'm not even sure what the rules should be, but rather I feel like losing a common sense of unwritten rules is losing part of what it means (or used to mean) to be human.
Heh I don't bother with the app and suffer with the web interface.

Annoyingly I now need to "Request Desktop Site" to use messenger or else it tries to get me to install the app. The artificial friction they're put in place has pushed me ever closer to just deleting my account.
Do you think those moving away from California have learned a lesson or will they vote for similar policies and politicians wherever they go?
I think the majority of users have several emails, and Gmail rules purely on interface convenience. Its more advanced features (like google maps knowing what hotel you've booked) are mostly creepy, and its storage allowance is not a standout.
Thanks for your in-depth posts!
Really? When the service is free it provides a a clue as to what may be happening. Not always true but a safe starting point.
This libertarian utopia obviously breaks down any time you're presented with a 200-page Terms of Service. Nobody has the time and/or skills to read and understand the content at the level required for "informed consent".

Which is why societies have come up with a far better method: collectively decide (or collectively choose people to decide) on reasonable limits for certain types of transactions.

My German law professor used to say that she never read ToS. Because under the country's law, they are either reasonable or unenforceable.

Such laws have nothing to with censorship. If you really need your users private messages, you just have to more explicitly present them with the choice, and respect their decision to say no without unreasonably denying them service.

The US has far more lenient standards for such one-sided contracts, but the basic principle is obviously the same: If Facebook were to add a paragraph giving them ownership of your house somewhere deep in the ToS, they wouldn't stand a chance in a court of law.
Saying I gave it to them is like saying a guest that robbed me should be able to keep what he stole just because I let him into my house.
Sorry, I misinterpreted what you were saying. My intent was to imply that if you're going to wrangle Google into the Facebook clusterfuck then you better put the spotlight on other companies that have done more nefarious shit than Google.
I don't know what the NRA is doing but it looks like it is working. Here is a graph showing a long term decline in gun deaths in America.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Gu...
Haha—that's great!

But wait, you weren't in Berkeley, CA in 2013 were you?
Isn't that so they can pause / save the game when you get an incoming phone call? I recall reading that on an app once.
I believe it. As a former (albeit a very unimportant L3 SRE in a distant and unrelated division with no nonpublic info whatsoever about Waymo) Googler, the only thing that impressed me about my time there was the engineering culture, which despite the inevitable dilution from becoming so large, was very strongly oriented towards valuing software safety, hygiene, correctness, processor etc, compared to other shops anyway.

Even when i observed other types of dysfunction, it tended to go down in a way that demonstrates valuing software safety, and something else would be sacrificed, or at the very least it cost a lot more political capital to override that particular cultural value than most any other.

I've never worked at uber but when it comes to carefulness, well, their reputation precedes them and needs no rehashing here.
The first time I installed the Facebook app and saw the huge wall of permission requests (back before they had on demand permission requests and they all had to be up front), I noped out of that crap.

Never installed the facebook app on any of my phones (In the odd event I REALLY need to check a cat picture on facebook, I use the browser version). Glad I went that route.

Now though I got a Samsung phone that has the facebook app preinstalled, but I never opened it (and all the other preinstalled apps DONT have the permissions on by default...so I hope it's true of the FB app too)
I think we make this harder than it has to be, by not doing proof-based math earlier.

Real analysis is often the first class in a math bachelor's program where things really get far from intuition and much harder to wrap your head around than the material from earlier classes.

Making that the first proof-based class is just piling one hard thing on top of another.

I think we'd be better off if we made basic calculus proof-based, at least for people such as math majors who are going to need to learn to follow and do proof-based math at some point. For those going into fields where they will not need to read and do proves, have a separate "practical calculus" track.

You can start out with more informal proofs at the start of basic calculus, and slowly step up the level of rigor throughout the year.
It's still not getting completely away from Google, and they could probably still track you through IP, but I've been really happy with the NewPipe client for Android; it's attempting to provide all the features of browsing without falling back on any official API and certainly without needing an account. There are a few features that aren't out yet (most notably comments, notifications, and YT-user playlists, though it can play the latter if you get the link through another browser) but it gives you an offline subscription list and in my opinion is more comfortable to use than the official app.
I’m always amazed by the ability of libertarians to believe that in the jungle, they’d be tigers rather than tiger shit. More often it turns out they just have a grossly inflated opinion of themselves, as in this case. We’re all human, all weak, and we all need to depend on each other a lot, it’s just the way it is.
Which is why I have to laugh at the way military dude bro types in all those Active Denial videos are like “yeah, wow, it’s so non-lethal and harmless!”

It really doesn’t matter much to me that the Active Denial System is advertised as non-lethal, because any non-lethal system can be pushed into overdrive to inflict an excruciating living hell on individuals pinned down by lethal fire, and weapons like these are usually in the hands of operators with lethal options locked and loaded, and ready to go.

So, it’s a small leap of the imagination to consider that these non-lethal options are being developed as a cheaper version of tear gas, to push adversaries into lethal funnels, because lazy troops don’t take prisoners, and bored troops often torture, for information or sadistic amusement. So videos will show up in the distant (or nor so distant) future with people being tied up and subjected to hours of Active Denial beams for sure, and that says nothing about the animal testing that’s already happened.

So here’s another weapon you’ll see smoking combatants into fatal funnels. Just because non-lethal options are available, doesn’t mean lethality is off the table.

And by the way, wasn’t there some shit like this happening in Cuba recently?
That’s not a justification that helps the user much though.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/case.htm...

>...we have recognized that the preservation of a free society is so far dependent upon the right of each individual citizen to receive such literature as he himself might desire... can those people who live in or come to Chickasaw be denied freedom of press and religion simply because a single company has legal title to all the town? For it is the State's contention that the mere fact that all the property interests in the town are held by a single company is enough to give that company power, enforceable by a state statute, to abridge these freedoms. We do not agree that the corporation's property interests settle the question... Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.
Looking for a side project? Take ours over: BountyHunt.io
A couple friends and I built Bounty Hunt (https://bountyhunt.io/) over the last 9 months and just launched it on Product Hunt a couple weeks ago (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bounty-hunt/).

Unfortunately, given one of our teammates has started med school, we've decided we can no longer pursue this project as a team and are now exploring exit opportunities.

We've chatted with a few fintech companies about soft landings, but before we go that route, we thought it'd be cool to see if any fellow hackers would be interested in taking over BountyHunt.io and growing it into something more.

In our convos with other entrepreneurs, there's been excitement around the idea of tailoring the product / branding to one specific use case and doubling down on that niche to see what can be done in terms of growth + monetization (eg, rent collection, fraternity dues, social / fantasy sports leagues).

We're trying to find a home for Bounty Hunt in the next 2-3 weeks so if you're interested, drop me a line!
Her statements are highly specific.
Wait to judge on running and hiding until the inevitable cases reach the Supreme Court. Congress can pass any law, but that doesn’t mean it will stand.
The defiance of an 'untouchable' New York subway worker