skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you prefer I can rename it to nix

This makes me sound pedantic, but yes. I understand the world is more then plain desktops. The topic was dominant platforms; UNIX is not.

I'm aware of most of your examples. But all of them are either unix-like or posix complaint.

But as admitted my complaint was a nitpick.

"UNIX is dead; long live *nix." ~ oneweekwonder
Google surely can draw a network of its ever-logged-in users just with their ad services alone:

1. You visit a page with some Google ad at home.

2. Someone else at home visits another page with some Google ad.

3. Your browsers make the request through the same IP address, marking you as potential acquaintances.

With the frequency of this happening, they can put weights on the edges to mark how closely you are related to that other person. And since they can, they will. Otherwise, it would be the loss of this great opportunity for them.

I don't see Google being any less manipulative than Facebook, with all the capable tools they have now. They are ever-present, can track you almost regardless where you visit (ads and analytics), they can gather information about your profile/network, and most importantly, they curate the information presented to you (search and ads).
Here's a radical idea: let [gifted kids] have childhoods!

As a child who experienced both "regular" and gifted education, I can say with some certainty that: My "childhood" began when I entered gifted school.

Before that I was bullied, I didn't fit in, I wasn't challenged, and I was unhappy.

It was my personal experience and the experience of many of the students around me at gifted school that this was what we wanted. We were happy and grateful to be around "our kind". Precisely because we could be the kids we wanted to be.

That feeling certainly wasn't universal. It wasn't for everyone. And I will readily grant that schools -- even gifted schools -- are prison-like and could be improved.

But I reject the notion you seem to be arguing that these programs are prima facie harmful (or at best not helpful), as compared to the standard-education alternative.
Nissan Motor didn't win. They don't own the domain. Who can quantify the millions and millions of lost revenue and brand tarnishing that resulted from people reading about this story or accidentally visiting nissan.com

In the end, Nissan Motor should own the domain and Uzi should have been fairly compensated - i.e. they should have paid him the $15 million he initially asked for.
Agree with your suggestion, but the cost of lawyers is probably too much in light of it only being 16 hours work.
I had not considered using the phone as the always-on link. I will have to check what this means for storage since I only have a lowly 16GB handset, but at least for the important bits it should work. Some great ideas there, thank you!
People didn't seem to care back then, though. If you asked a random FB user about app permissions in 2011, I suspect that person wouldn't think it was a big deal.

Social mores are changing, becoming better developed.

The Internet, social networking, OAuth -- these are not exactly well-trodden subjects in humanity's past. It's not like we have decades or centuries of precedence to look back on.

The important thing is what FB does now.
I might have misled you with my initial post - it's not the keyboard or IME that it's restricted to, it's the display language.

en_US only, not en_AU, en_UK etc.
You assume consumers with perfect information unselfishly optimizing for the long term good of all people and a market with true competition. None of which is true in reality.
He acted like a massively spoiled baby throughout the entire situation.

I've always viewed him through that lens. The way other involved businessmen and the fans / people who cared about the general health of professional football as a whole (because they wanted to preserve a form of entertainment / ensure the future of pro football for whatever reason) view him. I've seen that same song and dance repeat ad nauseam in all sorts of different markets and situations he has his grimy hands in.
>I think the French law on this topic is more or less aligned on international standards which are quite recent at WHO or in EU.

Maybe it is now, actually France received a complaint by the Council of Europe in 2015 for NOT having such a Law (together with a few other EU countries) or not having it "clear enough":

https://www.coe.int/bs/web/portal/full-news/-/asset_publishe...

http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/assets/pdfs/press-relea...

https://web.archive.org/web/20150305031324/http://www.coe.in...

Of course one thing is the Law, and another thing is practice, as said I believe that in most EU countries, even those that do not have a "proper" Law the actual use of corporal punishments (within the family) is largely a thing of the past.

About corporal punishment in schools or anyway outside the family/paretns (which is another thing), I believe it is forbidden everywhere, and as you mentioned last occurrences were probably in the '60's, see the map here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal_punishment#Legal_stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal_punishment#/media/Fil...
My 5c: both Fraleigh and Dummit & Foote are pretty good.
This would be easier to control if Android would allow users an option to see historically what resources the app requested and how it processed them (just list them, used them, processed them).
There are non-evil uses of that data, of course. A custom-built news feed for example. That would actually be pretty nice...
that seems to be a common theme with kde and to a lesser degree gnome. they moved to 'features and innovation first' years ago and it shows. sure its nice that Linux is becoming more accessible for 'normal' people but for me both kde and gnome are getting in my way more and more while stability is suboptimal. i switched from kde to gnome around 2010 then xfce in 2012 and finally i3 in late 2013. for the rest of the apps i'm always looking for the leanest and least sophisticated solution that has enough features and suit my needs. these also tend to be pretty reliable.

like you said, if i really needed all those fancy features and eyecandy I'd rather switch to apple or microsoft.

I'm still taking a look at kde and gnome once a year or so, especially since kde5 looked really clean and nice, but it just isn't there yet..
They used to care pretty strongly. That's a fact. They also didn't do much about it. Also a fact.
> Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate.

This hasn’t been true for quite some time. These banks on you are really elaborate. They know where you live, they know where you work, they know where you drink your coffee and they know your online behavior.

Those factors mean that you’re never truely anonymous anymore. When you buy a new device it gets tiered to your access points, then your online behavior gets profiled and matched to people who frequent your access points.

Last summer I was on a business trip to another region of my country. Just before I went I had to turn in my work pc for repairs, which meant I had to use the borrow device from our IT department. Despite never having used this device before, and never having logged in from that particular hotel I still ended up getting adds for a very specific online course that I had taken earlier that month as well as a pair of shoes I had just bought.

I guess the irony in that is that even though they we’re able to pinpoint who I was, through what seem like impossible means, they still didn’t know I had actually already bought those products they were advertising.
Brilliant introduction to static FP, uses F# but applicable to Elm, Occaml, Purescript, Haskell, etc.

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/
Introducing the AntarctiCoin ICO – Antarctica's first and only cryptocurrency
I've always loved KDE and has been a contributor. So take my work with a grain of salt.

But KDE is pretty light these days and it doesn't really get in the way. It's really polished.

2010 was the KDE 4.x times and it was indeed a bad time for the project.

Things are quite different now.
I spoke about bash and this exact thing here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb3k0sGKrjQ

Plug for book that resulted:

https://leanpub.com/learnbashthehardway
> Isn't Tor Browser fairly bad due to it being a target? I'm not sure if that changed recently, but I recall seeing lots of "don't use the Tor Browser bundle"

Just FUD.

> Tor also relies on exit nodes to exist, yet it's considered very dangerous to run one.

It's dangerous in some places to run an exit, not everywhere.
It's astounding. And much of the reporting is really, really terrible. Like just not describing things with any degree of accuracy at all.
also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wandering_Soul_(Viet...

But I think the bigger application might be in using this tech to trick the enemy into giving up their position to investigate some weird sound, flush them out of buildings, etc.
XT3X – Write Video Games Like in the 1980's
Holy crap this is the most amazing thing ever. How can I help? Donate on Patreon?
I think it's a false dichotomy.

We use money and investment as a distributed resource allocation system.

It's kind of worked so far, but it is fundamentally flawed and on a catastrophic trajectory.

We've created a self-amplifying dissipative system without any kind of braking system, and we're already wasting the earth away faster than it regenerates.

The growth religion must be dispelled. I hope we can find a system that captures the positive aspects of capitalism while stopping the current destruction/consumption wave.
The article is by a family therapist selling their book/service, not a medical doctor.

Also it's ironic a Bioethics PhD wants to model ADHD after the French system. Their history with psychiatry leaves reason for so few French psychiatrists contributing to the ICD and DSM.

France is better known for their neurological contributions anyways.
I don't assume anything. I just observe the "freer" markets like computers, entertainment and software and marvel at the rich choices, advances and quality present in spite of no regulations requiring for them.

And then I look at any heavily regulated markets and I shudder at the prices, lack of choice, crappy quality and how horrible stuff happens in spite of regulations supposed to prevent it.

So I draw a logical conclusion: Free Markets beat Regulations pretty much every time.
Ada didn't take off (despite some decent level of enthusiasm in the industry) because a compiler cost $$$$.

That's also why Smalltalk failed to gain traction. I suppose both languages hailed from an era in which employers did still provide training - say up to the late 80s, maybe even early 90s. The idea that programmers would need to learn languages on their own time/dime never even occurred to those vendors.
this so much. i guess we have LEDs to tjank for that.

then people just slap them onto their bikes without giving it any thought or even being like 'yeah I'm gonna make it shine really high so i can see even further'.

also bonus points to people who set them to blink because it saves 2$ a year in batteries but is even more irritating in the dark as it's much harder to extrapolate the path of movement.
That's not true for most parliamentary systems. In fact it's only customary in the UK to arbitrarily call elections when poll numbers are up. But even in the UK, there is obviously a maximum term between elections. And calling elections without reason isn't actually possible anymore. Theresa May had to jump through some hoops to almost lose her majority last summer.

In the US, a president who leaves office before the expiration of their term is replaced by the Vice President (or the next in the line of succession if there is no Vice President). In Germany, a chancellor can only recalled by electing a replacement. If they resign or die, the President gets to make a few decision, and they will usually task the leader of the largest party to find themselves a majority. Only after two or three failures of that process would a President turn to early elections.
They can if they are willing to, but I doubt many companies are willing to.

"This is a tough one; spend a year rebuilding our backend and terms of services or shut ourselves out from a market of almost 500 million people (not including the UK) probably forever?"
I expect nike.com to tell me about the Greek goddess Nike but what do I get when I go there?

There was a similar lawsuit in France over some lady named Milka who had milka.fr and she lost probably because she didn't have millions to blow on the lawsuit. They didn't bug me when I bought milka.eu (or something similar, it was a while ago) after reading the article and being drunk at the time decided it was a good idea to use it to host one of the wonderful pictures I took of a Lenin statue while in Budapest. Probably not worth the effort since it was pretty obvious I was just trolling them.
Year 2006, we had a very high-traffic website running with 1 MySQL server and 1 web server (PHP). Maybe high availability or resillience terms were not coined yet, that's why we were comfortable with having one server per each function. Web server had two ethernet cards, one is with private IP and one is publicly accessible IP. After a while, the platform started to crash and I would be called by my loyal users before Pingdom alerts reach to me, then I would call the datacenter technicians to press restart button of the web server. Obviously it was a lengthy process for recovery, with a lot of human involved.

After a while, I discovered that the issue was about web server's ethernet card attached to internal network and used to connect MySQL server. When that ethernet card stops working, the platform would crash. On the other hand, it was also possible to connect to MySQL using the other ethernet card via public IP. It would reduce the performance of the platform, since all the bandwidth of that card (100 mbps!) is already eaten by HTTP traffic, but at least it would keep it running.

I ended up writing a script at my home computer, checking if the platform is up or not. Once the faulty ethernet card fails, it would connect to FTP, change PHP configuration to use the other ethernet interface to connect to MySQL server, and send an e-mail to datacenter technicians to press restart button.

This script successfully did its job during 3 months, until I eventually replaced the faulty ethernet card and fixed the issue.

Isn't it "Invent and Simplify" like Jeff Bezos says?
I see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code. We have that situation in Javascript land but at least there it was kind of unavoidable for a very long time.

That said, I may take Pantheon for a spin - I've been a happy KDE user for many years but I never mind trying new things and perhaps learning something new. Everything I've tried so far made me return back to KDE but one must keep an open mind.
I started with fvwm on Slackware 2.0 in 1995, went through all major desktops until around 2006, did very minor contributions to Gtkmm.

Nowadays only use Unity on a travel netbook, soon to be replaced with GNOME with the upcoming LTS release, the remaining laptops are on macOS/Windows.
Thanks for the link. It looks pretty good - open source clients, all major platforms, affordable.
Yeah too bad the baton was handed off to those darling Soviets, eh comrade?
Keep in mind that these "Active Denial Systems" have been abused in torturing prisoners in LA county, in some cases to near death.

https://youtu.be/t4lS7nlR_BY
https://www.courthousenews.com/man-says-l-a-jailers-shot-him...
There's a link to their Patreon at the bottom of the page.
It seems to me like competing companies actually are incentivised to share information with each other. That would allow them both to cut costs. Does anyone know why they don't do this? Or know of examples where they do do this?

Of course competition would force them both to lower prices after they cut costs, but this will lead to increased demand so both companies should be making more profit. Also if they have a third competitior then they will both be gaining customers from them.

EDIT: Actually this happens all the time, just mediated by money. My economist brain switched off for a second. I was imagining a situation like "You tell us that trade secret in exchange for this one". But this situtation would require a "coincidence of wants". Money alleviates that problem. So this does happen all the time, it just looks more like "Even though you're our competitors we'll give you secret X in exchange for $n".
I've heard this from you before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353591

You should instead help with Pidgin 3.
Why just for kids? I wanna be a planet guardian!
Considering both the language and the ecosystem/community, I'd recommend Elixir.

Both the language and the community bear resemble my experience with Ruby. Like Ruby, the language is relatively beginner-friendly, and the community is very welcoming and helpful.

The language is probably my favorite so far. For me it hits the pragmatic sweet spot between enforcing functional programming without being needlessly strict/pedantic about it, or overwhelming me with FP concepts. That can be considered a downside too, of course, but in my case it really helped me ease into functional programming in a way that other languages did not (Haskell was a bit too much, and Clojure felt too alien, for example).

The friendly community matters a lot when you're in the 'stupid questions' phase. More than once my undoubtedly very silly questions were answered promptly, often even by the creator of the language. My experience with quite a few other 'functional' communities is that there's an unfortunate tendency toward condescension, or a kind of academic elitism that made me avoid asking what I thought might be stupid questions.

Furthermore, people actively try to teach functional principles, and in particular the Phoenix web framework is great even just to see how things are done (I often add it to my projects just for reference). Dave Thomas, who is an excellent and prolific teacher/language enthusiast, has more than once expressed his affection for Elixir as a language to teach functional programming.

Another advantage is tooling. One of the explicit goals set by the creator (Jose Valim) was to make the language 'friendly'. So very often error messages give hints on how to do things instead, and there's an automatic formatter that 'fixes' stuff for you (proper indentation, idiomatic code style, etc.). The documentation for the language, packages and functions are probably my favorite ever, and it comes with other goodies like a testing framework, interactive code shell (REPL), a really nice package manager and probably some other stuff I forgot.

And finally, even though it's by no means a very popular language (yet), it's well on its way to being a 'mainstream' functional language, and it's something you can actually use for a lot of stuff (backend development, scripting, or to start a telephony company ;).

Btw, if anyone else is already playing around with Elixir, I can highly recommend searching for Dave Thomas' articles and videos. They're an excellent way to learn FP as well 'why' FP is interesting/important/worthwhile.
> I see it's written mostly in Vala - I must confess I have a deep prejudice against Vala, mostly because it seems silly and complicated and just wrong to me to take a programming language and then compile it to C and then further compile it to machine code.

You mean like Objective-C, C++, Eiffel, Scheme, Nim?

Compiling to another native language is a shortcut to avoid implementing a complete compiler backend.

With C being the best option as target language on UNIX systems, given its ubiquity.
There are non-evil uses for anything. That doesn't mean we don't need security.
They Didn’t Even Need to Hack Facebook
Since Unity became the default in Ubuntu, I've been using KDE. Was very happy with the 4.x, but not so happy with the bump to 5.x. I've been using 5.x daily since the beginning. Mostly it works really well, though I still have to restart plasma or desktop effects daily. I'm not sure if it related to a bug with Nvidia. I also have an issue with framerate drops with Dota 2. But except from those minor issues, it works really really well, but I still feel that the latest 4.x was more stable than the current 5.x
I was also working on Facebook apps from 2011 to 2013 using Facebook APIs.

At this time whenever we have released any app, useres could login to it using OAuth which means they were presented with a list of privileges our app needs from them (eg. Friends list, photos, posts etc). Once user has authorised the app we could fetch all of this data.

This was how Facebook worked at this time, you can’t say it is a leak of data because we explicitly ask user for permission. You basically say, I want to use your app, here is my profile if you need it. I don’t really understand why people are so mad about their data privacy. If you publish your photos, list of friends, what you like, where you live and work, who are you merry to, then it shouldn’t be a surprise this data can be viewed by not only your neighbour but also a dodgy automated scripts. Once the data is fetched then you can only imagine what people can do with it. It’s not really Facebook fault. It’s people who thinks when they publish things on the Internet, it’s safe and can be only viewed by other people.

Maybe Facebook only role should be to make people more aware of all of this, but is it in their interest? I don’t think so.
There's a lot of conspiracies and security absolutism in this thread. So while I agree that this policy is misguided, I think it's important for the community to address the actual issues raised, and not some strawmen about the government preparing to enslave all citizen etc.

Imagine you're a high-minded, fair, and absolutely law-abiding FBI officer charged with solving some white collar crime, like corruption or fraud.

You started some time in the 80s. The usual MO was to get a warrant and search someone's house and office. You'd find 60 to 100 binders full of letters, transaction records, and org charts for this criminal enterprise you're investigation.

Today, you find an iPhone and a smug banker telling you take it. "The new model is coming out anyway." Then, he orders a Vodka Soda from his butler and you slink out, iPhone in hand.

Just to be clear (again): I absolutely do not think that this scenario is reason enough to mandate backdoors. But I am similarly convinced that it happens, probably quite often. And that it would be rather frustrating to deal with.

It will be far easier to convince people if we start acknowledging what they already think to be true, to avoid hyperbole, and not to obscure our real motivation behind some rather ridiculous claims of technical impossibility[0[.

[0[: bitcoin already has 2-of-3 multisig, so 1-of-2 shouldn't really be impossible if anybody, you know, tried
Yes. We'll use that. Thanks!
Thank you! Fascinating reading.
News and the like, really needs some sort of habbit to handle them by now.
Like i wont read anything that has not been around longer then 2 weeks and has been reposted by several vendors.

It also would help, if there was a App-Agent, checking the facts in a text.
For which loudspeakers will do just fine, if you know where someone is with enough precision to pull this off.
I've had the first book (Watchmaking by George Daniels) on an Amazon wishlist for some time but the price never seems to drop below £50 (and used copies go for far more). Always a sign of a worthwhile book :-)
I can understand being against Facebook login but why not Twitter? Don't think it's a particularly shady company as far as I'm aware, and you don't have to give the app access to tweet on your behalf.