skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why are law documents (GDPR) so difficult to understand?
As much as I want to comply to GDPR, I think its articles difficult to understand, like many other law documents.

https://gdpr-info.eu/

As an engineer, I found it is very difficult to translate from the regulation text to code, to actual implementation.

Taking the following statement as an example:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/

>>>

(Personal data shall be) processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage, using appropriate technical or organisational measures (‘integrity and confidentiality’).

===

"In a manner". In what manner?

What's "appropriate security" and "appropriate technical measures"? How to interpret it? There seems to be much flexibility?

Every website has some security measures to protect data to certain degree. How do I know if that's "appropriate" or enough to meet GDPR?

Do I need symmetric encryption? Or Do I need asymmetric encryption? Which kind of crypto hash is considered "appropriate"? What if I use a database which is insecure by flaws, but I don't know or don't have the technical strength to know it? What if encryption on my backend caused performance penalty? What if I run a hosted, non-profit BBS based on certain open source BBS program that might be insecure? Should I patch the server with OS Update JKB8948, which is known to fix a security hole but opens another? is it an "appropriate measure"?

I found this regulation put too much burden on small businesses. Just to understand this GDPR text may require consulting cost. What if this law will be abused as a tactic to attack business competitions? I'm worried.

How do you understand this "security appropriateness" of the above text? How can you be sure your understanding is correct?
The more I think about this the more it makes sense in a horrible way. The important thing for Uber is that they are first to market. If they are first to market there are two outcomes:
a) they are successful, they make more money with lower fares because they don't need to pay drivers anymore. They basically take over the market that they are already dominating, beating competitors into bankruptcy. The market explodes as it is cheaper to get on demand cars than to own your own. $$$$$
b) they are not successful. They kill a hundred people in a month or two. The self-driving car industry gets shut down, and for the cost of a few hundred million dollars in settlements they keep their current market dominance in the current industry, but have to keep paying drivers. $$

The alternative, they are not first to market, someone else is and immediately replaces Uber with a network of cheaper self-driving cars:
a) Uber goes out of business
b) They can somehow convince someone to license the tech or sell them the cars at a reasonable price, making them vulnerable and less profitable, with no market advantage.
Spotify reveals 2M free users are dodging ads
It sounds like you'd be happier in academia. You don't sound like startup material to me. Why stay in a place that makes you unhappy to that degree?
It was the wealthiest nation in Latin America in the early 1980s, with a GDP per capita considerably higher than Argentina and several times that of Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia.

Oil output peaked the few years prior to Chavez taking over and then began a persistent decline. Oil exports boomed from 1987 to 2000, going from 1.5m to 3m barrels per day. Under Chavez that collapsed by nearly 50%. Maduro of course has just continued the trend line.
I find a somewhat irresolvable issue on the liberal viewpoint of female sexuality and using sex to sell things (or selling sex directly)

I see a lot of push back and negativity towards things like "booth babes" and other models that are employed to use their sexuality to help sell something. And I dont really argue with that, from a consumer angle. But I do also hear and feel for those models, who likely rightly say, why am I now out of a job? How is that empowering?

On the other hand, I think typically liberal viewpoint would be that prostitution should be made more legal and out of the shadows, and of course people can sell sex. Which I also dont disagree with.

As it relates to laws and rights, it isn't in conflict - they both should be legal. But the underlying feelings and opnions about them, it seems somewhat unresolved. There seems to be more hatred towards the objectification of women, but not targeted at say strippers. It doesn't seem totally coherent.
Ask HN: Benefits of “the blockchain”?
What are the benefits of blockchain technology that currently aren't solved by having some central trustworthy source maintain a database?

To me it seems that a "blockchain" claim to fame is being decentralized. But who maintains the tech to make the system reliable? Seems like a centralized organization would essentially be needed to maintain a database used by others.
<blunt>:

You have an over-inflated view of your own contributions, because, well, you're human, and we tend to view our own contributions as much more valuable (because we understand how complex and impactful they are, and we don't usually do so for other people's contributions).

My perspective, as a technical person who started doing startups in 2007 (as CTO in my first 2 startups), is running a successful company now (as CEO), and has advised a bunch of companies over the last 10 years, is that a 50/50 deal is extremely generous and if anything I would advise the CEO that he was too generous with you and probably set up this problem of your overinflated ego by doing that. Possibly this problem has sunk the company unless you're able to pop your inflated head balloon and get back down to earth.

Ideas aren't everything, but recruiting great people to work on your idea is part of execution. You got recruited 4 months in. You're an employee who somehow miraculously has as much equity as the founder. That is an insanely good deal and you are foolish and extremely greedy to be questioning it, especially at this point.

Now, about who wears the pants, which you mention in another comment - you need to clarify who wears the pants in what context. You're not an expert on everything, and neither is he. Obviously you have expertise in technical matters, and so it is reasonable that you will want to own technical decisions and have a strong say in product/vision decisions. But based on your post you sound blissfully unaware of all it takes to build a larger company (I notice you didn't specify how "successful" your online business was) so you should defer to the CEO on most of what it will take to get this to actually become a company. That's his job. And if you think he can't do it, quit.
Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague (Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an economic system that matched its population.
How to negotiate a startup job offer
Wow, what the hell happened here? Parent suggested that the only benefit of self-driving cars would be if it prevented accidents. This is just wrong, and I don't think you all are helping the discussion by denying this and downvoting me for pointing out that other benefits exist too, even if self-driving cars will be just as unreliable as human drivers.
We are still talking about it and she wasn't even elected. The emails should definitely have been a scandal. Being the leading story for a few weeks seems reasonable, but its being treated as a massive, important scandal years later.
How to Use Social Media to Promote Gun Control and El Paso Taco Seasoning
In addition to not belonging on HN, this article is stupid. By even reporting on this, it accepts the premise of a known con-man and equates him with Daniels... ignoring the fact that unlike him, she has a contract with Trump as well as photographic evidence both public and not (yet) public.
Isn't "not keeping campaign promises" in a different league from "not using email correctly", which in turn is in a different league from colluding with Russia and using government office for personal gain?
What do you mean "deliberately [...] impossible to use"? Select a contact and choose "Start secret chat", wait for the keys to exchange and then the entire experience is identical to unencrypted chats.
I think it is more like cigarettes, you are free to smoke your lungs off but tobacco companies are forbidden to advertise.

Fair enough, I don't want my daughters watching ads about amazing returns for beautiful girls in the prostitution industry.
Lessons for Building AI-Driven Products
...and raining diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter. Surely there is a frothy Series A to be had here somewhere.
(Shadow-banning by HN moderators is free speech banning. I have to VPN just to say this:)

Media also told us reason for war is WMD. His name is Seth Rich. Wikileaks has email from Podesta say he wants him to be example. DNC chairperson Donna said on national tv she also fears for her life. Ready downvotes.
There's always a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
You are probably right about drive-ins, and if I like them so much I should create a non-profit, co-op one.

I completely agree non-viable businesses should fail just like we let insolvent banks and automakers...well those were an exception.

It comes down to what our core beliefs are as a society. If we want to maximize private profit, why aren't there slot machines and cigarette vending machines at every bus stop? Toys-R-Us was a viable business that was destroyed for a relatively small profit - should that behavior be: illegal, discouraged by taxes, or encouraged with government backed loans? Those are the kinds of questions we could be asking. Our current regulatory environment is not the same as what it was in the past or what it will be in the future.
The critiques of Pinker that I've found most convincing have focused on his presentation of the Enlightenment's intellectual side. The review by John Gray that Aaronson dismisses has some fairly convincing points, and it's disappointing seeing him travesty Gray's case.

It should be pretty obvious to someone with reasonably good reading comprehension that Gray is not saying, as Aaronson suggests he is, that Pinker supports eugenics. Gray's point is that the thinkers who Aaronson presents as defining "Enlightenment values" in fact had much more ambivalent positions. The argument is that one cannot define "Enlightenment values" simplistically--because the Enlightenment thinkers were in disagreement about basic principles.

I don't agree with all of Gray's critique--I think Pinker's case that things have improved over the last several centuries is reasonable--but I think this part of his argument is difficult to answer. It's very easy to define praiseworthy "values" if you keep them divorced from real-world arguments, and that seems to be Pinker's approach. Any thinker who can present Enlightenment values as simple and univocal is going to do a poor job understanding things as they are today. Deny the disagreements of the past, and you're sure to miss the substance of today's disagreements. Aaronson is happy to take the "classic liberal" label. I wonder if he's familiar with the work of others who identify as classic liberals right now; my guess, given what I've seen of his writing, is that he'd disagree with many of them pretty strenuously.
Interesting insight. Thanks for sharing!

Watching others in the process of coding sounds like an excruciating level of transparency for the subject. Mine would have to be X-rated for all the language during the frustrating periods, ha.
Alot of people are workaholics, maybe because they feel aimless and need some outside driving force.
I work, but I also make alot of time for family and other activities. I turn down jobs that ask for more then 40 hours a week and I've quit jobs that had an unhealthy obsession with having your ass in a chair 8 hours a day at exactly 8am.
Not just the Android app. Facebook and Snapchat are notorious for having bloated apps: http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...
No google mission is to maximize shareholder value.

Making the world a better place increases shareholder value and is therefore compatible with their mission ;-)
It might be a reaction to the fact that the common English word "blind" tends to convey total inability to see, whereas many legal and medical definitions involve "merely" serious impairment of certain definitions. One of my sons is legally deaf and legally blind, which puts us in somewhat rarified territory even by disability standards on the one hand (merely a few hundred in the state of Michigan), but on the other hand, he lives life mostly like a person with sight and hearing. When we go to some of the gatherings, many of the other "deaf blind" people are also able to significantly function with at least one sense. He is neither "incapable of seeing at all" nor "incapable of hearing at all".
> Life is too short to make excuses for stupid behavior.

Like meeting strangers on the internet and buying/selling sex for money? If it was legal, it could be better regulated, and they could operate with more safety...but it's not legal. While I'm in favor of decriminalizing adults engaging in adult behavior, I don't believe anyone goes into selling sex with a healthy attitude towards sex. They're typically victims of sexual abuse at a young age, which has warped their perspective, leading them to believe that their biggest value is to sell their bodies for sex.
We can already do that. It's called public transport. The idea of self-driving cars is they can go places public transport doesn't go but the incident happened on a major highway. When I sit on a train I can work without even thinking about where I'm going. It really doesn't look like we're anywhere near that.
I learned many fun abbreviations reading the personals in the local newsweekly in middle school/high school (aka the pages you were supposed to pretend weren't there, and the reason school officials were sometimes angry if they saw you with a copy on school grounds) that carried directly over to Craigslist. They used to charge by the word in the personal ad, so people got into a lot of common abbreviation habits.

The newsweeklies that used to carry personals lost a lot of ad revenue when Craigslist took over the space for free. (Some went bankrupt soon after CL added their city, even.) Unlikely that they will get that ad revenue back with CL out of the game, as many won't want to touch personals again for similar reasons to CL, and a lot of the personals space is also moved on to the Match.com/OKCupid/PlentyOfFishes of the internet.
No, only the things which can be explained.
Yup. No secret, once recorded, stays secret forever and the surveillance state's expansion is making it worse. It'll just be a bigger pot to steal and no one bothers to pay for security because they don't have to.

Equifax made money off its security breach ffs.
> Your users can always benefit from having the code available, so you should give them that code.

Thanks. This is the mindset I plan to stick with!
I think we’re talking about different classes of customers.
I do not question the usefulness of C, I use it in my daily work. What I am saying is that most C developers that use the language day-in-day-out know quite well what they are doing, and don't need yet another non-standard way of writing the code. Safety is a good point, but the initiative doesn't even mention the word, and there is no reason to assume the C-for-All extension targets safety at all
Which is funny, because he runs the service that allows all of our mistakes of youth and naivety to be remembered forever.

No - he made this bed, he can lie in it.
Yeah, and without it around they'll have to move to far sketchier platforms or streetwalking. Good job making it worse.
>cost of lawsuit*the likelihood of crash vs the cost of a recall.

To anyone interested in this issue, I recommend the following paper.

https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-...

Also, this story about the engineer who investigated the infamous Pinto 'fire after rear end collision' issue, and the decision not to recall.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-...
How is it being treated as a massive important scandal? I can dig up mainstream articles that denounce the importance placed on it. Can you point me to a mainstream article of any recent origin that makes a big deal out of it?
> Small communities, however, are able to be moderated by a small team of humans.

That doesn't change the cost per user. You're essentially talking about having the users do the moderation, but that isn't enough when it comes to legal requirements. What happens when they make mistakes because they aren't lawyers?

If smaller communities take over it won't be because they're more economical, it will be for the same reasons that piracy sites continue to exist -- they're in violation of the law but for every one that gets shut down two more pop up.
What if you quantify against Europe? The article is pointing out the unhealthy work obsession and work environment of the US.
How many people do you know with vacation the won't take for fear of losing their job? That is not the norm in every country.
Except you're going to have to pay me a real salary if you expect me to take 49.99%. That last bit is worth a lot, not just in terms of actual power but also in terms of faith and personal dynamics.
Ask HN: Who are the best growth hackers?
"Who you know" can be really valuable. It can be based on past work relationships and reputation. And it can make raising money a lot easier.

That has a lot of value.

If the OP thinks he can do better than he should leave and start his own company, including raising funding. Problem solved.
Neuralcoref v2.0: state-of-the-art coreference resolution
I've often thought that legislation that is enacted with a specific outcome in mind should come with an initial expiration date. At that point we could evaluate the effectiveness and unintended consequences and decide if the law should be made permanent.
"Censorship" is a Bad Word because of Nazi book burnings, Soviet political censorship, Fahrenheit 451, and other notions of "government censorship". Its "Bad Word" status means that we don't want it to apply to the kinds of blocking that we think are legitimate.

But the reality is that censorship is not all, or even mostly, bad. YouTube censors snuff videos. And porn. Is that bad? How about videos showing how to make bombs? What about nuclear bombs? What about anthrax? What about biological weapons?

Clearly, YouTube and other platforms must and will draw lines on what does and doesn't constitute acceptable content.

The question isn't about censorship. It's about where the line should be drawn.

For whatever reason, there's a lot of people who think that instructional videos on guns should be in-bounds rather than out-of-bounds. To the extent people are talking about "censorship" writ-large it is a distraction from having to justify making specific kinds of content widely available.
There was also an active market discussion subreddit for peddling steroids: https://www.reddit.com/r/steroidsourcetalk

It has been banned as well.
That's ridiculous but this one [1] has a bit of a scary thing to it, with the two bots walking towards you in the beginning…

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS18SeuMqtA

EDIT: Ah, probably because I was listening without sound. The music makes it less menacing (clever them).
Original source of the press release: http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/worlds-largest-animal-s...

Please don't submit mere republications. (It's in the HN guidelines.)
HL-2 Begins.
But do you have unlimited access to wenches?
I find the linked review by John Gray more reasonable and mostly because unlike Pinker he does not seems too eager to please affluent with all great things happening around.
Probably not enough money. It took $120 million to get to Boston Dynamics' Big Dog.
wish there were more projects like this
"A well balanced breakfast being necessary to the start of a healthy day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed."

Do the people get to keep and eat food, or does a breakfast get to keep and eat food?

It's a matter of English grammar. Again:

"Well stocked libraries being necessary to the development of a sound mind, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."

Is it only people in libraries that can keep and read books?

If you want a sentence diagram of it: https://imgur.com/vTB11TE

Several state constitutions have parts with similar structure. It wasn't uncommon.

The meaning of law should not change when common language usage changes. At the time of writing, "well regulated" meant effective/functional/working, and militia meant every male from about age 12 to 60.

Trying to reinterpret the 2nd amendment away is an attempt to bypass the proper process for making constitutional changes. There is one legitimate way to restrict guns; simply amend the constitution.
Not violating rules because there were no rules is also not an impressive defense. Plus, again, I'd say reading the first-hand source I linked shows that yes, they knew they were doing something skeevy.

You would not approve if Trump did the exact same thing. That is not a question, because it doesn't need to be, and please don't insult anybody's intelligence by trying to claim otherwise. Either apply the standards evenly, or don't be shocked when the world turns on Silicon Valley for its unwillingness to apply the standards evenly.
Just moved from London to the continent because of Brexit. And it's amazing how quickly I stopped giving a damn about stories like this one since the move. I pity the victims though.
No you don't? If you click on a particular commit, you can click "View file @ HASH" and from the click the Blame button?
Another gun person who thinks he's living in an action movie...
Thanks for checking out Rainforest Connection! Seems that there are lots of [appropriate] questions about how well this works in the forest, and how our partners on the ground follow up on alerts. Here’s a recent intervention in Peru that sums up the process:
https://twitter.com/lilitjejauregui/status/97585519352188518...
That is a negative. Sometimes walking from my car to the door is all the exercise I get. I make it a point to park far from the door.
I find it strange you’re made uncomfortable by this as opposed to a president privately profiting off the White House, actively courting a foreign power for his own gain in the election, empowering his own family like banana republic dictator, wantonly obstructing the investigation like a petty child, and being surrounded by incompetents and shady characters who keep dropping like flies for actually breaking the law and getting caught for it.

If this were Nixon, wouldn’t it be an appropriate response to hope that all involved were caught?

If wanting to see this kind of criminality be ended is “salivating” call me Mr. Drooly.
https://twitter.com/lilitjejauregui/status/97585519352188518...
Considering how hard it is to write truly exception-safe C++ and considering how major C++ code bases don't allow exceptions, adding exceptions to C does not seem like a good idea.
Show HN: Infer – Use TensorFlow Models in Go to Evaluate Images
Likely obvious to many in this group, but I think the right phrasing is "ordinary calorie" rather than "reduced-calorie" diet. People routinely eat more than they need and misunderstand that they are burning most of their calories while working out.
The question you have to ask is whether or not a "booth babe" would choose such work over others if they had a choice and not merely because it pays the bills.